Sandor Harmati

Sandor Harmati (9 July 18924 April 1936) was a Hungarian-American violinist, conductor and composer, best known for his song “Bluebird of Happiness” written in 1934 for Jan Peerce. Biography Sandor Harmati (Harmati Sándor in Hungarian orthography) was born into a Jewish family in Budapest on 9 July 1892. He studied at the Budapest Music Academy in 1909, becoming a professor at age 17. From 1922 to 1925 he played first violin with the Lenox String Quartet, In 1921 Sandor Harmati was a founding member of the American Music Guild, created by a group of young American composers “to learn each other’s music and to present worthy works by other American composers to the New York public”. The other charter members were Frederick Jacobi, Marion Bauer, Emerson Whithorne, Louis Gruenberg, Charles Haubiel, A. Walter Kramer, Harold Morris, Albert Stoessel and Deems Taylor. On 11 November 1923, at the Klaw Theater in New York, Harold Bauer and the Lenox Quartet gave the first performance of Ernest Bloch’s Piano Quintet No. 1, which was dedicated to the performers (Harold Bauer, piano; Sandor Harmati and Wolfe Wolfinsohn, violins; Nicolas Moldavan, viola; and Emmeran Stoeber, cello). On 19 Septe