It's 90 degrees on this summer day, but Sandor Salgo slips gracefully into a suit jacket when company arrives at his campus home. The retired professor of music is formal but solicitous, and he looks every bit the maestro. He has glorious waves of silver hair and a young man's complexion. Though his age can be gleaned from any of the biographical dictionaries where he's listed, he won't confess to it.
"It's a trade secret," Salgo says confidentially in the accent of his native Hungary.
Salgo (his name is pronounced "SHAWN-dor SHALL-go") taught in Stanford's music department for 24 years, directing the Stanford Opera Theatre and the Stanford Symphony Orchestra. At the same time, he built a distinguished career on the professional concert stage, conducting orchestras from Carmel to London to Berlin and beyond.
He retired from Stanford in 1974, but the eighty-something professor emeritus continues to share his love for the masters with students of classical music. This winter, Salgo will give a series of music appreciation lectures on campus sponsored by the Stanford Alumni Association. The series, open to alumni and friends, drew sellout crowds to Campbell Recital Hall last fall and is expected to do the same this year.
In his lectures, Salgo does more than talk about music history and theory: He brings in top musicians to perform sections of the works under discussion. These performances, coupled with Salgo's vast knowledge and understated comic timing, have enchanted students of the series.
"It's a combination of his courtly, European manner and the force of his scholarship and knowledge," says Susan Christiansen, '60, who attended Salgo's lectures last year. "Having a pianist illustrate his points by playing the music was wonderful."
Last year, Salgo held forth on the finer points of Vivaldi, Chopin, Beethoven and--for a change of pace--Thomas Jefferson, who was a "gentleman musician." "He was a very fine violinist," Salgo says, "not just a country fiddler."
Researching Jefferson's musical life is another of the projects Salgo has taken on in his retirement. A volume on Jefferson lies at the top of a pile of books stacked in the maestro's living room, which doubles as a library. The side wall is lined with more books, and a baby grand piano stands dramatically framed against a floor-to-ceiling window. Another prized possession, which Salgo keeps framed in his study, is a note from Albert Einstein. The physicist played the violin and attended one of Salgo's orchestra concerts at Princeton in 1942. Later, the two met to play violin duets by Vivaldi. "Mr. Sandor Salgo is a musician of high standing," the note reads. "The concert he gave . . . has made a deep impression on me."
Einstein was "very sweet," Salgo says with a wry laugh, but he was not very good at the violin. Salgo recounts that once, Einstein was playing in a quartet with more established musicians, when he lost his place. One of the virtuosos shouted at him, "What's the matter with you, Albert? Can't you count?"
Salgo was raised in Budapest, studied music in Berlin and began his professional career as a violinist with the Roth String Quartet. In 1937, he came to the United States for the first time on a tour with the quartet. Two years later, he was offered a job teaching music at Princeton, where he stayed 10 years.
He arrived at Stanford in 1949 and began a campus career that encompassed teaching and conducting music by all the masters. In 1956, he became the director of the Carmel Bach Festival and nurtured it from a local event into one of the largest and most recognized celebrations of Bach's music. Along the way, he influenced hundreds of musicians, many whom have gone on to successful careers.
"When I went to work with him at his home, I didn't feel like I was a student. I felt like a friend," says Denis de Coteau, DMA '64, now music director and principal conductor of the San Francisco Ballet. "He has a humanness about him."
Salgo brings that same gentle, down-to-earth quality to his lectures, which are designed to help listeners make more sense of classical music.
"The only way to understand music is to see how it is put together," he says. "Notes themselves do not mean much. It is what is behind those notes. It is the poetry of it."
For information about this winter's lecture series, contact Heather Lilly at the Stanford Alumni Association, (800)786-ALUM.
Kirsten Lee Soares is a San Francisco writer and editor.
