Jenő Hubay

Hubay's first teacher was his father Károly, concertmaster of the Hungarian National Theatre, who sent him on to Joseph Joachim in Berlin; a Paris debut made on Liszt's advice followed, and then the decisive meeting with Henri Vieuxtemps. Born Jenő Huber in Pest, he took the violin chair at the Brussels Conservatoire in 1882, where Vieuxtemps and Wieniawski had previously taught and returned to Budapest in 1886 to take charge of the violin department at the Academy of Music, where he developed the Hungarian violin school. Joseph Szigeti, Stefi Geyer, Jelly d'Arányi, Ilona Fehér, André Gertler and Eugene Ormandy all passed through his class. With the cellist David Popper he formed the Hubay-Popper Quartet, and he composed steadily: four violin concertos, concert pieces, songs, chamber music, several operas, and the Scènes de la csárda that violinists still play. He was eleven when he first played a concerto in public and he studied in Berlin from 1873 to 1876, and the Paris debut came in 1878; he adopted the Hungarian form of his name while living in Paris. With Popper he played chamber music with Brahms more than once, including the first performance of the Piano Trio in C minor, Op. 101. Franz von Vecsey, Emil Telmányi, Zoltán Székely, Tibor Varga and Ede Zathureczky were also among his pupils. He served as director of the Budapest Academy of Music from 1919 to 1934.