Joseph Szigeti

Hungarian classical violinist

• Born: September 5, 1892
• Birthplace: Budapest, Hungary
• Died: February 19, 1973
• Place of death: Lucerne, Switzerland

An important concertizing violinist, Szigeti championed the notion that performers must remain faithful to composers’ wishes as seen in notations on the printed score, a practice that broke with the current vogue but ultimately gained the respect of violinists, conductors, and critics.

The Life

Joseph Szigeti (SIH-geh-tee) was born Jóska Singer. He acquired the last name he would keep for life when, at the age of three, his mother died, and he moved to live with his grandparents in the town of Máramarous-Sziget in the Carpathian Mountains near modern Slovakia. He took early violin lessons in Hungary, he performed concerts around Europe, and he lived in England for six years (1907-1913). He moved to Switzerland in 1913, teaching at the Geneva Conservatory (from 1917 to 1925) and concertizing throughout Europe and America. In Geneva, he met his wife Wanda Ostrowska, and they were married in 1919. They had a daughter, Irene, shortly thereafter.

Szigeti emigrated to the United States in 1940, and he became a citizen in 1951. By this time, he was internationally acclaimed as a soloist, and he toured the world, performing in recitals and in concerts with orchestra. In the mid-1950’s, arthritis began to affect his performances. He returned to Switzerland in 1960, spending the remainder of his life teaching and writing about the violin and its music. He died in 1973, at the age of eighty, in Lucerne.

The Music

Szigeti began to study the violin with his uncle, but his superlative talent was evident early on, and his father soon took him to Budapest to study with Jenö Hubay at the Franz Liszt Academy of Music. Among his fellow students were Stefi Geyer and Ferenc von Vecsey, both of whom established solid solo careers in the early to mid-twentieth century.

At the time that Szigeti began his career, fashion emphasized recitals of salon pieces by composers ranging from Pablo de Sarasate and Henryk Wieniawski to Fritz Kreisler, George Enescu, and František Drdla. The 78-rpm recorded disc was just becoming a household item, and the short side lengths, typically three to four minutes, were also well-suited to character pieces, thus making them an ideal way to supplement a concert career. Szigeti made his solo debut in Berlin in 1905 at age thirteen, but the concert received almost no press, and the result for Szigeti was a few years playing intermission entertainment between acts of operettas and circuses.

Influences: Busoni and Bartók. According to Szigeti, the salon miniatures he emphasized during these early days required little thought, and he began to give consideration to musical masterpieces by composers such as Johann Sebastian Bach, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and Ludwig van Beethoven only after meeting and being mentored by pianist and composer Feruccio Busoni. The artists met in England while they were concertizing, and Busoni’s influence was profound, coloring Szigeti’s approach to music for the rest of his career as both a performer and a pedagogue.

Szegeti also met Béla Bartók in the first decade of the twentieth century. Several years later, they became fast friends, forming a concertizing duo, with Bartók playing the piano. (There is an important recording made by these two musicians at the Library of Congress in 1940—two days after Bartók arrived as an émigré—including the Sonata for Violin (1917) by Claude Debussy, Ludwig van Beethoven’s Sonata No. 9 (1802), also known as the “Kreutzer,” and Sonata for Violin No. 2 (1922) and Rhapsody No. 1 for Violin and Orchestra (1928) by Bartók.

Performances. Szigeti’s American debut occurred in 1925 at Carnegie Hall, when he performed Beethoven’s Concerto for Violin (1806) with the Philadelphia Orchestra, conducted by Leopold Stokowski. This concert was an unqualified success, and it helped to secure his international performance career, which included concerts during the 1930’s in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and South America. Until the 1950’s, he was known as one of the top concertizing violinists in the world, and—because of his dedication to the composer’s written intentions—he was often affectionately known as the “scholarly virtuoso.” Because of his noted commitment to contemporary music, Szigeti received the dedications of several important mid-twentieth century compositions, including violin concerti by Hamilton Harty, Frank Martin, Ernest Bloch, Bartók, and Eugène Ysaÿe. He performed the world premiere of Bloch’s Concerto for Violin in Cleveland in 1938.

Writings on Music. Of the books he authored, Szigeti on the Violin is probably the most valuable. It presents elements of his biography as a prelude to a detailed analysis of his ideas on interpretation and technique, ranging from a discussion of fingering with respect to string color to larger concepts of phrasing. He also expresses his views on musical life, detailing the change of emphasis throughout the twentieth century from recitals as a proving ground for young musicians to the competition, a change he indicates was not in the best interests of profound music making.

Recordings. Szigeti made numerous recordings throughout his career, including all the major violin concerti and sonatas. Most, if not all, have been remastered to digital format. His last recordings, notably the complete solo sonatas and partitas by Johann Sebastian Bach, met with some criticism for inconsistencies of tone and execution, yet they still reveal Szigeti’s legendary deep understanding of the music.

Musical Legacy

As a performer, Szigeti set a standard for faithful adherence to composers’ wishes as seen on the printed score, rather than imposing a willful virtuosity upon the music. He was an early champion of twentieth century music, performing and commissioning concerti and chamber music by Igor Stravinsky, Bartók, Maurice Ravel, Sergei Prokofiev, and Arthur Honegger. He lived in a time of great stylistic individuality in performance, and the concept of careful score study as a path toward understanding a composer’s intentions was relatively new.

Szigeti’s reception throughout his career was mixed. Some reviews described his tone as small but elegant and interpretations as dry and stiff. At the other end of the spectrum, crowds in Naples, Italy, cheered him for fifteen minutes at a concert in 1956. Nevertheless, Szigeti’s adherence to the belief in the overarching value of a composer’s intentions ultimately triumphed and became the fundamental rule of interpretation for the next several generations of performers.

Later in his life, when arthritis affected his technique, he retired from concertizing and taught violinists who became prominent musicians, including Arnold Steinhardt (first violinist for the Guarneri String Quartet) and concert soloist Kyung-Wha Chung. His students credit him with increasing their insight into the deep meaning of great music, much as Busoni did for Szigeti fifty years earlier.

Aside from his influence as a teacher, Szigeti’s legacy rests upon his scholarly approach to performing, his writing (especially the book Szigeti on the Violin, which should be read by any serious student of the violin), and his leadership in commissioning two masterpieces by Bartók: 1940’s Contrasts for violin, clarinet, and piano (commissioned jointly with clarinetist Benny Goodman) and 1944’s Concerto for Orchestra. The commission for the latter piece was sprearheaded by Szigeti and conductor Fritz Reiner (ultimately made by conductor Serge Koussevitzky) almost as a charity gesture, because Bartók, near the end of his life, needed the money.

Principal Recordings

albums:Bach: Partita for Violin Solo No. 3 in E Major, 1908; Brahms: Violin Concerto in D Major, Op. 77, 1928; Hungarian Folk Tunes: Bartók, 1930; Beethoven: Violin Concerto in D Major, Op. 61, 1932; Mendelssohn: Violin Concerto in E Minor, Op. 64, 1933; Mozart: Concerto for Violin, No. 4 in D Major, 1934; Prokofiev: Violin Concerto No. 1, 1935; Bach: Concerto for Two Violins in D Minor, 1937; Handel: Sonata for Violin and Basso Continuo in D Major, Opp. 1 and 3, 1937; Mozart: Sonata for Violin and Piano in E Minor, 1937; Concerto for Violin: Ernest Bloch, 1939; Bartók: Contrasts for Violin, Clarinet, and Piano, 1940; Debussy: Sonata for Violin and Piano in G Minor, 1940; Rhapsody for Violin and Piano: Béla Bartók, 1940; Beethoven: Sonata Nos. 4, 9, and 10, 1944; Stravinsky: Duo Concertant for Violin and Piano, 1945; Beethoven: Sonata for Violin and Piano, No. 5 in F Major, Op. 24, Spring, 1948; Bach: Brandenberg Concerto No. 1 in F Major, 1950; Hindemith: Sonata for Violin and Piano in E Major, 1953; Ravel: Sonata for Violin and Piano in G Major, 1953; Mozart: Sonata for Violin and Piano in B-flat Major, 1955.

writings of interest:With Strings Attached: Reminiscences and Reflections, 1947; A Violinist’s Notebook: Two Hundred Music Examples with Notes for Practice and Performance, 1964; Beethoven’s Violinwerke: Hinweise für Interpreten und Hörer, 1965; Szigeti on the Violin, 1969; Bach: Six Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin, 2003.

Bibliography

Horowtiz, Joseph. Artists in Exile: How Refugees from Twentieth-Century War and Revolution Transformed the American Performing Arts. New York: Harper, 2008. This book examines the lives and careers of performers who migrated to the United States from Russia or Europe, and it contains references to Szigeti.

Szigeti, Joseph. Szigeti on the Violin. New York: Dover Books, 1979. This book contains some autobiographical information, but more importantly it explores in detail issues of interpretation, including musical examples from masterpieces in the violin repertoire.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. A Violinist’s Notebook: Two Hundred Music Examples with Notes for Practice and Performance. London: Gerald Duckworth, 1964. A literal master class in book form, with examples drawn from great violin literature, each with its own technical or musical problem that Szigeti explains in English and in German.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. With Strings Attached. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1947. Szigeti’s autobiography, written (according to several reviews) rather haphazardly, yet it includes interesting glimpses of Szigeti’s teachers, his colleagues, and personal details on his life. Includes a discography.