Hungarian Heritage Review, 1987 (16. évfolyam, 1-12. szám)
1987-01-01 / 1. szám
==^ungartan~cIVmertcan Profile*= EUGENE FODOR: The Hungarian “Fiddler of Turkey Creek” On March 5, 1970, in the tiny mountain town of Turkey Creek, Colorado, a son was born to the Fodor family. The boy’s father, born in the United States, came from a family native to Transylvania. The boy Eugene’s greatgreat-grandfather had founded the Fodor Academy of Music in Budapest. (The Academy was destroyed by bombs during World War II.) Eugene entered life into a family immersed in music. His father, a building contractor, was — and still is — a talented amateur violinist. His elder brother, John, teaches music in Denver. And it became apparent at a very early age that young Eugene was more than normally gifted. “.. .good noises” At the age of six Eugene became acquainted with the fiddle; he knew how to hold it properly because he constantly watched his brother practice. When, after a year of nagging, Eugene persuaded his parents to buy him his own violin, he was thrilled with the quality of its sound, and, as he says, “.. .within a week or so I was making some quite good noises.” He studied initially with Harold Wippler, a local teacher who had been concert-master of the Denver Symphony Orchestra. A sign of the quality of the teacher and of the extraordinary talent of the student Eugene Fodor came when Eugene, at the age of seven, made his first concert appearance in public. The Road to Stardom That first appearance was just the start of Eugene's phenomenal climb to the height of the artistic pyramid. Almost every year — at nine, ten, twelve, seventeen — Eugene won awards at prestigious competitions and appeared with one major orchestra after the other. At twenty-two he won the Gold Medal in an international competition — the Paganini — at Genoa, Italy. But he reached the pinnacle in 1974 — at the age of twenty-four — when he won the Silver Medal in the Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow; he was the first Western violinist to achieve that honor. Great Pupil/Great Teachers Fodor studied for two and a half years at the Julliard School of Music in New York; it was here that he came into contact with the first of his truly great teachers. The master Ivan Galamian honored Eugene by making him the only student to take all his lessons with the master himself. But perhaps Eugene’s greatest influence, and certainly his greatest thrill as a violin student, was his being able to study with the legendary Jascha Heifitz. As Fodor himself says, “A year with Heifitz was more like a ten-year course.” Something of the rigors of working with such a master is given in Eugene’s schedule: “We met for seven hours twice a week... so that meant quite a bit of playing for each one. We also had to practice for seven hours a day!” At the Top Eugene Fodor now stands at the top rank of the world’s greatest violinists. His concerts throughout the world are always sold out; ovations from delighted audiences are the rule rather than the exception. And Fodor has appeared more than a dozen times with Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show. He feels that exposure such as this gives him a chance to present classical music to the largest possible audience. And that is something of a mission in his life. —continued next page JANUARY 1987 HUNGARIAN HERITAGE REVIEW 5
