“Are you related to Tibor Varga?” was a question invariably put to me on introducing myself wherever my travels as Editio Musica Budapest's promotion manager took me. The answer was no. I was aware who Tibor Varga was, although I had never heard him play the violin. His was a name one simply knew; I could vaguely recall his association with new music. He seemed to be a figure of the past, even though he was in his early fifties at the time, since he appeared to have given up the life of a traveling virtuoso. His presence was due to his past. Eventually news of the festival he had founded at Sion in Switzerland reached me and the programs revealed that he was conducting at least as much as he was playing the violin.

My curiosity was really awakened when Editio Musica Budapest published a selection of Schoenberg's correspondence, edited by Erwin Stein. Amid the many morose, angry, bitter letters, I came upon one exuding an altogether different mood. Writing just over two weeks before his death, Schoenberg was clearly gratified by the fact that a musician nearly half a century his junior—that is, representing the future—had done justice to his Violin Concerto in an exemplary manner; that his score had readily communicated itself to a young violinist.

When news of Tibor Varga's arrival in Budapest reached me, in 1980, I immediately rang him at his hotel to arrange an interview.