Eugene Ormandy

Over a period of four decades, from the 1940s until the beginning of the 1980s, Eugene Ormandy was a mainstay of the classical music world. As music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra for more than 40 years, beginning in 1938, he was one of the most popular conductors in America, and his recordings with that orchestra on the Columbia Masterworks label consistently outsold by a wide margin the recordings of the admittedly superior New York Philharmonic under Dimitri Mitropoulos. Ormandy was a supremely competent, often inspired conductor whose approach to music displayed extraordinary care and polish. Although never regarded as a musical trailblazer, he also presented the first recordings of several important works during his career, and helped several composers achieve wider recognition than they'd ever had before. The son of a dentist, Ormandy's father wanted him to be a violinist, and he began his musical training at age two. He was already capable of recognizing serious musical works at that age, and when he was five he entered the Royal Academy of Music in Budapest. He had his master's degree at age 14, and received an artist's diploma at age 16 as a violinist, at which time he also received a degree in philosophy from Budapest University. He toured as a violin prodigy just before the outbreak of World War I and remained a Hungarian national during the war, becoming a professor at the Hungarian State Conservatory when he was 20 years old. Ormandy came to conducting completely by accident. In 1920, he came to America based on a promised series of violin concerts that never materialized, and during his stay, he joined the orchestra of the Capitol Theater in New York City. He quickly moved up the position of concertmaster, and some eight months later, when the...