Violinist Mery Zentay – Victim of the 1918 Influenza Pandemic

On 3 October 1918, a young violinist named Mery Zentay succumbed to influenza, dying in her Manhattan apartment only 4 days after contracting the virus. She had ventured to America to aid her family’s business in Budapest. Her death a little over a century ago at the tender age of 21 seems especially poignant today given the ongoing ravages of Coronavirus. This is her story.

She was born Mária Zentai-Zimmer in Budapest on 30 July 1897, daughter to a prominent luthier, Ottó Károly Zimmer, and began her studies at age 4, first playing in public 3 years later. Before joining Hubay’s class at the Academy of Music, she studied privately with his former pupil Rezső Sabathiel, a superb violinist who occasionally played the with famed Hubay-Popper Quartet when they needed a fifth or sixth player. In 1910 she finally began training under Jenö Hubay, making her formal debut in at the Hungarian Royal Opera House on 18 March 1910.

The following year she appeared with the Tonkünstler Orchestra of Vienna. In 1914 she played Beethoven’s Violin Concerto Op. 61 and Vieuxtemps Violin Concerto No. 5 Op. 37 with the Berlin Philharmonic. American impresarios would bill her as Hubay’s “favorite pupil”, a claim I have not been able to verify. In any case, she seems to have been of no mean talent and in the years preceding WWI boasted engagements in Vienna, Berlin, and London.

In fact, she was giving concerts in the latter when the Great War broke out, hastening her return to Budapest. The onset of hostilities across the Continent wrought a dramatic downturn in her father’s business and so, at age just 17, she made a fateful decision. Running away from home, she would make a desperate bid to reach America, where she hoped to establish herself, rescuing her family’s declining fortunes and repaying them for her musical education. Her father had tried to warn her off from such plans; in a 30 January 1916 interview with the Pittsburgh Press Zentay recalled her father saying that she “must never come to America, that I would be ruined, would starve and die – but you see?”

Her own journey to America is the stuff of Hollywood films. She crossed into Austria, making her way to the front, specifically to Kassa (present-day Kosice, the second largest city in Slovakia) in the Carpathian Mountains, then a Jewish enclave. There she is given permission to play for the troops, generously dividing her remuneration between a fund for the wounded and her own private savings to purchase passage across the Atlantic. From Kassa she traveled to Berlin, where she made two fortuitous acquaintances – one a New York impresario named Hugo Goerlitz, the other an American nurse returning to the States. Goerlitz, who had introduced Jan Ignace Paderewski, Jan Kubelik and Richard Strauss to American audiences, encouraged her to come to New York. The homeward-bound nurse – her name is lost – agreed to shepherd the young Zentay in her transatlantic sojourn, even lending her a spare uniform to better slip the suspicions of immigration officers. Their penultimate stop – in Rotterdam – nearly brought Zentay’s plan to grief, the authorities there refusing to grant departure to a parentless minor. Mery’s mother, however, had been in pursuit since Berlin, tipped off by family friends in the Prussian capitol who had met her daughter. Their reunion in Rotterdam was quarrelsome, but in the end Mery’s arguments won out and her mother agreed to accompany her to New York. They arrived in the summer of 1915.