When I heard the news that Eugene Fodor had died at the quite tender age of 60, I flashed on the full-color cover for an album of violin trivialities played by a fetchingly attractive young man who wore a pair of white slacks with exceptional flair. You can’t judge an LP by its cover and I wasn’t about to buy a entire album of pap just because the violinist was photogenic. But to my mind, Eugene Fodor = great hair, electric smile, and white slacks. He could have played the ophicleide for all I cared.
Besides, in those days I was quite the night owl and rarely missed Johnny Carson, nighttime TV host extraordinaire who had a penchant for inviting camera-friendly young classical musicians to appear on the Tonight Show. That was a smart move. Johnny Carson was a smart man. Adding a pretty violinist like Eugene Fodor to his lineup gave him cultural bragging rights while simultaneously providing twink glam that enticed younger viewers of both sexes. It was a no-lose proposition, provided that said pretty violinist was sufficiently bland. Nobody with real artistic heat would have been remotely appropriate. The last thing Carson wanted was some razor-sharp über-talent bursting with ideas, passions, and an agenda. What he needed was technically polished but emotionally undemanding violin playing packaged in pulchritude and predictability. Eugene Fordor was right out of Central Casting.
The tornado of shallow celebrity scoops up the occasional classical musician along with its steady haul of yawpy pop singers, starlets both female and male, crime-obsessed rappers, and attractively vicious sports heroes. Fodor was a prime example of a particular type of young performer who shines briefly then fades, his or her fifteen minutes of fame having run out. Fodor did everything right: he was from a normal-as-blueberry-pie Colorado background, he studied with all the hottest violin teachers of the day (Ivan Galamian, Josef Gingold, and Jascha Heifetz), he amassed a repertory of impressive but vapid pieces that threw up a smoke screen around his musical shallowness, and he put his scrupulously-honed technique to good use by winning a high-profile competition. So it was almost inevitable that the media managers would come calling; here was a nice fresh cash cow indeed, just ripe for the milking.
So on went the white slacks. Coiffure, lighting, and discreet pancake foundation took care of the rest. Camera-ready and media-savvy, he could play the parfait gentil knyght as he zinged his way through yards of Sarasate, Paganini, and Wieniawski. It was all wonderful fun for a while.
But twinkaliciousness doesn’t age worth a damn. Callow musicianship stops being attractive once manhood begins to replace adolescence. Artistry must arise to replace skin tone. But all that focus on the quick win, the endless unquestioning slough of drill necessary to produce those competition-winning chops, all the emphasis on surface polish, may take a disastrous toll on a young musician’s development at a time in life when so many crucial attitudes are formed and the seeds of later wisdom are sown. The college-age mind needs to spend its days thinking, experiencing, feeling, experimenting, exploring, arguing, failing, succeeding, and stretching. Impossible on a diet of empty-calorie Paganini caprices, endlessly practiced and mindlessly honed.
But that golden calf is one tempting little bitch. All those dire warnings to the effect that a life in music is a gamble and most people will never make a decent living at it…nyah nyah nyah, you can say, I’m making scads and scads of money per concert and, besides, I was on Carson twice last month alone! I’ll worry about the rest of it later. Right now I have a photo shoot for the Gramophone cover.
So they bloom, the concert circuit fleurs du jour. But most musicians don’t live like that. Most of us go through a long apprenticeship, develop slowly and steadily, and spend our lives out of the limelight, working happily for the most part. The musical profession hasn’t really changed all that much from the eighteenth century, at least not the profession as practiced by most musicians. In 1711 I would have been somebody’s kapellmeister; in 2011 I am a conservatory professor and wide-range all-purpose musician. The details and the titles change, but not the day-to-day experience.
Having never worried about the glitzier aspects of a life in music, I never had any glitz to fade away. But many of the fleurs fade disastrously — and then they need to rediscover what it means to be a musician. Some make the transition gracefully. Some just don’t have the musical, intellectual, or emotional substance to back up those now-slowing reflexes. Bach just might have sustained and nourished them for life. But the most vapid valley girl at the local mall has a better chance of fathoming Bach or Beethoven or Mozart, or any music of artistic integrity.
I hadn’t even thought of the name “Eugene Fodor” in twenty-five or thirty years. His playing made absolutely no impression on me. Despite our being close to the same age, he was neither role model nor inspiration. My heroes were the great artists, Schnabel and Serkin and Rubinstein and Casals and Reiner and Szell. While he was spritzing Sarasate bon-bons hither and yon, I was struggling with the mysteries and magic of late Schubert. Only upon reading his obituary did I find out that he became a drug addict and was even arrested for both possessing and dealing.
Back in the 1970s he was the archetype of the flashy media glam-boy classical music sensation. And now he is just as compelling an archetype of the dank mustiness that’s left in the pan once the flash has come and gone.