Joseph Szigeti: The Violinist Who Served the Score
In 1938 a Hungarian violinist and the King of Swing walked into a commission together. Szigeti and Benny Goodman had asked Béla Bartók for a short piece to fill out the spare side of a 78 rpm record. What came back was *Contrasts*, a three-movement work for violin, clarinet and piano that outgrew its packaging entirely and entered the permanent repertoire. It was the sort of thing that kept happening to Szigeti, because composers trusted him with their music in a way they trusted almost no other player of his generation.
A Boy from Máramaros-Sziget
He was born Joseph Singer in Budapest on 5 September 1892, into a Jewish family. His mother died when he was three, and he was raised by grandparents in Máramaros-Sziget, the Carpathian town that supplied the surname he took. Music was the family trade: his uncles made up the town band. He began on the cimbalom with an aunt, took up the violin at six under his Uncle Bernat, and was brought to Budapest by his father for proper training. After a spell of inadequate teaching he auditioned at the Franz Liszt Academy and was admitted straight into the class of Jenő Hubay without the usual formalities — Hubay, himself a pupil of Joachim, was then establishing himself as one of the pre-eminent teachers in Europe.
Two years later, aged thirteen, Szigeti made his Berlin debut playing Bach's Chaconne, the Ernst F-sharp minor concerto and Paganini's *Witches' Dance*. He then spent time performing in summer theatres and circuses, the ordinary indignity of the prodigy economy. In 1906 Hubay arranged for him to meet Joachim in Berlin. Joachim was impressed and offered to teach him. Szigeti declined, out of loyalty to Hubay and a sense of personal distance from the older man — an early sign of a musician who made his own decisions.
Busoni, and the End of Complacency
An English tour followed, including the premiere of Hamilton Harty's violin concerto and appearances alongside Nellie Melba, Wilhelm Backhaus and John McCormack. The decisive encounter of these years was with Ferruccio Busoni, who became his mentor and remained a close friend until his death in 1924. Working through Bach's Chaconne with Busoni, Szigeti later wrote, "shook me once and for all out of my adolescent complacency." What Busoni gave him was the thing that defined his career: the conviction that a violinist is an intellect in service of a text, not an athlete with an audience.
Davos, Bartók, and a Second Life
In 1913 he was diagnosed with tuberculosis and sent to a sanatorium at Davos. His doctor limited him to twenty-five or thirty minutes of practice a day. In the same sanatorium, recovering from pneumonia, was Béla Bartók — the beginning of a friendship and a working partnership that outlasted both illnesses. By 1917 Szigeti had recovered fully and, at twenty-five, was appointed Professor of Violin at the Geneva Conservatory. In 1919 he married Wanda Ostrowska, a Russian stranded in the West by the 1917 Revolution; their daughter Irene was born in 1920.
America
In 1925 he met Leopold Stokowski, and a telegram from the Philadelphia Orchestra's management produced his American debut. He was initially unimpressed by American concert life, which struck him as commercially driven and indifferent to masterworks; by 1930 he was touring Europe, the United States and Asia as one of the major concert violinists alive. In 1939 he and Wanda emigrated to California to escape Nazi persecution, and he was naturalised in 1951. In January 1942 he gave up his seat on TWA Flight 3 so that fifteen soldiers could board; the aircraft crashed, killing everyone aboard including Carole Lombard.
America also produced the ugliest episode of his life. In 1950, returning from a European tour, he was detained at Ellis Island for five days under the Internal Security Act and released after an immigration inquiry cleared him of charges never disclosed to him. The *New York Times* reported he had been a sponsor or patron of committees regarded as subversive. Szigeti maintained he had never joined a political organisation.
The Composer's Violinist
His discography is the argument. Bartók dedicated the First Rhapsody (1928) to him. Ernest Bloch dedicated his violin concerto to him, and Ysaÿe the first of the solo sonatas. He was among the first to establish Prokofiev's First Concerto as standard repertoire, recorded Berg's concerto twice, and recorded Stravinsky's *Duo Concertant* with the composer at the piano in 1945. He and Bartók gave a sonata recital at the Library of Congress in 1940 that survives on record. Beyond those he championed Ravel, Honegger and Frank Martin. In 1944 he secured ASCAP funds for the desperately ill Bartók's medical care and helped persuade Koussevitzky to commission the *Concerto for Orchestra* — an act of practical friendship that gave the twentieth century one of its central orchestral works.
Bloch explained the attraction plainly: "Modern composers realize that when Szigeti plays their music, their inmost fancy, their slightest intentions become fully realized."
The Books
Szigeti wrote three books: *With Strings Attached* (1947), a memoir the *New York Times* praised for its flavour of life and its exhilarating revolt against arranging catastrophes and triumphs under neat chapter headings; *A Violinist's Notebook* (1965); and *Szigeti on the Violin* (1969), a treatise. The last is unusually opinionated for a technical manual. He attacked competitions for displacing the recital as the route to artistic maturity, distrusted what the recording industry was doing to young players, and insisted on musical intention over technical convenience — demanding of the student "a seismograph-like sensitivity to brusque changes of tone colour caused by fingerings based on expediency and comfort rather than the composer's manifest or probable intentions."
Why Joseph Is Called a Genius
The claim here rests on interpretive intelligence rather than instrumental perfection, and the sources are unusually candid about the difference. Szigeti eschewed the role of the virtuoso and put himself entirely at the service of the music; Nathan Milstein wrote that he "was an incredibly cultured musician — actually his talent grew out of his culture," and János Starker called him one of the giants among violinists. Arnold Steinhardt, his student, described him as a template: inquisitive, innovative, sensitive, feeling, informed. What that meant technically was a capacity to read a new score, grasp what its composer was reaching for, and realise it so convincingly that the piece entered the repertoire — a skill demonstrated repeatedly across Bartók, Bloch, Prokofiev, Berg and Stravinsky.
The counter-case is that the playing itself was frequently imperfect, and was said so in print. Boris Schwarz judged that his technique was not always flawless and his tone lacked sensuous beauty, acquiring a spiritual quality only in moments of inspiration. He held the bow in an old-fashioned manner, elbow close to the body, producing power at the cost of extraneous noise. A 1926 *New York Times* notice found his playing stiff and dry, with angular phrasing and poor intonation. Yehudi Menuhin, who admired him, compared him to a priceless Sèvres vase and criticised his extreme intellectualism. Arthritis degraded his hands through the 1950s. If genius means the flawless instrument, the word does not fit. If it means the mind that knows what the notes are for, few violinists of the century have a stronger claim.
Legacy
In November 1956, days after Soviet tanks put down the Hungarian uprising, a Naples audience held up his concert for nearly fifteen minutes shouting "Viva l'Ungheria!" He retired from performing in 1960 and returned to Switzerland, teaching, judging competitions and writing; his late recordings of Bach's Sonatas and Partitas are prized for interpretive depth by listeners willing to forgive the fingers. He died in Lucerne on 19 February 1973, aged eighty, and the *New York Times* ran his obituary on the front page, closing with Menuhin's 1966 tribute: that the breed of cultured and chivalrous violin virtuosos, aristocrats as human beings and as musicians, had survived into a hostile age in the person of Joseph Szigeti.
