Eugene Ormandy

For four decades stretching from the 1940s into the early 1980s, Eugene Ormandy stood as a central presence in classical music. He served as music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra for more than forty years after taking the post in 1938, becoming one of the most widely admired conductors in the United States; his Columbia Masterworks releases with that ensemble regularly outsold, by a substantial margin, those of the New York Philharmonic under Dimitri Mitropoulos, even though the latter group was widely viewed as superior. Ormandy conducted with exceptional competence and frequent inspiration, bringing unusual attention to detail and refinement to every performance. Though never considered a pioneer, he produced the first recordings of several major works and enabled multiple composers to reach larger audiences than they had previously enjoyed.

Born to a dentist, Ormandy was steered by his father toward the violin and began formal training at the age of two. Already able to identify major compositions at that stage, he entered Budapest’s Royal Academy of Music when he turned five. He earned a master’s degree at fourteen and, two years later, received an artist’s diploma in violin performance along with a philosophy degree from Budapest University. He toured as a child prodigy in the months before World War I, retained Hungarian citizenship throughout the conflict, and at twenty became a professor at the Hungarian State Conservatory.

Ormandy entered the conducting profession entirely by chance. Arriving in America in 1920 for a violin recital series that failed to occur, he joined the orchestra at New York’s Capitol Theater. Within months he advanced to concertmaster, and when the ensemble’s conductor fell ill roughly eight months later, Ormandy stepped in at the podium. He was soon named permanent conductor, a role he held for seven years while leading as many as twenty performances weekly. The experience sharpened his ability to convey intentions clearly and elicit finely finished playing from his musicians.

That competence led, at the close of 1927, to his appointment as conductor of the CBS Radio Orchestra. The post reduced his weekly performances and allowed him to observe Wilhelm Furtwängler, Willem Mengelberg, and Arturo Toscanini rehearsing the New York Philharmonic. Toscanini exerted the strongest early influence on his orchestral technique, although Otto Klemperer later shaped his musical outlook more profoundly. In 1930 Ormandy directed the New York Philharmonic in outdoor concerts at Lewisohn Stadium. The following year he substituted for Toscanini with the Philadelphia Orchestra; those appearances earned him the music directorship of the Minneapolis Symphony in 1931.

At Minneapolis, Ormandy gained freedom to shape programs and introduced Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 2, scored for orchestra, chorus, and soloists, which he later preserved in a live recording at Northrop Auditorium—the first American recording of any Mahler symphony and the first electrical recording of this particular work. He also gained his initial studio experience there; RCA captured the orchestra extensively in the mid-1930s over extended sessions that yielded more than one hundred titles, including the Mahler Second. The technical familiarity he acquired proved invaluable when many senior conductors still treated recording as a mere obligation.

Ormandy’s European profile rose as well; in 1936 he conducted at the Bruckner Festival in Linz, Austria. Mid-decade he became co-conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra alongside Leopold Stokowski. When Stokowski stepped down in 1938, Ormandy assumed the music directorship, which he retained for more than forty years. Although he accepted occasional guest engagements, his primary identity remained tied to Philadelphia. Relations with the players were notably warm, unlike the more distant rapport he had maintained in Minneapolis. He remained uneasy, however, about the presence of women in the orchestra and hired Philadelphia’s first female violinist only after auditioning a performer whose excellence left him no choice.

From the 1940s through the 1970s, Ormandy strengthened the Philadelphia Orchestra’s standing as the most aristocratic of America’s major ensembles. Stokowski had already begun shaping that identity through early 78 rpm discs, yet Ormandy refined the ensemble’s sonority further and captured the principal benefits of the long-playing record and subsequent stereophonic, and briefly quadraphonic, formats. He understood that recordings functioned both as revenue sources and as powerful vehicles for extending the orchestra’s reputation far beyond its home city. Aware of the advantages enjoyed by Columbia Masterworks’ New York Philharmonic rivals through their location in the media capital, he worked to keep Philadelphia competitive on every level. He also aligned concert and recording schedules to minimize rehearsal time and maximize productive studio hours.

The outcome was an extensive catalog of smoothly polished, seamless performances that proved highly popular, especially after the introduction of LPs and stereo. Ormandy began with RCA, but in 1943 he and the Philadelphia signed a twenty-five-year contract with Columbia Masterworks that generated a vast body of work.

His tastes extended across a broad spectrum. He recorded Mozart and Haydn, included Bach and Handel on occasion—his Columbia Messiah, though popular, was heavily abbreviated and stylistically distant from modern expectations—and delivered capable, occasionally inspired Beethoven symphonies. He made several first recordings of Anton Webern and helped bring wider attention to Samuel Barber and Charles Ives; late in his career he also addressed Penderecki, and his account of Paul Hindemith’s Mathis der Maler symphony remains among the finest available. He achieved his greatest renown, however, with the Romantic repertory—Sibelius, Tchaikovsky, Dvořák, Rimsky-Korsakov, Mussorgsky, Smetana, Liszt, Richard Strauss, and similar composers—now commonly labeled “warhorses.”

Ormandy occasionally ventured into less familiar territory. When Deryck Cooke prepared a performing version of Mahler’s unfinished Symphony No. 10 in the early 1960s, years passed before many younger leading conductors accepted it, and Leonard Bernstein never conducted the realization. Ormandy not only programmed the work but recorded it, one of Philadelphia’s few notable Mahler efforts. He also recorded the so-called Tchaikovsky Symphony No. 7. In the mid-1960s he produced a well-regarded collection of Frederick Delius’s music, previously regarded as the domain of English conductors.

Some choices were pragmatic. Even in the 1960s the classical recording industry faced a repertory squeeze, with numerous conductors competing over a limited number of major works; by being among the first to record the Mahler Tenth, the Tchaikovsky Seventh, and comparable pieces, Ormandy enhanced both the orchestra’s prestige and its income.

His earliest recordings date from the mid-1930s with the Minneapolis Symphony and include Schoenberg’s Transfigured Night and Griffes’s Pleasure Dome of Kubla Khan. Apart from the Mahler Second and Bruckner Seventh, most of those discs now hold primarily historical interest. Ironically, his later Mahler and Bruckner recordings, excepting the Tenth, proved less consequential, although the Bruckner set helped broaden awareness of the composer when few American ensembles or labels invested heavily in his symphonies. Among his notable early Philadelphia releases are the Brahms Alto Rhapsody with Marian Anderson, Samuel Barber’s Essay for Orchestra No. 1, and Hart McDonald’s Symphony No. 1.

Ormandy’s recordings enjoyed particular success in the 1950s and early 1960s, when stereo attracted many audiophiles to classical music. The orchestra’s refined sonority matched what these listeners—whose purchases often subsidized less commercial projects—sought. His fluent, occasionally score-altering approach made him a favored accompanist for concerto recordings, most notably the Sibelius Violin Concerto with David Oistrakh.

As audiences grew more specialized and discerning, critical and commercial favor declined, with some observers citing insufficient interpretive depth. He retained an older following into the late 1960s. Returning to RCA with the Philadelphia in 1968 after a twenty-five-year absence, he re-recorded much of his most popular repertory. More than a decade later he and the orchestra helped pioneer digital recording, producing one of the label’s earliest digital releases. By then his interpretive faculties had begun to waver, and even longtime admirers recognized that his era was ending.

Ormandy’s long dominance with the Philadelphia has continued to affect the orchestra’s later identity. Under Riccardo Muti and, more recently, Wolfgang Sawallisch, the ensemble has received favorable critical notice, yet the stereo Columbia recordings from Ormandy’s tenure continue to sell briskly and overshadow many newer releases, despite praise for the Sawallisch catalog. Sony Classical, Columbia’s successor, has reissued increasing numbers of Ormandy performances even while EMI dropped the current Philadelphia Orchestra in 1997 owing to disappointing sales.