Sándor Végh
Sándor Végh (17 May 1912 – 7 January 1997)[1] was a Hungarian, later French, violinist and conductor. He was best known as one of the great chamber music violinists of the twentieth century.
Education
Sándor Végh was born in 1912 in Kolozsvár, Transylvania, Austria-Hungary, (since 1920 Cluj-Napoca, Romania). His parents were not professional musicians but folk music especially was an important part of family life. At the age of six he was given a violin, "Because", he says, "that was cheaper than a piano. My parents had no idea how much money I had to save later to be able to buy a Stradivari."[2] He entered the
Chamber musician
As his solo career was developing, he joined the Hungarian Trio with Ilonka Krauss and László Vencze. In 1934, he became one of the founding members of the Hungarian String Quartet. He was initially the first violinist, but gave that position to Zoltán Székely and took second chair. He participated with the Hungarian String Quartet in the first Hungarian performance of Béla Bartók's String Quartet No. 5.
Végh left the Hungarian String Quartet in 1940 to found his own quartet, the Végh Quartet. At the first international music competition held in Geneva in 1946, the Végh Quartet was awarded the first prize.[3] He and the quartet left Hungary in 1946. The quartet continued to give concerts until the mid-1970s; Végh also made solo appearances as a violinist. From 1958 Végh played on his own Stradivari from 1724, which once belonged to Niccolò Paganini.
Teaching, conducting
In the same year (1940) in which he established the quartet that bore his name, Végh became a professor at the Franz Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest, a position he held until 1946, when he left Hungary.
In 1952 he met cellist Pablo Casals, who invited Végh to join him in giving summer classes in Zermatt, Switzerland (1953–62) and to appear annually at Casals' Prades Festival (1953–69). He began his first recital there with Bach: the solo Sonata in g minor. Works of Bach played a special role in his life, as Végh himself declared on numerous occasions.
He found teaching rewarding and taught at the
He founded the
that won the Grand Prix du Disque in 1989.He was awarded "Chevalier de la
In letters to Charles Barber, Carlos Kleiber referred to Végh as "my conducting idol" and said: "That man is pure music. A monster". "He is great, wild, Asiatic... I didn't get a word in edgeways, thank God."
Végh took French citizenship in 1953, but is perhaps best regarded as a "world citizen of music", having made his home in Basel and, from 1971, in Greifensee, near Zurich. He also lived in Salzburg from the 1970s onwards.
After a short illness in 1997, he died at a hospital in Freilassing, just across the border from Salzburg. His grave is in the cemetery of the old parish church in Liefering, in the district of Salzburg.[5]
See also
References
- ^ "Sándor Végh". data.bnf.fr (in French). Bibliothèque nationale de France. Retrieved 10 February 2023.
- ^ "Elizabeth Mortimer: Sándor Végh and the Camerata Academia". www.mortimer.at. Retrieved 28 September 2023.
- ^ "Sándor Végh /Notable Alumni Franz Liszt Music Academy".[dead link]
- ^ "International Music Seminar Prussia Cove". www.i-m-s.org.uk. Retrieved 28 September 2023.
- ^ "Grave of Sándor Végh in Salzburg". knerger.de. Retrieved 28 September 2023.