Nándor Plotényi

For ten years this stretch of riverbank was called Plotényi Embankment. Uzhhorod's councillors voted the name through in November 1934, a year after the violinist's death and for what would have been his ninetieth birthday. It did not survive the war. István Horthy took it in 1942, Molotov in the autumn of 1944, and it has been Kyivska Naberezhna ever since.

Plotényi came back to the same water in December 2023, in bronze, a few metres from the pedestrian bridge, folded around an outsized violin with three strings.

The mining master's son

He was born on 29 August 1844 at Nagyláz — Velyki Lazy, a village southeast of the city — and learned violin, piano and cello from his father, a mining master. The Prague Conservatory turned him down. What saved the career was a meeting in Mukachevo in 1862 with Ede Reményi, the Hungarian virtuoso who had once toured with the young Brahms. Reményi took him on as accompanist, then as concert partner across Europe, and introduced him to Liszt in Rome; Berlioz, Wagner and Saint-Saëns stayed in the circle after that. He gave his first solo recital in Pest in 1867, and by 1870 he was first violinist of the National Theatre orchestra in Budapest.

Three strings, three makers

The violin has three strings instead of four, and the pegs are lettered: Stradivari, Guarneri, Amati. This is not a generic salute to great workshops. Plotényi owned one of each — a Stradivarius that came to him from the violinist Heinrich Wilhelm Ernst, a Guarneri bought in 1885, an Amati — an extraordinary shelf of instruments for a landowner's son from an Ung county village.

Read the same violin as a body and it turns into his wife. Eugenia MacAlister, an Englishwoman, married him in 1879, after which he mostly stopped giving professional concerts; the sculptor leaned the instrument against him the way a person leans. Follow the outline further and the curve resolves into a brandy glass and a bottle. The Nagyláz estate he built up ran to some 250 hectares of vineyard and orchard, with a steam mill and a distillery turning out around 400 hectolitres a year.

The hourglass underneath

Below the figure sits a working hourglass, and the sand really runs. The idea is plain, and it lands, because the man it marks was known across half of Europe in his lifetime and then went so thoroughly out of Uzhhorod's memory that his embankment was renamed twice without argument. A music school carrying his name opened here in 1939 and is likewise gone.

The unveiling date was chosen with the same deliberateness: 13 December 2023, International Violin Day. The piece joins a bronze population the city has been accumulating since 2010, about sixty strong now.

Finding him

Kyivska Naberezhna runs roughly a kilometre along the Uzh between the Masaryk road bridge and the pedestrian bridge, and Plotényi is at the pedestrian end. Švejk is on the same stretch. Bring a torch after dark — the bronze sits low and the embankment lighting does him no favours. Across the water, the linden avenue Czech botanists planted in 1928 runs 2.2km, the longest in Europe.