Back in October, a Facebook post from Béla R. Balogh, ringmaster of 3 Leg Torso, stated that his dad, Lajos Balogh, had been admitted to the emergency room and was recovering from surgery. Lajos Balogh, at age 94, survived the surgery for a herniated esophagus and returned home a week or so later. 

Balogh, pers, has been a main player in Portland’s classical music scene. He was Principal Second Violinist with the Oregon Symphony for many years. He founded the Metropolitan Youth Symphony and was its maestro from 1974 to 2012. He founded the Portland Festival Symphony and conducted it from 1981 to 2016. He served on the faculties of Marylhurst College, Portland State University and Lewis and Clark College.

I visited Balogh at his home in Lake Oswego. He met me at his front door, looking very chipper. He can give you the impression that he is related to Einstein because of the wildness of his hair. 

In his very large living room were a couple of music stands with scores open. I asked him about his daily routine. “I still play Bach on my violin before I go to bed,” he replied.   

“God bless you. Go!”

Although a lot has been written about Balogh as a violinist, conductor, and music professor, I wanted to find out more about the time when he was a young man, growing up in Hungary. 

“I was robbed of my teenage years because they coincided with the first years of WWII,” he said. “My hometown had been bombed. My high school was turned into a military hospital. School was held in the morning during those years. So for music, there was not much that you could do. Everything was focused on the war. I would have been in the music business much earlier.”

But the war didn’t really stop Balogh from pursuing music. He went to the Liszt Academy in Budapest, and studied with Zoltán Kodály. 

Sponsor

“There were no books, only lectures,” noted Balogh. “I asked him what are we supposed to know for the finals. He said ‘Everything.’” Kodály was evidently pretty blunt as well. Balogh recalled singing a famous song for him, and Kodály replied, “Your brain is better than your voice.”

Balogh was inspired by one of his violin professors whose eldest son was shot by the Nazis near the Danube River. Balogh knew of a half dozen young men who were killed by the Nazis. 

While in Budapest, Balogh became involved in literary circles, and in his twenties he supported the Hungarian Revolution against the Soviet Union.  

“On October 30^th, 1956, during the Hungarian Revolution the 18-ft tall Stalin statue in Budapest came down. They dragged his head through the streets, and I was one of those who peed on his head… on Stalin’s head. It wasn’t long before we heard that the Soviets were massing troops on the east side of the country. The Soviets were going to come in and take things over. I was told that I had better get out of there. If I had stayed, I’m not sure if I would have lived. I went to my hometown, Beled, which is near the border with Austria and not far from Vienna. The situation was chaotic. My parents brought me to the border and said ‘God bless you. Go!’  I was with a large group of people, and we just walked towards Vienna. We went to the refugee camp at Traiskirchen, which was on the outskirts of Vienna.” 

Austria became an independent, neutral country in 1955. Germany was split into West Germany and East Germany. 

“I was in a small group that went to the West German embassy.  Some of us spoke a little German, and a dozen of us were invited to dinner at the Regina Hotel, one of the top hotels in Vienna. The Germans were eager to find out what we knew about the Soviets. At the dinner, the Germans asked if we wanted to start with a nice Hungarian Tokay (Tokaji) wine. We said, ‘No.’ We asked for Coca-Cola. He asked us again, and we affirmed very strongly that we wanted Coca-Cola. That’s because we had read in the papers that American soldiers drank Coca-Cola. What the papers didn’t tell us was that they put rum in their coke!

“I wanted to go to Munich. I had been attending the Liszt Academy in Budapest and would have graduated had I stayed another year.  It took a while, but I did get to Bavaria and went to the University of Music and Theatre Munich. I got very involved with some of the composers there. I had a string quartet and lived in Munich for almost ten years. I played violin on TV and on radio also had a Hungarian string quartet in The Netherlands, which did a recording of Haydn quartets. I spent about a year and a half in Holland, and I played violin on a ship that went from Holland to New York.”  

Sponsor

Everything was green

In the meantime, his brother Charles got his doctorate in mathematics from Oregon State and started teaching at the University of Portland. Lajos got a scholarship from the German government to play music – first at Lewis & Clark and other colleges on the West Coast. At first he didn’t like the rain. It rained through the winter. He took a trip to California, but everything was brown there. When he returned to Portland, everything was green. So he decided to stay and make Portland his home. Then his parents moved to the U.S. also. So, he started the immigration process in Portland. 

Marylhurst University got a federal grant to get him on its faculty. He earned a Masters in Music from the University of Oregon in 1967, and in 1980, he became a U.S. citizen.

Balogh joined the Oregon Symphony, playing for conductors Jacques Singer, Larry Smith, and James DePreist. During one of the concert seasons, he split concertmaster duties with Tony Porto and Paul Bellam.

“I believe in the power of music,” said Balogh. “I wanted to make music available for all kids. That’s why I founded the Metropolitan Youth Symphony. Music is an international language, and it makes life better. Based on what I’ve read, I don’t think that anyone who was a school shooter ever studied music.”

A few years ago, Balogh donated money to Marylhurst University for the construction of an outdoor amphitheater. But declining enrollment forced Marylhurst to close.  Balogh is pretty sure that the amphitheater, which has a stage that holds an orchestra, has been stored by the City of Lake Oswego. He hopes that it will be resurrected and put to use again. 

“I would like it to be set up again at Westlake Park,” he said. “That would be a great setting for music making.”