In memoriam: Gyorgy Sebok

Musical Times, Spring 2000

Gyorgy Sebok

A musician of immense skill and gentle humanity, and one who had little time for the pursuit of fame divorced from musical excellence, the pianist Gyorgy Sebok survived both the Nazi occupation of his native Hungary, and the Soviet intervention there of 1956. The most productive phase of his career began when, aged forty, he moved from Paris, where he had fled from an appointment as Professor of Music at the Bela Bartok Conservatory, to take up a post at the faculty of the Indiana University School of Music in Bloomington. His friend, the cellist Janos Starker, already in America and with whom Sebok played music for sixty years, encouraged the move. It was Starker who said of his friend that `Firsthand, second-hand or in recordings, Gyorgy Sebok is the greatest pianist who ever lived.'

Even in terms of only modified rapture, however, Sebok's musicianship could be judged as beyond repute. Thriving on the combination of teaching and touring, he regularly gave masterclasses at the Hochschule der Kunste in Berlin, spent the first three weeks of June at the Banff Center of the Arts in Alberta, before continuing on to McMinnville, Oregon, for a week-long masterclass at Linfield College. In November, he usually visited Tokyo to teach at the Toho School, before travelling on to the Royal Conservatory in Amsterdam. For many years he held masterclasses at the Conservatoire de Paris and Helskinki's Sibelius Academy. He also frequently visited the Liszt Academy in Budapest, and the Hochschulen der Musik in Freiburg.

Sebok preferred chamber music to the spotlight of the soloist's role. His many pupils valued the breadth of his teaching, his awareness of the role of music in the wider scheme of things, and his ability to resolve a student's problems by `unlearning' those parts of their training that had not been thought through for their own particular needs. Jewish by ancestry and thus debarred from conscription by the Germans during the Second World War, Sebok ascribed this gift to the experience of breaking boulders in the Carpathian mountains to make gravel for road-building. Forced labour under the Nazis taught him to reduce things to zero and start from scratch: `self-demolition and rebuilding', as he put it. Indeed, self-deprecating humour was a consistent feature of his teaching, and part of a personality that earned the deepest respect and affection of students and colleagues.

Gyorgy Sebok: born Szeged, Hungary, 2 November 1922; died Bloomington, Indiana, 14 November 1999.