Jeno Hubay
Encyclopedia
Eugen Huber (ˈɔʏ̯geːn ˈhuːbɐ) (15 September 1858 12 March 1937), better known by his Hungarian
name Jenő Hubay (ˈjɛnø ˈhubɒj), was a Hungarian violin
ist, composer
and music
teacher.
s in Pest, Hungary. He adopted the Hungarian version of his name, Jenő Hubay, in his twenties, while living in the French
-speaking world.
Hubay was trained in violin and music by his father, Karl, concertmaster of the Hungarian National Opera House and a teacher at the Budapest College of Music
. Hubay gave his début public performance playing a concerto at the age of eleven.
At the age of thirteen, Hubay began his studies in Berlin
. He remained there for five years, receiving instruction from Joseph Joachim
. In 1878, following the advice of Franz Liszt
, he made his début in Paris
, which was a great success. Sitting in the audience was Henri Vieuxtemps
, with whom Hubay formed an intimate friendship and from whom he received instruction.
In 1882 Hubay was employed at the Brussels
music institute as the head of the department of violin studies. Returning to Hungary in 1886, he succeeded his father as head of the Liszt Academy. That same year, he established the Budapest Quartet
with fellow teacher, cellist David Popper
.
Hubay's main pupils, aside from Joseph Szigeti
and André Gertler
, included Eugene Ormandy
--who later turned to conducting--and Eugene Lehner
. He also taught many female violinists such as Stefi Geyer
, Bartók
's first love, to whom he dedicated his first violin concerto; Jelly d'Arányi
, Joachim's niece, who was successful in England
and France
and who collaborated on Maurice Ravel
's Tzigane; and Ilona Fehér
. Other pupils included Franz von Vecsey
, Emil Telmányi
, Zoltán Székely
, Gerhard Taschner
, Barnabás von Géczy and Ede Zathureczky.
and many others.
As a chamber music
ian, he formed two string quartet
s, one while he was in Brussels and one with David Popper during his Budapest (Budapest Quartet) years. With Popper, he performed chamber music on more than one occasion with Brahms, including the premiere of Brahms's Piano Trio No. 3 in C minor
, Op. 101.
Among his earliest recordings are ten-inch acoustic discs, dating from 1910, on which he was accompanied by the composer Zsigmond Vincze
.
pieces. His concertos incorporate themes from Hungarian gypsy music, and his "gentle breeze" pieces, which share features of the compositional style of his chamber music partner, David Popper, continue the tradition of the German romantics such as Felix Mendelssohn
and Robert Schumann
.
Hubay's output also contains several operas, including The Venus of Milo, The Violin-Maker of Cremona, The Mask and Anna Karenina (after Leo Tolstoy
). The opening of The Venus of Milo is based on whole tone scales
and archaisms that perhaps are meant to suggest the ancient setting.
Hungary
Hungary , officially the Republic of Hungary , is a landlocked country in Central Europe. It is situated in the Carpathian Basin and is bordered by Slovakia to the north, Ukraine and Romania to the east, Serbia and Croatia to the south, Slovenia to the southwest and Austria to the west. The...
name Jenő Hubay (ˈjɛnø ˈhubɒj), was a Hungarian violin
Violin
The violin is a string instrument, usually with four strings tuned in perfect fifths. It is the smallest, highest-pitched member of the violin family of string instruments, which includes the viola and cello....
ist, composer
Composer
A composer is a person who creates music, either by musical notation or oral tradition, for interpretation and performance, or through direct manipulation of sonic material through electronic media...
and music
Music
Music is an art form whose medium is sound and silence. Its common elements are pitch , rhythm , dynamics, and the sonic qualities of timbre and texture...
teacher.
Early life
Eugen Huber was born into a German family of musicianMusician
A musician is an artist who plays a musical instrument. It may or may not be the person's profession. Musicians can be classified by their roles in performing music and writing music.Also....* A person who makes music a profession....
s in Pest, Hungary. He adopted the Hungarian version of his name, Jenő Hubay, in his twenties, while living in the French
French language
French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...
-speaking world.
Hubay was trained in violin and music by his father, Karl, concertmaster of the Hungarian National Opera House and a teacher at the Budapest College of Music
Franz Liszt Academy of Music
The Franz Liszt Academy of Music is a concert hall and music conservatory in Budapest, Hungary, founded on November 14, 1875...
. Hubay gave his début public performance playing a concerto at the age of eleven.
At the age of thirteen, Hubay began his studies in Berlin
Berlin
Berlin is the capital city of Germany and is one of the 16 states of Germany. With a population of 3.45 million people, Berlin is Germany's largest city. It is the second most populous city proper and the seventh most populous urban area in the European Union...
. He remained there for five years, receiving instruction from Joseph Joachim
Joseph Joachim
Joseph Joachim was a Hungarian violinist, conductor, composer and teacher. A close collaborator of Johannes Brahms, he is widely regarded as one of the most significant violinists of the 19th century.-Origins:...
. In 1878, following the advice of Franz Liszt
Franz Liszt
Franz Liszt ; ), was a 19th-century Hungarian composer, pianist, conductor, and teacher.Liszt became renowned in Europe during the nineteenth century for his virtuosic skill as a pianist. He was said by his contemporaries to have been the most technically advanced pianist of his age...
, he made his début in Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
, which was a great success. Sitting in the audience was Henri Vieuxtemps
Henri Vieuxtemps
Henri François Joseph Vieuxtemps was a Belgian composer and violinist. He occupies an important place in the history of the violin as a prominent exponent of the Franco-Belgian violin school during the mid-19th century....
, with whom Hubay formed an intimate friendship and from whom he received instruction.
In 1882 Hubay was employed at the Brussels
Brussels
Brussels , officially the Brussels Region or Brussels-Capital Region , is the capital of Belgium and the de facto capital of the European Union...
music institute as the head of the department of violin studies. Returning to Hungary in 1886, he succeeded his father as head of the Liszt Academy. That same year, he established the Budapest Quartet
Budapest Quartet (1886)
The Budapest Quartet was a string quartet established in Budapest, Hungary in 1886 by Jenő Hubay and David Popper.Johannes Brahms performed with the quartet and thought it was the best he had heard....
with fellow teacher, cellist David Popper
David Popper
David Popper was a Bohemian cellist and composer.-Life:He was born in Prague, and studied music at the Prague Conservatory. He studied the cello under Julius Goltermann , and soon attracted attention...
.
Teaching
Joseph Szigeti
Joseph Szigeti was a Hungarian violinist.Born into a musical family, he spent his early childhood in a small town in Transylvania. He quickly proved himself to be a child prodigy on the violin, and moved to Budapest with his father to study with the renowned pedagogue Jenő Hubay...
and André Gertler
André Gertler
André Gertler was a classical violinist and teacher.Born in Budapest, Hungary, he fled the country under the Nazis. He was a teacher at the Royal Conservatory of Music, in Brussels, Belgium....
, included Eugene Ormandy
Eugene Ormandy
Eugene Ormandy was a Hungarian-born conductor and violinist.-Early life:Born Jenő Blau in Budapest, Hungary, Ormandy began studying violin at the Royal National Hungarian Academy of Music at the age of five...
--who later turned to conducting--and Eugene Lehner
Eugene Lehner
Eugene Lehner was a violist and music educator.Mr. Lehner, as he preferred to be addressed, was born in Hungary in 1906. Originally named Jenö Léner, he performed as a self-taught violinist from the time he was 7. When he was 13, the composer Bela Bartok heard him play, and arranged for him to...
. He also taught many female violinists such as Stefi Geyer
Stefi Geyer
Stefi Geyer was a Hungarian violinist.She was the daughter of Josef Geyer, a police doctor who played the violin himself. When she was 3 years old she started playing the violin, with remarkable results for someone who had not practiced at all...
, Bartók
Béla Bartók
Béla Viktor János Bartók was a Hungarian composer and pianist. He is considered one of the most important composers of the 20th century and is regarded, along with Liszt, as Hungary's greatest composer...
's first love, to whom he dedicated his first violin concerto; Jelly d'Arányi
Jelly d'Arányi
Jelly d'Aranyi, fully Jelly Aranyi de Hunyadvár was a Hungarian violinist who made her home in London.She born in Budapest, the grand-niece of Joseph Joachim, and sister of the violinist Adila Fachiri. She began her studies as a pianist, but switched to violin at the Music Academy in Budapest...
, Joachim's niece, who was successful in England
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
and France
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
and who collaborated on Maurice Ravel
Maurice Ravel
Joseph-Maurice Ravel was a French composer known especially for his melodies, orchestral and instrumental textures and effects...
's Tzigane; and Ilona Fehér
Ilona Feher
Ilona Feher, Ilona Fehér , was one of the last representatives of the Central European Violin School whose greats included Joseph Joachim, Otakar Ševčík and Jenő Hubay. She was also a noted violin teacher.-Early years:Feher studied with Jenő Hubay for six years at the Franz Liszt Academy of Music...
. Other pupils included Franz von Vecsey
Franz von Vecsey
Franz von Vecsey was a Hungarian violinist and composer.He was born in Budapest and began his violin studies with his father, Lajos Vecsey, and at the age of eight he entered the studio of Jenő Hubay...
, Emil Telmányi
Emil Telmányi
Emil Telmányi, b. 22 June 1892 in Arad, then in the Kingdom of Hungary, d. 13 June 1988 in Holte, Denmark was a Hungarian violinist who invented the Bach bow, designed to play and sustain three or four notes on a violin for Bach's sonatas and partitas for solo violin...
, Zoltán Székely
Zoltán Székely
Zoltán Székely was a violinist and composer.Székely studied violin with Jenő Hubay and composition with Zoltán Kodály at the Franz Liszt Academy in Budapest. He composed mainly chamber music...
, Gerhard Taschner
Gerhard Taschner
Gerhard Taschner was a noted German violinist and teacher.-Biography:Taschner was born in Krnov , Czechoslovakia, of Moravian origins. After studying with his grandfather, he played Mozart's Violin Concerto No. 5 at his debut in Prague, when aged only 7...
, Barnabás von Géczy and Ede Zathureczky.
Performance
As a soloist, Hubay gained the praise of Vieuxtemps, Johannes BrahmsJohannes Brahms
Johannes Brahms was a German composer and pianist, and one of the leading musicians of the Romantic period. Born in Hamburg, Brahms spent much of his professional life in Vienna, Austria, where he was a leader of the musical scene...
and many others.
As a chamber music
Chamber music
Chamber music is a form of classical music, written for a small group of instruments which traditionally could be accommodated in a palace chamber. Most broadly, it includes any art music that is performed by a small number of performers with one performer to a part...
ian, he formed two string quartet
String quartet
A string quartet is a musical ensemble of four string players – usually two violin players, a violist and a cellist – or a piece written to be performed by such a group...
s, one while he was in Brussels and one with David Popper during his Budapest (Budapest Quartet) years. With Popper, he performed chamber music on more than one occasion with Brahms, including the premiere of Brahms's Piano Trio No. 3 in C minor
Piano Trio No. 3 (Brahms)
The Piano Trio in C minor, opus 101, by Johannes Brahms is scored for piano, violin and cello, and was written in the summer of 1886 while Brahms was on vacation in Hofstetten, Switzerland...
, Op. 101.
Among his earliest recordings are ten-inch acoustic discs, dating from 1910, on which he was accompanied by the composer Zsigmond Vincze
Zsigmond Vincze
Zsigmond Vincze was a Hungarian pianist, conductor and composer who wrote several very successful operettas.-Life and career:...
.
Compositions
Hubay composed four violin concertos and a very large number of encoreEncore (concert)
An encore is an additional performance added to the end of a concert, from the French "encore", which means "again", "some more"; multiple encores are not uncommon. Encores originated spontaneously, when audiences would continue to applaud and demand additional performance from the artist after the...
pieces. His concertos incorporate themes from Hungarian gypsy music, and his "gentle breeze" pieces, which share features of the compositional style of his chamber music partner, David Popper, continue the tradition of the German romantics such as Felix Mendelssohn
Felix Mendelssohn
Jakob Ludwig Felix Mendelssohn Barthóldy , use the form 'Mendelssohn' and not 'Mendelssohn Bartholdy'. The Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians gives ' Felix Mendelssohn' as the entry, with 'Mendelssohn' used in the body text...
and Robert Schumann
Robert Schumann
Robert Schumann, sometimes known as Robert Alexander Schumann, was a German composer, aesthete and influential music critic. He is regarded as one of the greatest and most representative composers of the Romantic era....
.
Hubay's output also contains several operas, including The Venus of Milo, The Violin-Maker of Cremona, The Mask and Anna Karenina (after Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy
Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy was a Russian writer who primarily wrote novels and short stories. Later in life, he also wrote plays and essays. His two most famous works, the novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina, are acknowledged as two of the greatest novels of all time and a pinnacle of realist...
). The opening of The Venus of Milo is based on whole tone scales
Whole tone scale
In music, a whole tone scale is a scale in which each note is separated from its neighbors by the interval of a whole step. There are only two complementary whole tone scales, both six-note or hexatonic scales:...
and archaisms that perhaps are meant to suggest the ancient setting.
External links
- Jenő Hubay Foundation
- Jenő Hubay in performance: video clip from the 1935 film Halló, Budapest! (Hello, Budapest!)