Conductors: Hungarian’s Rhapsody

He used to say that he wanted to die on the podium. “But that would be too embarrassing for the concertmaster. He would have to carry me off the stage. Now I say that I would like to die in my dressing room just after giving the greatest conducting performance of my life.”

Coming from Eugene Ormandy, this means one of the greatest performances that any conductor has ever given anywhere. For at 65, Ormandy accepts no living conductor as his superior. This year he is celebrating his 30th anniversary with the Philadelphia Orchestra, a tenure unmatched by any other conductor of the world’s major orchestras.

Wall-to-Wall Strings. In those 30 years, the orchestra has been famed for “the Philadelphia sound.” What exactly is that? Very simple, says Ormandy: “It’s me! My sound is what it is because I was a violinist. Toscanini was always playing the cello when he conducted, Koussevitzky the double bass, Stokowski the organ.” Ormandy plays one big lush violin. His music is coated with the satiny sheen of wall-to-wall strings, a sound that readily lends itself to the works of the romantics—Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, Ravel, Debussy, Brahms.

Once he mounts his specially air-conditioned podium,* he rivets his cobalt-blue gaze on the musicians and sweeps into the music with a concentration so intense that he likes to think it hypnotic. He is thickset and stubby (5 ft. 5 in.), but he makes up for his small stature with big gestures. At one rehearsal Ormandy swung his fist down for a crescendo and accidentally knocked out the orchestra’s librarian, who happened to be standing too close.

Lest the spell of his glare be broken, Ormandy very rarely consults a score when conducting. He commits everything to memory, which in his case is a kind of built-in microfilm system that now encompasses more than a thousand compositions. Ormandy says he developed his powers of total recall as a child in his native Budapest. Father was a dentist who was determined that his son should be a great violinist. So while he drilled away on patients’ teeth in the front room, he kept an ear cocked to be sure that young Jeno (Hungarian for Eugene) was grinding away on his violin in the rear. “I hit on the idea of memorizing the music,” explains Ormandy, “so that I could read novels as I practiced. It came easy and has been ever since.”

New Instrument. Ormandy began playing at three on a one-eighth-size violin, at age four caused a stir in local music circles when he leaped out of his seat at a concert and cried: “Papa! That violinist played an F sharp! It should be an F natural!” At five, he became the youngest student ever accepted at Hungary’s Royal Academy of Music. At 21, Ormandy came to the U.S. for a concert tour, but was stranded when the promoters went bankrupt. Literally down to his last nickel, he joined the fiddle section of Manhattan’s Capitol Theater orchestra. Five days later, when the conductor suddenly took ill 15 minutes before showtime, Ormandy was thrust onto the podium for the first time because, naturally, he was the only musician who knew Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony by heart. Presto! “I discovered a new instrument, richer and fuller than the violin—the orchestra.”

When he arrived in Philadelphia, the little, heavily accented conductor was received coolly by the Main Line matrons, who for 22 years had yearned over the bony Polish profile of Leopold Stokowski and his evocative hands. But Ormandy took charge. He developed the classical side of the orchestra’s repertory, which Stokowski had scorned, and became a tireless promoter of new works. Today, when he schedules a particularly difficult modern piece, he invites the audience to rehearsals so that they will be better prepared. The result, he says proudly, is that “I receive 200 enthusiastic letters instead of 400 unpleasant ones.”

Summer Home. Today, long past the time when he was a humble aspirant to an old master’s throne, Ormandy has all the moves of a maestro to the manner born. He receives visitors in his Bellevue-Stratford Hotel suite (where he has lived with his second wife for the past 15 years) attired in blue satin smoking jacket and matching polka-dot ascot. His still-accented English has taken on the authority of a Charles Boyer, his pronounced limp (an old hip injury aggravated by an automobile accident five years ago) appears less a handicap than a charming idiosyncrasy. True, he no longer tears around town like a dragster in his car, and after several unsuccessful attempts at beating Jascha Heifetz, he has given up ping-pong. But he will take the orchestra on its first tour of Latin America this spring. Then he will move his 104 musicians into their summer home at the new $3,000,000 pavilion in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. “The day I retire,” says Ormandy, “will be the day I die.”

* Installed beneath the stage, the air-conditioning unit cools the maestro by blowing air through holes in the floor of the podium.