My musical grandfather- Lorand Fenyves

The greatest influence I had in my life comes from Professor Lorand Fenyves (1918-2004), who was a great pedagogue and have taught many successful violinists and violists. His teaching was tailored to each of his students according to the background, personality as well as the body types, and his insight in music was greatly admired among entire musicians in Toronto, where he lived and taught. The time I spent as one of his students literally changed my life. For one, I ended up marrying with one of his students and when our son was born, we gave the name “Lorand” to him. His students almost formed a “cult,” and could talk about his greatness, kindness and how his eyes twinkled at the special moments, as well as exchanging the information about the lessons we had. Well, we still do this whenever we meet anyone who studied with him!

Mr. Fenyves (this is how we called him) was not just a violin teacher, but also a mentor in life itself. He spoke at least 6 languages with heavy Hungarian accent, survived WWII and worked with historical figures like Menuhin and Toscanini. He loved his students and truly cared for us. At the age of 80 as I went under his wing, the experience he had as a musician and as a teacher made him a figure like Yoda in Star Wars.

There were so many “eye opening” moments while I studied with him that I cannot write everything here. Mr. Fenyves made me think, listen, analyse, and find a solution to whatever problem I had. 

Sometimes, how he saw through me was scary. At one of the earlier lessons, he heard me playing a scale and said “You are not listening to what you are playing.”

At the physical level, what has happened was that I played some notes out of tune. But he could see the fundamental problem hidden behind, and made me aware of it. 

Mr. Fenyves was the first teacher in my life who has explained which muscle is used to do certain movement in violin playing. Under his guidance, I started to figure out how to practice efficiently by analysing each movements, rather than blindly repeating so called “difficult” passages. With him, I have learned how to use my technical ability to express music…which seems obvious, but I lost sight of it while I was too busy “training” myself to play Paganini caprices back in Japan. 

He would sometimes intentionally confuse me by showing contradicting ideas which would both work. I think it was his way of showing there is no “correct” way of performing, but most suitable way according to the situation. I remember Mr. Fenyves telling me how he dislikes saying “never,” as there always are some exceptions. 

Music was his life, and one could see his love for music in each lesson. He always had a few episodes he could share with us for the major violin repertoire. Each of these were like a jewel in my memory, along with his twinkling eyes and his gentle smile. 

If we played something out of habit or copy someone else’s style without good reason, he would detect it and let us think about it. Mr. Fenyves would give his opinion, gave some technical advise to achieve his point, but also let his students to think themselves and  perform in their own way. He was definitely not producing his clones. 

The curiosity he had for music made him always open to new ideas. He knew his performing style for Bach was outdated, and made sure all of his students took historical performance practice class which was led by Jean Lamon, leader of Tafelmusik at the time. His students used Bach’s manuscript to play solo Sonatas and Partitas. This was my first contact with “early music.” I did’t know at the time, that it was going to change my musical career later on…

Without knowing, I became one of the last students who could learn from him. Sadly, he passed away just 6 months after I left Toronto. The loss of him to all of his students and the entire musical seen in Toronto was huge. 

Mr. Fenyves was teaching till the last moment of his life. He fell during transition at Zurich airpot on the way to a masterclasses in England. The news was shocking, yet his students all knew, that he will be gone suddenly. It was well known back then that the only reason why he was still alive was for his love for music and teaching. His diet was not healthy (it was famous that he didn’t like vegetables and fish), and he did have a pacemaker for a while. He would teach long lessons and could go on without eating, yet never said “I am tired.”

A lot of his teaching finally made sense to me years after I left him. Probably there are some more yet to be discovered, so in a sense, he is still guiding me. As I write this post, I feel very fortunate to have had met him to start with.

What Mr. Fenyves has taught all his students will live on us, and definitely will be passed on to the next generations. Maybe not what he literally told us. That was not his point anyway. But the yarning for performing music in a sincere way by never stopping to learn. By doing so, hopefully we will be the musicians who can inspire audience and do justice to all the music we play, as well as passing this attitude to the next generation. So the legacy of our great pedagogue will live on…