Rethinking Central European Music

Violin 2023

RETHINKING

CENTRAL EUROPEAN MUSIC

The inaugural conference of the Central European Music Research Group in the Musicology Department at the Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music

An event of the Bartók World Competition 2023

Budapest, 8–9 September 2023

RETHINKING

CENTRAL EUROPEAN MUSIC

The inaugural conference of the Central European Music Research Group in the Musicology Department at the Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music

An event of the Bartók World Competition 2023 Budapest, 8–9 September 2023

Liszt Academy, Room XXIII

(1061 Budapest, 8 Liszt Ferenc Square)

Organizing and programme committee: Anna Belinszky, Gergely Fazekas, Lóránt Péteri

CONFERENCE PROGRAMME

Friday 8 SEPTEMBER 2023, 9.30

Chair: Lóránt Péteri

Welcome: Dr. Andrea Vigh , President of the Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music

BARTÓK

Virág Büky

Response to a Salonstück – The Question of Szymanowski’s Influence on Bartók’s Sonata for Violin and Piano No. 2

László Vikárius

Eastern Europe and Central Europe in the Centre of Béla Bartók’s Life and Work or What Did Five Hungarian Folk Songs Want to Do at the 1938 Baden-Baden Festival?

coffee break

STYLES

Oana Andreica

Polystylistic Traits in Ede Terényi’s Music: The Baroque Concertos

Gergely Fazekas

“To Penetrate into the Brain-windings of the Text” – Translation as a Compositional Method in Kurtág’s Music

Rachel Beckles Willson

Against the Grain of Late Style

Friday 8 SEPTEMBER 2023, 14.30

Chair: Péter Bozó

SYMBOLS

Anna Belinszky

Death, Nostalgia and Tradition – Narratives of Brahms’s Funeral from Vienna to Budapest

Stephen Downes

A Polish Pianist travels to Budapest: ‘Affective Geography’ in Bruno Monsaingeon’s Piotr Anderszewski: Voyageur intranquille (2009)

coffee break

IDENTITIES

Jeremy Barham

Literary Analogues of Mahler’s Central European Musical Identity in the Works of Joseph Roth and Gregor von Rezzori

Ivana Medić

Ludmila Frajt as an Embodiment of a Central European Identity

CONFERENCE PROGRAMME

Saturday 9 SEPTEMBER 2023, 9.30

Chair: Katalin Komlós

NARRATIVES

Veronika Kusz

Dohnányi’s Viennese Carnival: The Context of the Piano Cycle Winterreigen (Op. 13)

Martin Elek

Wilhelm Furtwängler and the ‘German’ Sonata Form

coffee break

PERFORMANCE

Anna Stoll Knecht

Gustav Mahler and Cosima Wagner: Singing around 1900

Lóránt Péteri

Mahler’s Music in Interwar Budapest: Performances and Discourses

Saturday 9 SEPTEMBER 2023, 14.30

Chair: Gergely Fazekas

STATE SOCIALISM

Marsha Siefert

Ferenc Liszt as a Central European Music Diplomat: A State-Socialist Interpretation

Gabriella Murvai-Bőke

‘Formalism, Tradition, Folk Music’: The Vocal and Dance Ensemble of the Hungarian People’s Army in Poland in 1952

Anna Dalos

A Soviet Composer in Central Europe? About György Kurtág’s Postmodern Turn

coffee break

RECORDINGS

Péter Csobó

Music–Recording–Aura: Marginal Notes to the Debate between Adorno and Benjamin

Ferenc János Szabó

(Inter)national Recording Histories of Central Europe

OANA ANDREICA (The “Gheorghe Dima” National Music Academy, Cluj-Napoca)

POLYSTYLISTIC TRAITS IN EDE TERÉNYI’S MUSIC: THE BAROQUE CONCERTOS

Ede Terényi (1935–2020) belonged to a generation of composers in Romania that displayed a wide variety of approaches in their works, from spectral and aleatoric to minimalist and electroacoustic music. His own compositional career developed throughout several phases that showed the influence of the Hungarian folklore from his native Transylvania, of Bartók, Webern and the serial technique, musical graphism, and the preoccupation for the archaic Transylvanian musical elements, notably those belonging to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Furthermore, acknowledging his debt to Baroque masters, Terényi’s most relevant works of the ‘80s were a series of concertos in the style of Vivaldi, Bach, Scarlatti, Lully, Telemann and Handel. This paper examines the most important features of these works, which the composer himself considered to be a reflection of nostalgia and a continuous play with time.

oana.andreica@amgd.ro

JEREMY BARHAM (University of Surrey)

LITERARY ANALOGUES OF MAHLER’S CENTRAL EUROPEAN MUSICAL IDENTITY IN THE WORKS OF JOSEPH ROTH AND GREGOR VON REZZORI

The difficult task of determining Mahler’s socio-political and ethnic-national identity within a larger central European context is made no easier by recourse to biographical information. For every indication there is a counter-indication, for every claim a counterclaim. Similarly, his music shifts between or juxtaposes a relatively non-specific folk tone and a frequently subverted though nevertheless readily discernible mode of core western European symphonism. These deeply meaningful creative processes offer both hyper- and hypoeloquent testimonies to the complex culture of 19th- and early 20th-century imperial Habsburg politics. Overflowing with expressive suggestions, allusions, and oblique metaphors, Mahler’s music nevertheless remains pre-linguistic, proto-conceptual, its text settings favouring parable and metaphysical poetic licence. Using the works of two great literary chroniclers of fin-de-siècle to WWI central European life and manners – Joseph Roth (1894–1939; The Emperor’s Tomb, Hotel Savoy ) and Gregor von Rezzori (1914–98; Memoirs of

an Anti-Semite ; An Ermine in Czernopol ) – I attempt in this paper to recover through works of narrative verbal fiction a measure of what Mahler’s music says, without being fully able to communicate, about his central European world and identity.

j.barham@surrey.ac.uk

RACHEL BECKLES WILLSON (Leiden University – the Academy of Creative and Performing Arts; Codarts University of the Arts, Rotterdam) AGAINST THE GRAIN OF LATE STYLE

In this paper I consider the Milan premiere of Kurtág’s Samuel Beckett: Fin de partie – scènes et monologues, opéra en un acte (2018) as an occasion to revisit the Adornian notion of “late style” as elaborated by the late Edward W. Said. For Said, late style was a means to theorise late works not just by Beethoven (as discussed by Adorno), but also some by Richard Strauss, Constantine Cavafy and Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa among others. He argued that the syntax of these musical and literary creators became fragmentary and exilic, eventually constituting an extreme form of “unproductive productiveness going against …” (On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain (2008), 7). Through these means, he claimed, they achieved exceptional detachment and alienation from the contemporary social order.

In a persuasive review of the premiere, Francesco Parrino suggested that Kurtág’s Samuel Beckett: Fin de partie could be included retrospectively in Said’s line-up of such “late style” works (“Alla Scala l’opera tarda di Kurtág”, Musica , 26.11.2018). My own interest here, on the other hand, is in reflecting on the opera with an against-the-grain reading of late style. I reject the lens of Adorno and Said that homed in on creators alone. Rather, I explore the broader phenomenon of Samuel Beckett: Fin de partie , including institutional traditions and the ethos of performance practice. I propose this reveals a broader constellation of “going against”, and that this has long and intricate roots in the region of interest to this conference, Central Europe. I point to some of the ironies in its formation, and suggest it may even have a particular timeliness – rather than lateness – at this juncture of the twenty-first century.

r.beckles.willson@hum.leidenuniv.nl

ANNA BELINSZKY (Central European Music Research Group, Musicology Department, Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music, Budapest)

DEATH, NOSTALGIA AND TRADITION – NARRATIVES OF BRAHMS’S FUNERAL FROM VIENNA TO BUDAPEST

In the afternoon of 6 April 1897, a large crowd gathered in Vienna to bid Johannes Brahms a final farewell. The contemporary reports not only describe the funeral procession and list the names of the social elite present, but also tell us about the music that was played at the prestigious event. In front of the Musikverein, the choral piece, Fahr wohl was sung – the only Brahms piece to be performed at the funeral. From the Musikverein, the procession continued to the Lutheran City Church, where the church choir sang the chorale Jesus , meine Zuversicht, and then, according to some reports, a choral version of Mendelssohn’s Es ist bestimmt in Gottes Rat . This was followed by Schubert’s – or, in some accounts, Carl Gottlieb Reissiger’s – setting of Goethe’s first Wandrers Nachtlied (Der du von dem Himmel bist). The mourning crowd accompanied Brahms’s coffin to the Zentralfriedhof, where he was buried close to Beethoven and Schubert. In my paper, I will follow the route of the procession to discover the stories behind the symbolic details of the funeral and the music performed as part of the service. I believe these unfolding narratives offer a great chance to take a closer look at both the prevailing images of Brahms and the cultural milieu of Vienna and Central Europe at the fin-de-siècle. Finally, I will move the focus a little further east in Central Europe, to Budapest, and illustrate how the news of Brahms’s death gave the opportunity to the Hungarian newspapers to publish their own stories of the composer and to reflect on current issues in the musical scene. belinszky.anna@academy.liszt.hu

VIRÁG BÜKY (Budapest Bartók Archives, Institute for Musicology, Research Centre for the Humanities)

RESPONSE TO A SALONSTÜCK – THE QUESTION OF SZYMANOWSKI’S INFLUENCE ON BARTÓK’S SONATA FOR VIOLIN AND PIANO NO. 2

Almost every analysis written on Bartók’s two violin sonatas (BB 84 – 1921, BB 85 – 1922) discusses the question of Szymanowski’s possible influence. Although most scholars accept that the music of the violin parts, jointly worked

out by Szymanowski and the violinist Paweł Kochański, in the Polish composer’s works exerted some influence on Bartók’s violin compositions, opinions differ as to how significant this influence was, which components of Bartók’s music it may have affected, and how much share, if any, Jelly d’Arányi may have had in this influence, given that it was with her that Bartók first encountered Szymanowski’s Myths , Op. 11 (1915) and the Notturno e Tarantella , Op. 28 (1915), that are most often mentioned in connection with the sonatas.

It is usually Bartók’s First Sonata that is examined in this connection, because it is the earlier work that seems to show more obvious traces of Szymanowski’s influence. In my talk, however, I will focus on the Second Sonata, rarely mentioned in this respect. I will attempt to show how some features of the Notturno e Tarantella, especially those that give the piece its distinctive, exotic colouring, might have contributed to the special, Central European flavour of Bartók’s Second Violin Sonata.

buky.virag@abtk.hu

PÉTER CSOBÓ (University of Nyíregyháza)

MUSIC–RECORDING –AURA: MARGINAL NOTES TO THE DEBATE BETWEEN ADORNO AND BENJAMIN

There is hardly another Frankfurt School treatise on art theory today which is as much discussed and quoted as Walter Benjamin’s notable “artwork”-study. This text has become a mandatory reading; however, it has been largely overlooked by musicologists.

Benjamin developed his theory in connection with the visual arts: it is only the image that carries the aura, travelling through time and space and is saturated with historical substance. Benjamin remained seemingly uncertain about the place and role of the sound (and the music) in the historical process of losing the aura. Among the three surviving versions of his study, the first one posited a direct cause-and-effect relationship between the reproduction of sound and the paradigm shift that affects art as a whole, while in the third version, this connection is vanishing.

It is generally known how challenging Walter Benjamin’s study was to Adorno’s ideas on art theory. Adorno tried to deny the positive value of the change that Benjamin described. He raised doubts about the constitutive role of “reception

in the distraction” in his famous “Fetish-Character” study. The “distracted perception”, the “atomistic hearing” dissociates the unity of the work. Adorno wanted later to preserve the validity of the “auratic work” and its derivatives that he called “critical works” (for example, in the famous footnote 40 of the “Philosophy of New Music”, or in the 1950s, when he was facing with efforts aimed at the radical erasure of the musical context, and for example, he classified Krenek’s works written in the 1920s as productive forms of loss of aura). According to these, it is difficult to place the technical work of art on Adorno’s aesthetic value horizon. This makes his writings on gramophone recordings or the relationship between music and mediality so interesting.

Focusing on the discussion of Benjamin and Adorno, this presentation tries to find an answer to the following questions: how can the paradigm shift in art history (and art ontology) described by Benjamin be interpreted in relation to music? And what does this imply about the relationship between the “artwork of music” and the sound recording?

csobopgy@gmail.com

ANNA DALOS (Institute for Musicology, Research Centre for the Humanities, Budapest)

A SOVIET COMPOSER IN CENTRAL EUROPE? ABOUT GYÖRGY KURTÁG’S POSTMODERN TURN

Within the framework of official cultural exchange programmes, many Soviet musicians appeared in Hungarian concert life after the Iron Curtain came into existence. Nevertheless, the Soviet composers’ reception was very negative. It was an expression of the political resistance of Hungarian composers, who followed the Western European and American avant-garde and postmodern movements with attention, not to take contemporary Soviet music seriously. Soviet avant-garde music, at the same time, remained practically unknown in Hungary until as late as the 70s and 80s. My paper will focus on documents of concert life, contemporary music criticism, and personal recollections in order to reveal the underlying motives of this refusal. At the same time, however, I intend to present a special case. The 4th movement of György Kurtág’s cycle of choral works, Omaggio a Luigi Nono (Op. 16, 1979) was dedicated to Sofia Gubaidulina and Kurtág wrote two homages to Alfred

Schnittke in his piano collection Játékok (Games) in 1985. The 70s and the 80s witnessed Kurtág’s Russian period anyway, as he set Russian literary texts to music in his vocal compositions: Messages of the Late R. V. Troussova (Op. 17), Songs of Despair and Sorrow (Op. 18), Scenes from a Novel (Op. 19), and Requiem for a Friend (Op. 26). The choice of Russian poems is very unusual in Hungarian music history, and it cannot be explained exclusively with Kurtág’s singular attraction to Russian culture. I wish to show the motives underlying Kurtág’s decision to use Russian texts: after the failure of the first performance of his vocal concerto, The Sayings of Péter Bornemisza in Darmstadt in 1968, when his role as a representative of Hungarian avant-garde music was questioned, he decided to put on the Soviet avant-garde composer’s clothes. This conscious change of cultural identity allowed him to win international reputation, and helped him to implement his postmodern turn using a dense web of musicalcultural references, especially references to Gustav Mahler, a symbol of CentralEuropeanism per se, at the same time.

dalos.anna@abtk.hu

STEPHEN DOWNES (Royal Holloway, University of London)

A POLISH PIANIST TRAVELS TO BUDAPEST: ‘AFFECTIVE GEOGRAPHY’ IN BRUNO MONSAINGEON’S PIOTR ANDERSZEWSKI: VOYAGEUR INTRANQUILLE (2009)

There are three symbolic sites in Monsaingeon’s 2009 film portrait of Piotr Anderszewski: Warsaw, Zakopane, and Budapest. This paper examines how cinematic technique and musical performances combine to create an ‘affective’ geography, in which the pianist moves between significant central-eastern European places. Anderszewski travels in a special train carriage (it includes a grand piano) which, the director said, ‘as a place of meditation and reflection … would facilitate the use of flashbacks’. Memory, identity, and origins are central to the film’s symbolism.

After Freud’s ‘railway philia’, we can interpret the railway as ‘a privileged analogy for unconscious and repressed thoughts … the train metaphor thus functions as a way of imaging the mental apparatus and its lines of conduction.’ For Freud, this psychological function is primarily a reconnection with the lost mother, ‘the mother is the landscape … through, towards and away from which the traveller journeys.’

While Warsaw, the start of the journey, is identified with Anderszewski’s relationship with his Polish father, the first stop is Budapest, where he meets his maternal grandmother, aged keeper of memories in danger of being lost. In the concert hall of the Liszt Academy, we see him playing the fifth and final piece from Schumann’s Gesänge der Frühe, Op. 133. These are songs without words in which the piano, in romantic fashion, strives for poetic eloquence. But it is also music which seeks to gain movement towards ‘home’: ‘Im Anfange ruhiges, im Verlauf bewegtes Tempo’ as it opens in the F# of the previous piece and moves back to the home key of D. The music evokes birth, return, but also the shadow of death, all now associated with Anderszewski’s relationship with Budapest. The choice of Schumann’s Op. 133 also recalls Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida [La Chamber Claire, 1980], which associates this music with the pain felt on the loss of his mother.

The next symbolic stop is the Polish mountain resort of Zakopane. Here we see Anderszewski and his sister play Szymanowski’s Berceuse (1925). As a lullaby we hear a complement to the Schumann heard in Budapest - another symbol of home, birth, and the mother.

Monsaingeon’s film therefore evokes a central-eastern European geography which gives Anderszewski’s performances rich interpretative potential.

stephen.downes@rhul.ac.uk

WILHELM FURTWÄNGLER AND THE ‘GERMAN’ SONATA FORM

This paper examines the concept of sonata form through the writings and recordings of the conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler (1886–1954). Furtwängler claimed that sonata form is a quintessentially German form, which is made unique not by its schema but rather by its dynamic conception, whereby the music is governed by large, goal-oriented processes, and subjects go through various transformations, mirroring a kind of ‘spiritual process’. This relates

MARTIN ELEK (University of Cambridge)

closely to organicism as well as the notion of musical form as process, both of which have their roots in eighteenth-century German philosophy. This understanding of sonata form is also reflected in Furtwängler’s performances, in which goal-orientation and broad intensifications are often given precedence over traditionally emphasised features of the schema.

me452@cam.ac.uk

GERGELY FAZEKAS (Central European Music Research Group, Musicology Department, Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music, Budapest)

“TO PENETRATE INTO THE BRAIN-WINDINGS OF THE TEXT” – TRANSLATION AS A COMPOSITIONAL METHOD IN KURTÁG’S MUSIC

When asked in a recent interview for a documentary about his goal in setting texts to music, Kurtág replied, “I want to penetrate into the brain-windings of the text.” He then analyzed an excerpt from A Midsummer Night’s Dream by Shakespeare in the translation by János Arany, the greatest Hungarian Shakespearean translator of the 19 th century (some say ever), to show how a great translation can penetrate the “brain-windings” of the original text. Kurtág was born in Transylvania to a Jewish-Hungarian family, attended a Romanian grammar school, and grew up in the German-influenced world of the remnants of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. As for most Central Europeans, multilingualism, and thus translation, is a key experience for him. He created a vocal oeuvre that spans more languages than that of almost any other composer: his vocal pieces use Hungarian, German, Russian, English, French, Romanian, and ancient Greek texts. The aim of this paper is to use translation as a metaphor for interpreting Kurtág’s compositional method. After a brief summary of how translation theory can be used as an interpretive tool in music, specific examples of Kurtág’s vocal pieces will serve as illustrations. Settings of texts by the Hungarian poets János Pilinszky, Dezső Tandori, and Attila József are selected, to show that a composer who sets texts written in his native language to music also acts like a true translator.

fazekas.gergely@lisztacademy.hu

VERONIKA KUSZ (Institute for Musicology, Research Centre for the Humanities, Budapest)

DOHNÁNYI’S VIENNESE CARNIVAL: THE CONTEXT OF THE PIANO CYCLE WINTERREIGEN (OP. 13)

Ernst von Dohnányi (1877–1960), the Hungarian composer and pianist, was usually described as a remarkably harmonious, easy-going, and resilient person by his contemporaries. At the same time, however, he was emotionally withdrawn so we know very little about how he adapted to different life situations. An excellent example of this is the short period he spent in Vienna in his twenties (1901– 05) which his first biographer Bálint Vázsonyi depicted as an idyllic period, in which Dohnányi “enjoyed the artistic society of Vienna, the family home in which he was surrounded by two beautiful children and he composed a lot.” Following a more critical interpretation of the sources and the unearthing of their hidden references, this popular interpretation proves to be slightly flawed, and it seems that Dohnányi reacted very sensitively to the seething public mood in Vienna at the turn of the century, and he himself went through a deep personal-creative crisis. In my presentation, I would like to present the author’s experience of Vienna in connection with his piano cycle Winterreigen (Op. 13, 1905– 06), composed for his Viennese friends, and to show how this experience haunted him even when he lived there again as a political refugee for a short time in 1945– 46 — when Vienna appeared for him not as a possible home in Central Europe but rather as the last bastion of the “West” against the advancing “East,” the Soviet army.

kusz.veronika@abtk.hu

IVANA MEDIĆ (Institute of Musicology of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts)

LUDMILA FRAJT AS AN EMBODIMENT OF A CENTRAL EUROPEAN IDENTITY

In this paper I will discuss the life and work of a remarkable Serbian composer of Czech origin, Ludmila Frajt, married Franović (Czech: Ludmila Frajtová, 1919–1999). My paper will address the issues of cultural and social interactions among different ethnic groups in Serbia, the mobility of musicians, and a possible scope and implications of a Central European musical identity.

Born in Belgrade, in a musical family that arrived in Serbia in 1903, Ludmila Frajt (nicknamed “Lida”) was the first woman who graduated in composition at the Belgrade Music Academy (nowadays Faculty of Music, University of Arts in Belgrade). Her father Jan Frajt, born in 1882 in Plzen, was one of the numerous Czech professional musicians who arrived in the Kingdom of Serbia which, at that point, had only just liberated itself from the centuries-long Ottoman rule; upon settling in Belgrade, he took a Serbian name Jovan and established a successful multifaceted activity. He was a violinist, organist, conductor, composer and businessman, owner of the music publishing house Edition Frajt and importer of musical instruments and other goods. After his death in 1938, his son Stevan Frajt, also a violinist, continued to run the family business, whereas Ludmila enrolled to study composition at the Music Academy (which itself was only founded in 1937). Her student days were interrupted by the outbreak of the Second World War, during which she served as a nurse; her husband Mile Franović was killed at the Syrmienfront. She resumed her study after the war ended; however, her composition teacher Miloje Milojević died in 1946, so she graduated in the class of a Croatian composer Josip Štolcer-Slavenski (1896-1955), who had settled in Belgrade in 1924. Ludmila Frajt wrote chamber, vocal-instrumental, electroacoustic and applied music, and was one of the most original Serbian avant-gardists of the second half of the 20th century. In this paper, I will discuss multiple influences that shaped her complex personal and artistic identity.

dr.ivana.medic@gmail.com

GABRIELLA MURVAI-BŐKE (Central European Music Research Group, Musicology Department, Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music, Budapest)

‘FORMALISM, TRADITION, FOLK MUSIC’: THE VOCAL AND DANCE ENSEMBLE OF THE HUNGARIAN PEOPLE’S ARMY IN POLAND IN 1952

After the Second World War, the Soviet Union did not simply squeeze the countries of the Central and Eastern European region into its sphere of interest and under its economic, political and cultural control, but also isolated them from each other in order to secure its dominance. The Kremlin’s control was also reflected in weakening the established diplomatic relations. Politicians of the so-called people’s democracies communicated with one another through Moscow, and the

importance of the embassies was reduced by appointing mostly incompetent persons to diplomatic posts. In this light, the revival of Hungarian-Polish cultural relations at the end of the 1940s, including the exchange of artists between the two countries, deserves special attention. In addition to their diplomatic importance, the guest performances also provided an opportunity to discuss Soviet musical aesthetics. Based on archival press sources, my paper focuses on the two-week guest appearance of the Vocal and Dance Ensemble of the Hungarian People’s Army in Poland. I wish to explore the ways in which leading representatives of the musical life of the two countries interpreted Soviet artistic decisions in 1952, and also their differing strategies of living up to the conceptually ambiguous ideal of socialist realist art.

boke.gabriella@gmail.com

LÓRÁNT PÉTERI (Central European Music Research Group, Musicology Department, Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music, Budapest)

MAHLER’S MUSIC IN INTERWAR BUDAPEST: PERFORMANCES AND DISCOURSES

From 1921 until 1937, Gustav Mahler’s music was performed on a regular basis in the concert halls of the Hungarian capital. His symphonies and orchestral song cycles were conducted by resident Hungarian conductors and guest conductors from Germany and Austria, and his songs were also sung at recitals with piano accompaniment by local and international singers. During that decade and a half, the majority of Mahler’s works were performed in Budapest, and, in 1935, even the unfinished Symphony No. 10 was premiered in the city. In the interwar period, the framework of Hungarian social and political life was a conservative parliamentary system with authoritarian elements. In the first year of Miklós Horthy’s tenure as governor (1920–1944), and from 1938 onwards, anti-Semitism resulted in discriminatory legislation. However, the public sphere under that regime was, at least until the late thirties, multipolar both in cultural and ideological sense, and it had a pluralistic structure. Mahler’s music had conservative as well as left-wing and modernist adherents, while his art was rejected by representatives of folkloristic neo-classicism, by Zoltán Kodály and musicologists belonging to his inner circle. Mahler’s music was performed in Budapest owing to the efforts of Hungarian and German-Austrian conductors,

who formed a heterogeneous group in terms of socio-cultural background and political orientation. Although the anti-Semitic law passed in 1938 did not place any concrete obstacles in the way of Mahler’s music being performed, it was clearly a consequence of the political climate that Mahler’s works almost completely disappeared from the concert halls of Budapest from that year onwards.

In my paper, I would like to position the situation of Mahler’s music in interwar Budapest within the context of the global reception of the composer. Furthermore, I will also attempt to answer the question to what extent Mahler’s personal relationship with Hungarian musical institutions and with the musical elite in Budapest determined the posthumous reception of his music in Hungary. peteri.lorant@zeneakademia.hu

MARSHA SIEFERT (Central European University)

FERENC LISZT AS A CENTRAL EUROPEAN MUSIC DIPLOMAT: A STATE-SOCIALIST INTERPRETATION

In 1970, the film Szerelmi álmok (Dreams of Love), a two-part prestige biopic about Ferenc Liszt, premiered in Budapest. Directed by Márton Keleti and featuring Hungarian lead actor, Imre Sinkovits as Liszt, this film portrays the way in which Liszt in his travels acted on behalf of his adopted country, Hungary. What makes the film interesting, in light of the over 35 films that feature Liszt in a leading or supporting role, is that the film was co-produced with Lenfilm in the USSR, adding a second layer of musical diplomacy to the selection of the cast, the writing of the script, the pianists who performed the music, and the portrayal of diplomatic encounters between Liszt and imperial Russia. After internal review the Soviet version omitted certain scenes, suggesting the limitations of a shared interpretation. Using sources from the Hungarian and Russian archives, the Soviet version as well as the 2011 restored Hungarian version from the National Film Institute of Hungary, this paper will discuss Szerelmi álmok as a portrayal of 19th century music diplomacy realized through state-socialist co-operation and interpretation.

ANNA STOLL KNECHT (Accademia Teatro Dimitri; Bibliothèque La Grange-Fleuret)

GUSTAV MAHLER AND COSIMA WAGNER: SINGING AROUND 1900

This paper reconsiders Gustav Mahler’s relationship with Richard Wagner’s widow Cosima, arguing that their strong artistic collaboration challenges the usual divide between the ‘Bayreuth style’ on the one hand, and Mahlerian productions in Vienna that are considered to be resolutely modernist.

Mahler and Cosima Wagner’s relationship is documented by a large number of letters, mostly from her side; only five of Mahler’s letters have been published so far. The available letters extend from 1896 to 1905, but their correspondence began earlier. In 1894, she asked Mahler to coach a tenor, Willi Birrenkoven, for the role of Parsifal in preparation for the Bayreuth Festival the following summer, and was delighted by the result. Birrenkoven was only the first in a series of singers whom Mahler trained for Bayreuth.

Anna von Mildenburg, who began her Wagnerian career with Mahler in Hamburg in 1895, also worked closely with Cosima in Bayreuth between 1896 and 1914; and judging by the triangular correspondence between Mildenburg, Cosima Wagner and Mahler, Mildenburg functioned as a link between the other two, her singing practice being inspired by Mahler’s readings of Wagner and, at the same time, reflecting the Bayreuth style established by Cosima. Therefore, even if Mahler never conducted in Bayreuth, he left a trace there of his Wagnerian vision through his artistic collaboration with the composer’s widow. While Mildenburg’s interpretation of Isolde in the 1903 Tristan in Vienna marked the climax of her collaboration with Mahler, this ground-braking production also initiated a break between Cosima and Mahler. She did not approve the Secessionist tones of the Tristan production, and, despite her repeated demands, he refused to conduct other works by Siegfried Wagner in Vienna after Der Bärenhäuter in 1899. Mahler’s artistic choices in the 1903 Tristan had clearly diverted from the Bayreuth staging tradition; but his work with a singer who had been partly trained by Cosima questions the assumption that Wagnerian productions in Vienna had nothing to do with the ‘Bayreuth style’, an experimental performing practice that needs to be reassessed and considered in a new light.

FERENC JÁNOS SZABÓ (Institute for Musicology, Research Centre for the Humanities, Budapest; Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music, Budapest)

(INTER)NATIONAL RECORDING HISTORIES OF CENTRAL EUROPE

The early international record companies considered Central Europe to be a more or less unified market, both before and after the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The Gramophone Company created a separate catalogue for the ‘non-German’ language recordings of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and some neighbouring states, and assigned the territory belonging to this catalogue, with frequent changes, to the Berlin, Vienna and Budapest Branches, so that in several cases the company’s Budapest General Agency was responsible for organising recording sessions in Bosnia, Serbia and even Bulgaria. Although with the break-up of the AustroHungarian Monarchy this common market was also fragmented, the links have not disappeared. Most of the gramophone records of the Hungarian Sternberg company contain recordings by a Czechoslovak record company, some Hungarian recordings are also known to have been taken over by Polish record labels, and a close examination of the Edison Bell International Ltd. matrix numbering system reveals that the company’s Yugoslav, Hungarian and Romanian recordings are closely linked. In my paper, I will present some of the links in the record company network of Central Europe before and after 1920, through short case studies based on archival documents, contemporary printed sources and the repertoire. I will argue that it is not possible to understand the events and recording history of the Central European countries in isolation, without knowledge of the recording history of the surrounding countries.

szaboferencjanos@gmail.com

LÁSZLÓ VIKÁRIUS (Budapest Bartók Archives, Institute for Musicology, Research Centre for the Humanities; Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music, Budapest)

EASTERN EUROPE AND CENTRAL EUROPE IN THE CENTRE OF BÉLA BARTÓK’S LIFE AND WORK OR WHAT DID FIVE HUNGARIAN FOLK SONGS WANT TO DO AT THE 1938 BADEN-BADEN FESTIVAL?

The peasant music Béla Bartók first discovered in 1904 and which he collected systematically between 1906 and 1918 belongs to what he generally described as “Eastern Europe.” His career as pianist and composer was naturally oriented towards Western Europe. His contract with one of the most important publishing houses of the period interested in contemporary music, the Universal Edition in Vienna, seems to have preserved a Central-European network during the interwar period—a network originating in the by then dissolved Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. Apart from pointing out the conspicuous contrast between Bartók’s concept of Eastern Europe and his Central European position as an intellectual, the paper will revisit a particular historic event, the new music festival organized in April 1938 in Baden-Baden to examine Bartók’s concept through his art and careful politics during a period of heightened tensions. Since the première of his Second Piano Concerto in Frankfurt in January 1933, Bartók had avoided visiting Nazi Germany. When invited to offer a piece for the 1938 festival he first proposed Five Hungarian Folk Songs for voice and orchestra (1933). Despite his initial consent, however, he tried to withdraw the work and forbid its performance shortly before the start of the festival; his work did remain in the programme notwithstanding his protest, in the end. The reasons behind his strategy on this occasion seem to have been prompted by his dispute with the German copyright office (STAGMA), which categorized his works in which he used folk melodies as mere transcriptions declaring them unoriginal. It appears that Bartók might have consciously offered such a “questionable” work to demonstrate its originality. At the same time, however, it seems that this particular set might have had a special topical message, too. Starting with a deeply-felt composition based on a song considered to belong to the most ancient layers of Hungarian folk music, it ends with a grotesque arrangement of a folk song which Bartók described as of Western, probably German, origin. One might wonder whether it was intentional to offer a narrative that contrasts the values of indigenous EastEuropean folklore with the shallowness of Western, specifically German, influence.

vikarius.laszlo@abtk.hu

IMPRESSUM

Publisher: Dr. Andrea Vigh, President of the Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music

Editor in chief: Lóránt Péteri

Layout: Allison Advertising Kft.

Layout editor: András Váradi

Publication manager: Ágnes Mester

Finalized: 21 June 2023

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