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Ormandy, Eugene (18 Nov. 1899-12 Mar. 1985), conductor, was born Jenö Blau in Budapest, Hungary, the son of Jewish parents. His father was Benjamin Blau, a dentist and amateur violinist; his mother was Rosalie Blau (her maiden name is not known with certainty, but in several accounts she is referred to as Rosalie Ormandy Blau). Named after the Hungarian violin virtuoso Jenö Hubay, the young prodigy showed musical talent at age two and seemed predestined to become a concert violinist. At the age of three, he received his first violin, which his father made sure he practiced. By age five, he was enrolled in the Royal State Academy of Music in Budapest; he studied the violin under Hubay from the age of nine. His other professors included composers Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály. When he was almost fourteen, he received his diploma as the youngest graduate ever of the Royal Academy. At seventeen, he accepted a teaching position at the Academy while studying at the University of Budapest. He graduated at age twenty with a degree in philosophy.

In 1917 Jenö toured Hungary and Germany as a soloist with the Blüthner Orchestra and in 1920 toured France and Austria playing solo recitals. Setting his sights on concertizing in America, he arrived in New York in 1921 only to find that the series of concerts promised him never materialized. It was at this time that he Americanized his first name to Eugene, having changed his last name to Ormandy while touring Europe. With only about $20 in his pocket, Ormandy auditioned for a violinist's chair with an orchestra that played for silent movies at the Capitol Theater in New York. Within a week, he went from last chair to concertmaster.

In 1922 Ormandy married harpist Stephanie Goldner; they divorced in 1947. In 1926 he became an American citizen--exactly five years and ninety days after his arrival, the minimum waiting time. His love for America was instant and lasting; he once remarked in an interview that he "was born in New York City at the age of twenty-two."

It was at the Capitol Theatre that Ormandy revealed a talent for conducting when he filled in at the last minute for the regular conductor who was ill. Finding himself a better conductor than violinist, and desiring the additional $25 that came with the job, Ormandy chose to become the orchestra's conductor. This decision would change the course of his life. His conducting career took off after famed impresario Arthur Judson attended a dance recital at the Capitol and became enthralled with Ormandy's vigorous conducting. Under Judson's management, Ormandy became a conductor with the CBS radio network. In 1931 he began his association with the Philadelphia Orchestra after Judson booked him as a last-minute replacement for Arturo Toscanini, who was incapacitated by bursitis. To the audience's surprise, the unknown conductor more than filled the legendary Italian's shoes. This exposure led to an invitation to conduct the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra in 1931, replacing the ailing Henri Verbrugghen.

After five years of making the Minneapolis into an orchestra of international repute, and numerous recordings for RCA Victor, in 1936 Ormandy left Minneapolis to become the Philadelphia Orchestra's associate conductor. In 1938 he succeeded Leopold Stokowski as musical director of the Philadelphia Orchestra. Stokowski and Ormandy were polar opposites. Flamboyant, good looking, and fervently partisan toward "new music," Stokowski would chide audiences, as some walked out in the middle of a concert, on the importance of being open-minded. Ormandy, on the other hand, was short of stature and quiet-tempered, approaching the role of music director as an accommodating "organization" man. In an era when conductors such as Stokowski, the brooding Serge Koussevitzky, and the fiery Arturo Toscanini were promoted as almost godlike "maestros," Ormandy must have seemed an anachronism.

The transition from Stokowski to Ormandy, however, which ended in 1941 after the last of Stokowski's guest appearances, was uncharacteristically smooth and amicable. Under Stokowski, the orchestra was famed for its "Philadelphia sound," which was characterized by clarity of phrasing, skillful execution, and warm sonorities. Ormandy, who was actually quite honored to have such an unrivaled ensemble placed in his hands, sought to preserve Stokowski's unique sound. The changes he made were implemented gradually, placing tonal emphasis on the orchestra's peerless string section. He also reintroduced uniform bowing and conventional seating arrangements--in contrast to Stokowski's free bowing and experimental instrument placement--to bring a consistent sound to the orchestra. Another change he made was in programming less modern or experimental music. Stokowski had been a fervent champion of "new music" and often scheduled his programs along the lines of 50 percent established classical repertoire and 50 percent music by contemporary composers. Ever eager to please the conservative Philadelphia audiences, Ormandy selected 75 percent of his programs from the established repertoire and only 25 percent from relatively new compositions.

Over the next four decades, Ormandy's name became synonymous with the Philadelphia Orchestra. He possessed perfect pitch and was able to memorize an orchestral score overnight. The orchestra became his musical voice, characterized by a Romantic conception of sound, emphasizing tonal color and instrumental balance rather than interpretation of the score. He readily admitted his debt to Toscanini in his quest for perfect sound: at the Capitol Theater, he had sneaked into the Italian maestro's rehearsals with the New York Philharmonic and studied his methods. Yet Ormandy's sound was uniquely his own. He commented, "My conducting is what it is because I was a violinist. Toscanini was always playing the cello, Koussevitzky the double-bass, Stokowski the organ. The conductors who were pianists nearly always have a sharper, more percussive beat, and it can be heard in their orchestras."

Like Toscanini, Ormandy put himself and the Philadelphia in the service of remaining true to the letter and spirit of the score. Composers such as Bartók, Dmitri Shostakovich, Jean Sibelius and Sergei Rachmaninoff regarded Ormandy's performances of their works as unparalled. In 1941 Rachmaninoff--whose association with the Philadelphia Orchestra began when Stokowski was musical director and who recorded his complete works for piano and orchestra with both Stokowski and Ormandy--made an announcement to Ormandy and the orchestra on the first day's rehearsal of his valedictory work, the Symphonic Dances: "Today when I think of composing, my thoughts turn to you, the greatest orchestra in the world. For that reason, I dedicated this, my newest composition, to the members of the Philadelphia Orchestra and to your conductor, Eugene Ormandy."

Carrying on Stokowski's tradition of broadcasting and recording, in 1948 the Ormandy/Philadelphia team performed the first televised symphonic concert on the CBS network, the American premiere of Rachmaninoff's rediscovered First Symphony, beating out Toscanini and the NBC Symphony's broadcast by ninety minutes. In 1950, Ormandy married his second wife, Margaret Frances "Gretel" Hitsch of Vienna, who remained with him until his death. They had no children.

Ormandy's accompaniment was regarded as without equal by virtuoso soloists who performed with the orchestra. Pianists such as Arthur Rubinstein, Vladimir Horowitz, and Robert Casadesus and violinists such as Isaac Stern, Joseph Szigeti, and David Oistrakh were put at ease by his sympathetic approach. On his ability to intuitively communicate with musicians, violinist Dylana Jenson remarked, "He was incredibly supportive. . . . The Philadelphia Orchestra had built up such a rapport with him after so many years, so he didn't have to do very much with his conducting to get the orchestra to totally respond to what he wanted--he got an immediate response."

Taking full advantage of the recording medium, Ormandy and the Philadelphia's most lasting legacy is the recordings they made for RCA Victor, from 1936 to 1942 and 1968 through 1980, and for Columbia Records, from 1944 through 1968. When Columbia introduced the inexpensive, long-playing record in 1948, the records introduced their performances to listeners around the world and brought them invitations to appear abroad, beginning with a tour of Great Britain in 1949.

Soon the Philadelphia became the world's most traveled orchestra. Yet, despite his self-assumed role as musical diplomat on behalf of the United States, he never forgot his European Jewish roots: in 1955, when the Vienna Philharmonic visited Philadelphia, Ormandy pointedly refused to shake the hand of conductor Herbert von Karajan, who had been a member of the Nazi party, apparently as a means of furthering his career in Hitler's Germany.

In 1960 Ormandy was instrumental in the return of Leopold Stokowski as guest conductor. If, as earlier, many critics claimed that the "Philadelphia sound" was entirely Stokowski's doing, by now Ormandy was secure enough in his own predominance to exclaim "The Philadelphia Sound--it's me." The 1960s also saw some discontent within the orchestra: labor strife over recording royalties and grueling recording and touring schedules had been building up since the late 1950s, and in 1966 the musicians' union put the orchestra on strike. Ormandy, as deferential as ever, stayed out of the way and went on a conducting tour of Europe. Stokowski, however, jumped into the fray and led a benefit concert at Carnegie Hall on behalf of the striking musicians. Once the grievances were resolved, Ormandy returned and in 1967 took the orchestra on their first tour of Japan. In 1970, President Richard Nixon presented the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Ormandy for his efforts in using music to spread American goodwill, and in 1973 Secretary of State Henry Kissinger arranged for Ormandy and the orchestra to tour Communist China in conjunction with Nixon's policy of openness with the Mao regime.

During the late 1970s, after hundreds of recordings and hundreds of thousands of miles on tour, Ormandy realized that he was slowing down. Suffering from a heart ailment, he cut back the number of concerts he performed and in 1980 named Italian conductor Riccardo Muti as his successor for music director. By the mid-1970s both Columbia's and RCA's classical catalogues were dominated by Ormandy's recordings. Ormandy continued to perform as Conductor Laureate, a position he held until his death, marking the longest unbroken association between a conductor and a major orchestra. His last concert was with the Philadelphia Orchestra at Carnegie Hall on 10 January 1984. He died in Philadelphia.

In his own lifetime, Eugene Ormandy was dismissed by some critics as "conservative," by others as "unimaginative" (Igor Stravinsky once quipped that Ormandy was an ideal interpreter of Strauss waltzes). Since his death, however, a reappraisal of his work has begun. In 1998, San Francisco music critic Stuart Canin rhetorically pondered, "The large question in Philadelphia these days is how to resurrect the Ormandy years without Eugene Ormandy. The Philadelphians, bellwether orchestra of the U.S. music scene for so many years and a non-stop recording machine which supplied turntables with music as far as the ear could hear, have lost their recording contracts, had bitter labor disputes, and had short-term conductorships. The Sterns, [Rudolf] Serkins, and everyone else used to want to record under the Philadelphia umbrella, and their records sold. Now, no longer do the top-name soloists record every concerto in sight with the Philadelphians." In 1999, the centenary of his birth, Ormandy was the subject of a BBC World Service radio tribute and biography. Ormandy's reputation in the Far East has never needed rehabilitating: while 1999 saw no special rereleases of his recordings by either RCA or Columbia in the United States, RCA Records Japan issued a 15-CD set in commemoration of the centenary, which was so well received that they issued a 20-disc follow-up issue in April 2001.

The Eugene Ormandy Archive, which includes the conductor's letters, professional papers, music scores, and sound recordings, is housed in the Annenberg Rare Book & Manuscript Library of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Most of Ormandy's stereophonic recordings have been rereleased by Sony and RCA Victor, and a great number of his historical mono and 78-r.p.m. recordings have been issued by Biddulph, an independent British label. There have been no biographical books devoted solely to Ormandy, though music critic Herbert Kupferberg, clearly an Ormandy and Philadelphia partisan, has provided a thorough biography in Those Fabulous Philadelphians--The Life and Times of a Great Orchestra (1969). His writings on Ormandy can be found also in a condensed, though updated, form in his essay "The Ormandy Era" in John Ardoin, ed., The Philadelphia Orchestra: A Century of Music, pp. 73-91 (1999). A retrospective interview with Ormandy, conducted by editor Robert Chesterman in 1971, is in Conductors in Conversation, pp. 103-24 (1990). Edward Arian's case study Bach, Beethoven and Bureaucracy: The Case of the Philadelphia Orchestra (1971), documents labor grievances; this volume is as acrimonious as Kupferberg's profiles are laudatory. An obituary and critical appreciation are in the New York Times, 13 Mar. 1985.

Citation:
Robert L. Jones. "Ormandy, Eugene";
http://www.anb.org/articles/18/18-03663.html;
American National Biography Online Jan. 2002 Update.
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