Eugene Ormandy

Diese Musik in meiner Werbung Born in Budapest, Hungary as Jenö Blau on November 18, 1899, conductor Eugene Ormandy's musical career began at a very young age. He could identify symphonies at the age of three and began to play the violin at age four, and Ormandy’s father envisioned a career for his son as a virtuoso solo violinist. When he was five, he became the youngest pupil in the history of Budapest’s Royal Academy of Music. By the time he was 10, he was performing for the Austro-Hungarian royal family.
In 1921, Ormandy was invited to the United States to undertake a concert tour. It was at this time that he changed his name. He arrived on American shores aboard the S.S. Normandie, and it is said that he then decided to adapt the boat’s name for his own use. Unfortunately, the promised tour fell through, and he was stranded in the United States without any money. He happened to run across an old Budapest friend at a coffee shop near Broadway; the friend told Ormandy to call Erno Rapee, who conducted the Capitol Theater Symphony. The young violinist auditioned for Rapee, who told him that he was much too gifted to be playing for a movie house—he should be aiming for Carnegie Hall instead. Still, the impoverished musician played in the Capitol Theater Symphony for some time, and he eventually came to the attention of the vastly influential impresario and manager Arthur Judson, who took him on as a client after hearing him conduct the musicians at an Isadora Duncan recital. "I came to see a dancer," Judson later reflected, "and instead I heard a conductor." He made his conducting debut in 1924, and Judson kept Ormandy engaged with various orchestras until his real breakthrough came in 1931. Arturo Toscanini, who was one of Ormandy’s great influences, was scheduled to perform with the Philadelphia Orchestra. Ormandy, invited to fill in, became an overnight sensation. Years later, when asked what stood out to him as the single greatest moment of his career, he responded, "When I replaced Toscanini to conduct this great orchestra." His later long-term relationship with the Philadelphia players found its genesis in that last-minute substitution.

In 1936, Ormandy was asked to conduct the Budapest Orchestra, much to his father's disappointment—he believed that a career as a conductor paled next to the opportunity to be a great violinist. That same year, Ormandy became Associate Conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra under Leopold Stokowski, then in 1938, he was promoted to head the orchestra, where he remained for an unprecedented 44 years. The meticulous conductor became known as the "modest little maestro," building a warm yet precise orchestral color that became famously hailed as "the Philadelphia sound." The orchestra undertook several historic international tours throughout North America, Europe, Latin America, Japan, Korea, and China—making Ormandy’s players, in 1973, the first American symphony to visit the People’s Republic of China.

Among the awards granted to Ormandy were the Presidential Medal of Freedom, bestowed in 1970 "for bringing to each performance something more precious than his great gifts—himself and the rich experiences of his life." He received the Kennedy Center’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 1982. He retired from full-time work in 1980, at which point he was named Conductor Emeritus of the Philadelphia Orchestra. Appropriately, his last concert was with that ensemble at a Carnegie Hall concert given on January 10, 1984. He died of pneumonia on March 12, 1985.