Early Career
During this time, however, he had composed a Violin Concerto and he had been asked to perform it with the Vienna Philarmonic Orchestra. It was so well received that he had no trouble obtaining a position with the Austrian Orchestra as it assistant conductor and concertmaster. It was also at this juncture that he decided to embark on a tour of the United States of America in 1893, abandoning the career chosen for him by his mother. His parents were heart-broken at his sudden departure.
After playing with the Austrian Orchestra at the Chicago World's Fair, and taking the first prize trophy in an open competition, he decided to remain in the U.S. The people of America took him to their heart as few nations did—certainly more quickly and generously than his native Austria, and not less so than Canada where he was to settle down later on in life.
In Chicago he taught violin and composition and led a String Quartet he personally founded. He came to Pittsburgh which had been without a professional symphony orchestra until 1895 when British conductor Frederic Archer took the baton. With Archer at the helm, von Kunits had organized and shaped an ensemble into a respectable orchestra. During the next 14 years, von Kunits was the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra's concertmaster, first violin, and assistant conductor to Frederic Archer (from 1896 to 1898), Victor Herbert (from 1898 to 1904), and finally Emil Pauer (from 1904 to 1910) when the orchestra came into financial difficulties and was dissolved.
Also, it was in the United States that he first became aware of his Serbian roots. At Chicago's Columbian Exposition he witnessed Nikola Tesla's alternating current system running everything mechanical, not to mention the illumination of the entire exposition itself. In Pittsburgh he saw Serbian steelworkers forming one of the oldest Serbian fraternal organizations (the Serb National Federation) in 1901, and in 1907, merging with Michael I. Pupin's Sloga (Unity). From then on, von Kunits always maintained that he was by descent a Serbian though his training was Austrian. After all, the Austro-Hungarian Empire of which Vienna was the capital, was a multi-national assemblage, yet there is no question that 'Austrian' can be used to denote certain characteristics shared by these twenty-five million different nationals.
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