Anchored in Artistry ( )

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2 CHAPTER ONE Anchored in Artistry ( ) Erzsébet Szőnyi was born into a world turned upside down. Four years before her birth, Austria-Hungary had been divided up according to the terms of the 1920 Treaty of Trianon. The Kingdom of Hungary lost 72% of its territory, 64% of its population and 31% of its ethnic Hungarians, who abruptly found themselves living outside of their own country. Thus it happened that Erzsébet was born into the newer, smaller Kingdom of Hungary to parents born into the older, larger one. None of her family was ethnically Hungarian, yet all of them were culturally Hungarian. This paradoxical situation, common in the new Hungary, produced some of the twentieth century's finest composers, musicians, music teachers, and teachers of music teachers. Erzsébet Szőnyi is all these in one single individual. Like many of her generation, she became a great Hungarian patriot through her contributions to her country's artistic life and her activity as a cultural and educational ambassador on five continents. During the 43 years between 1871 and 1914, the Dual Monarchy of Austria- Hungary tried to hold together its vast, mostly agrarian territory. The Austro- Hungarian Empire began to collapse with the onset of World War I in 1914, ten years before Erzsébet's birth. The Empire was a bewildering array of culturallinguistic identities constituting present-day Austria, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, plus parts of Romania, Poland, Serbia and Italy. The First World War itself was chaotic enough, but in the aftermath of erased and re-drawn borders, the yearning for ethnic autonomy and self-determination made for widespread population shifts across borders and the formation of new territories. The daily lives of ordinary families seemed to be all that held together many fragile Central European societies after World War I. One particularly cohesive family of mixed ancestry would bring forth and nurture a gifted musician to continue their struggle for a higher human experience Erzsébet Steidl, later Szőnyi born April 25, 1924 on the Buda side of Budapest. Erzsébet naturally seeks the humor in any situation; so of the ethnic diversity of her family she slyly says there is absolutely no Hungarian blood in my blood! Concerning her mother, She spoke, of course, Bulgarian, but her mother tongue was German, because her mother was German from the south of Hungary. Her mother's father was George Pisanoff, a Bulgarian linguist from a farming

3 2 Early Childhood family that produced rose oil. He studied linguistics at the Sorbonne in Paris and later came to Hungary to study German, the lingua franca of Austro-Hungary. Not long afterward, George went to live in the town of Bela Crkva to continue to learn German. i There he met and married Anna Waszner ( ), Erzsébet's maternal grandmother. After marriage, George and Anna Pisanoff went back to his native Bulgaria where Erzsébet's mother, Alice, was born in 1894 in the Danube port city of Vidin, not far by river to Budapest. Another daughter, Mária, was born in Sofia during the time George was employed there. After George died of leukemia at age 46, Anna moved back to Bela Crkva, where the girls went to a German speaking school. ii Eventually, Alice came to Budapest in 1913, the same year she married Erzsébet's father. Alice Pisanoff and Jenő Steidl were introduced to each other through her mother's relatives who had previously moved to Budapest. Jenő was born in Óbuda in iii His father Károly Steidl and his mother Bertha Mayer were from the Eszterházy lands of Western Hungary. iv Erzsébet remembers how nice her parents looked together. My father was a big, tall sportive gentleman, a good-looking gentleman. My mother was like a girl beside him. People used to say, 'There is Mr. Steidl with his daughter!' In summing up her own family tree, I am passionate in my love for my country without having any real roots, Erzsébet also speaks for many similar families who forged the new Hungary out of the defunct Austro-Hungarian Empire. We considered this country as our home. My father a citizen of Óbuda had deep roots in Budapest as an officer of the National Institute for Land Credit. His brother, Tivadar, was even more successful, having reached a very high position in the Hungarian State Railways. In brief, my immediate and extended families regardless of our mixed origin were Hungarian according to position and lifestyle. v Table 1. Steidl-Pisanoff Family Tree

4 Anchored in Artistry 3 Although their collective mother tongue was German, Erzsébet's family spoke both German and Hungarian at home throughout her childhood; and of course, she attended Hungarian-speaking schools. But she still recalls being scolded in German. When this went up, she says with her infectious laughter while demonstrating the accusatorily wagging finger of a parent, I remember all of this in German! Additional insight into Erzsébet's remarkable linguistic ability comes from the fact that her grandfather Pisanoff's Petit Dictionnaire Français-Bulgare was published in Sofia in 1898 in which the humble use of "petit" in its title is ironic for a dictionary of more than 30,000 words and over 800 pages. vi His passion for all things French would come to be an important part of Erzsébet's childhood and ultimately of her lifework, even though he died before she was born. Figure 1. Erzsébet and her mother Alice in After Erzsébet's parents were married, her mother's mother and younger sister Mária came to live with them. Erzsébet remembers how her kindly father comforted the whole family, ultimately building their house on Tamás Street with a separate apartment for her grandmother and aunt. vii Mária had a congenital hip condition and after marriage, she and her husband and two children also lived in the apartment. Even after the passing of Erzsébet's grandmother, her mother helped Mária throughout the rest of her life.

5 4 Early Childhood The three women did not speak Bulgarian at home, but Erzsébet remembers that her mother always spoke it with Angel, the Bulgarian vegetable merchant at the marketplace. And of course she received beautiful goods; they were not cheaper, but at least they looked great! Although Erzsébet occasionally heard them speak Bulgarian, she did not learn to speak it herself. She remembers being told that her grandmother's family was not very happy when she married a Bulgarian because the general Austro-Hungarian attitude toward them was that they were rough and peasant-like. My mother and her sister only went back to Bulgaria once around the ages of 60 or 70 to see where they were born and lived as children, but that was all. They were satisfied to have seen it. The Steidl-Pisanoff s were an educated, musical family. All of them were amateur musicians without a professional among them because then as now, music was not a sure profession but a compulsory subject of culture, and at the same time it later became a hobby for many families. Erzsébet was nurtured in just such an environment, one in which her early exposure to and facile grasp of music became, like languages, a major theme in her life. My father and mother were very gifted, and my mother and grandmother played piano very well. I remember when my mother was in the mood she just sat down at the piano and played. She usually played the Grieg Papillon, and still today I have the sound of my mother's piano playing in my ear. So I think it gives a good reflection of Hungarian bourgeois families where children started to learn music very naturally at an early age because this was part of the culture. Before the First World War and to some extent between the two world wars, it was the Hungarian custom to make music at home in the Italian way, as Erzsébet characterizes it. My father played the guitar; my parents and my aunt had a group of friends playing different types of mandolin soprano and alto, similar to violin and viola and the guitar. So, about four or five people were playing a complete repertoire of mostly Italian music from the turn of the century. When I was small, I listened to this chamber music and it became very familiar to me, their sounds of playing together. Her father's love of singing also played a role in Erzsébet's early musical formation. I must add that my father did not play guitar just in chamber ensembles; he used to sing and accompany himself on the guitar. He had a very beautiful voice. It was never a question for him to be a professional musician, however. In my father's whole family there were different people who were very musically gifted but no one became a professional. Funny! He also enjoyed painting for a hobby, which in time came to have its own way of influencing Erzsébet's musical future.

6 Anchored in Artistry 5 Nourished in such an environment of active music making, Erzsébet quite naturally became the third musical generation living in the household. I started my first music lessons with my grandmother at kindergarten age while walking in the street and reciting the different note names, so I learned note names before I learned the alphabet. It was such a natural a thing to do because my grandmother was so musical. So now when I speak in music education about starting at the early age of kindergarten, it instinctively goes back to my own childhood when I went for walks with my grandmother. Figure 2. Erzsébet and her grandmother Pisanoff in Her formal music instruction with a private teacher began soon thereafter in the early 1930's, before Hungarian school music attained its world-class status. The piano was the natural choice simply because the family already owned a piano. I started lessons with a private piano teacher who was quite famous, not only in and of herself, but because she was the niece of the very famous Hungarian painter, Gyula Benczúr. viii Her name was Aglaja Benczúr, a very wonderful piano teacher. So, if I see a Gyula Benczúr painting today, I look at it with warmth. Not only because of my piano teacher, but also because my father was fond of the painter. She had a lot of students and did a lot of common work with them, such as having an annual concert of her students in her home. I well remember that we listened to each other very carefully. Still today I have some friends who were together with me at that time. Erzsébet recalls that as soon as it became evident that she was heading toward a musical profession, her parents sold the old family piano in order to buy

7 6 Early Childhood her a Vienna Bösendorfer grand, which soon became a permanent part of her musical life. I still have this piano with me today because I felt it was part of my body and I could not get along without it. When I was already married and going regularly to the countryside with my children to be with my husband's family in the summertime, my father-in-law decided to buy a piano so that I could play during the summer holiday as well. There was an easy and cheap way of buying a very good Steinway so now I had two pianos. After a certain period of years we no longer went on holidays to the countryside, so we sold the Steinway and today I still have my Bösendorfer. Erzsébet enjoys how people are shocked when she tells them this because they cannot understand her choosing a Bösendorfer over a Steinway. She responds by telling them that she has played that particular Bösendorfer since her young childhood and that there simply is not enough room for two grand pianos in a city apartment. Erzsébet's early music study and her family's commitment to it were intense. Miss Benczúr came to their home twice a week for hour-long piano lessons. Erzsébet began composing short piano pieces at age 13, simultaneously manifesting her growing abilities and ever-deepening passion for classical music. ix When she was 16 years old Miss Benczúr recommended that her mother find a theory teacher for her gifted daughter, preferably someone at the Liszt Academy of Music. x It was decided that Erzsébet would study there with Miklós Laurisin, a pianist and composer and well-known professor of theory. xi She began having twice-weekly theory and composition lessons with Laurisin while continuing piano lessons with Benczúr. Erzsébet's mother accompanied her to Laurisin s flat for the composition lessons, again indicative of her family's supportive attitude and encouragement. The young musician loved those years of study! I was a very diligent student. I did my homework all the time, and if I liked it, I did it twice! I am still very grateful to Miklós Laurisin because he taught me a lot of things. I remember how much I enjoyed the classes with him and how much I felt proud of learning all those things from him. Erzsébet began to research Laurisin's background while preparing the interview sessions for this book. She discovered that he first taught from 1922 to 1924 at the Nemzeti Zenede, now known as the Béla Bartók Conservatory for high school students, then from 1924 to 1930 at the Ernő Fodor School of Music, now called the Aladár Tóth Music School. xii He eventually secured a faculty position at the Liszt Academy, where he taught from 1930 to And that was when they sent him, meaning that he was released from the Academy when the Communists came to power in Hungary. Erzsébet explains that Laurisin's only

8 Anchored in Artistry 7 offense to the Regime was that he was bourgeois. Removed from his position, but not imprisoned, he continued to give private lessons until his death in Erzsébet remembers Laurisin most as an all around musician. He was not only an accomplished vocal coach and accompanist at the Academy along with his other teaching duties, but he also composed Singspiels, ballets, theater and film music and art songs. He was two years younger than his more visible brother, opera tenor Lajos Laurisin ( ), who sang Calaf in Turandot and Rodolfo in La Bohème among other prominent roles in the Royal Hungarian Opera before leaving Hungary after World War Two. The two brothers formed a professional performing ensemble with their sister Irén, also a singer. Miklós Laurisin composed a ballet for the Hungarian Opera House entitled Debreceni Historia, or Debrecen Story. xiii A successful comic ballet before the First World War, the plot was a retrospective about amusing situations of 18 th century student life in Debrecen. Erzsébet regrets that Ferenc Farkas composed a similar ballet just after World War Two because it brings to mind the worrisome issue of forgotten masterworks. What is most important to me is that compared with Farkas' ballet, Laurisin's should have been played later on as well. When something similar happens in the history of music, such as when Faust or Romeo and Juliet are set by different composers, one becomes famous while audiences forget the other simply because it is not played as much. So surely this happened to the works of Miklós Laurisin. In addition to piano and composition, Erzsébet also studied French throughout her childhood. She remembers being able to practice speaking French during the frequent visits of a special family friend. He was a priest, an elderly gentleman a wonderful man who, by the way, baptized me, baptized my children, and performed my marriage. When he came to visit us we spoke French; he made it fun to give me French lessons. He always brought books, anecdotes and little stories that were interesting and exciting and therefore not boring, something very important in learning a language. We had very good reading sessions! The School Years The Hungarian education system has remained remarkably stable throughout the nineteenth- and twentieth centuries in spite of the country being continually overrun by various invading armed forces. The depth and breadth of Erzsébet's own involvement in Hungary's educational aims and support systems first as a student, later as a curriculum architect, teacher-educator and composer is a third major strand of her career.

9 8 The School Years Erzsébet attended first grade in a school near the family's Márvány utca house in the First District where she lived from her birth in 1924 until She was only at that school for one year because her family had a new house built in the 12 th District of the Buda Hills that same year. xiv Erzsébet attended grades two through four at the brand new school on Németvölgyi utca, where Irén Nánási was the music teacher. This teacher accompanied the singing on a portable harmonium, which the older students helped her to carry from classroom to classroom for music lessons. Erzsébet remembers that this early school music experience was pleasant enough but did not make a lasting impression. She also remembers that the author of their school singing book was Pongrác Kacsóh. xv Erzsébet's assessment of his school materials was that they were well-known traditional songs of some musical validity, but not authentic folksongs and related masterworks such as would later be introduced into the national curricula. Erzsébet unfavorably compares her own secondary school experience to the so-called "modern" school at the end of the street in the Buda Hills where she now lives most of the time. xvi The new school is an eight-year school with students ranging in age from 10 to 18 years. xvii With an obvious sense of loss for a more disciplined era, Erzsébet observes how the older students leave the school and immediately have a cigarette in their mouth like this (she imitates their attempt to look sophisticated) wearing dark blue nails. When you compare it to our behavior, I tell you frankly I don't think that they are happier than we were then. It's much more comfortable to be in a certain règle. xviii Of course, there were other educational options besides the public schools Erzsébet attended, but they contrast even more starkly with the modern school at the end of her street. There were different schools directed by nuns, for instance. Those were very expensive and very severe, much more severe than ours; the girls had to wear black stockings. Nowadays it's unbelievable that such things could have happened! For her part, Erzsébet speaks with great fondness about her experiences at the Erzsébet Szilágyi Girls Grammar and Secondary School, a Capitol Region public school she attended age 10 through 18 in the years from 1934 to xix Languages and music were of course prominent subjects for her, but she also enjoyed religious studies. During those pre-nazi, pre-soviet occupation years, religious education was available to Catholic, Protestant and Jewish students in the public schools. Erzsébet actually credits the school s religious instruction more than her family life for her lifelong devotion as a Catholic. Of her family's religious practices she recalls, I wouldn't say that they were churchgoers. My father wasn't at all, nor was my grandmother, but my mother sometimes went to church. Being an observant youngster she was certainly aware of their seeming passiveness. I

10 Anchored in Artistry 9 am a believer, but strangely, I did not inherit it from my family like most religious people. My parents were religiously indifferent. xx She was less sure of her father's actual position. I never knew what kind of beliefs he had because he was uninterested in religious themes. xxi Her maternal grandfather was apparently Greek Orthodox and she knew that her mother went to a German school, most likely Lutheran. I remember my mother often sang Lutheran psalms in German. I think she was Catholic, but she only became religious in her old age. xxii Erzsébet's school experience with religion was the opposite. The religious life at the grammar school I attended was at a very high level. I received most of my experiences in this field at school. Religious study became more serious each of the eight years I was a student at the grammar school. Each faith had its own twice-weekly religion class taught by an instructor from that faith. Part of the religious study was for the whole school population to attend Sabbath services, each according to their particular beliefs. On Sundays, the Catholic students went to Mass at the Matthias Church, the coronation cathedral of Old Hungary. xxiii Figure 3. Erzsébet with her parents in The Matthias Church is in the Castle District, conveniently near the old campus of the Szilágyi School, an old one-story Baroque building close to the Fishermen's Bastion. Eventually, the student body outgrew the small building and instead of renovating it, the City built a new school in 1939 in the Krisztina District at the foot of Castle Hill. The Szilágyi Catholic students then began attending services at the Tabán church close to the Krisztina church. These two large Baroque-era edifices were built in an area formerly rich in vineyards dotted with little chapels bordering the Danube and close to the Chain Bridge lin-

11 10 The School Years king Buda to Pest. By Erzsébet's time, the area was already quite built up as part of the central business district on the Buda side of the river. The students' church attendance was noted, especially on major holidays like Christmas and Easter when Catholic students were required to attend Confession. Although Erzsébet naturally mentions the relationship between the Catholic students and their teacher priest with special fondness, she was also keenly a- ware of the other religion teachers. The priest was an elderly gentleman. He was very much favored by all of the students; everybody liked him very much! I know there were ladies teaching the Protestants and a rabbi teaching the Jewish. Later on there was a lady who taught the Jewish students she was a very nice and kind person who loved music very much. We became very good friends because she always attended the musical activities of the school. I mean to say that our religious life was completely integrated into our school experience. Erzsébet also remembers there was an easy mutual acceptance, more than mere tolerance, among the three religious groups represented at the school. Everyone knew each other, each other's religious preferences, and even which religion the teachers belonged to. She recalls, for example, that everyone knew that the director of the school was Protestant. But what seems to have impressed her most was the opportunity to go as deeply into one's religion as one desired. Religion itself was built into the life of the school in such a way that if one were interested in it, one could learn everything one wanted to about it. I still have the textbook from my eighth year, Apologetika, which means 'defending the faith.' I felt that we were lucky, and still, when we meet each other, we always feel that this kind of religious study was not only very, very important in itself, but I would also say important for the development of each personality. Some of Erzsébet's remembrances of the religious atmosphere at the school explain why it so deeply affected Catholic students, who even today still talk with affection about the two priests who taught them, Antal Mihalik and Frigyes Huber. I received religious instruction at school from them until priests were removed from the schools (by the Communist regime). We lived a serious religious life; there was a Heart Club, for example, and other things. xxiv To this day I am in contact with those whose 'little mother' I was as an older student. We were constantly together; we went to spiritual retreats and to church together. Her intensity, however, unsettled Erzsébet's parents. At home, they found this a little much. I used to cough a lot, so my mother wrote a letter to 'my' Antal Mihalik so that I would not have to go to church every Sunday all

12 Anchored in Artistry 11 the way from Tamás Street to the Városmajor church. It might be that I was coughing because of that. xxv To this day, Erzsébet is glad that the priest somehow managed to disregard the letter. Such specific religious education was apparently the norm in pre-world War Two Hungary. In those days, it was not questioned, as it is nowadays, whether one could take part in religious instruction or not. Or, one would say to you, 'It's up to you; if you wish, you can; if you don t want to, you don't have to.' This was the average situation for the bourgeois level of Hungarian society at that time. So, there were no extremely rich or extremely poor people. Of course, secular school subjects also delighted Erzsébet. She remembers studying German language and history for her entire eight years at the school. Headmistress Gabriella Schultheisz, herself an excellent singer, was the teacher. She correlated Schubert and other Lieder to German lessons. We would go down to the music room and I would accompany the class while Mrs. Schultheisz taught and directed the singing. Erzsébet was pleased whenever they studied an important German literary figure then went to the music room to sing the associated Lieder. During those years while under the inspiration of German art songs, she composed a song to Heine's text, Der Fichtenbaum und die Palme. xxvi Music generally seemed to be the unifying element of the Szilágyi School. All of the teachers were so musical and loved to integrate music into their subjects, and that's why Sztojanovits (the music teacher) was so supported. In addition to German, Erzsébet's course of language study also included six years of French and four years of Latin. After eight years, we had to pass final exams in Hungarian and in those three other languages before graduating. xxvii Mathematics, geography, history and other usual school subjects were also taught and examined at the Szilágyi School. The Szilágyi School students expressed their abundant musical feeling through the select 100-voice student choir conducted by Adrienne Sztojanovits ( ), to whom Zoltán Kodály dedicated his 1929 choral masterwork Pünkösdölő (Whitsuntide). xxviii By the time Erzsébet was a student at the school, it had become fashionable for Hungarian school choirs to wear uniforms featuring authentic folk costume elements. xxix Erzsébet recalls that the Szilágyi School choir wore dresses designed by Klára Tüdős Zsíndelyné of the Hungarian Opera in the boldogi kendő style, fashioned of medium blue linen with a white-on-white embroidered apron and a matching white embroidered tiara with seed pearls. xxx Maestra Sztojanovits came to be one of Erzsébet's most important mentors, who she remembers with great admiration. Besides the choir, Sztojanovits was

13 12 The School Years responsible for the unusually high level of all of the musical education at the school, a professional example Erzsébet has brilliantly emulated in her own career. Figure 4. Choir of the Szilágyi Girls School in the National Opera House. In 1941, Sztojanovits organized a folksong competition at the school with the purpose of finding out how many each student knew. Erzsébet won the competition for which the prize was a photograph signed by Zoltán Kodály she still displays on the wall of her apartment sitting room. This indicates Sztojanovits' enthusiasm for Hungarian folksong, including her performances of Bartók's and Kodály's folksong choral arrangements. In tandem with such intense music making during school hours, Erzsébet continued to take piano and composition lessons after school and on Saturdays. She began accompanying Sztojanovits' choir at age 14, and to perform featured piano solos in school concerts at age 15. The first of the pieces she performed was Franz Liszt's Gondoliera" from his Années de Pèlerinage. Erzsébet began documenting her musical life in a variety of ways beginning in Her scrapbooks contain programs and reviews of her own performances, performances of her compositions and their performers. Her autograph books hold messages, notes, cards and letters from visitors to classes she has taught over the years. One of the items in the first of Erzsébet's 18 scrapbooks was about her singing in a girls trio on the radio on December 6, The work was a Saint Nicholas text set to music by Tibor Kazacsai. Erzsébet delights in how she spent this first professional stipend on a little Hummel figurine of a musician, still displayed in her Buda Hills apartment right alongside her many professional awards.

14 Anchored in Artistry 13 Figure 5. Erzsébet in her Szilágy Girls School choir uniform. A Manifest Career Beginning in 1940 and throughout her last three years at the Szilágyi School, Erzsébet organized and presided over a club for students with special musical interests. They called it a "self-educating" club, a musical circle with aims and activities very much like a literary circle for the mutual cultivation of tastes and a broadening of knowledge. xxxi In their particularly musical school setting, the club met often for active music making interspersed with presentations about certain composers and their works. Erzsébet began her pedagogical career through her initiative and leadership of this circle of musical friends. They discussed their common musical interests such as Bartók's and Kodály's folksong research and performed related musical examples. By this time, she was regularly writing lectures about such topics, foreshadowing what would become one of her areas of teaching expertise. Another of Erzsébet's autograph books contains an entry signed by classmates she organized and directed in a special choir for singing religious services. This was in addition to Adrienne Sztojanovits's school choir, but it certainly was done with her approbation as an extension of the musical and religious life of the school. Then, too, she certainly recognized Erzsébet as a gifted young musician whose artistic leadership was as evident as her native musicality

15 14 A Manifest Career and disciplined musicianship, so no doubt Sztojanovits would have encouraged her as much as possible. Erzsébet explains that Father Frigyes Huber, the same priest who taught the religion classes to Catholic students up until 1940, also happened to be a highly trained musician in his own right with particular expertise in Gregorian chant. He was not only a central figure in the musical life of the Szilágyi School, but in Hungary as a whole. xxxii I was eager for good music at the Masses, so this priest and I founded this church choir in the school. I organized it from among my schoolmates, even the smaller o- nes who wanted to join, and we had regular performances in the church. So I was conducting a church choir when I was still in school. Huber was also the church music editor of the national choral director's journal, Magyar Kórus. xxxiii So, it was evident that we obtained scores to use in the performances at very low cost or none at all, which means that whoever was ambitious could really do something. I was the one who was ambitious, so I did it. The singers in Erzsébet's church choir very much enjoyed reading Gregorian chant from scores written in neuma, or neumatic notation, such as were found in the Liber Usualis and in Sanctus, Huber's singing book for Catholic youth. She always thought their interest in reading from Gregorian script was especially unusual because theirs was not a specialized music school. It is clear that by the time Erzsébet graduated from the Szilágyi School in 1942, her course was already set for a career in music, one in which she would before long join the ranks of internationally recognized composers. Concerning the rich combination of school music, private lessons, the music club and the church choir she and her classmates enjoyed at the Szilágyi School, Erzsébet says, I am certain those students had a musical treasure for the rest of their lives. It was certainly the case in hers. Erzsébet tells a favorite anecdote about the director of the Szilágyi School. It is especially significant in light of the fact that grammar and secondary schools of the time were either all-boys or all-girls schools, reflecting certain social attitudes about gender roles. She remembers how the director of the school pretended that he was of the idea that girls only need to have enough brains to not stand under the rain gutter when it rains. Of course, it was a joke and everyone knew it. While teaching a mathematics lesson, he challenged the class to solve a difficult problem. Erzsébet quickly solved it and he exclaimed: You should have been a boy! For her, that was the greatest compliment he could have given