Classical dressage master Charles de Kunffy died April 14. He was born in 1936 in Hungary and was a member of the Austro-Hungarian nobility. He wrote seven books and many articles for the Journal of Equitation and Culture and has a lecture series online.

Announcing his death on social media Monday, his longtime student Jessica Jo “JJ” Tate wrote of the man she called her mentor and family:

“The world has lost a true gentleman, a man who had a deep love for horses, and the most knowledgeable gift of teaching the people who love them as well. I don’t think I’ve ever know anyone who could actually claim “am I right, or am I always right?” On so many horses, and in so many lessons (on life lessons as well) he was always right. The dedication to what’s right, no matter what, will really stay with me for the rest of my life. He was always this beacon of hope, this ray of elegance, and a moral compass for me. In a world that can be fickle and lacking content, Charles de Kunffy always grounded me into what is right, not only in horse training, but in life itself.”

In his memory, we’re republishing this article, which ran as a feature in the June 5, 2017, issue of The Chronicle of the Horse.

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Dawn had yet to lighten the sky as Charles de Kunffy, then around 20, set out on the deserted streets of Budapest to make his way from his apartment to the riding academy. The city on that early November morning in 1956 was under martial law, imposed by the occupying Soviets. The curfew lifted at 6 a.m., and de Kunffy had six horses in training.

Lining the elegant avenues, communist sharp shooters were positioned atop buildings and behind doorways, keeping a close eye out for suspicious behavior. De Kunffy, like all Hungarians, constantly feared for his life. He walked calmly, trying not to draw attention to himself, well aware that a gesture as innocent as pulling a handkerchief from his pocket could be misconstrued as going for a weapon. He carried the white piece of cloth in his hand, its purpose two-fold: for wiping his nose on this chilly morning and/or to wave as a sign of surrender.

Across the street in front of a movie theater, a soldier paced back and forth patrolling the area. A young boy of approximately 6 appeared from a side street and determinedly approached the door of the theater with a piece of paper in his hand, most likely a Hungarian revolutionary leaflet.

As the child struggled to tape the paper on the glass, the soldier silently approached, leveled his gun, and shot the boy in the back of his head.

The sole witness on the street, de Kunffy choked back vomit. The child fell silently into a crumpled heap. De Kunffy dared not turn his head nor acknowledge the horror he had just viewed. Instead, he focused on putting one foot in front of the other, the sanctuary of the riding academy closer with every stride, as he wondered if the next bullet would strike him.

Even after the passing of more than six decades, the memory is too painful for de Kunffy to discuss with me in person, but he describes that terrible moment in his memoir, a book he tells me “is not an autobiography but a thank-you note to those who helped me survive, the horses and the like-minded people who loved them.”

He writes in “A Rider’s Survival From Tyranny,” “And so it happened, that I did not get shot but I had to watch someone else die. I reached my horses; riding them helped me live that day. I could not tell what I saw. Even now I can only write it to avoid sobbing.”

For de Kunffy, horses not only saved his life literally—as an elite rider, he was allowed by the Soviets to continue his equestrian education in the hopes that he (and other top riders) would bestow future prestige on the communist occupiers—but also they did so spiritually and emotionally.

And de Kunffy reciprocated, devoting his life to repaying these animals through the preservation of the art of classical dressage and horsemanship.

“With dressage, you are in charge of the horse’s emotions and spirit and intellect. So you don’t just develop his body to be stronger or more precisely balanced, you have to address his mind and his sweetness of temper. That’s why it’s dressage and not just riding—because it goes beyond the physical,” he says.

A Gorgeous Dream

We’re sitting side by side on a down-filled sofa in an elegant living room reminiscent of the old salons of Europe with art hung floor to ceiling, a glittering crystal chandelier and rich oriental rugs. Large windows frame orange and lemon trees, their branches heavy with fruit.

De Kunffy lives alone in the townhouse. (“I would go crazy with anybody,” he says. “No, I am not the type who can live with other people. Claustrophobic.”) In the distance the mountain range outlines the western edge of Palm Springs, California.

We are a long way from Hungary.

One side of a photo album rests on each of our knees as we flip through it together.

De Kunffy is now an octogenarian.

I think.

He won’t confirm my questions as to his age or how old he was during the Nazi invasion.

“This is what we keep a secret. Exact years. Divulging exact dates of age and other important things is considered totally rude and impermissible because it makes you a statistic. I lived the Nazi occupation, but I don’t have to say how young I was. I was a child,” he confirms politely.

He is so unfailingly well-mannered and gracious with a musical, lilting voice. As we chat, he slowly divulges more information.

Part of his hesitancy is his abhorrence of what he calls “celebrity culture” with its blurring lines between the personal and the public.

“I loathe celebrity culture. There is something so despicable about it. Wasn’t Hitler a celebrity culture? Mussolini? Stalin? All these disgusting creeps. I don’t like to discuss too much of my personal life because I think it jibes into the whole celebrity thing. I always say, ‘Nobody is entitled to know that,’ and they should buy my future book,” he adds, giving me a mischievous smile as his elegant fingers turn the pages of the album.

He’s been writing an account of his life that goes beyond the few years detailed in his aforementioned “thank you notebook” along with a video documenting his life story. But that is for the future. We are here now.

Image after black-and-white image of an idyllic life prior to the Nazi, and later, Soviet occupation, are affixed to the pages: de Kunffy as a 3-year-old sitting on a rocking horse under a magnificently decorated Christmas tree; exterior shots of the 45-room castle in Hungary where he lived as a child (which he was to inherit, had history not intervened).

Others of the exotic 49-acre park that surrounded the castle, with its imported trees from Africa and the United States.

Photos of carriages and horses. So many horses.

The family owned race horses, riding horses, draft horses, carriage horses, ponies. You name it, and that equine was represented. De Kunffy’s father acquiesced to his 7-year-old son’s demands and registered a race horse in his name. The horse would go on to win a derby three years later, the silver cup now sitting on the bookshelf in his Palm Springs home.

De Kunffy also began taking riding lessons from a former cavalry sergeant that same year, on a horse named Csillag.

“My childhood was like a gorgeous dream. Nobody was out to hurt anybody,” he says as he turns the pages and continues to narrate images.

He points to a photo of his aunt, who was in a position to offer forged documents to Jews allowing them to flee, which they all sadly refused. Another of a smiling young child, the son of their Jewish general manager.

“He was murdered at Auschwitz, that boy,” he says sadly.

It’s an album of ghosts, both of people and innocence.

“It was a big switch,” he ruminates as we look at the images. “From living in paradise to dropping into the reality of utmost brutality.”

That these photos survived is astonishing. De Kunffy found them—some 200 in all—beneath the melting snow in the English ivy surrounding the castle.

Discarded by the Russian “liberators,” the history of his childhood was quickly disintegrating in the elements.

The photographs would later be smuggled out of the country by an Italian diplomat and mailed to de Kunffy following his escape to the United States after the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, but we are getting ahead of ourselves.

A Rider’s Memory

De Kunffy’s recollections of the Nazi occupation remain vivid as he recalls the first time he saw the SS soldiers.

“It was March 19, 1944. We were, as we were very often, in a gorgeous Landau carriage. We didn’t use autos in the countryside; the roads were not paved. We were in a nearby town pompously sitting on the main square when all traffic was stopped because the German invasion was coming through. We were allies, but they didn’t trust us anymore. They thought that Hungary would skip out, and we had—how should I say? We gave them reason to believe this. They weren’t wrong,” he concludes with a proud chuckle.

“And so they came in and occupied the country, but in one day, in 24 hours, we were under German occupation, and they put in a puppet government to carry out a Nazi program,” he adds.

“So anyway, you asked about Nazi occupation—I lived it! I’ve seen it, and from a rider’s point of view. I have a rider’s memory of these SS troops on horseback. A column on horseback. They sat there in perfect, impeccable vertical balance, eyes closed, and they were sleeping!

The horse was walking, and they were sleeping. Exhausted, 15-, 16-year-old soldiers, fast asleep on the horses,” he says, still incredulous after all this time.

Nazis quartered with the de Kunffy family in their castle outside the town. “We hated them!” de Kunffy says with a snort. “Well, not everybody in Hungary did. There were some Nazis, but my family hated them. All civilized people did.”

His family was treated well by the SS troops however.

“The aristocracy was not bothered by the Nazis. Aristocracy had a great respect from them. They were very class conscious and totally anti-Bolshevik,” he explains.

The Nazis stayed in the castle for only a brief time, leaving Hungary on Sept. 11, 1944, but they inflicted unimaginable horror during those months.

“They came in March 19th, and the Jews were sent to their death camps by June 30th at the latest. What are we talking about? Three months?! They gathered up and enslaved and packaged and shipped and murdered 1.5 million Jews from Hungary,” he says angrily.

Following the end of World War II, Russian troops entered and occupied the country. Unlike the Nazis, the aristocracy held no sway. In fact, they were targets.

“In the communist regime, when you are born into the upper classes, you were labeled an ‘enemy of the people’ and also a ‘class enemy’ and many other labels. You were slated to be as demeaned and destroyed as possible but ultimately killed by work and lack of medical care. They took you into concentration camps, and they worked you to death,” he says.

De Kunffy’s father would be sent to a communist work camp (he survived) along with the aunt who offered to forge documents for Jews (she died days after she was released). The castle was seized and all 80 of their horses taken.

It would be other horses and those who trained them who now entered de Kunffy’s life, thereby ensuring his survival.

Saved By Horses

The skill de Kunffy demonstrated on horseback transformed into a lifeline under the Soviet occupation.

“Horses gave me the undeniable prestige of having talent and diligence and a progress toward high achievement,” he explains.

This, in turn, reflected well on the communist regime.

“In sports and arts, success became an advertisement of communist supremacy. When you have talent that could be trained to become an exhibit monkey, then you are on a golden list. When you reached an elite [level], you had a chance. It didn’t guarantee you anything, but you had a chance of survival,” he says.

“I was set on my road to survival, if not fame, by riding so well and by doing the work, by pulling my weight. Mental and physical weight. So this one way I mean horses saved me, but the other way was that it saved me emotionally and psychologically because I had to practice the virtues that horses teach you. And they teach you mercilessly,” he says, “to be all those things: brave, generous, empathetic, patient, disciplined. They raised me.”

“[I]t saved me emotionally and psychologically because I had to practice the virtues that horses teach you. And they teach you mercilessly to be all those things: brave, generous, empathetic, patient, disciplined. They raised me.”

Charles de Kunffy

He was admitted to the Riding Academy in Budapest in 1952 as the youngest student in the school’s history.

The Academy had been revitalized by the communists in the hopes of fielding Olympic riders, and de Kunffy’s instructors were all products of European equestrian institutions, including Vienna and Hanover. Many were high-ranking officers with advanced degrees, educated not only in horsemanship but scholars in their own right, and, in turn de Kunffy was educated in the same classical manner, which emphasized academic education and an unwavering respect for the animal.

“They educated the virtues, the spirit and the intellect. You had to know your academics. You had to know why you rode the shoulder-in and why, if you do it this way, it’s inferior, and if you do it that way, it’s superior. You had to know the entire academic theory. People who were cruel or roughed up a horse or jammed into his mouth and backed him up, they were out within minutes. The horse always comes first,” he says, switching to the present tense.

It was true for him then, and it’s true for him now.

Coming To The United States

California held a magical appeal for de Kunffy from the time he was a young boy. His grandmother had taken a Cunard voyage around the world in 1938 and shared her memories and photographs before the war tipped the world upside down.

After immigrating through New York, his plan was always to live on the West Coast.

“I asked for Carmel when I was processed to get a sponsor because I remembered all this from my grandmother’s stories. I was just enchanted by the pictures and the books she showed me, and it happened. I got to California, and I live always here. I’ve never lived in any other state,” he says.

As to the events leading to his escape from behind the Iron Curtain on Nov. 22, 1956, he bristles.

“I won’t tell that because it still shakes me, and I break down and cannot tell it. I was asked to tell it many times, and I can’t. It’s too horrible to really chat about it. I can relive it in my memory, but I cannot talk about it,” he says, visibly upset.

The timing of his escape corresponds to the Hungarian Revolution, an unsuccessful uprising lasting a few weeks in October and November of that same year. It resulted in the deaths of 2,500 Hungarians and 700 Russian troops with more than 200,000 Hungarians fleeing the country.

I change the subject.

Upon arriving in the United States, de Kunffy attended the University of California at Berkeley on a scholarship, graduating in 1962 and becoming a philosophy and psychology teacher in the San Francisco area, lecturing to high school and college students.

Although he escaped alone, he was later able to buy his parents’ release.

“Communists don’t like money at all,” he says sarcastically. 

“But I bought them, and they were cheap!” he jokes. “And I never let them forget. They said, ‘Oh, we are so grateful we can live in America,’ and I said, ‘Don’t you forget, you were so cheap.’ ”

While at college, he visited the famous Pebble Beach riding stable near his home in Carmel and was asked to ride a horse whose owner was in Hawaii for an extended trip.

“So I rode, and the people were awestruck because the horse was on the bit, was longitudinally flexed, and was rhythmically cadenced and flowing and this high off the ground,” he says measuring a great distance with his hand in relation to the floor.

“They said they had never seen anything like that. I wasn’t hanging on the reins or waterskiing on the horse. The owner showed up one day, after like six months of my riding his horse. He watched me ride. I didn’t know he was the owner when I was riding, and he said, ‘I want to give my horse to you  because it’s unbelievable to see you two together. I want you to have it!’ ” he says with a laugh.

He recalls it cost $90 per month then to board a horse, even a free one, and his scholarship was $96 per month.

“I had to work to eat, so I said, ‘I can’t have a horse because I don’t have the money.’ So anyway, that was that. It was a brief period of a year or so, and then I didn’t ride again for a while,” he recalls.

Just Good Or Bad Riding

Years passed, and then his academic students, intrigued by the stories de Kunffy would sometimes share about his previous life of riding and training horses while in Hungary, asked for his help.

“They turned out to be very ambitious young riders who knew nothing, and I started to teach them. They were three-day eventers, but of course, you need dressage. That is the ultimate correct sport, three-day eventing,” he says.

It was the manner in which de Kunffy had been trained. His classical equestrian education made no differentiation between the various disciplines.

“Hungary and elsewhere, there were just good riders or bad riders. There wasn’t, ‘I’m hunt seat equitation; I’m a jumper,’ ” he says. “There is only one riding and one way of keeping the horse pain free and keeping the horse in an evolutionary progress from simple to complex. In other words, you find a piece of nature, and the job is to—painlessly—teach this piece of nature to become a monument of art. To use his faculties with such precision and educated propriety that you have maximum performance with minimum effort, and that is the classical goal,” he says.

“Jumping is one movement of dressage. You can choose to piaffe and then the next day do cavaletti work, and you jump as part of the whole thing. This segregation in riding did not exist in my upbringing,” he adds with a small shrug.

Classical Versus Competitive Dressage

Relying on the lessons he learned from his master instructors, de Kunffy introduced the riders in his orbit to the art of classical dressage. He became a judge (eventually he became an FEI judge) and took a year off from teaching school to give lessons. A second sabbatical followed, and he never returned to the classroom, shifting his teaching back to the ring, authoring numerous books and articles on the topic, and giving clinics worldwide.

When asked if he sees a difference between classical and competitive dressage he answers, “None! There should not be.”

This division comes down to knowledge, he says, or lack thereof.

“Judges are not equal in knowledge. Some terrible, some excellent and everything in between. I like judging very much, and I based it, of course, on knowledge, not on politics or heresy. I actually saw what was happening and could evaluate it. I understand, and I now teach judges and instructors, and they say over and over again, ‘Why were we not taught this? Why?’ ” he explains.

Sonja Vracko, a former Grand Prix rider who operates View Ridge Farm Equestrian Center outside of Seattle, is a fellow S-rated judge and has worked alongside de Kunffy for four decades.

“He is a very good judge and a very good clinician. He has a keen eye and more knowledge than anybody I know. He applies that knowledge both in teaching and judging. We are very close in our scores in the judging. We see things the same way, and he has a way of conveying his message that is extraordinary. He is very special,” she says.

De Kunffy bemoans the lack of mentoring and riding academies, which he sees contributing to the dilution of dressage.

“This art, the art of mentoring, you cannot find a recipe book; you cannot find an instructional book. The best books—and I think I wrote some of them,” he jokes with a smile, “are not instructional manuals because there is no way of transmitting a great art that is body, mind and soul.

“It cannot come from the pages of a book,” he continues. “It is a good skeleton on which you can build your meat. You can have the books, but you cannot stay only there. You need a mentor, and you need an academy that brings you up so that your culture is equine friendly. So you don’t just know what the horse needs physically, but you know also how to respect his mentality and his nature.”

De Kunffy sees fewer and fewer classically trained dressage riders. Instead of spending years training under a mentor and learning to produce a horse up the levels, he sees too many young people with no experience beyond riding a made horse in competition. “Replacement [of trainers] is not forthcoming, and what poses as a replacement—which is a pretense—are 17-year-old girls saying, ‘I give you a dressage lesson,’ Go to hell, kiddo,” he says with a dismissive wave of his hand.

For many years, de Kunffy wrote proposals to universities and college with equestrian programs, outlining the necessary steps to re-create the prestigious riding academies of his youth, to no avail.

“In all the great arts, like the plastic arts—painting, sculpting and all of that, everybody was apprentices. Leonardo da Vinci was the student of Ghirardelli—the older artist guided them and guided their spirit. The same in riding—it was always a mentored art, and you put huge value on those who knew what it was all about,” he says.

“If it’s correctly judged,” he concludes, “Of course the classical riding has to be victorious because that is what competition was meant to be. Show us where you are in the progression to your ultimate goals.”

De Kunffy has been encouraged by the many judges he’s instructed over the decades.

“There is an incredible hunger for knowledge from those candidates and no supply. Demand, demand, demand, no supply. They loved it. They had all these questions, and I had the answers. They were asking me about the ideals, and that is legitimate. What are the ideals, and how do we get there? These judges were so keen to be really excellent and discern, but they got four of these courses, and then they were let loose on humanity!” he says with a laugh.

De Kunffy says he never feels things are hopeless because people can change.

“But the spirit of riding with this competition mania and assigning everything to competition success is devastating for me because, to license somebody to instruct at the highest level because she rode a fourth level test with 60% or something? We just so casually say, ‘Competition is enough. If you compete, then you should be a trainer.’ Come on! A trainer has to know so much and all for the horse’s sake,” he says.

“We are custodians of an ancient art that has been fiddled with, experimented with, tried by millions of riders through the ages, and what we’ve retained as a classical understanding is what worked most of the time for most horses to the highest level—that’s what we retained. Why should we now, because we call it competition, destroy it?” he asks.

De Kunffy As Mentor

De Kunffy is renowned for these beliefs and his ardent defense of them. You won’t find a list of horses he’s trained or shadowboxes filled with Olympic medals he’s won, but Charles de Kunffy is still a household name for many professional riders, including international Grand Prix rider Jessica Jo Tate.

Tate, now 39, has been riding with de Kunffy since she was 11, a partnership she calls “fate.”

From a small Wisconsin town, Tate was introduced to de Kunffy when he was brought in to clinic at the barn where she stabled her horses, and his philosophy on riding changed her entire perspective. Not only did he impact her riding career, over the years he’s influenced the way she wants to live her life.

When she married, it was de Kunffy who gifted her “something old” to carry.

“He is one of the most elegant, inspiring people to be around in the way he carries himself in the world. He knows who he is, and he’s kind and humorous and someone I look up to on all levels: as a person; obviously as a teacher; obviously as a rider. But then to be a true, elegant person? He inspires me to always do better and be better, even as a person, as that is very rare,” she says.

Recalling their first encounter she shares with a laugh, “He was giving this lecture. I was in the front row, taking down notes, and I was absolutely taken with him. He was my dressage god or guru. I thought, ‘This makes so much sense to me.’ Just to be embedded into that system was amazing.”

De Kunffy’s old-school system is all about putting the horse first.

“I think a real thread that runs through his teaching is that these horses are majestic animals, and we are given the gift of being able to interact with them and to truly learn about ourselves through them,” Tate says. “That has really resonated with me throughout my whole life and has really been a powerful thing, not only for myself but for my students. It’s so much deeper than ‘get a good half-halt.’

“I feel like people aren’t aware of those amazing lessons about yourself that the horses are teaching you, which Charles has really exposed me to, and that through horses you learn to live a masterful life because of your involvement with them,” she adds. “It’s about being of service to the horse and to the art and the sport that we love, and then all other things come from there.”

Tate appreciates that he focuses on teaching the rider how to ride, thereby producing incredible results from the horse. “He jokes that there are a lot of lessons out there that are about ‘horsing,’ and it’s not a horsing sport. It’s a riding sport, and the human needs to learn to become a rider. A horse is a horse. We, as riders, need to learn that as a species, they are all very similar, and if you understand that, you can train a lot more effectively,” she says.

“He always would tell me—because I used to ride really not good quality horses when I was younger—and he would always say, ‘You have to make the OK horse good.’ Then you need to know how to make the good horse great. And then hopefully in your life, you’ll get a great horse, and you’ll make it incredible,” she adds.

Those days of riding not-so-great-horses are behind Tate. Despite being able to ride with Olympic coaches and some of the best trainers in the world, it is de Kunffy to whom she returns over and over, not only for his remarkable eye but for his ability to remind her why she began doing this in the first place.

“That is what is so inspiring about him,” she says. “He taught me how grand horses are and how generous of spirit they really are. I think that is a wonderful way to come to the sport every day. That humbleness and service towards the horse is something every professional should have. I think you forget that you do it—and started doing it—because you love horses. The whole service to the horse and their wellbeing—mentally, physically, emotionally—and the humility of this is a powerful animal, and it allows me to do any of this. It’s amazing, and he never lets those he teaches forget this.”

De Kunffy believes in teaching any level of rider.

“I never had a limit put on who I teach. I will teach anybody who wants to learn. This is a must. If you say, ‘I teach fourth level and above’ it’s the worst thing you can say because that means you want personal fame and notoriety. Instruction is very special, and on the basest level, the lowest level, you have to excel. That’s where you form and shape your rider. The basics have to be in the hands of the greats,” he concludes.

Dressage Hall Of Fame

For his efforts to keep the art of classical dressage and horsemanship alive, de Kunffy was inducted into the Roemer Foundation/USDF Hall of Fame in 2013.

“It was a huge nod. I value it enormously. I think of it as truly a great honor. This is the greatest honor USDF can bestow on a person, so of course I am very appreciative of that,” he says.

But for de Kunffy, it’s always been about the horse and not the accolades.

“The horse feeds you—it’s completely intravenous. It never stops. It is a meditative art. You are a student of the horse. You are listening. Correct form comes from correct content. Content to form, not form to content,” he says.

And yes, the horses have fed him since childhood. They fed his spirit, his mind and his intellect. By listening to their lessons and perfecting his riding ability, horses kept him alive during a brutal historical period. De Kunffy has spent his life reciprocating and advocating on behalf of the animal that saved him, acting as a link between the prestigious training he received in classical dressage from the masters in Europe and students of today.

“Horses were my survival vehicle. I became a man of, eventually, quite substantial culture, and culture is more than knowing the dates of the Renaissance. Culture is level of inner life, and I got there because I was taught by horses and those who trained them. I survived,” he said.

And so shall classical dressage, if de Kunffy has anything to say about it.

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This article originally appeared in the June 5, 2017, issue of The Chronicle of the Horse. You can subscribe and get online access to a digital version and then enjoy a year of The Chronicle of the Horse. If you’re just following COTH online, you’re missing so much great unique content. Each print issue of the Chronicle is full of in-depth competition news, fascinating features, probing looks at issues within the sports of hunter/jumper, eventing and dressage, and stunning photography.