Ernst von Dohnányi
[2] He first studied music with his father, a professor of mathematics and an amateur cellist, and then when he was eight years old, with Carl Forstner, organist at the local cathedral.
In 1894 he moved to Budapest and enrolled in the Royal National Hungarian Academy of Music, studying piano with István Thomán and composition with Hans von Koessler, a cousin of Max Reger.
[3] István Thomán had been a favorite student of Franz Liszt, while Hans von Koessler was a devotee of Johannes Brahms's music.
[4] After a few lessons with Eugen d'Albert, another student of Liszt, Dohnányi made his debut in Berlin in 1897 and was recognized at once as a performer of high merit.
He made his London debut at a Richter concert in Queen's Hall, with a notable performance of Beethoven's Piano Concerto No.
Unlike most famous pianists of the time, he did not limit himself to solo recitals and concertos, but also appeared in chamber music.
Hans distinguished himself as a leader of the anti-Nazi resistance in Germany and was ultimately executed in the final stages of World War II.
[7] Before World War I broke out, Dohnányi met and fell in love with a German actress (also described as a singer),[8] Elsa Galafrés, who was married to the Polish Jewish violinist Bronisław Huberman.
[9][10][11] During the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919, Dohnányi was appointed Director of the Budapest Academy, but a few months later the new interim government replaced him with the prominent violinist Jenő Hubay after Dohnányi had refused to dismiss the pedagogue and composer Zoltán Kodály from the Academy for his supposedly leftist political position.
His pupils included Andor Földes, Mischa Levitzki, Ervin Nyiregyházi, Géza Anda, Annie Fischer, Hope Squire, Helen Camille Stanley, Bertha Tideman-Wijers, Edward Kilenyi, Bálint Vázsonyi, Sir Georg Solti, Istvan Kantor, Georges Cziffra and Ľudovít Rajter (conductor and Dohnányi's godson).
[14] Peter Halász continued this in an article titled "Persecuted Musicians in Hungary between 1919–1945", which portrayed him as a "victim" of Nazism,[15] and by James Grymes, who in his book called Dohnányi saw him as "a forgotten hero of the Holocaust resistance".
In his orchestra, the Budapest Philharmonic [17] he managed to keep on all Jewish members until two months after the German invasion of Hungary in March 1944, when he disbanded the ensemble.
2) was American Rhapsody (1953), written for the sesquicentennial of Ohio University and including folk material, for example, "Turkey in the Straw", "On Top of Old Smokey" and "I am a poor wayfaring stranger".
17, in G major, K. 453, playing and conducting the Budapest Philharmonic),and also his own Variations on a Nursery Tune, the second movement of his Ruralia hungarica (Gypsy Andante), and a few solo works (but no Beethoven sonatas) on 78 rpm.
[citation needed] He had also recorded various other works, including Beethoven's Tempest Sonata and Haydn's F minor Variations, on early mono LPs.
