Lianna Kissinger-Virizlay - Playing to God

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M y F a t h e r a n d t h e S p i r i t u a l i t y o f
M u s i c a n d A d d i c t i o n
Lianna Kissinger-Virizlay
A Senior Thesis Submitted to
The Department of Religion, Princeton University
In partial fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of
Bachelor of Arts
Professor Albert J. Raboteau
April 12, 2010

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This composition represents my own work in accordance with University Regulations.
I authorize Princeton University to lend this thesis to other institutions or individuals
for the purpose of scholarly research.
I further authorize Princeton University to reproduce this thesis by photocopying or
by other means, in total or in part, at the request of other institutions or individuals
for the purpose of scholarly research.
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The First Poem
Within that exploding and
gaseous cavern
from which all life
pours itself out
in beauty or in terror
from that place stares
my loved one out.
Innocent in this terrifying
current, yet not drowning,
(not comprehending the breakneck forces,
the impending threat of being extinguished)
But sending out
his own melodious sprout
from a beaming soul.
Robin Kissinger
October 1979

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Table of Contents
Acknowledgements v
List of Photographs vi
Prelude: Playing to God 1-16
First Movement: Death Brings in God 17-26
Second Movement: The Savior of the Family 27-49
Third Movement: The Concert Hall and the Casino 50-73
Coda: A Homily 74-76
Bibliography of Works Cited and Consulted 77-81
Bibliography of Interviews and Ephemera 82

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Acknowledgements
This thesis is a map of my father’s spiritual journey. I am reflecting on music and
gambling and their place in my father’s life—the spiritual freeways he traversed, the
roadblocks he encountered, and the people he met along the way. I have been blessed not
only with the facts that provide directions, but also with the memories that form the
landscape. For such gifts, I am grateful to my father’s inability to throw anything away and to
the Peabody Conservatory and Baltimore Symphony Orchestra Archives for following suit,
and I am indebted to all those who agreed to a conversation (or many) and shared their
memories with me. Without their willingness to lead me on this journey, I never would have
made it to the end.
My Religion Department advisor, Albert Raboteau, has been an invaluable resource
and guide. I’d like to thank him for encouraging me to explore the holy wherever it can be
found. John McPhee also has never been without advice when I’ve asked for it, for two years
and counting, and I feel honored to call him a friend and mentor. My friends have given me
inestimable support and encouragement, especially my pseudo-editor Benjamin Knudsen, my
best friend Anna Heffron, and my beautiful mother. They deserve inestimable thanks.
Finally, here’s to spirit, and to this gift of life.

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List of Photographs
Mihaly Virizlay Cover
Baltimore, circa 2000
Janos Starker and Mihaly Virizlay 32
Bloomington, IN, circa 1997
Lianna Kissinger-Virizlay, Robin Kissinger, 36
Mihaly Virizlay, Vilma Virizlay, and Ilona Virizlay
Hungary, circa 1994
Mihaly Virizlay 38
Hungary, circa 1950
Sarolta Kodály, Lianna Kissinger-Virizlay, and 40
Mihaly Virizlay
Hungary, circa 1994
Agi Rado and Mihaly Virizlay 45
Hungary, circa 1955
Domenico Montagnana Cello 53
Tricia Shallin and Mihaly Virizlay 56
Hungary, circa 1970
Mihaly Virizlay and Paula Childress 57
Robin Kissinger and Mihaly Virizlay 59
David Virizlay, Stefan Virizlay, Mihaly Virizlay, and 61
Baltimore, 1988
Ed Patey, Mihaly Virizlay, and Larry Temple 63
Mihaly Virizlay, Robin Kissinger, and 67
Vilma Virizlay, Mihaly Virizlay, and 70
Hungary, circa 1994
Mihaly Virizlay and Lianna Kissinger-Virizlay 73
Baltimore, 1988

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Prelude: Playing to God
The foundation of my life is three things—
my children, love of fellow human beings…and music.
Mihaly Virizlay, 20001
My father’s relationship with the cello lasted seventy years. It was the longest
relationship he had—longer than those with his wives, his children, his friends, or his bad
habits. Aside from the basic necessities of eating, sleeping, and breathing, music was his most
faithfully practiced activity. The place music held in his worldview becomes clear in
interviews he gave The Baltimore Sun during his forty-year tenure as principal cellist for the
Baltimore Symphony Orchestra (BSO). In 2002 he said, “Being in an orchestra is like being
in a church and being a part of a Mass […] to be in the middle of it is an unbelievable
experience.”2 Though he was raised Catholic, my father spent more time in rehearsals and
performances for the Dallas, Chicago, Pittsburgh, and Baltimore Symphonies than he could
have possibly spent in a church. And if the symphony was his church, then the masters of
composition were his saints. In 2002 this is how he described his favorite composers: “The
Bible was written by Bach […] the foundation for classical culture was laid by Haydn.
Mozart opened the door to heaven. Beethoven opened the door to everybody on this big
planet of ours. And Schubert was sitting on God's lap when he composed.”3
Music was so pervasive in my father’s life that he used it to describe the ineffable
connectedness of people to each other, to the past, and to God. A former colleague said the
1 Mihaly Virizlay, quoted in Tim Smith, “Playing a Different Tune,” Baltimore Sun, September 10, 2000, 8E,
http://www.newsbank.com.
2 Mihaly Virizlay, quoted in Tim Smith, “BSO Honors Cellist for His Endless Enthusiasm,” Baltimore Sun,
June 6, 2002, 1F, http://www.newsbank.com.
3 Mihaly Virizlay, quoted in Tim Smith, “Playing a Different Tune,” 8E.

P r e l u d e : P l a y i n g t o G o d
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cello was “the love of his life.”4 It was also his medium for expressing love. “He had a very
loving heart, and you could hear that in his sound,” said his third wife and fellow BSO cellist,
Paula Childress.5 “His second voice was the cello,” she added.6 In the same article, my
mother, pianist Robin Kissinger, said, “He always had a sound like no one else's. It spoke
straight to your heart.”7 For my father, love and music were so related that he married four
musicians.
There is general agreement among scholars of music and scholars of religion on the
inherent connection between the two—from religious ceremonies replete with or requiring
music to the effects that music has on man—but to ask for proof would be a tall order.
Consider that faith and music are two of the most difficult things to put into words. Perhaps
the inadequacy of words to express how one feels God or hears music is why so few have
attempted to relate the two concretely; however, the rhetoric used to describe music and
spirituality is almost identical, and this thesis will argue that the two were almost identical for
my father.
In their stoutly secular book called The Music Effect, Dorita S. Berger and Daniel J.
Schneck discuss the nature of music and its effect and hold on man. Their analysis uses
physiological, psychological, intellectual, and emotional reactions to describe what they call
“the music effect,” defined like this:
The music effect is about music’s ability to truncate the fear spiral, and to evoke
emotional and intellectual connections both with oneself, and with the creator and
any listeners or other participants. Why? Because music has a profound effect on
4 Calman J. Zamoiski Jr., quoted in Frederick N. Rasmussen, “Mihaly ‘Misi’ Virizlay,” Baltimore Sun,
October 16, 2008 22A, http://www.newsbank.com.
5 Paula Childress, quoted in Frederick N. Rasmussen, “Mihaly ‘Misi’ Virizlay.”
6 Ibid.
7 Robin Kissinger, quoted in Frederick N. Rasmussen, “Mihaly ‘Misi’ Virizlay.”

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human behavior; because it can resonate with basic physiological function to
‘transport me into another state,’ in the words of Leo Tolstoy.8
Berger and Schneck’s definition of the music effect echoes the language used by those who
have found religious faith or spiritual guidance. Many look to religion to overcome fear,
which, for Berger and Schneck, is a programmed response to perceived threats in our world.
Their analysis refrains from drawing connections to religious conceptualizations of fear,
which identify the sensation—as it stems from experiences of suffering, distrust, injustice, or
doubt—as having the paradoxical potential to test faith, to renew or destroy it. As religion
requires a positive reinforcement of faith to overcome fear, Berger and Schneck require the
positive reinforcement of music to reprogram what they call the “fear spiral.” They claim that
music’s physiological effects are able to bypass cognitively programmed responses and that
the sustained influence of music can change these responses in the long-term, just as some say
sustained faith can overcome doubt. In addition, Berger and Schneck’s quoting Tolstoy
indicates at least an understanding that music is similar to religion in that it can “transport me
into another state.”
Berger and Schneck also describe the music effect as bringing those affected into
connection with themselves and others, including the creator. Their use of the word creator,
in following with the rest of the book, is secular. It relates to the musician, composer, and
instrument. I suggest, however, that the word itself hints at another meaning, that of the
Creator. Though Berger and Schneck do not draw this spiritual parallel, I do not think they
would reject it. They clarify that, “Music is the receptacle into which one’s feelings are placed
8 Dorita S. Berger and Daniel J. Schneck, The Music Effect: Music Physiology and Clinical Applications (London:
Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2006), 249.

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in order that one may reveal one’s self to one’s self, as well as to others,”9 a description that
echoes other writers’ conceptions of the role of spirituality for man.
Compare, for example, Berger and Schneck’s description of music to the following
definition of spirituality: “It is concerned with our ability, through our attitudes and actions,
to relate to others, to ourselves, and to God, as we understand Him.”10 This definition could
be a paraphrase of Berger and Schneck’s description of music, though it comes from Jerry
Dollard’s pamphlet Toward Spirituality: The Inner Journey, published by Hazelden Addiction
Treatment Center. In addition, for Dollard the first step towards reaching a positive
spirituality is to move from fear to trust.11 With these two sources, we begin to see the relation
of music to spirituality.
As I use the words “spirituality” and “faith,” I am making a distinction between being
spiritual and being a practitioner of a particular faith. The above definitions of music and of
spirituality are broad, concerned not with practice but with desired effect. What I mean to
say, therefore, when I say that my father was spiritual is that he felt a longing for meaning
and for communion—communion with himself, with others, and with his conception of God.
It is important to note that my father’s spirituality was not rooted in aspirations to
reach a heavenly realm or to experience divine transcendence. His was a remarkably human
spirituality that emphasized connectedness and that saw music as the means for connection.
In a footnote in his book Thresholds: Rethinking Spirituality Through Music, Marcel Cobussen
explores music’s connective potentials:
Certain modes of interacting among musicians might perhaps be considered traces of
the spiritual as well. I am thinking here about musical, interactive and (thus) social
connections based on risk, vulnerability, and trust during the course of performances
9 Ibid., 248.
10 Jerry Dollard, Toward Spirituality: The Inner Journey, Pamphlet (Center City, MN: Hazelden, 1983), 7.
11 Ibid.

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that exceed the conscious technical input of the individual musicians separately […]
In that sense, we should also take into consideration the notion that spirituality is not
about the interior but about the exterior, about departure and, therefore, about a
fundamental instability of personal identity. Spirituality occurs or happens in and
through connections to the world, to other people, to [through] music.12
Cobussen emphasizes connection as the occasion for spirituality. The sentence preceding this
footnote discusses more explicitly the connective potentials of music as they are related to
spirituality. He writes, “Spirituality refers to a relating, a certain relation between a subject (a
listener, a musician) and an object (music), a relation which is at the same time possible and
impossible, necessary and contingent, enforced and unverifiable.”13 According to Cobussen,
spirituality constitutes, creates, and implies not only longing but also fulfillment, and it has as
its foundation a desire for connection.
Spirituality, like music (or as music, as Cobussen would say), can therefore be secular
as well as religious. I believe, however, that both music and spirituality provide an
opportunity to transcend, in that they can lead man to a deeper understanding of himself, of
his relationship to others, or of his relationship to creation. Therefore, for the purposes of this
thesis, the connection sought through spirituality can be with oneself, with others, or with
God. These relationships are similar in nature; they imply a mutual connection that is missing
from associations not based on reciprocity. And though these connections are intangible, they
are also indispensible.
Music’s ability to form these connections is rooted in the nature of music itself. In his
book, Harmonies of Heaven and Earth, musicologist Joscelyn Godwin notes, “It is not necessary to
be so philosophical in order to recognize the existence of an unheard music all around us,
12 Marcel Cobussen, Thresholds: Rethinking Spirituality Through Music (Aldershot, Hampshire, England:
Ashgate, 2008), 143-144.
13 Ibid., 143.

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even permeating our own bodies. All matter is perpetually in a state of vibration.”14 Berger
and Schneck take this idea and explore the physics of music and the physiology of men, and
how the two interact. They claim that “music resonates symbiotically with instinctive
physiological attributes,” meaning that it can bypass cognitive functions, which is the reason
they find music so effective a tool for reprogramming learned responses.15 They link music’s
physiological effects with emotional rather than cognitive responses, an argument that
supports their theory that music can be used to treat mental illness, but there are bigger
implications. If the emotional effects of music are a direct result of vibrational energies
interacting with man’s physiology, then all men are physically predisposed to respond
emotionally to music.
Berger and Schneck write, “In fulfilling the need to emote, to expel, convey, and
share emotional energies with others everywhere, a universal language was necessary, one
that everyone could understand and to which one could instinctively relate. Music is that
language…Music is all about just being—human.”16 Music’s universal ability to elicit
emotional responses in men invests it with the potential power to develop connections.
Similarly, I would argue that faith provides an outlet to fulfill universal needs “to emote,
expel, convey and share emotional energies with others everywhere,” and that it too is “all
about just being—human.” Since neither music nor faith is cognitive, they are each their own
“universal,” emotive language; they can bypass bias and transcend language barriers. In
addition, the language of music and the language of spirituality, though they may be
recorded, are in essence ineffable. They are felt, not thought.
14 Joscelyn Godwin, Harmonies of Heaven and Earth: The Spiritual Dimension of Music from Antiquity to the Avant-
Garde (London: Thames and Hudson, 1987), 14.
15 Dorita S. Berger and Daniel J. Schneck, The Music Effect, 115.
16 Ibid., 248.

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Many people affirm that my father was not religious, and he wasn’t in the sense of
practicing within the institutional structure of his Catholic heritage. I argue, however, that my
father was profoundly spiritual, that music was his spirituality, his access to others, and his
means for overcoming fear. “He used the cello,” Paula said.17 “It was his way of getting along
in life, getting through the good and the bad.”18 My father’s passion was made manifest in
his devotion to practicing, studying, performing, teaching, and bearing witness to music.
But there is another side to my father’s relationship with spirituality. From the sixties
through the early nineties, my father split his time between the concert hall and the casino.
Especially after the opening of Atlantic City in 1978 and the introduction of the Lottery to
Maryland that same year, my father’s gambling affected the trinity of things he found sacred
in devastating ways. His marriages dissolved, his children’s time was split between him and
their mothers, and he sold at least one cello to pay off debts.
Much of the literature on addiction claims that behavioral and substance
dependencies indicate misguided spirituality. The most famous example of this ideology
comes from Alcoholics Anonymous. Carl Jung, in correspondence with AA’s co-founder Bill
Wilson, wrote that a “craving for alcohol was the equivalent on a low level of the spiritual
thirst of our being for wholeness, expressed in mediaeval language: the union with God.”19
Jung’s letter has been incorporated into the mythology of AA, and his theory has been more
broadly applied to other rehabilitative groups, including Gamblers Anonymous. GA’s website
cites “certain spiritual principles which had been utilized by thousands of people who were
recovering from other compulsive addictions” as having led to the recovery of its founding
17 Paula Childress, in conversation with the author, August 9, 2009.
18 Ibid.
19 Carl Jung, letter to Bill Wilson, January 30, 1961, in Pass It On: The Story of Bill Wilson and How the A.A.
Message Reached the World (New York: Alcoholics Anonymous World Services, 1984), 383-385.

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members.20 Their emphasis is on relatively secular traits (“kindness, generosity, honesty, and
humility”), but their mission includes reaching out to other gamblers—it is impossible to
ignore the religious parallels.21
Jung ended his letter to Wilson by drawing a semantic connection between spirituality
and its opposite. He writes, “You see, Alcohol in Latin is ‘spiritus’ and you use the same word
for the highest religious experience as well as for the most depraving poison. The helpful
formula therefore is: spiritus contra spiritum.”22 Jung’s understanding of spiritus alludes to an idea
of spirituality that Godwin expounds—that spirit in all its permutations “can mean anything
from the Third Person of the Trinity to the volatile fumes that emanate from brandy.”23
Godwin continues:
In particular, they have been used in two distinct ways by writers belonging to the
Western esoteric tradition. Recently, under the influence of Theosophy, Spirit tends
to mean the most divine part of Man, equivalent to the Greek Nous or Higher
Intellect, hence superior to its companions Soul and Body. The other meaning, which
prevails in earlier texts, is of something far lower on the scale of being that is neither
body nor soul but in some way unites them.24
Godwin uses this latter definition of spiritus in his book, and Jung’s formula spiritus contra
spiritum also implies this usage, for those who seek the “highest religious experience” or “the
most depraving poison” in essence seek the same thing. That both could be related to the
spirit implies not that man’s spirit is a perfect entity at the mercy of man’s imperfection, but
that it is a nebulous entity capable of joining man both with depravity and with
enlightenment.
20 Gamblers Anonymous, “History,” http://www.gamblersanonymous.org/history.html.
21 Ibid.
22 Carl Jung to Bill Wilson, in Pass It On, 383-385.
23 Joscelyn Godwin, Harmonies of Heaven and Earth, 25.
24 Ibid.

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Spiritually based rehabilitation groups all emphasize the presence of an absence, a
longing of which compulsive behavior is a symptom. Inherent in this theory is not an absence
of faith but a need for it, one that gets fulfilled by other, destructive forces. Man’s spirit can
therefore connect the base to the high or the high to the base. It flows in both directions; it is
connective and full of potential. Spirituality can lead man to unity or fragmentation, to
heaven or hell, to music or gambling. When I use the word spirit or spirituality, I wish it to
evoke that indefinable thread between here and there. My father’s spirit led him to both ends
of this spectrum. Thus, whether he was playing a concert or playing craps, I believe my father
was playing to God.
As I said, my father, though raised Catholic, was not observant. His rehearsal and
performance schedule necessarily superseded his regular attendance at Church, but there
may have been other, more theological reasons for his religious disassociation. My mother
said that he felt alienated from the Church because of his four divorces, a practice not
condoned by the Catholic faith. According to a colleague, he also felt residual guilt over the
injustice done to Jews during World War II, especially after meeting and marrying his first
wife, a Jewish-Hungarian pianist whose entire family was killed in concentration camps. My
mother agreed that these two things—not his schedule—led my father to reject the practices
of organized Catholicism, out of guilt and doubt.
Loss of faith in organized religion is one point at which a person can, in an attempt to
compensate for that loss, become susceptible to addictive behavior. One article on addiction
and spirituality cites Percy M. Sessions, who “explains this apparent contradiction by
proposing that the alcoholic often rebels or resorts to agnosticism ‘as a reaction to’ or ‘in flight
from’ certain aspects of what Sessions calls ‘superego’ or guilt-centered religion.”25 Such
25 Howard P. Brown, Orville Cunnin and John H. Peterson, “Rationale and Theoretical Basis for a
Behavioral/Cognitive Approach to Spirituality.” Alcoholism Treatment Quarterly, 5, 1/2 (1988): 52.

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rejection or rebellion also presents a barrier to being open to an “act of grace,” one of Jung’s
solutions to addiction.26 The other solutions he saw were “through a personal and honest
contact with friends, or through a higher education of the mind beyond the confines of mere
rationalism.”27
My father never received an act of grace that I know of. His cure then, according to
Jung, should have come from communion with friends or an education “beyond the confines
of mere rationalism.” Jung placed special emphasis on relationships with others, should an act
of grace not be forthcoming. He wrote to Wilson, “I am strongly convinced that the evil
principle prevailing in this world, leads the unrecognized spiritual need into perdition, if it is
not counteracted either by real religious insight or by the protective wall of human
community.”28 Here, Jung underscores the tendency for man to fall into fear or doubt, and
such a fall’s potential to lead the doubter to addictive behavior. To demonstrate the spiritual
implications, one could call such behavior sin. As psychiatrist Gerald G. May writes in his
book Addiction and Grace, “Theologically, sin is what turns us away from love—away from love
for ourselves, away from love for one another, and away from love for God.”29 The addict’s
physical and mental consumption by the object of his addiction certainly turns him away
from these interpersonal connections.
As my father rejected organized religion, whether consciously or not, his second
chance at filling the spiritual void—according to Jung—depended on his friends. A 1987
article for The Baltimore Sun says, “Affection is central in Virizlay’s life. He has a need to
shower it on his family, friends and audiences. He has just as great a need to receive it.”30
26 Carl Jung to Bill Wilson, in Pass It On, 383-385
27 Ibid.
28 Ibid.
29 Gerald G. May, Addiction and Grace (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988), 2.
30 Stephen Wigler, “Mihaly Virizlay: Cellist’s Strings Tied to Hungary,” Baltimore Sun (morning edition),
February 8, 1987, sec. E.

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This need for physical reciprocity was key to understanding my father, because I think he
often confused displays of love with love itself. He played music as a demonstration of his
love, and he expected equal amounts of love to be delivered in return—whether through the
cheers of an audience, the accompaniment of a wife, or the embrace of a child. But these
displays are not love; they are acts of love. Acts of love are tangible entities that can be
exchanged, whereas love is a mutual connection that is ineffable. I would say that, as he was
addicted to gambling, my father was also addicted to acts of love—both to giving them and to
receiving them. In order to distinguish between love and its tangible manifestation, I will call
these acts affection.
For my father, even something as simple as a meal became a medium for expressing
and receiving affection. In a profile for The Baltimore Sun’s food section, my father explained,
“I love to make the food and I love to see the success when people love it.”31 Food was love
for my father, and its enjoyment love—but in reality both his act of preparing food and his
guests’ reactions (which my father used to tally the level of his “success”) became displays of
affection first given then returned. Confusing these displays for the ineffable sensations they
represent can propel man from one end of the spiritual spectrum to another without his
realizing it. My father longed for the connection of love, but became consumed with desire
for its tradable manifestation.
My father viewed his every act as affection. One could replace the word “food” in the
above sentence with almost anything else my father cherished—from music, to success, to
love itself. My father’s acts of making music, making money, and making love then became
party to his desire for reciprocated acts of love. With so much affection being given, it is
inevitable that he was sometimes disappointed with the amount he got in return. My mother
31 Mihaly Virizlay, quoted in Scott Duncan, “A Chef of Note,” Baltimore Sun (evening edition), October 30,
1985, sec. C1.

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said he was “always demanding, ‘Show me your love, show me your love, show me your
love,’ and some people get tired of that.”32
In certain Buddhist traditions, there is a word for a being with the kind of insatiability
that my father had for affection. Pretas, or “hungry ghosts,” are depicted with swollen
stomachs and narrow necks that prevent them from swallowing.33 They inhabit the preta
realm, a type of purgatory for previously greedy or jealous people, where they are reborn with
insatiable urges for often disgusting things.34 Of course I am not calling my father’s hunger for
affection disgusting, but I wonder whether his understanding of love was a blessing or a
curse—whether it confused the kind of mutual love that could be called divine with a material
love made up of checks and balances. I know he had access to both.
Here it is necessary for me to clarify what I mean by the words “divine” and
“material,” as I will use them to describe my father’s spirituality. Divine spirituality is that
which travels upwards, towards peace, unity, love, and beauty. Music, as I will define it in the
First Movement, is the ultimate medium for and representation of this divine spirituality. On
the other hand, addiction, as Jung defines it, is the symptom of a confused spirituality to
which all those with a spiritual longing are susceptible. To describe this misguided spirituality,
I will use the word “material.” The choice is calculated. My father’s gambling devoured his
spirit, leading him to seek divine spirituality through material means. The capricious nature
of gambling disrupts concepts of order and harmony, and the quest for money remains a
material, not a divine, impulse. In a similar way I have distinguished between affection and
love—the former is a material entity, the latter divine.
32 Robin Kissinger, in conversation with the author, September 1, 2009.
33 Hungry ghost sketches (images), Hungry Ghosts, http://web.sxu.edu/mdr1/studentwork/hungry
_ghosts/pages/images.html.
34 Encyclopædia Britannica Online, s.v. “hell,” available from Princeton University Library, http://libguides
.princeton.edu/.

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My father’s friends perpetually came to his aid. Former wives balanced his checkbook
and managed his accounts. Financial consultants offered their services for free. Fellow
symphony members, old friends, and even a nurse he met in the hospital during a heart-
bypass surgery gave him rides, took him to lunch, and indulged his most needy tendencies.
What bound my father and these people with such strength? As his child, I am forever bound
to him, as are my two brothers. For the others, was it music? His former wives, colleagues,
and admirers would say so. But for his nonmusical friends—was it love? If it was, was it his
love for them, or their love for him? Or was there something about his enthusiasm for
showering love on everything and everyone that was contagious? Did they feel as if they owed
him something?
My father was rarely alone, though much of his family has said he was lonely. When I
asked her about it, my mother said pointedly, “Gamblers are very lonely.”35 Though my
father would have interpreted his friends’ acts as affectionate, they would by all clinical
accounts be considered enabling. My father’s friends kept his head above water. Most of the
conflicts between my father’s genuinely good intentions and his destructive actions stemmed,
I think, from avoidance of the real problem he faced: spiritual longing. His friends never
stopped supporting him, so he never fully had to confront the spiritual implications of his
loneliness, and he never had to seek one of Jung’s true cures for addiction.
The last of Jung’s theories for reforming addicts is an education that overcomes
rationality, a spiritual education. Though a master of language, my father’s formal education
was exclusively musical. Plato understood the potential of musical education to inspire grace.
In Book III of his Republic, he writes, “Musical training is a more potent instrument than any
other, because rhythm and harmony find their way into the inward places of the soul, on
which they mightily fasten, imparting grace, and making the soul of him who is rightly
35 Robin Kissinger, in conversation, Sept. 1, 2009.

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educated graceful.”36 As I will discuss in the Second Movement, my father’s education in
Hungary coincided with a time during which similar ideas of music’s spiritual potential were
being incorporated into the Hungarian musical curriculum. As it developed, my father’s
music—whether he heard, played, or composed it—certainly allowed him moments of grace.
Those who were touched by his musicianship are a testament to this fact; however, since
music was my father’s profession and therefore tied to his material security, it is easy to see
how his conception of music could lead him to a misguided spirituality centered on material
success.
In the last years of his life, my father was silent. A massive stroke in the left
hemisphere of his brain paralyzed his right side and left his tongue mute. It was his second
stroke, one from which he would not recover. My father never took care of his health, so I
cannot attribute his stroke purely to psychological responses. But increasing numbers of
studies on psychosomatic illness demonstrate a link between psychological duress and
physical illness. Berger and Schneck cite prolonged stress, and I would include spiritual stress,
as a cause for strokes and other potentially fatal afflictions. They write, “It’s the stress,
manifesting itself in all of these consequences, that kills.”37
In his last three years, before complications from a third stroke ended his life, my
father was unable to practice music. Listening to it caused him great suffering, so we stopped
playing it. Less than three months before he passed, my mother sent him a letter, which she
asked my brother to read to him. The following passage comes from that insightful and
tender letter:
I also hope that you are able to use this time of great aloneness to go within and
recognize the gifts of your spiritual self. This is work that can only be done alone.
36 Plato, The Republic, trans. Benjamin Jowett (Millis, MA: Agora, 2001), The Internet Classics Archive,
Daniel C. Stevenson, http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/republic.html.
37 Dorita S. Berger and Daniel J. Schneck, The Music Effect, 102.

15
Your life has always been so full, with so many distractions. Maybe this quiet time is
God’s gift to you for reconciling your life and your choices and finding the peace and
joy that are more durable (infinite even) than accolades, society and even music—
since all that music flows from the inner cosmos.38
My mother’s words are profound, and they highlight the longing that, I believe, deeply
influenced my father’s life. I can’t know if my father heeded her advice. My brother doesn’t
remember his reaction to the letter, though he guesses it probably “just pissed him off.”39 This
would have been true of my father before the stroke, when matters of faith and spirituality
were inconsequential in comparison to his search for affection and devotion to musical
accomplishment. This period of his spiritual journey is the subject of the Third Movement.
As absent as my father’s voice was from his last three years, so it is from these pages.
With a subject who wrote his thoughts on napkins and brochures more easily thrown out by
our housekeeper than cherished, and who can no longer explain his intentions, many of the
remarks I make are necessarily interpretative—interpretations of behavior, and, even more
subjectively, of memory. To explain my use of and relationship with memory, I turn to
novelist Julian Barnes, who grappled with memory’s potential problems in his recent memoir
on death, Nothing to Be Frightened Of. His brother, a philosopher, argues that “‘on the Cartesian
principle of the rotten apple, none is to be trusted unless it has some external support.’”40
Barnes then reflects, “I am more trusting, or self-deluding, so shall continue as if all my
memories are true.”41 While I’ve tried to check my memories with others’, and those with
what evidence there is, I’ve also invested a certain level of trust in these memories, even when
they conflict. Impressions are subjective. Relationships are subjective. It is my belief that there
38 Robin Kissinger, letter to Mihaly Virizlay, July 31, 2008.
39 Stefan Virizlay, in conversation with the author, February 28, 2009.
40 Julian Barnes, Nothing to Be Frightened Of (New York: Vintage Books, 2008), 7
41 Ibid.

16
is as much value in two conflicting accounts as in one definitive account, though their values
are of very different natures. For chronology and detail, definitive accounts are essential, but
for illuminating the dynamic between the rememberer and the remembered, conflicting
accounts are precious.
My father was not a world-renowned cellist, though, of course, I think he should have
been. I would therefore like this introduction to serve not only as an outline of the ideas to be
explored in this thesis but also as my chance to introduce others to my father, Mihaly “Misi”
Virizlay, a man whose story deserves to be told again and again. He was a person who
required and demanded attention; he also deserved it, for what his life has taught me is
valuable for anyone attempting to find meaning in the world. Over the course of conducting
the interviews and research that I will reference in these pages, I have invested an immense
amount of time in understanding those three things—love, family, and music—that my father
found so sacred. This thesis will hold its place in the long spiritual tradition of filial piety, but
it strays from that tradition in that in the end, such loyalty will not be the greatest testament
to my father. What will be the greatest testament is that, in the process of writing my thesis, I
have come closer to my family, to music, and to my own sense of spirituality. I hope his story
will do the same for all those who meet him hereafter.
Princeton University
February 2010
P.S. My father would like you to remember—in addition to love, children, and music as the
three most important things in life—the five Ls: Love, Live, Listen, Learn, Laugh.

17
First Movement: Death Brings in God
My husband and I had the opportunity to attend the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra’s performance of
Mozart’s Requiem. Because Misi was the principal cellist, we had a clear view of his face from our box seats
above the stage. It seemed as though Misi was transported as he performed that night, once again his face
becoming a canvas of a myriad of human emotions as he played through each phrase of the Requiem.
Immediately following the performance, my husband and I were invited to go backstage to see Misi.
As we entered the backstage area, we could see him sitting alone on a chair with his cello still perched against
his shoulder. We were alarmed as we approached him and found that he was quietly weeping. When we
inquired as to the reason for him being upset, he looked up at us and in a voice cracking with emotion, he softly
told us what he was feeling. “He never had the chance to finish the Requiem,” Misi said, “And when he died,
he was thrown into a common unmarked grave.” Not knowing how to respond, my husband and I placed our
hands on his shoulders and stood there with Misi as he continued to cry. It was clear that what he was feeling
transcended anything we could truly comprehend, and we were in awe of the depth of emotion that Misi was
experiencing as a result of the performance he had just completed.
Carol Jean Young, March 201042
My father died what Julian Barnes would call “a modern death, in hospital, without
his family, attended in his final minutes by a nurse,” which is how Barnes’s own father died.43
In an interview about the memoir this quote comes from, Barnes, a self-proclaimed agnostic,
said, “I covered love and stuff in my earlier books. This one's about death. And death brings
in God, and how you spend the period before death brings in art. And then there's how you
42 Carol Jean Young, e-mail message to author, March 23, 2010.
43 Julian Barnes, Nothing to Be Frightened Of, 10.

F i r s t M o v e m e n t : D e a t h B r i n g s i n G o d
18
got here, which is family.”44 Barnes worked in reverse from death, to God, to art, to family—
a progression that seems logical to me after thinking for so long about my father, perhaps
because, as my father’s last child and the only one not to have reached legal age by the time
of his death, my strongest memories of him have been as he approached the end. And,
because this has proved to be my spiritual journey as much as a parsing of my father’s—one
that has led me from reflections on his last years, through his spiritual struggles and artistic
passions, to his family (my family)—that’s where I’m beginning: the end. Because only once I
knew what things he had lost did I understand what those things meant to him.
My father died alone around breakfast time in room 230 of the Merwick Care Center
in Princeton, New Jersey. Room 230 was next to the “Casino Corner,” an ironic though
innocuous locale for a bedridden, reformed gambler. My brother Stefan had left his bedside a
few hours before—and I had left a few hours before that—to get some sleep. My father had
been unconscious for a little less than a day.
I was then a junior at Princeton and had just finished acting in a production of
Shakespeare’s Richard III. Two days before my father’s death, Stefan pushed his wheelchair
the few blocks from Merwick to the theater for the matinee, but my father didn’t see me
perform. He was audibly uncomfortable, and, out of consideration for him and for the
audience, my brother sat with him outside in the fall sun for the entire show.
Inside was a much darker scene. I was playing Queen Elizabeth, a character whose
sons and husband fall victim to Richard’s murderous plot through the course of the play.
Luckily, my tears over my father’s absence weren’t so out of place. I spent intermission
holding his hand outside in Victorian clothes of mourning—a strange and eerily prophetic
44 Susannah Herbert, “The Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival 2008: Julian Barnes—Not Dead Yet,
Just Dying,” Times Online (UK edition), March 16, 2008, http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/
tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/ article3533651.ece.

19
sight. I couldn’t stop crying, and to put into words why is as difficult to express now as it was
then. I missed my father. He had always clapped the loudest and now couldn’t even sit in the
theater. He couldn’t lift his right hand to applaud.
I didn’t walk back to Merwick with my dad and brother after the curtain call. In fact,
I didn’t see my father again until the next evening, when I got a call that he was unconscious,
though “still with us.” I didn’t understand the phrase. My father hadn’t been “with us” for
almost three years. He hadn’t played the cello, composed, conversed, cooked, or lived at
home since the stroke that disabled him in early 2006. His spirit, however, hadn’t left him
until that evening. The unconscious body I sat with all night was not the man who had used
his functioning hand to flip off a teasing friend, or who had flirted with the nurses when he
couldn’t speak by winking his left eye. His unrelenting spirit is what I miss today. I listen to its
manifestation in recordings of his performances or compositions. I sense its renewal when I
reread letters he sent me at summer camp or the articles written about him. I taste it in my
mother’s approximation of Hungarian chicken paprikás and cucumber salad, made with the
spirit of improvisation that prevented my father’s recipes from being recorded. (It’s a
common saying in my family that my father “cooked the way he lived life: he improvised.”45)
But like those non-existent recipes, I feel the need to capture his spirit in these pages before I
forget the combination of spices that made up his irresistible—even at its most distasteful—
personality.
His spirit is why those last three years with my father contain my most cherished
memories of him, my most meaningful interactions, and perhaps the reason I pursued a
degree in Religion. With no words and little movement available to him, all I could engage
with was his spirit. They were often sad engagements, full of shared longing, pain, and desire.
In a strange reversal of parent-child dispositions, I longed for a chance for emotional and
45 Paula Childress, in conversation.

20
physical reciprocity. I wanted him to say, “I love you”; I wanted a hug. He simply longed for
everything he had had before the night of January 18, 2006, the night of his stroke.
He’d returned that day from the hospital—a relief after a week of treatment for
unexplained internal bleeding. Although he’d used a cane since his first stroke in 2002, I
remember clearly his triumphant march up the front stairs of our home in Baltimore, where
he’d lived for over four decades. It was a bright, if windy, afternoon. Our dog Fred nipped at
his feet, and, gesticulating with the cane as he climbed the stairs, my father shouted, “Oh, it’s
good to be alive!” The next day he could not speak.
In an email I wrote after my first visit to the hospital following the stroke, I said with
certainty that my father recognized me, though he may not have been able to comprehend
words. The stroke had occurred in the left hemisphere of his brain, the center for speech and
communication. Although it paralyzed much of his right side, I was hopeful. I went on in the
email to say, “He understood ‘I love you,’ though, and he waved goodbye when we left […]
PT will hopefully reverse some of his paralysis.”46
His body seemed deflated, and his mind disoriented. Though I’m sure he was lying
on his back during my first visit, he had the vulnerable look of a lost child in his eyes, and to
this day I imagine him in a fetal position—all the more so because, to help the nurses insert
an NG tube, I cradled his head in my arms. I ended my email, “The shock of what happened
yesterday was magnified all the more by the short-lived relief of his hopeful return home the
day before. I hope you will, if not pray, keep him in your thoughts. We are all hoping for the
best.”47
Everyone did hope and work for the best. From the beginning we kept music playing,
made attempts at verbal or written communication, and encouraged him to move parts of his
46 Lianna Kissinger-Virizlay, e-mail message to Henry Lord, January 20, 2006.
47 Ibid.

21
unresponsive right side. In one of the last of these attempts that I remember, I opened a large
music manuscript notebook to a blank page, positioned a pen in my father’s non-dominant
left hand, and asked him if he could compose something.
We had noticed by then, several months after the stroke, that music was becoming
more and more difficult for him to bear. When friends and students came to play for him,
tears pooled in his right eye that he couldn’t stop from falling. Sometimes when he heard a
recording—of Mozart, say—he would shout out loud, a sound that became a visceral, almost
animalistic, rejection with no words to tame it. Since he couldn’t play music, and couldn’t
tolerate listening to it, the notebook was our final attempt to reconnect my father to his life-
long love by giving him the tools to invent it. The scribbles he left on that page—and the
force with which he eventually pushed the notebook away—still haunt me.
I tried to imagine my life without music—unbearable enough. Then I thought about
the effects of such a loss on a musician, whose relationship with music is not passive, but
active, participatory, and creative. The musician exists as both a creator of and medium for
that ineffable connective power conjured by music. His is a strange role; it is at once powerful
and submissive. Marcel Cobussen discusses the role of the musician, particularly the
composer, as being “in a double inbetweenness as they are suspended on a putatively
existential level situated between heaven and earth while at the same time existing on the
level of consciousness somewhere between the initiates and the laypersons.”48 Cobussen
places great emphasis on locating music as well as spirituality “inbetween,” as connective
tissues whose function is to bond concrete spheres (heaven and earth) without themselves
becoming concrete. He is harkening to a long and enduring tradition of music as a gift from
and reflection of God.
48 Marcel Cobussen, Thresholds, 44.

22
The idea dates back to the origin of the word itself, which derives from the Nine
Muses of Ancient Greece, divine beings revered for inspiring the creation of art in general
and music in particular. The mother of the Muses is Mnemosyne, Goddess of Memory, and
their overlord is Apollo, God of Harmony. Joscelyn Godwin explains, “The Memory of
which Mnemosyne is patroness is not the everyday memory that recalls things from the past,
but the power of recapturing our other modes of being: of remembering whence we came,
who we really are, and where we are going.”49 He adds that the artist cannot rely on this
Memory alone, but must be able to compose music that others can interpret. The composer
thus requires the “blessing” of Apollo, “god of order and beauty, supreme wielder of the bow
and lyre,” in order to transcend himself and deliver his message of Memory to an audience.50
Conversely, having the faculty of Apollo without a sense of Memory will lead to technically
proficient works, but not to art or music that bridges the gap between this world and others;
technical music lacking a divine Memory cannot touch the spirit.
Cobussen notes that music itself has a double potential, like spirit. He agrees with
Godwin, writing that music “is—or at least was—a strategy running parallel to religion.
Primordially, music as well as religion has as its function the creation, legitimation, and
maintenance of order. […] Both music and religion honor harmony and are produced to
make people believe, to believe in order.”51 Cobussen then cites economist Jacques Attali’s
claims in the book Noise: The Political Economy of Music, to point out the power of music to
subvert such an order. Cobussen writes, “Music has another facet as well, a dark side, marked
by subversion and ambivalence. For Attali, music is always already permeated by noise, that
is, internal and external powers that threaten and finally undermine the existing (musical)
50 Ibid.
51 Marcel Cobussen, Thresholds, 25-26.

23
order.”52 Truly, dissonance can be an unsettling sound, and minor keys can be depressing
indeed. (As classical musician Benjamin Zander quips about the minor interval between the
notes B and C, “The job of the C is to make the B sad…composers know that. If they want
sad music, they just play those two notes.”53)
Music’s potential to drive human emotion has been developed in stories ranging from
religious myths to scientific and cultural folklore. One such story, which beautifully
demonstrates music’s emotive powers, concerns Pythagoras, the classical philosopher known
for possessing and encouraging awe for numerical order. For Pythagoreans, music is directly
and naturally related to the soul, for both “share a basis in number.”54 The belief that music
is akin to and able to influence the soul is illustrated by Godwin’s retelling of a simple story of
Pythagoras himself:
Walking out one night to contemplate the heavens, he came upon a young Sicilian
who had been jilted by his woman, and incited by the Phrygian music of a nearby
aulos-player, was preparing to set fire to her house. Instead of accosting the crazed
youth, Pythagoras approached the musician and asked him to change his tune to a
slow and solemn spondaic one. The youth, his emotions already in thrall to the music,
responded instantly by calming down, and soon went home.55
The youth in this story reacts strongly to the quality of both pieces, demonstrating the
potential for music to access and augment a range of emotions, from distress and rage to
peace and solemnity. This story also hints at the immense power inherent in music. The link
between music and the soul invests music with a power that can be damaging or
rehabilitating, and it implies that the musician has a certain power over his listeners’ souls,
52 Ibid., 26.
53 Benjamin Zander, “Benjamin Zander on Music and Passion,” TED, February 2008, http://www.ted
.com/talks/benjamin_zander_on_music_and_passion.html.
55 Ibid., 30.

24
that he can drive his listeners’ spirits across the ineffable space between the divine and
material planes.
As stated above, Cobussen claims that musicians, like priests, exist between heaven
and earth. He describes them as having a paradoxical interaction with the connective forces
of music in that they act simultaneously as a guide and as a bridge; they are at once powerful
and submissive. What’s more, making music itself can be symbolic of the two realms to which
music has the potential to connect listeners: the divine and the material. Musicians, according
to Cobussen, “introduce us to an inbetweenness of music evoking divine feelings using human
means.”56 He explains that the relationship between the human and the divine qualities of
music is symbolic of the “inbetweenness”—the unnameable location—of spirituality, which
opens the tangible sphere to the divine sphere:
The world in which music exists is a spiritual world…But even when we thus assume
a close connection between music and spirit, this spiritual dimension needs to be
incarnated in order to sound, which means that this incarnation is no accidental
supplement, but an inevitable necessity. Not only do we need our ears to hear music,
the musician needs his body and/as an instrument to awaken music. Ears, drumming
hands, stamping feet, the bow that moves the strings of the cello: these are all part of a
bodily world. Music is born in a space that connects a spiritual and an embodied
world.57
When my father lost bodily function, he lost his ability to perform the “double
inbetweenness” of the musician. And for the musician, this inbetweenness is an expression of
spirituality. Though my father’s spirituality was that of a double-edged blade—the kind of
spiritus that opened him both to sin and to salvation, dissonance and harmony—I wondered
56 Marcel Cobussen, Thresholds, 44.
57 Ibid., 45.

25
what could remain of his spirit, helpful or harmful, after the loss of his access to that opening.
In each moan and tear, I sensed he was losing faith, not just in his ability to overcome, but
also in his deepest held beliefs. Music had become so enmeshed in his being that it was his
means for communicating love. Everything he loved, from food, to women, to children, to
astronomy, he had throughout his life described, understood, or related to through music.
Now, he was silent, invalided, restricted to a diet of thickened liquids, and mostly alone,
unable even to call a friend. His loss was profound, the deepest spiritual challenge I could
imagine. He had lost that entity through which he expressed love and explored spirituality,
that ineffable bridge that could relate the chaotic world to a divine order.
My father’s first teacher and eventual colleague, Janos Starker, has said, “If I don’t
hear music or I don’t make music, it has the same effect on me as being starved.”58 He
diagnoses how my father must have felt after the stroke: starved. The sensations that music at
its best evokes are of peace, order, harmony, and connectivity, those sensations that provide
relief and security in the face of doubt, fear, or pain. How could one live without such support
in the time of greatest doubt, fear, and pain, with death at its most imminent?
In those last years, I spent as much time with my father as possible. His move from a
nursing home in Baltimore to Merwick in Princeton occurred so that, as a student here, I
could visit him after classes. I watched his detachment grow, but I also felt my attachment
strengthen. This attachment manifested itself in music. I sought catharsis outside of the
nursing home by replaying recordings of his that I had hoarded, by attending concerts, and
by recalling memories of the times I had felt his spirit without realizing it—that is, those
moments when whatever angst I was feeling as a spoiled toddler, as a self-important
adolescent, or as a detached teenager dissipated, and I loved him absolutely.
58 Peter P Jacobi, “The Starker Story: A Life in America Since 1948,” unpublished pamphlet, i.

26
Tears often identified these moments. Before the stroke, they would be marked by a
sense of resentment for the manipulative powers of his music. In 2003, for example, I
attended a performance of his orchestral composition based on the story of “The Emperor’s
New Clothes.” I sat next to my father in the audience and cried while holding his hand and
listening to the magnificent piece, which, as legend has it, he composed on a bet. My tender
reaction was at the age of fourteen, when I could barely stand to sit through dinner with my
parents. At the end of the concert I wiped my eyes and hardly looked at my father when he
thanked me for showing him that I loved him, a sentiment he inferred from my reaction. For
weeks I held a grudge against him for making me so vulnerable, but today I consider those
moments to be dear indications of his music’s beauty, proof that his music could bridge gaps,
heal wounds, and connect souls. My father’s music always served to remind me that I felt
connected to him. In fact, I am certain that music will always be able to bring me into
connection with my father, even now that he is gone.

27
Second Movement: The Savior of the Family
On a tour of Albania, I performed at a gala concert in Tirana, the capital, which was attended by the
premier and a large number of soldiers. During an encore, I glanced up to find several soldiers arguing and
gesticulating wildly. To my astonishment, the commotion soon erupted into a full-scale brawl. Shaken, I
thought about leaving the stage, but decided to continue playing. When I finished, the soldiers shouted and
lunged toward me. I grabbed my cello and somehow managed to out-run them. Only later, when the manager of
the theater finally caught up with me, did I learn that the rival garrisons of soldiers were fighting to determine
which would carry me out on its shoulders. Since then, I haven’t played a concert that could match “the
Albanian Success.”
Mihaly Virizlay, undated59
He who does not love others cannot be loved by others; at most they can marvel at him. And woe to
those great men who command only wonder and not love! Love is eternal, like God; wonder is transitory, like the
world.
Sándor Petöfi, July 184760
My father’s music—in training, performance, character, quality, and composition—
was inextricably tied to his native Hungary. Hungary has a vast musical tradition, but his
connection to his homeland went even deeper. Even after he became a citizen of the United
States, my father never forgot his Hungarian roots. A constant reminder of this fact was in his
accent and intonation, which rumbled and soared through glottal stops and sung vowels and
maintained the Hungarian’s inability to discern between “he” and “she.” He embraced
59 Mihaly Virizlay, undated ephemera.
60 Sándor Petöfi, Rebel or Revolutionary? Sándor Petöfi as Revealed by his Diary, Letters, Notes, Pamphlets and Poems, ed.
Béla Köpeczi, trans. Edwin Morgan and G. F. Cushing (Budapest: Corvina Press, 1974), 147.

S e c o n d M o v e m e n t : T h e S a v i o r o f t h e F a m i l y
28
America and all she offered; a former student remembered “his pride and joy of being an
American and religiously watching and falling asleep during Orioles’ games.”61 But his love of
America, at its root, came from the idea that the true American is allowed—required even—
to remember his past and to be proud that his country is made of people like him who come
together to share their history and create their future. My mother remembers him saying,
“When I go back to Hungary, I go home. When I return to the U.S., I come home.”62 From
the music he created, to the accent he maintained, to the lace and china gifts he imported, to
the food he cooked and the literature he read, my father shared Hungary with America.
The above lines from Hungarian poet Sándor Petöfi come from my father’s collection
of his writings, which I have inherited. Petöfi lived and wrote during the Hungarian
revolution of 1848, and, though his revolution occurred more than a century before my
father’s, there is a kinship between my father and his favorite poet—a Hungarian artistic
sensibility. Petöfi used his art to express romantic, ideological, political, and national
sentiments—his art was inseparable from his beliefs, and he recognized the potential for his
art to allow him to connect with others.
The Hungarian artists that my father grew up studying and admiring expressed any
and all ideas with a level of idealism, romanticism, and fervor I’ve never seen replicated.
These artists—from 19th Century Petöfi to my father’s future teacher Zoltán Kodály—shaped
my father’s character, not just in how he approached art but also in how he approached life
through art. Only by knowing them too can one attempt to understand the origins of my
father’s music and character, his life and spirit.
A Hungarian musician is never alone. I can’t find a period in my father’s life when he
wasn’t associated with another musician imported from Hungary nor a time when reviewers
61 Sam Matthews, “Mihaly Virizlay,” Alumni Association, Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University,
http://www.peabody.jhu.edu/alumni/tributes/virizlay.
62 Robin Kissinger, telephone conversation with the author, April 11, 2010.

29
didn’t jump at the chance to mention the “grand Hungarian tradition of the early 20th
century,” as demonstrated by his playing and composing.63 The Hungarian tradition is hard
to shake, not that anyone would want to. Marked by a combination of romanticism and
technical proficiency—the extreme both in feeling and in physical feats—Hungarian music
has a certain charm, which is now a part of its history. In addition, Hungarians offer each
other a community that is strong, passionate, and, though teased sometimes for its dalliances,
ultimately respected—especially when it comes to music.
My father was born into this community on November 2, 1931. His father, an
electrician by trade but a violinist at heart, began teaching him the violin at age four. Three
years later, he took my father to the Franz Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest, where he
began taking private cello lessons with 14-year-old prodigy Janos Starker. For an instrument
that became so important to my father, the cello’s initial appeal for him makes a curious
story. At the Academy, he was told there were too many violinists and was asked to switch. As
he told a journalist, “I said, ‘Sure, why not?’ I got tired of standing all the time.”64 Although
ending up with a cello rather than a violin seems like it was an arbitrary choice—a matter of
circumstances—the cello surpassed every other instrument in my father’s mind by at least
1987. That year he asked a Baltimore reporter, “‘You know what the cello possesses that the
[more powerful] piano and the [more brilliant] violin don’t? That magical middle range that
has the power of the human voice.’”65 That fated decision at the start of his musical career
gave my father his second voice.
Starker doesn’t remember much from when he was a 14-year-old Academy student
with a seven-year-old former-violinist under his wing. “I was only busy trying to tell people
63 Stephen Wigler, “Mihaly Virizlay,” sec. E.
64 Mihaly Virizlay, quoted in Jill R. Yesko, “Baltimore Cellist Enjoys Life-Long Love Affair with Music,”
Encore, August 17, 1994, 23.
65 Mihaly Virizlay, quoted in Stephen Wigler, “Mihaly Virizlay,” sec. E.

30
the right thing to do,” Starker said when I asked him about it at his home in Indiana.66 He
did add that he remembered enjoying working with my father because he was, “as we say in
the music world, a digitally, aurally, and mentally gifted person.”67 He meant he had the
dexterity, the ear, and the mind to be an accomplished cellist.
Starker left Hungary after World War II and would later play an integral part in my
father’ immigration to America. He told me, “When the war was over and I left Hungary,
from then on [your father] started being the shining star of the cellist generation.”68 Although
Starker was gone for most of my father’s rise through the Eastern European musical circuit,
as the person who introduced my father to the cello and in whose footsteps my father
followed more than once, I look to Starker for an understanding of the Hungarian musician’s
mentality. Luckily, he’s good with words.
Starker’s autobiography, The World of Music According to Starker, is full of parallels to my
father’s life—from smoking to gambling to playing to teaching. His writing demonstrates that
for him, artistic passion runs deep. His art is the lens through which trials and successes are
viewed, through which philosophy is spouted and ideas spread. The following excerpt from
The World of Music demonstrates his perspective:
In the [concert] halls, wherever I was, a spirit of unity prevailed—the love of
music brought together individuals of totally different backgrounds, regardless of their
color, religion, and nationality. But outside of the halls, under the guise of religion or
nationality, the same people went on killing their fellow human beings, as if God
commanded them. […]
I cannot belong to any party, nor does a Sunday sermon give me solace or answer
these questions. I pray to my God that the day will dawn when not only cures for
66 Janos Starker, in conversation with the author, June 4, 2009.
67 Ibid.
68 Ibid.

31
cancer and AIDS will be found, but also a common chord will be sounded to
eradicate the exploitative nationalism that serves only the few. […]
Then maybe more and more members of society will sit in concert halls around
the world and praise the beauty given to them by the likes of Bach, Mozart,
Beethoven, and their contemporary counterparts.”69
Starker’s God—the same as my father’s, I believe—resides in and presides over the peaceful
concert hall, wherein beauty and love compose the atmosphere; however, as much as Starker
protests “exploitative nationalism,” I believe his own national identity strongly influenced his
worldview. As became clear when I met with him, as tenacious as the Hungarian accent is, so
is the Hungarian culture. In a short profile about him, a biographer writes, “Cellist Starker
emigrated to the United States, a country that took him in and that he then gratefully and
wholeheartedly accepted as his home. He would never forget his Hungarian roots; they would
be proudly displayed in his habits, his conversation, and his music making.”70 In fact, visiting
Starker was the closest I’d felt to having my father back since I’d lost him. With the disparate
threads of personal memory, staunch opinion, political commentary, and playfulness that he
wove seamlessly into our discussion of music and my father, Starker exemplified a familiar
trait. Namely, that it is never one thing or the other with Hungarians; all topics are related.
They lead into one another with an apparent lack of rhyme or reason, only to come together
in the end to tell a single story, like music.
Starker and my father’s musical education came at a time of renaissance in the
Hungarian music curriculum, focused on building national character and independence. In
1945, around the time my father would have been entering the Franz Liszt Academy, the
69 Janos Starker, The World of Music According to Starker (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 33-34.
70 Peter P. Jacobi, “The Starker Story,” 6.

32
Janos Starker with my father
Hungarian composer Zoltán Kodály wrote an essay titled “Hungarian Music Education.” In
it he places special emphasis on the importance of uniquely Hungarian music, not only to
create consummate Hungarian musicians, but also to invest Hungarian citizens with a strong
sense of national identity, pride, and independence. He writes, “When all is said and done,
we must make a choice: shall we continue to be a colony or shall we become an independent
country not only politically but culturally, in asserting our own personality, too? If this is what
we want we must find the roads that lead to the freest and fullest possible expansion of our

33
musical individuality.”71 For Kodály, as for Petöfi a century before, a country’s art and its
national identity were reflections of each other. One had to exemplify the other for Hungary
to be truly free.
With his views on music education, Kodály did not wish to alienate others from
Hungarian music or culture; rather, he wanted a dialogue wherein national traits would be
shared among a broad and educated global community through music. In the introduction of
his biography on Kodály, Percy M. Young summarizes the themes of Kodály’s national and
musical mission. He writes, “When one looks at Kodály’s works it becomes apparent that
their character can only be understood in relation to the whole life of the Hungarian people
and to the progress, hitherto sadly chequered [in 1964], of their musical tradition.”72
Kodály’s reform of music education began by refusing to “teach people the music by
ignoring, by throwing aside, what the people know of their own accord,” which is why he laid
such emphasis on the Hungarian folk tradition.73 In his 1929 essay, “Children’s Choirs,”
Kodály describes the devastating effect that a curriculum of strictly foreign music, music
devoid of relatable characteristics, can have on young students: “When it is from this
outwardly more cultured but inwardly emptier music that he receives the spiritual
nourishment he has been craving for, he loses his faith in better music and remains in this
state of musical infantilism for the rest of his life.”74 By allowing musical education to reflect
Hungary’s national character, a child’s first exposure to music could touch him deeply,
because it would be relatable and full of meaning.
71 Zoltán Kodály, The Selected Writings of Zoltán Kodály, ed. Ferenc Bónis, trans. Lili Halápy and Fred
Macnicol (Budapest: Corvina Press, 1964), 154.
72 Percy M. Young, Zoltán Kodály: A Hungarian Musician (London: Ernest Benn, 1964), xiv.
73 Zoltán Kodály, quoted in Ibid., 91.
74 Zoltán Kodály, Selected Writings, 125.

34
Kodály’s emphasis on instilling youth with a love for music stemmed from his idea
that good music nourishes spirituality, that it opens the soul. He emphasizes this point in
“Children’s Choirs,” when he likens bad music to spiritual disease:
Bad taste in art is a veritable sickness of the soul. It seals the soul off from contact
with masterpieces and from the life-giving nourishment emanating from them without
which the soul wastes away or becomes stunted, and the whole character of the man
is branded with a peculiar mark.
In grown-ups this sickness is in most cases incurable. Only prevention can help. It
should be the task of the school to administer immunization.75
Young summarizes Kodály’s technique: “Bad music, where there could be better music, bad
teaching, where there could be good teaching—those were wrongs which he himself could
right. And in so doing, for his view is comprehensive, other evils could be overcome. At the
end of the road was the vision of a unity in human relationships, of which music could be at
once the catalyst and the outward symbol.”76 The goal, therefore, always was to instill a love
of music in children that could develop into profound spirituality with age. Young describes
Kodály’s views on a national music culture not as exclusionary or radical, but as a
demonstration of his profound understanding of human nature—of man’s interconnectivity
with and dependence on his fellow man—as it can be accessed through and represented by
music. In Kodály’s view, this fundamental human characteristic has the potential to
overcome barriers of race, nationality, religion, and politics, but it cannot do so if the
individual’s soul has not been opened to the universal qualities of music. That opening is best
achieved at first with a familiar music, one rooted in national character, which is why a
national music education was tantamount for Kodály. It is such a view that he strove to instill
75 Ibid., 120.
76 Percy M. Young, Zoltán Kodály, 91.

35
in the pupils of the Franz Liszt Academy. From this standpoint came his national agenda, his
abhorrence for the oppression of culture and national difference, and his vision of a national
music culture and education.
These political ideals became particularly relevant during my father’s first years as an
official student of the Franz Liszt Academy, when Hungary became involved in World War
II. The country was first occupied by German troops in the summer of 1944, and as the year
turned came the Soviet siege of Budapest, one of the bloodiest events of the war. Although it
marked the end of the German occupation of Hungary, it was only the beginning of a
Communist rule that would persist until the late eighties, and Hungary’s Soviet liberators
were all but freeing. Their defeat of the German forces included the slaughter or expulsion of
many pro-German Hungarians as well as Hungarian civilians with Germanic backgrounds.
The Soviets’ celebration when the siege finally proved successful sparked fear into the hearts
of the remaining citizens, who had never been evacuated. The Soviet troops looted what
remained in buildings devastated by one hundred days of intense warfare, and they raped
civilian woman indiscriminatingly. As Historian James Mark writes, “During these months,
for the majority of the inhabitants of the city, rape was a common occurrence that might be
suffered by family, friends, acquaintances or neighbours”;77 my father’s household was no
exception to such a threat.
My father’s father died in the middle of the war, during an unnecessary medical
procedure in a time when medical supplies and technology were lacking. Left without a
patriarch were his wife Vilma and her sisters, his daughter Ilona, and my father. About his
father my father once wrote, “During my early years, our daily practice sessions together and
frequent visits to rehearsals and concerts had an enormous influence on my musical
77 James Mark, “Remembering Rape: Divided Social Memory and the Red Army in Hungary 1944-1945,”
Past and Present, no. 188 (Aug. 2005): 133, http://muse.jhu.edu.

36
development. His early death when I was twelve left a tremendous void in my life.”78 Not
only did his father’s death leave him without the musical guidance he had provided, it also
deprived him of the protection that an adult male could lend in a Hungary under siege. At
twelve years of age, my father became the sole male figure to protect his sister, mother, and
aunts.
Visiting my father’s father’s grave.
It is one of the stories I’ve been told time and again in different permutations—it has
become legend now, in my family. What remained of the Virizlays stayed hidden in their tiny
apartment day after day. “They were starving,” my father’s third wife Paula told me. Some
accounts say the women hid in boxes, others say there was nothing to hide behind. Either

37
way, the Russian conquerors soon arrived at their building. “It was a disaster,” Paula said.79
“They could hear the Russians going from apartment to apartment knocking on the doors,
and they’d hear screaming, and they’d hear, you know—they didn’t know if they were going
to be raped. There was no man there to defend them.”80
All the retellings agree on what happened next. My father had continued his cello
training throughout the war, and in a moment of desperation, foolishness, brilliance, or all
three, his mother told him to get his cello. “When they come through that door,” she said,
“you start playing your Russian folk songs.”81 He did, and, “According to Misi they stopped,
put down their guns, and they listened. And some of them cried, and they offered them some
of their rations—whatever they had.”82 Ironically, the lack of a Hungarian music culture had
blessed my father with the tools to win over his Soviet oppressors: the music of their
homeland. The soldiers stole nothing, and they left the apartment without laying a finger on a
single woman. It was a miracle.
My mother gives “The Story of the Russian Soldiers” a special emphasis in her
account of my father’s development, especially as concerns his relationship to women. Not
only was he now the only male in the household, my mother said, “He was a musical prodigy,
gifted, so all of the doting of everybody went on him. And then he was the savior of the
family. You know, who wouldn’t grow up a little imbalanced?”83 She quickly added, “And
truly he could just move people so much with his playing.”84
My father was by then a thirteen-year-old virtuoso, spoiled by the attention of the
women in his family and heralded as a shining young star. “He didn’t have to battle anything
80 Ibid.
81 Composite of multiple retellings.
84 Ibid.

38
over there. He didn’t have to prove anything over there. He was just adored for who he was.
There was nothing better than that,” said his second wife, Tricia Shallin.85 Opportunities to
meet women came hand and hand with my father’s role as a performing musician who
played solo concerts and toured across Eastern Europe. He was young, promising, and
talented, and he took full advantage of the fact. I have a hunch that the stories he told me
were tamed for my benefit. One involved an intimate hayride under the stars. My father told
me he blushed to hold the girl’s pinky finger. (In later years he would admit, “Okay, we were
necking.”) Still another recounted something lost in translation after a concert in Albania. He
was sitting with an Albanian girl by a fire. He didn’t speak Albanian, but somehow I doubt
they were talking. Suddenly, the girl’s mother burst in with a huge smile and kissed my father
on the cheek; apparently “alone time” in Albania was then equivalent to an engagement.
Needless to say, my father got the hell out of Albania.
My father as a student in Hungary
85 Tricia Shallin, in conversation with the author, September 13, 2009.

39
My father’s charm was not unbreakable, however; once at a fair, he took his date on
the Ferris wheel. Stuck at the top, his motion sickness got the best of him, and he ruined her
dress. “She never spoke to me again,” I remember him saying dejectedly, even at seventy
years old. His musical magnetism still needed time to develop the strength his future wives
would describe.
My father continued his studies at the Academy during the relative peace of Soviet
political control after the war. After Starker’s escape, Adolf Schiffer and then Leo Weiner
became my father’s teachers. Of Weiner, Starker writes, “From the 1920s to the ’60s all
Hungarian musicians of any future consequence attended his classes,” so my father was in
good company, but from the beginning he distinguished himself.86 His first public appearance
was a year after he began lessons with Starker, and his professional debut came the same year
as he saved his family from the Russian soldiers, “after winning a contest to perform Haydn’s
‘D Major Concerto’ with the Budapest Symphony Orchestra.”87 While pursuing his Artist’s
Diploma at the Academy, he won the Hungarian International Youth Competition and
received a solo contract with state-owned concert management, the Philharmonia. But there
was one distinction during the years of Russian occupation that would impact my father’s
professional and personal development more than any other. He was asked to play the
Kodály “Sonata for Cello and Piano” on Radio Bartók. The very next day, he met the
composer for the first time in the halls of the Franz Liszt Academy. According to my father,
Kodály’s “first comment was, ‘So, that’s what you look like. It’s rather pleasant to sip wine
and hear my music when it’s not badly performed.’ I later learned that ‘not badly’ was one of
his superlatives.”88
86 Janos Starker, The World of Music, 15.
88 Ibid.

40
My father and I with Mrs. Kodály
That meeting began a mentoring relationship that would permanently influence my
father’s musicality, nationality, and personality. “We discussed everything from breathing
correctly and my diet to painting, folklore, cello and my own compositions,” wrote my father.
“During a very difficult period in Hungary, he made certain that I had a beautiful cello and
an apartment, and often, before important concerts, he had me sent to the State’s artists’
retreat.” My father cited Kodály as the second most influential person in his life, after his
father.89
Starker commented that my father could never “shake the influence of Kodály,”
referring to the compositions he would come to write in the United States.90 More than just
affecting his compositions, however, I think that Kodály’s views on music and education
89 Ibid.
90 Janos Starker, in conversation.

41
instilled in my father some of his deepest held beliefs—that music can be a language through
which all of life is understood and communicated, and that it can be used as the form and the
means for expressing self, nationality, and, finally, that most universal quality of human
nature, love. In fact, both Kodály and Petöfi—at the same time as they allowed their works to
express their ideology and culture—wrote numerous love songs and poems. I’m sure these
odes had an equally strong influence on my father’s understanding of the purpose of and uses
for his own art.
In addition to presenting the opportunity for my father to impress, befriend, and
become the protégé of Kodály, my father’s relationship with Radio Bartók would have one
other significant effect. In the early fifties, he received a letter from the station asking him to
play a program with the already well-established solo pianist, Agi Rado. Agi remembers, “All
of a sudden I got a letter from the radio and so did he. […] We met, we rehearsed, and six
months later we were engaged, for better or for worse.”91 As my father’s first wife and the
only Hungarian he married, Agi holds a special place in my father’s story and its complicated
narrative of love and music.
Unlike my father, Agi was raised Jewish. Her experience during World War II
deserves its own story, but it has its place in this one too. Despite Hungary’s late entry in the
war and its slow and lenient adoption of anti-Jewish regulations, Agi and her entire family
were interned in concentration camps. She was the sole survivor, and this in itself is a miracle.
In her short memoirs, she describes the journey back to Hungary: “On the way, entering a
deserted German house, I found an old upright piano. I sat down and tried to recall
Beethoven’s Sonata OP. 110. It seemed like heaven.”92 When she finally arrived home and
91 Agi Rado, in conversation with the author, November 25, 2007.
92 Agi Rado, “Autobiography of Agi Rado,” unpublished.

42
learned of her entire family’s death, the only solace she had were an old family friend whom
she calls her “auntie” and her piano. She calls them “the two anchors in my life.”93
Both Agi and Starker have commented that my father felt tremendous guilt over the
injustices committed during the war. “There was not one bone in his body which would be
discriminatory,” Agi said.94 “He was always very, very touched by my past.”95 Starker’s
perspective was even broader, and it linked directly to my father’s sense of musicianship. He
said, “You have to project yourself or imagine that the musicians, all the musicians he
admired—except for Kodály and Bartók and so on—all the other instrumentalists were Jews.
And if there’s something which is difficult to explain to somebody two generations later,” he
added, “he was one of those persons who felt guilty of what happened to the Jews.”96
Although their war experiences were very different, Agi and my father had much to
bond over, especially when it came to music. “We were so compatible in music,” she told me
in a conversation at her apartment in Baltimore, “because I am an emotional person who
puts soul in the music, not just notes.”97 For both Agi and my father, music and feeling were
inextricable, and certainly this sensibility was a large part of their marriage, but not to the
extent that it would be in my father’s future affairs. That is, Agi was already my father’s
musical equal. Their styles and sentiments were similar because of their Hungarian musical
education. While other women have said my father’s attraction was his music, for Agi his
music did not have the same magnetism. “I could make the same kind of music,” she said, “so
music didn’t have any magic over me.”98 Instead, Agi was drawn to another aspect of my
father’s life: his family. “I was yearning to have a family,” she said.99 “That was almost the
93 Ibid.
94 Agi Rado, in conversation with the author, September 6, 2009.
95 Ibid.
97 Agi Rado, in conversation, Sept. 6, 2009.
98 Ibid.
99 Agi Rado, in conversation, Nov. 25, 2007.

43
only reason besides the music. I loved his family, and since I had none of my own except my
auntie, I was very glad that I could become part of a very gentle and loving family.”100 Not to
mention—though Agi has, time and again—”it was very romantic.”101
But it was not easy. Kodály helped them to find a one-room apartment in Budapest,
but it was not ideal. “You would call it an efficiency apartment, but it wasn’t very efficient,”
Agi said.102 The living room held Agi’s grand piano, their double bed, a table, and chairs.
“The sad thing was that I had to practice where the piano was, and Misi had to find a place
to practice for which he was forever sore.”103 This marked the beginning of a competitive
relationship that would persist throughout their marriage. Their musical career as a couple,
however, thrived. In 1956 Kodály asked my father to record two of his compositions, the
“Sonata for Cello and Piano” and the “Sonata for Unaccompanied Cello.” One of my
father’s enduring regrets was that, “Unfortunately, after signing the contracts, the October
political events put a halt to the recording, and I left Hungary shortly thereafter.”104
According to Agi, in October 1956 she and my father attended a performance of
some of Kodály’s Choral Works, of which he wrote many. I don’t know which pieces were
performed that night, but some of Kodály’s most recent compositions at the time were,
unsurprisingly, in reaction to the oppression first of the Germans, then of the Russians. Two
titles from 1944 compositions were “The Son of an Enslaved Country,” and “Still, by a
Miracle, Our Country Stands.” As one researcher of Kodály’s life and work writes, ”His
chorus ‘Wish for Peace’ (1953) expresses the most universal human desire.”105
100 Agi Rado, in conversation, Sept. 6, 2009.
101 Ibid.
102 Ibid.
103 Ibid.
105 János Breuer, A Guide to Kodály (Budapest: Corvina Press, 1990), 215.

44
The choral work composed and premiered closest to the Revolution was called
“Hymn of Zrinyi,” based on the political writings of a 17th Century Hungarian nationalist.
This mixed-part chorus is instilled with “the wish for freedom and patriotic sentiments.”106
Young calls it “a prophetic work,” alluding to the impending political events.107 But unlike
what was to come, Young writes that in “Hymn of Zrini,” “the end is in hope, in a nine-part
chord of D major.”108 Whichever of Kodály’s choruses were played, this is how Agi described
their reception: “At the end, the audience was screaming. It was a few days later that the
Revolution started.”109
My father had received his Artist’s Diploma by 1956, but he always prided himself on
having taken part in the student-initiated uprising that awoke Budapest on October 23 of that
year. At the time, he was partaking in a revolutionary tradition whose precedent was set a
century before by Sándor Petöfi; parallels were drawn even then, with some students
organizing into “The Petöfi Club.”110 At the time, however, my father could not have known
how different the outcomes of the two revolutions would be. In his retelling of the events of
October and November 1956, journalist Reg Gadney quotes the words Hungarian writer
Tibor Meray used to describe the unimaginable escalation of violence: “The Hungarian
Revolution of 1956 began as a student demonstration, like that which had taken place one
hundred and eight years earlier; it was followed by an armed uprising against a foreign power
possessed of crushing military superiority, and it ended with the execution of its leaders.”111
My father and Agi’s apartment was in the middle of a busy boulevard. When Soviet
tanks arrived in Hungary on November fourth to put down the Revolution, they shot at every
106 Ibid.
107 Percy M. Young, Zoltán Kodály, 141.
108 Ibid.
110 Reg Gadney, Cry Hungary: Uprising 1956 (New York: Atheneum, 1986), 25.
111 Tibor Meray, quoted in Ibid., 18.

45
building their vehicles passed. The window in the apartment Kodály had helped Agi and my
father to find became a gaping hole, so the Virizlays took shelter in their neighbor’s
basement. “Ours was on one side of the circle and his was on the other. And in the middle,
the tanks,” Agi said.112
My father with Agi Rado
Agi told me a story about “the shooting time,” as she called it.113 She and my father
never had children, but they did keep a small parakeet. “That bird was an important part of
the family,” she said, “because it was taught to say, ‘Misi, Agi, practice. Misi, Agi, you are a
crazy bird.”114 Agi said that my father left the relative safety of their neighbor’s basement to
113 Ibid.
114 Ibid.

46
retrieve it, though their apartment was “right on the front line.”115 My father held the cage in
his hand, and the bird in his inside pocket. It was the bravest and stupidest thing I’ve heard of
him doing during this period, but I admire him for it. The story reminds me that for him,
family was worth saving.
My father reveled in retelling how he threw paving stones and Molotov cocktails in
support of the uprising, the truth of which is hard to say. Regardless of his pride, the failure of
the Revolution and the brutality of its suppression left his and Agi’s future equally destroyed.
“When the Revolution was totally wiped out, everything seemed to be in ruins, and I thought,
‘There won’t be any musical life here. I don’t want to stay here,’”116 Agi said. She began
making plans for their escape.
She was able to secure visas for the two of them to go to Vienna as performing artists,
under the pretense that they would play a concert. The night before they left they slept with
his family in a tiny hotel room next to the train station. Early in the morning on December
fifth, they said their goodbyes to Hungary and to the family they held so dear—including the
parakeet.
It would be a harrowing journey. The train itself was overrun, and the platform was
swarming with anxious civilians, police, and Soviet soldiers. By then the quota of citizens
allowed to leave Hungary had been filled, and the soldiers pulled visa-less would-be refugees
off the train through its windows. Between the Hungarian drop-off and the Austrian border
there were five kilometers of no-man’s-land, which everyone had to cross on foot. My father
carried his state-issued cello on his back, in keeping with the story that he and Agi were to
play a concert. “We were totally out in the open where anyone could shoot us,” Agi said.117
Agi and my father’s reputations may have provided the means for their escape from
115 Ibid.
116 Agi Rado, in conversation, September 6, 2009.

47
Hungary, but their departure meant losing the comfort of their homeland and the security of
their local renown.
On the other side of the border, things were different. Some confusion almost cost my
father and Agi their safety, when, out of fear their visas would be revoked, they insisted they
had arrived as musicians. According to my mother, the guards replied, “No, you are
refugees.”118 The couple relied on what connections they could make, receiving slightly more
comfort here and there than their fellow, unknown expatriates. They even managed a
broadcast with Radio Vienna. The idea of going to America was forefront in Agi’s mind,
though it took more maneuvering to secure what would be a dangerous and uneasy passage,
which Agi describes in her memoirs:
When I realized that a small number of Hungarian refugees were being allowed entry
into the United States, I immediately sensed that this would be the opportunity of a
lifetime for both of us. The quota was already full, but some people who worked at
the emigration offices knew of us and managed to get us on the list. We left by bus for
Munich—a three-day trip—and in Munich we boarded a big old-fashioned propeller
plane belonging to the Army. Before departure, we were briefed on how to use shark
repellent powder in case we had to ditch the plane, and we were also instructed to
sign our last will and testament. After this “comforting” beginning, there followed a
very rough 24-hour flight, during which we had to make an emergency landing
because of the loss of one engine. Finally, we arrived at our destination: the U.S.A.!
We had to spend three miserable days at Camp Kilmer, a former detention camp for
war prisoners, but not even this difficulty could dampen our happiness at starting a

48
new life, happiness that superseded our anxiety over all the unknown elements of this
new life.119
Starker acted as their sponsor in the States, though they were held at Camp Kilmer in
New Jersey until they could reach Starker to confirm their story. No one believed that two
Hungarian refugees with barely any English between them could have such a well-established
sponsor. Starker was at that point principal cellist of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under
fellow Hungarian and master conductor Fritz Reiner. So Agi and my father went to Chicago,
where they began to look for work.
Agi recalled, “I had no particular goal as to where to go other than the United States.
That was every European’s dream. Let’s go to America. The wondrous country where
everything grows on trees, and you just have to pick it up, and it’s gold.”120 My father also
had big dreams. According to Starker, “He imagined that he was going to make it, because in
Hungary he was a star musician. That’s not the way it works when you come to America. It
takes a little longer. The question comes up that you have to make a living.”121 Luckily, a
living came, though under circumstances that were nothing like what my father and Agi had
hoped.
A member of the cello section in the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, where Starker had
been employed before joining Chicago, lost an arm. “The Dallas Symphony called me to ask
if I could recommend a cellist for the job,” Starker said, “and I said ‘Yes! I have one sitting in
my room in Chicago!’”122 He added that the timing was “a miracle in some sense,” though it
119 Agi Rado, “Autobiography of Agi Rado.”
122 Ibid.

49
was a somber beginning to what would be a series of short-lived stints in symphonies across
the country that were less than ideal, for my father and for Agi.123
By their arrival in America, Agi and my father’s marriage was troubled. Their
professional competitiveness, augmented by the fact that Agi had to follow him wherever
symphony positions were available, put tremendous strain on their relationship. He would ask
her, “‘Why aren’t you satisfied, just to sit and enjoy my playing and accompany me at home
and at practice?’ Like a servant,” she said.124 Despite her anger in such moments, Agi felt tied
to my father for reasons that went beyond the security of his paychecks. She was afraid to
leave the only person who, after losing her family in the war, she said represented “that thin
line of family.”125
From their arrival in America in 1957 until 1962, Agi followed my father from Dallas,
to Chicago (where my father briefly succeeded Starker as first chair), to Pittsburgh, and finally
to Baltimore, where they made their divorce official. Their marriage had lasted over ten years
because, Agi lamented, “I was petrified of being totally alone.”126 I don’t know whether my
father had the same fears after their divorce or not, but his musical reputation was growing in
every city, as was the admiration of audiences, musicians, and women. With this admiration
came great temptation.
123 Ibid.
126 Ibid.

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