How to Practice?

Sandor Kovacs (1886 - 1918) was one of Hungary's most beloved young professors and practitioners of music of his era-a piano teacher, as well as a music historian and theorist-who published five books during his lifetime, including How to Introduce Children to Music, with a volume of his writings on music published a decade after his death. Born Sandor Kohn, to Jewish parents who took on the Hungarian family name Kovacs when he was four years old, he graduated from the Franz Liszt Academy of Music, where he became the first person in Hungary to write a dissertation on music history. In Berlin, he studied under the noted German musicologist Johannes Wolf. From 1910 until his death, he was a teacher at the Fodor Music School, a distinguished private institution. He participated in the founding of the New Hungarian Music Association (UMZE) and helped popularizing modern Hungarian music, especially that Bartok and Kodaly, both domestically and abroad. He also achieved considerable success as a pianist. As a music educator, he broke new ground in Hungary by incorporating findings from the then-new field of psychology. In 1918, at the age of thirty-two, he committed suicide by poisoning himself. He was laid to rest in the Kozma Street Jewish cemetery.