Eva Marton and György Melis will have an aria and duet gala on April 24 in the Franz Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest (live broadcast from 19.30 /Thursday/ in the Bartók Radio).
Interview with Eva Marton
Who can tell it, how somebody become an artist? Eva Marton doesn’t believe in the predestination, because she thinks, everyone is responsible for his or her own life. If it’s true, how it could be explicable that she walked into the music school of Mester Street in the 9th district of Budapest and she knocked at the door of the director’s office and she said:
- Please, admit me to learn piano! She answered evidently to that question, why she would like to learn:
- I will be an opera singer. She had never been in any opera house yet, they didn’t have piano and nobody played any instrument in her family. Her mother was a housewife, her father was a chief. Her brother and her sister didn’t have any musical talent. She was admitted to learn piano and her first teacher, Magda Raksányi attracted the attention of her voice.
She doesn’t speak about that, how much purposefulness, tenacity and persistency was needed for the world career. The talent and the fortune isn’t enough for it. But her every word and her every move reveal that she is a strong person. What she plans, she puts through.
We are talking in the Atrium Hotel, what I would never mention, but the view is so harrowingly wonderful, that you forget the dirty Budapest, if Eva Marton doesn’t tell the following:
- We have always stayed here for ten years, when we are in Budapest. I don’t like to change the man, the doctor and the hotel. I have had a husband for 32 years – she bursts out laughing. Our talking is rambling. I would like to get to know the everyday Eva Marton, but she kindly and patiently sidesteps the question:
- I don’t have two similar days. I can’t tell you anything about my ordinary days. In Washington after theElektra-rehearsals I was so tired that I fell into the bed. We rehearsed from 2. p.m. to 9 or 10 at night. We had one hour break. I realized there, if I eat something – a light salad with chicken meat – it’s completely relaxes me and I have strength to go through the following hours. And I’m a bookworm, too. For example now I’m mad about Sándor Márai. It’s strange, for example that I could read Áron Tamási, I have to be far from Hungary.
So she could read Márai, Tamási and the others many times, because she have lived in abroad for a long while. In 1972 she got an engagement Frankfurt and eight years later she got German citizenship.
- It wasn’t an easy decision, I had a hard struggle. We wished double citizenship, but the Germans didn’t allow it.
She doesn’t talk about her Hungarian identity and her affection for the Hungarian nation (it’s true, I don’t ask about it), but after all: on 26 March 1997 she came to Hungary only for receiving the Kossuth Prize from the president Árpád Göncz. She could do it in April at any time, because she has got it, but the month was important for her. At least she could receive it in March, if on 15 March she wasn’t in Hungary: she sang the title role of Richard Strauss’s Elektra in Washington.
- I lived through many successes, but I have never had this kind of success: there were seven Elektra-performances with standing ovations after each of them. When I went to bow to the stage after the first performance, I didn’t recognize it. When I bowed, I started to go out, when I suddenly turned back. I realized the standing audience at that moment. My husband said I was so surprised like a child.
Ágnes Ferenczy
(Rádió és Televízió Újság. April. 21-27., 1997.)