Agi Jambor’s Piano Sonata “To the Victims of Auschwitz” Program notes written for the American Liszt Society Festival

Agi Jambor’s only known piano sonata, To the Victims of Auschwitz, was composed in 1949 and premiered that same year at the Philips Collection in Washington D.C.  Jambor performed the work but ascribed its authorship to a number representing a prisoner of a Nazi concentration camp.  The Washington Post, unaware of Jambor’s concealed authorship, reviewed the premier giving compositional credit to the cryptic number, furthering Jambor’s desire to amplify the presence of those who had suffered Nazi brutality: a reality that Jambor knew first-hand.

 Born in Budapest in 1909, Jambor’s prodigious musical talent was evident and nurtured from a young age.  She began her piano studies with her mother and later attended the Fodor Music School, where she was taught by Zoltán Kodály, and continued piano studies with Paul Braun.  After making her concert debut, Jambor moved to Berlin in 1926 to study with Edwin Fischer.  During her time in Berlin, she was introduced to many leading intellectuals and artists, including Albert Einstein, with whom she played duets.  In 1930, Jambor moved to Paris where she worked as a rehearsal pianist for a dance studio and was soon discovered and admired by Alfred Cortot.  Jambor married Hungarian physicist Imre Patai in 1933.  Patai, also a fine musician, encouraged Jambor to enter the Third International Chopin competition in 1937 where she won fifth place just behind fourth place winner, Emil Gilels.  In 1939, Jambor and Patai began a harrowing journey to evade Nazi captivity that would last nearly a decade.  Jambor’s autobiography, Escaping Extermination, edited by her great grandniece, Frances Pinter, provides a detailed account of the Nazi atrocities’ she witnessed and experienced and reflects her unflinching courage, artistry and resilience in the face of oppressive evil.

 Jambor and Patai immigrated to the US in 1947.  By 1949, Jambor’s career was blossoming while Patai’s health, due to tolls of the war, was failing, and he died that year.  Composed that same year, Jambor’s piano sonata is a sonic testimony that bears witness to both the tragic realities the Holocaust inflicted, as well as the enduring determination of one of its survivors to preserve the memory and legacy of its victims.  To the Victims of Auschwitz is comprised of three movements; the first movement, Allegro Appassionata, opens with a primary theme that weaves through juxtaposing textures of fugue-like counterpoint and dense, dissonant harmony.  Throughout the movement, sudden, disruptive octave gestures invade the musical texture, a metaphoric representation of German tanks raiding Hungary.  The musical substance- chromatic dissonance, intense expression and formal structure- harkens the late piano sonatas by Jambor’s contemporary, Viktor Ullman, which he composed while interned in Terezin. The second movement, Epitaph, is a hauntingly beautiful elegy. Continuous modal shifts and tri-tone iterations create an elusive sense of time and place.  Marked Andante teneramente, the movement evokes Brahms’ tender Intermezzo, Op. 118 No. 2.  The last movement, Allegro, is an aggressive march punctuated by scale passages comprised of parallel fifths and octaves. After a succession of triple fortissimo, hammering chords, the movement ends with a brief, ethereal coda.  The tone, timbre and spirit of the sonata echo Paul Celan’s poem Todesfuge (Fugue of Death), a literary fugue that depicts the traumatic imprint survivors endure; unending, haunting memory that forever chases those who live.      

 The sonata was an artistic portal for Jambor who chose to embrace life and went on to forge an exceptional career. She frequently performed with the Philadelphia Symphony under the direction of Eugene Ormandy and Bruno Walter, recorded twelve albums for Capital Records and became a professor at Bryn Mawr College teaching piano and pioneering ethnomusicology studies.  Jambor was a human rights advocate, feminist and activist, who fervently opposed McCarthyism and the Vietnam War.  On February 3, 1997, just one day shy of her eighty-eighth birthday, Jambor died of cancer at the greater Baltimore Medical Center in Towson, MD.

 Jambor’s biography and compositions are slowly beginning to surface thanks to the efforts of an intimate circle of family and friends who surrounded her in her last years.  John DesMarteau, to whom the sonata is dedicated, was instrumental in getting the work published by Hildegard Publishing in 1997.  In 2021, pianist Sarah Cahill performed and recorded the sonata for First Hand Records as part of her The Future is Female project, naming Jambor as the composer and reopening the portal to Jambor’s life and legacy, one of invaluable worth and timeless relevance that testifies to the extremes of human capacity.