István Kertész (28 August 192916 April 1973) was an internationally acclaimed Hungarian orchestral and operatic conductor who, throughout his brief career led many of the world's great orchestras, including the Cleveland, Chicago, Philadelphia, New York, Los Angeles, Pittsburgh, Detroit, San Francisco and Minnesota Orchestras in the United States, as well as the London Symphony, Vienna Philharmonic, Berlin Philharmonic, Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Israel Philharmonic, and L'Orchestre de la Suisse Romande. His orchestral repertoire numbered over 450 works from all periods, and was matched by a repertoire of some sixty operas ranging from Mozart, Verdi, Puccini and Wagner to the more contemporary Prokofiev, Bartók, Britten, Kodály, Poulenc and Janáček. Kertész was part of a musical tradition that produced fellow Hungarian conductors Fritz Reiner, Antal Doráti, János Ferencsik, Eugene Ormandy, George Szell, János Fürst, Ferenc Fricsay, and Georg Solti. Early life Childhood Kertész was born in Budapest, Hungary, in 1929, the first child of Margit Muresian and Miklós Kertész. His sister, Vera, was born four years later. Miklós Kertész, born in Szécsény, Hungary into a large Jewish family, was the director of a leather-works and died of appendicitis in 1938. An energetic, intellectually gifted woman, Margit Muresian Kertész went to work to support her family. Despite strictures against women working professionally in Hungarian society during the first half of the twentieth century, Margit was steadily promoted until she ran the office where she was employed. At an early age Kertész showed a great affinity for music, and began violin lessons. "When I was six and started music," he told a High Fidelity interviewer, "it was 1935 and cruel things were going on in Europe ... I found my 'exile' in music, practicing the piano, the fiddle, and writing little compositions." World War II and the Holocaust With the failure of Hungary's efforts to negotiate an armistice with the western Allies, German forces occupied Hungary on 19 March 1944. Aware of what was happening to Jews throughout Europe, the family went into hiding. Most of Kertész's extended family were deported to Auschwitz in July 1944 and did not survive the Holocaust. At the insistence of his mother, and despite the wartime interruptions of air raids, deportations, starvation and invasions by both Germans and later, the Russians, István Kertész continued his musical studies. By the time he was twelve, Kertész began to study the piano and composition in addition to the violin. The young Kertész,