Andor Foldes

Andor Foldes (actually Andor Földes ; born December 21, 1913 in Budapest , Austria-Hungary , † February 9, 1992 in Herrliberg near Zurich ) was an American pianist of Hungarian origin.

Memorial plaque for Andor Földes in Budapest: AF spent the first 25 years of his life in this house ...

Life

Children's and academic years

Földes was born into a musical and versatile family. The uncle played the viola in the Budapest string quartet , the aunt was a singer and Andor's mother was a concert pianist. She recognized her son's talent and gave him his first real piano lesson.

He was soon noticed as a child prodigy . At eight, he played publicly a piano concerto by Mozart . A concert agent from the USA then offered Foldes parents a contract, according to which the young pianist would give 30 concerts in the USA and receive a fee of 100 dollars per evening. The parents declined the offer. Instead, they released their son from attending regular school classes. This allowed Földes to concentrate fully on the music and technique of piano playing. Private teachers imparted the necessary basic school knowledge and also the prescribed curriculum for the grammar school. He passed the Abitur with ease.

Tibor Szatmari had taken over piano lessons in the meantime. This music teacher, himself a concert pianist, who taught at the Fodor Music School in Budapest, developed the musical knowledge and technical piano skills of his pupil to such an extent that he shone with Franz Liszt's E-flat major piano concerto at an anniversary celebration of the music school . He was accompanied by the Budapest Philharmonic under the direction of their chief conductor Ernst von Dohnányi .

This was followed by music studies at the Franz Liszt Music Academy in Budapest, majoring in piano and composition. The director of this music school was Ernst von Dohnányi at the time. In 1929 he accepted the now 16-year-old into his master class (years later the pianist Géza Anda also belonged to it) and trained him to be one of the best piano virtuosos of those years. Andor Foldes won first prize at the Franz Liszt Competition in Budapest in 1932.

In Leó Weiner , a professor at the academy, the young pianist took composition lessons. These regular lessons in the more conservative composition class did not prevent the young man from secretly seeking private contact with the pianist and composer Béla Bartók, who also teaches at the university . For the budding concert pianist Foldes, this encounter would later prove to be fateful.

Around this time, Foldes also took the opportunity to meet Franz Liszt's last living student, Emil von Sauer, and to play him a few pieces on the piano. Sauer was very impressed by the young pianist's playing. When they said goodbye, the old man kissed the young artist on the forehead, explaining that he himself had received this kiss from Franz Liszt and asked him to pass it on to a talented and worthy piano student.

First concert tours and outbreak of war

After four years of study with Dohnányi, the young pianist, not yet 20 years old, gave his first public concerts in 1933 with great success. Extended tours followed. In the years from 1934 onwards, they led to Austria, Sweden, France, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Poland, Yugoslavia, Belgium, Holland and Spain. Five years later, in the spring of 1939, Andor Foldes once again left his hometown Budapest for major concerts in Paris and Amsterdam. He then traveled on to London to make his debut there, to introduce himself to the critical English audience for the first time. Foldes had no idea that he would not see his Hungarian homeland again for about ten years.

During his onward journey from London to Denmark and the Scandinavian countries in early September 1939, he was surprised by the outbreak of World War II . Foldes thought it advisable to wait for further developments and not return to his Hungarian homeland for the time being. He spent a few weeks with his uncle, the former violist, in Norway and with friends in Sweden. For some time now, Foldes had been invited to several concerts in the USA. His application for a visa was accepted in Budapest and a so-called "visitors visa" valid for three months for the USA was sent to him. So Andor Foldes was able to board the Norwegian passenger steamer Stavangerfjord in Oslo in November 1939 , which dropped him off in New York after a stormy nine-day crossing across the Atlantic.

In exile in America

In early 1940 the emigrated pianist was back at the piano playing Ludwig van Beethoven's 4th Piano Concerto in G major . In this concert in the City Music Hall of New York , which was also broadcast on the radio , the NBC orchestra played under the baton of Hungarian conductor Ernö Rapée . For this, Foldes received a fee of 50 dollars as the first fee in America, the so-called "minimum fee" set by the US musicians' union, the Musicians Union. After all, the "Coast to Coast" radio broadcast was heard by some of Foldes' important and influential people and musicians. So did Joseph Szigeti , a Hungarian violinist who was very well known in America at the time. Szigeti invited the pianist as a piano accompanist to a three-month concert tour through Canada and the United States. The artist duo stayed together for three years and gave a total of 120 concerts with constantly changing programs during this time. The two musicians had finally developed a repertoire of 40 sonatas for violin and piano by classical, romantic and contemporary, including American composers.

1940 was a fateful year for Andor Foldes , as he now called himself instead of his name, Földes , which was ineffable for American tongues . The conductor Rapee had invited a young Hungarian journalist, Lili Rendy, who wrote for the Hungarian newspaper company Estlapok, to Foldes' first radio concert. A little later, she became Andor's wife, from then on worked for her spouse as a journalist and literary partner and accompanied him almost without exception on his many tours.

The second significant encounter was a reunion with Béla Bartók . Bartók had left Hungary in 1940 for political reasons and came to New York with his wife Ditta. Foldes worked closely with the composer to develop his entire solo piano works and tried again and again to bring Bartók's piano music closer to the American audience. He had also brought a copy of Bartók's handwritten score of the Second Piano Concerto with him to America on his crossing in 1939 in order to finally perform this work, which had long been considered unplayable, in the USA. But all attempts to win concert agents and conductors for a performance failed. It was not until 1947 that it was premiered in America with Andor Foldes as soloist in the half-empty Carnegie Hall , but it brought about a hardly expected press success. Forty times later the pianist played this concerto all over the world. The composer could no longer experience all of this. Béla Bartók died of leukemia in New York in 1945.

Return to Europe

In 1948, Foldes obtained American citizenship. He retained his permanent residence in New York and resumed his concert tours through European countries, which were interrupted by the war, from here, as far as this was possible at the time. From 1953 South America and South Africa followed, later Australia and Japan.

At the beginning of the winter semester 1957/58, Andor Foldes took over the piano professor position at the Saar University of Music in Saarbrücken, which had become vacant due to the death of Walter Gieseking . This music educational activity did not end until 1965. During this time, the pianist gave around 70 concerts every year in addition to his teaching activities around the world. He also held master classes in London, Paris, Berlin, Tokyo and other music metropolises. In the early 1960s, Foldes received an invitation to Kranichstein to attend the international summer courses for new music in Darmstadt . There he played and explained Bartók's piano works.

During this time the couple lived in Bad Homburg vor der Höhe . It was not until 1961 that the company moved to its final domicile in Herrliberg near Zurich, Switzerland.

Andor Foldes played Bartók's first piano concerto in 1969 as a Japanese premiere with the Yomiuti Orchestra in Tokyo. The pianist continued his concert tours in the 1970s and 80s. He also used the baton himself or conducted from the piano. In the winter of 1971/72, in addition to his usual concert engagements, he performed twenty times as a conductor. In 1978 he was the first pianist from the West to give solo concerts in Beijing.

Foldes used his compositional skills in several concert appearances. He wrote and played his own cadenza for all of Mozart's piano concertos . In addition to his exemplary recordings, radio and television broadcasts have also made the musician known.

Foldes spoke several languages. His diverse interest in current issues in the fields of culture, art and politics helped him to meet and make friends all over the world. He played violin sonatas with Albert Einstein and Brahms' piano trios with the Japanese Crown Prince and later Emperor Akihito , whose wife, later Empress Michiko , he gave piano lessons. He chatted just as easily with Grass , Böll and Dürrenmatt about literature and theater as well as with Pandit Nehru and Indira Gandhi about the problems of India or with Willy Brandt and Helmut Schmidt about Germany and the future of Europe.

The pianist Foldes has always been active in literature. His book "Ways to the Piano", published in English in 1948, has so far been translated into 14 languages. The informative and witty written "Memories" were only published by Lili Foldes after his death in 1993.

Andor Foldes died of the consequences of a fall in his home in Herrliberg near Zurich, a few days before a planned concert in the Beethoven House in Bonn .

Records and CDs

In addition to radio and television recordings with Andor Foldes as a soloist, there are around 80 piano works on record or CD. This includes the entire oeuvre of Béla Bartók for piano solo, but also recordings of works by the German classics Mozart and Beethoven, the romantics Schubert, Schumann, Chopin, Brahms and Liszt, and the impressionist Debussy. Andor Foldes also campaigned for the piano works of his Hungarian compatriot Zoltán Kodály . His complete recording of Bartók's works for piano solo was awarded the Grand Prix du Disque . Finally, the early recordings of Foldes should be mentioned, works by Grieg and Schumann, recorded by the Norwegian Tono and partly published in the USA on Mercury.

Awards

• Andor Foldes was awarded the Great Cross of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1964 for his services to the reconstruction of Bonn 's Beethoven Hall - for which he gave concerts in New York, London, Buenos Aires, Bonn and other cities - and in recognition of his artistic achievements .
• In France the pianist was honored in 1968 with the award “Commandeur du Mérite Artistique et Culturel” for his Debussy playing.
• In 1973 the Beethoven-Haus Bonn made him an honorary member.
• For his recording of Bartók's piano work, the German Phono Academy awarded Andor Foldes the 1982 German Record Prize in the category of “historical recordings”.

Publications

• Keys to the keyboard. A book for pianists . EP Dutton, New York 1948.
  • Ways to the piano . Introduction Malcolm Sargent . Translation of Maurguerite Valerie Schlueter. Limes-Verlag, Wiesbaden 1948
• Is there a contemporary Beethoven style? Limes Verlag, Wiesbaden 1963
• Memories . Limes Verlag / Ullstein Verlag, Frankfurt am Main / Berlin 1993

literature

• Riemann Musiklexikon , B. Schott's Sons, Mainz 1959
• Hans-Peter Range: The concert pianists of the present , Moritz Schauenburg-Verlag, Lahr (Black Forest) 1964
• Wolf-Eberhard von Lewinski : Andor Foldes , Rembrandt Verlag, Berlin 1970

Web links

• Literature by and about Andor Foldes in the catalog of the German National Library
• Andor Foldes Archive in the Archive of the Academy of Arts, Berlin