Robert Hupka (August 26, 1919 – July 3, 2001) was a

recording engineer An audio engineer (also known as a sound engineer or recording engineer) helps to produce a recording or a live performance, balancing and adjusting sound sources using equalization, dynamics processing and audio effects, mixing, reproduction, ...

for

RCA Victor RCA Records is an American record label currently owned by Sony Music Entertainment, a subsidiary of Sony Corporation of America. It is one of Sony Music's four flagship labels, alongside RCA's former long-time rival Columbia Records; also Aris ...

and later for

Columbia Records Columbia Records is an American record label owned by Sony Music, Sony Music Entertainment, a subsidiary of Sony Corporation of America, the North American division of Japanese Conglomerate (company), conglomerate Sony. It was founded on Janua ...

and, until his retirement, a cameraman for

CBS Television CBS Broadcasting Inc., commonly shortened to CBS, the abbreviation of its former legal name Columbia Broadcasting System, is an American commercial broadcast television and radio network serving as the flagship property of the CBS Entertainmen ...

in New York. He was born in

Vienna en, Viennese , iso_code = AT-9 , registration_plate = W , postal_code_type = Postal code , postal_code = , timezone = CET , utc_offset = +1 , timezone_DST ...

, and emigrated to the U.S. at the onset of World War II to escape the Nazi persecution which took his parents' lives. His grandfather was the composer

Ignaz Brüll Ignaz Brüll (7 November 184617 September 1907) was a Moravian-born pianist and composer who lived and worked in Vienna. His operatic compositions included '' Das goldene Kreuz'' (''The Golden Cross''), which became a repertory work for several d ...

, who was a friend of Brahms. Hupka took thousands of famous candid photographs of conductor

Arturo Toscanini Arturo Toscanini (; ; March 25, 1867January 16, 1957) was an Italian conductor. He was one of the most acclaimed and influential musicians of the late 19th and early 20th century, renowned for his intensity, his perfectionism, his ear for orch ...

while Toscanini was leading the

NBC Symphony Orchestra The NBC Symphony Orchestra was a radio orchestra conceived by David Sarnoff, the president of the Radio Corporation of America, especially for the conductor Arturo Toscanini. The NBC Symphony performed weekly radio concert broadcasts with Tosca ...

in rehearsals. Many of these photos were published in the book ''This Was Toscanini,'' (1963) accompanying an uncompleted essay by

Samuel Antek Samuel Antek (May 1, 1909 – January 27, 1958) was a violinist in the NBC Symphony Orchestra under conductor Arturo Toscanini. He joined at the orchestra's inception in 1937 and played with it until its dissolution in 1954. Antek was also a cond ...

, a

violin The violin, sometimes known as a ''fiddle'', is a wooden chordophone (string instrument) in the violin family. Most violins have a hollow wooden body. It is the smallest and thus highest-pitched instrument (soprano) in the family in regular ...

ist in the NBC Symphony. Later, those and several more photos were used as cover art for RCA LP and CD reissues of Toscanini's recordings. Three of these photos were used as set pieces in the television show, ''

The Odd Couple Odd Couple may refer to: Neil Simon play and its adaptations * ''The Odd Couple'' (play), a 1965 stage play by Neil Simon ** ''The Odd Couple'' (film), a 1968 film based on the play *** ''The Odd Couple'' (1970 TV series), a 1970–1975 televisi ...

''; the photos can be seen on the wall in

Felix Unger Felix Unger (born 2 March 1946 in Klagenfurt, Austria) is a heart specialist who served as the president of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts for three decades. He is the president of Alma Mater Europaea. In 1986 he performed the first a ...

's bedroom. In the late 1980s, Hupka worked with engineers at NBC International on the audio/video synchronization of the ten Toscanini telecasts, which were finally issued by RCA in the early 1990s. Hupka was also the author of ''Michelangelo: Pieta'', a collection of a hundred photographs, from various angles and with different lighting, of

Michelangelo Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni (; 6 March 1475 – 18 February 1564), known as Michelangelo (), was an Italian sculptor, painter, architect, and poet of the High Renaissance. Born in the Republic of Florence, his work was insp ...

's Pieta, taken in 1964 when this sculpture was exhibited at the New York World's Fair.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Hupka, Robert 1919 births 2001 deaths American audio engineers American people of Austrian-Jewish descent 20th-century American engineers