Redefining Hungarian Music From Liszt to Bartok...Rhapsody on Hungarian Th emes: Th e Development of Hungarian Art and Music in Historical Context from the Reform Era to World War

Redefi ning Hungarian Music from Liszt to Bartók

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LYNN M. HOOKER

1

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hooker, Lynn M. Redefi ning Hungarian music from Liszt to Bartók / Lynn M. Hooker. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-19-973959-2 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Music—Hungary—History and criticism. 2. Nationalism in music. 3. Hungary—Civilization. I. Title. ML248.H66 2013 780.9439—dc23 2013004981

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

Publication for this book was supported by the AMS 75 PAYS Endowment of the American Musicological Society, funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

In memory of Jim Hooker (1939–2012)

And to Joanne Hooker

For their unswerving support

and

To David

For everything


CONTENTS

List of Figures ix List of Tables xi List of Musical Examples xiii Acknowledgments xv

Introduction 3

1 . Rhapsody on Hungarian Th emes: Th e Development of Hungarian Art and Music in Historical Context from the Reform Era to World War I 18

2 . Th e Liszt Centennial and Liszt’s Legacy in Hungarian Musical Life 46

3 . From Gypsies to Peasants: Race, Nation, and Modernity 95

4 . Writing Hungarian Music: Genre, Motive, Spirit 154

5 . Cosmopolitan Nationalist Modernism: Promoting and Composing Modern Hungarian Music 230

Epilogue: “Liszt Is Ours!” versus “Liszt Problems” 249

Appendix : Biographical Notes 261 Selected Bibliography 265 Index 289


LIST OF FIGURES

1.1 Mihály Munkácsy (1844–1900), At the Drinking Trough (1869), oil on canvas [Hungarian National Gallery, reproduced by permission] 31

1.2 István Csók (1865–1961), Gathering Hay (1890), oil on canvas [Hungarian National Gallery, reproduced by permission] 31

1.3 Aladár Körösf ő i-Kriesch (1863–1920), Women of Kalotaszeg , tapestry (1908) [Town Museum of Gödöll ő , reproduced by permission] 33

1.4 Sándor Nagy (1869–1950), Lovely Júlia , black-and-white cartoon for stained glass triptych, Cultural Palace, Târgu Mureş/Márosvásárhely (1913) [Sándor Nagy House, Gödöll ő , reproduced by permission] 34

1.5 Anonymous, pastoral illustration on cover of József Dóczy’s (1863–1913) publication Négy eredeti magyar dal [Four original Hungarian songs], n. d. 40

1.6 Anonymous, image of carousing in a country inn on cover of Kornél Ábrányi Sr.’s Legujabb Budapest dalok és népdalok [Newest Budapest songs and folksongs], n. d. 41


LIST OF TABLES

2.1 Comparative concert calendar of Liszt centennial events 51 2.2 Hungarian concerts/events commemorating Liszt centennial 53 3.1 A selected list of articles and books on Hungarian musical life and the

“problem of Hungarian music,” 1844–1914 100 4.1 Nationality of composers for selections performed by Budapest

Philharmonic, 1853–1920 161 4.2 Most frequently performed composers of works performed by the

Budapest Philharmonic, 1853–1920 162 4.3 Sample compositions with “Hungarian” titles performed by the

Budapest Philharmonic Society, 1903–1913 163 4.4 Metric feet in metric and musical notation, according to theorists of

Magyar verstan [Hungarian prosody] 174 4.5 Emil Ponori Th ewrewk’s tabulation of rhythmic patterns found in

three major nineteenth-century Hungarian and one Finnish song collections 197


LIST OF MUSICAL EXAMPLES

4.1(a) “Typically Hungarian rhythms”: choriambus and iamb 177 4.1(b) “Iambic” and “choriambic” rhythms in József Dóczy’s (1863–1913)

song “Virágzik már a gyöngyvirág,” n. d., mm. 7–12 177 4.1(c) “Iambic” and “choriambic” rhythms in Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody

no. 14, mm. 25–28 177 4.2 “Hungarian rhythms” in Mihály Mosonyi’s “Búdal elhalt kis

játszótárs felett” [Lament for a dead playmate], Magyar gyermekvilág [Hungarian children’s world] (1859), mm. 1–16 178

4.3(a) “Hungarian iambs” in Bánk’s aria “Hazám, hazám” from Ferenc Erkel’s Bánk bán 180

4.3(b) Choriambus rhythms in Melinda and Bánk’s duet, Act II, Ferenc Erkel’s Bánk bán 181

4.4 “Hungarian rhythms” in Liszt’s Die Legende von der heiligen Elisabeth , Scene 1: “Th e Arrival at Wartburg,” entry of the Hungarian magnate 182

4.5(a) Hungarian folksong “Nem ettem én ma egyebet” [Today I ate nothing else], source of “Hungarian leitmotif ” in Liszt’s Die Legende von der heiligen Elisabeth [source: Abrányi, Characteristics , 82] 184

4.5(b) “Nem ettem én ma egyebet” in Scene 1, “Arrival at Wartburg,” Liszt’s Elisabeth , accompanying fi rst the Hungarian Magnate and then the chorus 184

4.5(c) “Nem ettem én ma egyebet” in Scene 4, “Countess Sophia,” Liszt’s Elisabeth 186

4.6(a) “Quasi stella matutina,” antiphon for the feast of St. Elizabeth and source of Elisabeth’s leitmotif in Liszt’s Elisabeth [source: Abrányi, Characteristics , 81] 188

4.6(b) Appearance of Elisabeth’s leitmotif at beginning of orchestral introduction to Liszt’s Elisabeth 188

4.7(a) Beginning of Prelude to Ödön Mihalovich’s Toldi szerelme [Toldi’s love] (1888–1894) 190

Musical Examplesxiv

4.7(b-c) From Prelude to Mihalovich’s Toldi : “Hungarian rhythms” with Wagnerian accompaniment 191 (b) mm. 25–32 (c) mm. 53–60

4.7(d) From fi nal chorus to Mihalovich’s Toldi : Hungarian iambs in accompaniment with contrapuntal, German-style choral parts 193

4.8 Th e antispastus in Kornél Ábrányi’s Hungarian Rhapsody no. 7, op. 108 (1896), mm. 91–102 202

4.9 Using Greek metrics to describe rhythms: Diff erent interpretations of the iamb [G. Molnár, Th e Analysis of Hungarian Music , 8] 206

4.10 Samples from Molnár’s tables of Hungarian (or racial) versus non-Hungarian rhythms 208 (a) [from pp. 88–89] (b) [from p. 84] (c) [from p. 80]

4.11 Kodály’s Galántai táncok (1933), mm. 74–85, violin I 219 4.12 Versions of choriambus in Bartók’s Suite no. 2, mvmt. III 221

(a) simple choriambus: woodwinds, m. 84 (b) expanded choriambus: woodwinds, mm. 98–99 (c) rotation/refl ection of expanded choriambus (= expanded

antispastus): woodwinds, mm. 92–93 (d) opening motto: bass clarinet, mm. 1–3

4.13 Bartók’s Fourteen Bagatelles , op. 6 (1908), no. 11, mm. 34–60 222 4.14 Bartók’s String Quartet no. 5 (1934), 3rd movement 224

(a) Scherzo, mm 1–7: nonchalant, with walking bass (b) Scherzo, mm. 36–40: rough, rhythmic, Bulgarian “folksy” (c) Trio, mm. 9–23: “Hungarian rhythms” fl oating over Bulgarian

meter 5.1 Antal Molnár, Sonatine pour violon et piano (1909–1911), mm. 1–17.

(Publ. Rózsavölgyi és Tsa, 1912) 240 5.2 Géza Vilmos Zágon, Mystères pour piano (1911) (Országos Széchenyi

Könyvtár [OSZK] Ms. Mus. 2007) 241 (a) mm. 1–12 (b) mm. 21–27

5.3 Géza Vilmos Zágon, “Fehér lyány virág-kezei” (OSZK Ms. Mus 2009) 242 (a) mm. 1–8 (b) mm. 25–46

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Th e road that led ultimately to this book began in 1984 when I was sitting in the viola section in the orchestra of Governor’s School West in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Th e conductor, Randy Foy, programmed a wide array of twentieth- century works and guided his crew of high school–age musicians through them intellectually as well as performatively; this experience prompted me to think about music more deeply and eventually led me to musicology. Among the works programmed that summer in North Carolina was Béla Bartók’s 1923 Dance Suite . I will always be grateful to Randy for sparking my curiosity about music scholar-ship in general and Bartók and Hungarian music in particular. For Éva Gedeon, who taught me Hungarian and who continues to off er words of support whenever we meet, I owe another great debt.

Research for the dissertation on which this book was based has been supported by a Fulbright Fellowship, with funds provided by the United States Information Agency; by the University of Chicago Division of Humanities and Department of Music; Melvin Grey and the Friedberg family; and from the Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowships (FLAS) Program of the US Department of Educa-tion. Since the completion of my dissertation, I have been fortunate to receive additional support from the University of Richmond, Global Partners, the Inter-national Research and Exchanges Board, and the following offi ces of Indiana University: the College Arts and Humanities Institute, the Russian and East Euro-pean Institute, the Inner Asian and Uralic National Research Center, the Offi ce of International Programs, and the Department of Central Eurasian Studies. None of these people or organizations is responsible for the views expressed, and I am grateful for their support.

I want to thank the Hungarian National Gallery for permission to reproduce depictions of Mihály Munkácsy’s At the Drinking-Trough , István Csók’s Gathering Hay , and Miklós Barabás’ Th e Arrival of the Daughter-in-Law , and Lilla Szabó for her assistance in obtaining copies of these images. Th e Town Museum of Gödöll ő has graciously allowed me to use images of Aladár Körösf ő i-Kriesch’s tapestry Women of Kalotaszeg and Sándor Nagy’s black-and-white cartoon for Lovely Júlia , and art historian Cecilia Nagy of the museum’s staff not only obtained copies of the images for me but also gave me a delightful guided tour of the museum collec-tion. Balázs Mikusi of the Széchenyi National Library assisted me with copies of

xvi Acknowledgments

Mosonyi’s Magyar gyermekvilág and with advice on Hungarian copyright law. Permission to reprint excerpts of the following musical works is gratefully acknowledged to the following: for Bartók’s Suite No. 2, Boosey & Hawkes Music Publishers Ltd.; for his Fourteen Bagatelles, Editio Musica Budapest; for Bartók’s String Quartet No. 5, Boosey & Hawkes, Inc. (in the United States), Universal Edition (in Germany, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia, and Romania), and Peter Bartók (elsewhere); for manuscripts of Géza Vilmos Zágon, the Széchenyi National Library of Hungary; and for Zoltán Kodály’s Galántai táncok , Universal Edition.

No project of this scope would come about without the support of many col-leagues, friends, and mentors. My dissertation advisor, Richard Cohn, off ered support and guidance as I worked to focus my arguments, even as my topic moved further and further away from his own research interests. His painstaking criti-cism helped me shape my writing, and his enthusiasm for my work encouraged me even when I felt buried in source material. Berthold Hoeckner, my second reader, helped me strengthen my rhetoric, and his suggestions were critical as I worked to shape my arguments. My discussions with my third reader, Philip Bohlman, during my doctoral studies as well as aft er my graduation, about our experiences in diff erent parts of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire rounded out the historical perspective of my work. His probing questions encouraged me to take risks as my research moved into the diffi cult territory of race; his exhorta-tion to confront whatever seemed most uncomfortable about a topic helped make me the scholar that I am.

In addition my graduate school mentors, I would like to thank Richard Taruskin, who commented generously on my dissertation shortly aft er its com-pletion and who has continued to off er support; Michael Beckerman, who has encouraged my work since my graduation, hosted me in a visit to New York, and off ered productive commentary on my thoughts about the “Gypsy question”; Malcolm Gillies, who was both a supportive reviewer and my most amusing early guide to the personalities involved in Hungarian musicology; and Judit Frigyesi, now on the faculty of Bar-Ilan University, who mentored me from afar at the in-ception of the project. Elliott Antokoletz, László Vikárius, and Péter Laki invited me to share my research at Bartók conferences in Austin, Budapest, and Annan-dale-on-Hudson, New York, allowing me to get to know Bartók scholars from around the globe. As my work delved deeper into the nineteenth century, Lisz-tians Dana Gooley, Shay Loya, and Klára Hamburger off ered valuable feedback.

My research in Budapest could never have succeeded without the generous help of the scholars, archivists, and librarians that I met there. László Somfai graciously granted me access to the Béla Bartók Archive and off ered advice on sources and my writing; Adrienne Gombócz kindly and effi ciently retrieved whatever I requested, answered my many questions, and off ered tea on many an aft ernoon. László Vikárius, before and aft er he succeeded Professor Somfai as di-rector of the archive, has also off ered whatever help I needed with research mate-rials as well as being a provocative but encouraging interlocutor at conferences in Texas, Budapest, and New York. Tibor Tallián of Hungary’s Institute of Musicology

xviiAcknowledgments

pushed me to expand my view of early twentieth-century Hungarian history and helped me gain access to several small archives in Budapest. Other colleagues at the Institute, in particular, Anna Dalos, Bálint Sárosi, and the late Katalin Kovalc-sik, gave feedback that has, I believe, made this a much better book. Sarolta Kodály allowed me access to the Zoltán Kodály Archives, and the late István Kecskeméti and his assistant, Teréz Kapronyi, were extremely helpful in guiding me through the collection. Katalin Szerz ő and Éva Kelemen of the Széchenyi National Library and Ilona Pásztor Pálossy of the library of the Liszt Academy of Music helped me fi nd and duplicate rare periodicals; Katalin Szerz ő was especially encouraging as I followed source threads through the reading room. Th e staff at the Liszt Ferenc Memorial Museum and Research Centre were also unstinting with their assis-tance. On short research trips to Berlin and Vienna, I received welcome help from Jutta Th eurich of the Deutsche Staatsbibliothek and Johann Ziegler of the Vienna Stadt- und Landesbibliothek. Other friends and colleagues in Budapest, including Mónika Mesterházi, Ágnes Vajda, Patrick O’Connell, István Szilvási, and espe-cially Márta Goldmann, answered my questions, gave me advice and assistance in living in a new place, opened their homes, helped me learn the language, and made my recurring stays in Hungary enjoyable as well as productive.

Márta Goldmann and Mária Szilágyi have helped me to proofread my transla-tions and Hungarian text; Berthold Hoeckner and Ryan Minor have assisted with some of my German translations, and Anna-Lise Santella has helped with my French. Th eir input has substantially improved the fi nal text, and their generosity with their time is much appreciated. Th anks to Zsuzsanna Schmidt, Zsolt Srájber, and Kristen Strandberg for their assistance with research and editing at key points in the process. Donna Wilson prepared the musical examples effi ciently and accu-rately. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own, as are any remaining errors.

Since arriving at Indiana University I have been blessed with colleagues from many disciplines whose encouragement and input have propelled me onward. Ethnomusicologists and folklorists Ruth Stone, Nina Fales, Greg Schrempp, and David Shorter off ered both new perspectives and writing advice; the Department of Musicology, especially Peter Burkholder, Dan Melamed, and Halina Goldberg, has welcomed me as a full member of its community, whether at colloquia, where I have presented draft s of portions of this work, or at social events. Being sur-rounded by the distinguished Hungarianists who have come through my home department of Central Eurasian Studies–faculty members Mihály Szegedy-Maszák, Pál Hatos, László Borhi, Ágnes Fülemile, Csaba Pléh, and Balázs Ablon-czy, and the many distinguished presenters at the annual Ránki Hungarian Chair Symposium the department has hosted–has brought me a much greater famil-iarity with the richness of Hungarian culture and scholarship without which this book would not be what it is.

A supportive community of fellow students at the University of Chicago of-fered invaluable support as I progressed through graduate school and since. I es-pecially want to acknowledge Anna-Lise Santella, Michael Siciliano, and Celia Cain, for writing feedback and empathetic conversations whenever needed. I have

xviii Acknowledgments

also been privileged to get to know fellow Bartókians Danielle Fosler-Lussier and David Schneider over the years. Our conversations challenged and encouraged me at key points in developing the manuscript.

I would not have made it to this point without the continual help of my mother, Joanne Hooker, and my father, Jim Hooker, who died days aft er I submitted my completed manuscript to Oxford. Finally, I would like to acknowledge the toler-ance and encouragement of my children, Jessica and Jack Reingold, and the un-swerving support of my spouse, David Reingold. I could not ask for a better partner, and I cannot thank him enough.



Introduction

Th ere is no Hungarian person, no Hungarian or foreign musician . . . no writer occupied with criticism or aesthetics, that is: with scholarly or artis-tic matters, no professor or cultured person who would not speak about, form an opinion on, or argue over this or that characteristic of Hungarian song or music. But how many have thought about it, are thinking about it, or are qualifi ed to think about it on the basis of scientifi c comparison?

—Kornél Abrányi Sr., Characteristics of Hungarian Song and Music (1877) 1

What makes an artist national? Not that he puts folk characteristics in the center of his works, but rather that his personality is impregnated with nationality in a non-arbitrary way. What makes him national is that he identifi es with the national audience, generated out of a common language, history, and fate.

—Antal Molnár, “Liszt the Hungarian composer” (1936) 2

As the Enlightenment gave way to the Romantic era, nineteenth-century philolo-gists, historians, literary fi gures, and artists in every medium sought the charac-teristics that would best capture the spirit, the existential core, of what individual cultures meant. Under the infl uence of Herder and others, “the ideal of a universal cultural grammar was gradually supplanted by the relativity of a diff erent set of values for every language.” 3 Th ough the author of this quotation was writing on the place of Hungarian language reform among linguistic movements around Europe in the early nineteenth century, the words also describe the discourse on music and the visual arts during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, especially

1. I.e., A magyar dal és zene sajátságai , 3–4.

2. Original title: “Liszt, a magyar zeneszerz ő ,” 43.

3. Szegedy-Maszák, “Th e Age of Emergent Bourgeois Society,” 117.

R E D E F I N I N G H U N G A R I A N M U S I C F R O M L I S Z T T O B A R T Ó K4

in “peripheral” areas. Yet the conceptual parallel between language and artistic discourses comes with problems. In the linguistic realm, terms like “grammar” and “language” apply to these projects quite literally; in music and the visual arts, however—in fact, even in literature—defi ning the “language” becomes an exercise in metaphor construction.

Th is is a book about a crisis in local “cultural grammar,” the grammar of Hungar-ian music, and about the debates that led to the construction of new metaphors—debates that invoked problems of race and ethnicity, high and low culture, that went well beyond the bounds of what they purported to be about. Decades of music scholarship have defi ned the two composers who frame this study, Ferenc (Franz) Liszt (1811–1886) and Béla Bartók (1881–1945), as “Hungarian national composers”; yet the label was defi ned completely diff erently for the two of them. Two very dif-ferent approaches to defi ning national music, both conveyed with certainty, are rep-resented in the opening epigraphs: Kornél Ábrányi Sr. focused on the argument over “scientifi c comparison” of individual characteristics whereas Antal Molnár evoked a diff use sense of identifi cation coming from individual personalities. What might these diff erences reveal about Hungarian musical life and about the way we do music history or cultural history more generally?

Th e scholarship of recent decades in music as in other fi elds has taught us skepticism toward ideas of national essences: the more we try to discern how an artist’s national identity is determined, the more provisional and artifi cial such defi nitions appear. Rather, we fi nd that like other kinds of meaning, the idea of the national

only reveals its depths once it has encountered and come into contact with another, foreign meaning; they engage in a kind of dialogue . . . . Such a dia-logic encounter of two cultures does not result in merging or mixing. Each retains its own unity and open totality, but they are mutually enriched. 4

Th e rise of native-born artists from outside the “panromanogermanic main-stream,” therefore, “came from facing and matching, not retreating” from Western styles, genres, and techniques, as Richard Taruskin and other recent scholars have demonstrated repeatedly, and the artists who did rise were defi ned not by their national purity but by their cosmopolitanism. 5 Th e Hungarian case is no excep-tion. Hungarian writers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries developed their skills not only by writing original works in the Hungarian language but also by

4. Bakhtin, “Response to a Question,” 7.

5. Taruskin, Defi ning Russia Musically , 394–395 and 43. Taruskin traces the derivation of the term “panromanogermanic mainstream” to the manifesti of Russian émigré intellectual Prince Nikolai Sergeyevich Trubetskoy (1890–1938) and his Eurasianist colleagues, who be-lieved that “Russia could renew its spirit only by turning away from Romano-Germanic Eu-rope and facing inward, acknowledging the kinship of all the peoples that occupied ‘Turan,’ the great steppe that extended from the Carpathians to the Pacifi c” (394–395).

Introduction 5

translating foreign works, and their original works also relied heavily on interna-tional models—the novel, tragedy, Volksstück, and epic and lyric poetry, among others. A leading example is Hungary’s great epic poet János Arany (1817–1882), who is known fi rst for his own works but also for his masterful translations of Shakespeare and others. Hungarian visual artists and musicians of this period also drew substantially from international models, and in fact most nineteenth-century Hungarian visual artists, musicians, and composers who were recognized internationally were largely trained abroad. Even leaders of several “national schools”—for Hungary’s visual artists, the Nagybánya, Szolnok, and Gödöll ő art-ists’ colonies, and for its musicians, the Academy of Music (though this last case is decidedly mixed, as will be discussed later)—drew authority from their interna-tional training and exposure. 6 A good example is multimedia artist Aladár Körösf ő i-Kriesch (1863–1920), who studied in France, Italy, and Spain before set-tling in Gödöll ő (near Budapest) and establishing the artists’ colony there. His manifesto for the colony, far from being a “purely Hungarian”—or even predom-inantly Hungarian—document, invoked England’s Pre-Raphaelites, stating that “most art is to be found where art encounters life, in the spirit of Ruskin.” 7 Still, critics and artists at home and abroad have long interpreted the works of such artists with the expectation that they should conform to or create some national ideal or school. Painter Simon Hollósy (1857—1918), leader of the Nagybánya art-ists’ colony, reinforced that expectation for Hungarians when he wrote that “only if nourished by the soil of our native land, only beneath a Hungarian sky and by renewed contact with the Hungarian people, can Hungarian art acquire strength, achieve greatness and become genuinely Hungarian.” 8

As this citation illustrates, national identity and culture were pressing issues in the arts in Hungary as elsewhere in Europe. In fact the idea of the nation per-vaded politics and society in Hungary during this time. But the national discourse was also shaped by ambivalence about Hungary’s place in the world. Hungarians

6. László Mednyánszky (1852–1919), who had studied in Munich and Paris and also lived for years in Vienna, was one of the fi rst major painters who spent time working in Szolnok beginning in the last quarter of the nineteenth century; others associated with Szolnok, in-cluding Adolf Fényes (1867–1945) and Lajos Deák-Ebner (1850–1934), had similarly inter-national careers. Simon Hollósy (1857–1918), the founder of the Nagybánya Colony, trained at Munich’s Academy of Arts and then developed a reputation as a teacher in Munich through the “private school of ‘free art’ he formed there in the second half of the 1880s” (Switzer, Nationalism in Hungarian Art , 131). Munich in fact had a particularly important role in the development of artists from Hungary and elsewhere in Eastern, Central, and Northern Eu-rope. See Jooss und Fuhrmeister (eds.), Nationale Identitäten–Internationale Avantgarden, and Kovács, “Facetten der Akademie der Bildenden Künste München in der ungarischen Kunstgeschichtsschreibung.”

7. Quoted in Gellér and Keserű, A gödöll ő i művésztelep , and in English translation in Éri and Jobbágyi (eds.), A Golden Age , 122.

8. Letter included in translation in Jacobs, Th e Good and Simple Life , 133; cited in Switzer, Nationalism in Hungarian Art , 131–132.


were proud of their nation’s distinctiveness, particularly its Asian heritage, but were also eager to join the mainstream of European civilization. In this era of nationalist aspirations, debates about everything from suff rage to poetry were seen as confl icts not only between new and old, but also between West and East.

Th is was nowhere more true than in debates on Hungary’s national music. By the mid-nineteenth century, Austrian and German musicians and musical institu-tions had long since established themselves as the leaders in Central European musical thought and had begun asserting their role as the arbiters of “universal” musical quality. 9 Meanwhile, Hungarian music, specifi cally what was known as the “Hungarian-Gypsy style,” had taken the world by storm in the nineteenth cen-tury, spreading across Europe both in informal settings like cafés and restaurants and in the concert hall; though its core musical substance was Hungarian in or-igin, Gypsy musicians were its primary performers and thus their playing, com-bined with the tastes of their audiences, defi ned its performance practice. 10 Th e potent image of the “Oriental” Gypsy—passionate, virtuosic, earthy, and defi nitely not serious—contrasted starkly with the more elevated and modern German.

For Hungarian musicians, this situation posed a dilemma. As Hungary sought to develop an art music that could, in Taruskin’s words, “face and match” the Austro-German tradition, the popular Hungarian-Gypsy style off ered both a cre-ative resource and a source of confl ict for serious musicians. On the one hand, it was rich, colorful, and well known enough to be recognized by many listeners not only in Hungary but elsewhere. On the other hand, it was a popular style, not an elevated one, and it was associated not with native Magyars but with “Indian” racial aliens who were universally reviled. Musicians and critics in Hungary spent decades trying to come to terms with the signifi cance of this style and trying to determine how it might be used in the concert hall.

LISZT STUDIES, BARTÓK STUDIES, HUNGARIAN MUSIC STUDIES

National music is of course not just a matter of style but also of personality, and Liszt and Bartók are two of the leading creative personalities in the history of music in Hungary. Liszt studies and Bartók studies have historically been prac-ticed by separate scholarly communities in independent literatures, as one might expect for subfi elds organized around two “great men” born seventy years apart. But while they are separated not only by time but also by profound diff erences in temperament and style, their common role as Hungarian na-tional composers is central to the way they are perceived both in Hungary and abroad. Th e label of “national composer,” though applicable to each in certain ways, has historically featured more prominently in scholarship on artists from a “peripheral” place like Hungary than it has on those from a “central” one. In

9. See for example Applegate, “How German Is It?”; and chapters of Applegate and Potter (eds.), Music and German National Identity .

10. I discuss defi nitions of this style in more detail in Chapter 1 .

Introduction 7

the cases of Liszt and Bartók, its use may carry implications that obscure an important fact: both Liszt and Bartók found themselves at odds with musicians and critics in their homeland because their respective writings questioned, in very diff erent ways, whether the “Hungarian music” of their age was truly Hun-garian. Now that the two composers have become monuments, the reception of those views in their time has oft en been minimized: Liszt’s views on Hungarian music are forgiven as the errors of a larger-than-life creative personality, whereas Bartók’s scholarship on these topics is seen as the necessary correction to these and other errors of the previous generations. Th ese aspects become side issues in more traditionally constructed works organized around these central fi gures.

By contrast I place the focus here on the discourse of Hungarianness itself. Rather than conceiving this book as about either Liszt or Bartók, my goal is a thick description of the world of Hungarian concert music—one in which the two “great men,” Liszt and Bartók, still loom large but are surrounded by a vibrant cast of characters that reveals the complexity of this musical world too long dismissed for being “peripheral” to the mainstream of European musical culture. Neither Liszt’s nor Bartók’s career or compositional infl uences was limited to Hungary, of course; their internationalism is one of the features that have led them to be con-sidered so important. Th us, discussing Liszt’s Hungarian style without delving in any detail into his German style, not to mention the French, Swiss, Italian, or Spanish infl uences on which he drew in the Années de Pelérinage , the Rhapsodie espagnole , and other works, may be seen as misleading. For Bartók, too, it is easy to over-emphasize the role of Hungarianness; unlike his friend Zoltán Kodály, Bartók did not limit his folk music collection to Hungarians but also made exten-sive studies of the music of other ethnicities, especially Slovaks and Romanians, beginning already before 1910, and used elements of non-Hungarian folk sources in his compositions extensively. Th is study is not intended to minimize or erase these important and well-documented biographical facts. 11 Rather, I have chosen to focus on the Hungarianness of both composers in order to view these two com-posers more thoroughly in the context of Hungarian reception and Hungarian discourse.

Although the central question is what makes music Hungarian, my aim is not to arrive at any defi nitive music-analytical answer to this question; instead, by constructing an ethnohistorical picture of high musical culture in Hungary, it is to “encounter the ways in which . . . inhabitants [of this world] constructed their

11. Discussion of Liszt’s relationships to and musical treatment of various nationalities can be found in, for example, Timbrell’s “Liszt and French Music”; Dalmonte’s “Liszt and Italian Folklore”; Mauricio’s “Liszt y España”; Gut’s “Swiss Infl uences on the Compositions of Franz Liszt”; Saffl e’s “Liszt und die Deutschen”; and numerous other chapters of Liszt und die Na-tionalitäten . On Bartók, Vikárius’ “Bartók and Folklore” outlines Bartók’s multiculturalism clearly and emphatically at its outset. Lampert and Vikárius’ Népzene Bartók műveiben (Folk Music in Bartók’s Works) catalogues the specifi c folkloric sources from various ethnicities that Bartók used in his compositions.


self-knowledge.” 12 Th e defi nitions of and debates over Hungarian style act as a way into “the semantic space, the fi eld of signs and practices” in which Hungarian musicians and critics labored to “construct and represent themselves and others, and hence their societies and histories,” 13 focusing especially on the relationships between tradition and modernity, between Hungarian music and the interna-tional concert scene that Liszt dominated in the nineteenth century and to which Bartók aspired in the early twentieth.

This approach builds on the work of several scholars—most prominent among them Richard Taruskin but also including Michael Beckerman, Jane Fulcher, and Carol Hess, all of them prefi gured somewhat by the arguments of Carl Dahlhaus 14 —who have produced important analyses of how issues of na-tional identity and cultural politics, writ large and small, have infl uenced mu-sical thought and musical composition, and vice versa. Some of the conclusions here may be considered additional confi rmation of some of the conclusions of these earlier authors in a new context, using and making available materials from sources in a language that is still rarely used in English-language scholar-ship. Finally, my research pays particular attention to the issues of purity and hybridity that come up repeatedly in discourses of the Hungarian nation and national music, and to the role Romani (Gypsy) musicians played in it—an element that has still only begun to be incorporated into scholarship on Liszt or Bartók. 15

12. Bohlman, “Fieldwork in the Ethnomusicological Past,” 152.

13. John and Jean Comaroff , Ethnography and the Historical Imagination , 27.

14. Dahlhaus’ essay “Nationalism and Music” was originally published in German in 1974; it then appeared in English translation in 1980. On the Spanish case, see Carol Hess’ Manuel de Falla and Modernism in Spain, 1898–1936 . Richard Taruskin wrote on a variety of issues related to Russian music history and historiography beginning with his dissertation in 1975; some of his most trenchant arguments are summed up in Defi ning Russia Musically . Michael Beckerman’s publications on Czech music history and historiography begin with “In Search of Czechness in Music” and continue through the present with works on most major Czech composers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Jane Fulcher has written several books on the intersection between music culture and national ideology in France, from Th e Nation’s Image (1987) to Th e Composer as Intellectual (2005).

15. Julie Brown’s “Bartók, the Gypsies, and Hybridity in Music” and Katie Trumpener’s “Béla Bartók and the Rise of Comparative Ethnomusicology” both address these questions to some degree in the case of Bartók, and Jonathan Bellman’s Th e Style Hongrois in the Music of West-ern Europe begins to treat these issues in nineteenth-century music, but all of these writers necessarily approach the Hungarian sources in a limited way and entirely through transla-tions. Hungarian authors, led by Bálint Sárosi on the history of “Gypsy music” (see Gypsy Music and A cigányzenekar múltja (Th e past of the Gypsy orchestra), among others) and Klára Hamburger on Liszt and “Gypsy music” (among others, see “Liszt cigánykönyvének Magyarországi fogadtatása” [Th e Hungarian reception of Liszt’s “Gypsy book”], parts I and II, here abbreviated RLGB 1 and RLGB 2 ), provide invaluable guides to sources but without some of the critical stance preferred in Anglo-American scholarship.

Introduction 9

For most non-Hungarian readers, the Hungarian context of these two composers is oft en perceived as “the gray background of an underdeveloped country.” 16 One of the premises of this book is that even places that many consider peripheral, whose rhetoric emphasizes their separation from some international mainstream, are oft en defi ned as much by their cosmopolitanism as by their isolation and underdevelopment. Th omas Turino demonstrated amply in his work on late twentieth-century Zimbabwe that nationalism and musical professionalism functioned there as “ cosmopolitan per-spectives ”; 17 in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Hungary, in the near periphery of Vienna, these ideas came to the fore that much earlier, and dominated the worldview of Hungarian artists, musicians, and critics throughout the period of this study.

Th is usage of “cosmopolitanism” is somewhat diff erent from common under-standings of the term. Th e Oxford English Dictionary lists among its defi nitions two that come closer to those common understandings: “Belonging to all parts of the world,” “free from national limitations or attachments.” It was in this sense that the word “cosmopolitan” was so oft en applied to Liszt, given the facts of his career: his lengthy residences in France, Germany, Switzerland, and Italy as well as Hungary, not to mention his more than one thousand performances all over Europe just during 1839–1847 (the period known as his “Glanzzeit”) and the dif-ferent ways he constructed his persona for diff erent audiences. Th ese facts not only suit the defi nition of “cosmopolitan” but also inspire suspicion among critics, especially Hungarian critics past and present, since the nineteenth-century rise of the national idea was in part a rejection of cosmopolitanism. 18

Th e perceived binary opposition between the national and the cosmopolitan, however, can be deceiving. To return to Turino,

Because cosmopolitanism involves practices, material technologies, and conceptual frameworks, however, it has to be realized in specifi c locations and in the lives of actual people. It is thus always localized . . . and will be shaped by and somewhat distinct in each locale. Cosmopolitan cultural for-mations are therefore always simultaneously local and translocal. 19

Th us we fi nd ourselves puzzling out an irony: that the discourse on the nature of national music took place only among the most cosmopolitan of critics, just as the best-known national musics were so oft en written or performed by the most cosmopolitan musicians—in Hungary just as in Zimbabwe, Russia, the Czech Lands, Spain, and elsewhere.

16. As Judit Frigyesi wrote about the perception of Bartók’s Hungarian environment in Béla Bartók and Turn-of-the-Century Budapest , 1.

17. Turino, Nationalists, Cosmopolitans, and Popular Music in Zimbabwe , 6; emphasis added.

18. See Delanty, “Th e Cosmopolitan Imagination,” 26–27, for a lucid summary of the oppo-sition between cosmopolitanism and the national idea. Delanty credits Frederich Meinecke’s 1909 Cosmopolitanism and the National State in particular as capturing that opposition.

19. Turino, Nationalists, Cosmopolitans, and Popular Music , 7.


Th is irony can be obscured by ongoing emphasis on the national, particularly in places considered culturally peripheral. Such emphasis can yield sharp divides along national lines, as in the case of Liszt: Hungarian scholars have stressed Liszt’s Hungarian works and connections, while to non-Hungarian scholars they can be more or less irrelevant. In this regard the contrasting emphases found in the multivolume Liszt biographies of Alan Walker and Dezs ő Legány are instruc-tive. Walker usually describes Liszt’s devotion to country and involvement in Hungarian musical aff airs relatively briefl y; these matters are at the center of Legány’s project, which is clear from his title, Ferenc Liszt and His Country . To compare but one parallel section, Walker describes the eight months Liszt spent in Hungary in 1870 as “exile,” stressing how personally he was aff ected by the Franco-Prussian War and then adding a brief summary of Liszt’s activities in Hungary to close his chapter on the war period. 20 Legány views this same period quite diff erently: as “refuge from this confl ict of emotions” created by the war. Th is period is also the fi rst part of Liszt’s return to permanent, if part-time, resi-dence in Hungary—his “Homecoming,” to quote the title of Legány’s chapter on this period—and a time of intense activity culminating in the opening of Hun-gary’s Academy of Music with Liszt as its president. 21

Beyond these biographies, both of them due for an interpretive update, I fi nd the recent work of two scholars to be a useful starting point in elucidating the Hungarian reception of Liszt. Hungarian scholar Klára Hamburger has contributed important, if brief, articles on the Hungarian reception of Liszt, particularly of his 1859 book Des bohémiens et de leur musique en Hongrie (On the Gypsies and their music in Hungary), but only a limited portion of her work is published in either English or German. Dana Gooley’s 2004 Th e Virtuoso Liszt includes a thoughtful section on Liszt’s 1839–1840 tour in Hungary and on the impact of the Hungarian enthusiasm seen during that tour in the German and French music press; however, Gooley’s consideration of Hungarian sources is limited, and Liszt’s role in Hungarian musical life aft er that tour lies beyond his scope.

Two recent books in English situate Bartók in his home context: Judit Frigyesi’s Béla Bartók and Turn-of-the-Century Budapest (1998) and David Schneider’s

20. Th e reference to “exile” appears in Walker’s Franz Liszt: Th e Final Years ( WFL 3 ), 211; Walker summarizes Liszt’s activities during his sojourn in Hungary at the end of the following chapter, “Th e Franco-Prussian War of 1870,” 225–227. Emile Ollivier, widower of Liszt’s daugh-ter Blandine, was prime minister of France during the war, while Liszt’s only surviving child, Cosima, became a fi ercely patriotic German during and aft er her marriage to Richard Wagner.

For a more thorough critique of some of the issues in Walker’s biography, see Michael Saffl e’s “Lingering Legends: Liszt aft er Walker.”

21. Quotation from Ferenc Liszt and His Country, 1869–1873 , 52. Th e fi rst thirty-two pages of the “Homecoming” chapter, 53–85, are devoted to Liszt’s activities in Hungary in 1870. Th e remainder of the chapter is devoted to the preliminary eff orts to establish the Music Academy and to Liszt’s participation in Hungarian musical events in 1871. Th ough Legány’s scholarly point of view might seem archetypically nationalist, he is also important because of his cosmopolitanism—e.g., his presentation of this research in English-language conferences, articles, and books.

Introduction 11

Bartók, Hungary, and the Renewal of Tradition: Case Studies in the Intersection of Modernity and Nationality (2006). Frigyesi places Bartók’s modernism squarely in the political, philosophical, and literary environment of the Hungarian metro-pole, among such thinkers and writers as György Lukács and Endre Ady. Still, of Bartók’s musical contemporaries Frigyesi discusses only Zoltán Kodály and nameless folk musicians, relationships that are well known, and Emma Gruber, Kodály’s fi rst wife, a relationship that is more critical from a personal point of view than from a specifi cally musical one.

Schneider, on the other hand, places Bartók’s compositions in the context of the sounds of his time, particularly the sounds composed by Hungarian predecessors of Bartók like Ferenc Erkel, Árpád Szendy, and Ern ő Dohnányi—as well as Rus-sian contemporary and rival Igor Stravinsky. As I do, Schneider reveals ways in which Bartók drew on Hungary’s recent musical past and transformed it into something new, in spite of his polemical rejection of that past. Our two projects diff er, however, in approach and emphasis. Schneider’s study centers on music analysis; he chooses Hungarian pieces from before Bartók, placed in historical context, in order to enrich our hearing of Bartók’s works. Th ough I also use music analysis in Chapters 4 and 5 to illustrate certain points, my book is more about the discourses practiced by musicians throughout the late nineteenth and early twen-tieth centuries and how their musical practices refl ect their thought about the is-sues that preoccupied generations of musicians and critics throughout this period.

Another recent book, László Vikárius’ 1999 Modell és inspiráció Bartók zenei gondolkodásában: A hatás jelenségének értelmezéséhez (Model and inspiration in Bartók’s musical thought: Toward an understanding of the phenomenon of infl u-ence) provides insight into the pan-European sources both intellectual and mu-sical that may have infl uenced Bartók, considering especially the issue of how Bartók may have resisted or concealed his infl uences, either real or perceived, as an indication of weakness or lack of “stylistic integrity,” something some—including, Vikárius infers, Bartók himself—might see as “damaging for a composer’s image.” 22 While Vikárius’ study investigates provocative and important issues in Bartók’s aesthetics and biography, it remains at heart a study of one “great man.”

22. Móricz, review of Vikárius, “Th e Anxiety of Infl uence and the Comfort of Style,” 468. Th e quoted passage of Móricz’s review refers to László Vikárius’ defense against Malcolm Gillies’ sug-gestion that Bartók’s borrowing of elements also found in Karol Szymanowski came dangerously close to plagiarism. Whereas Vikárius here appears primarily as Bartók’s defender (something Móricz considers unnecessary [469]), in general Modell és inspiráció explores quite sensitively the topic of how Bartók struggled with and hid some of his infl uences. One example of veiled infl uence is when Bartók, in his commentary on Leó Weiner’s Präludium, Nocturne, és Scherzo , op. 7 (a work he played in a December 1911 concert of the New Hungarian Music Society), fo-cused his praise on the third movement, while saying about the others only that they showed “the infl uence of the new French style”; Vikárius concludes that “In this instance Bartók might have been somewhat bothered by having to face the same characteristics of French impressionism in Weiner’s compositions that were then infi ltrating his own,” namely, Duke Bluebeard’s Castle , which had been Bartók’s greatest compositional project of that year ( Modell és inspiráció [Model and inspiration], 173; translation adapted from Móricz, “Th e Anxiety of Infl uence,” 471).


Th ough I argue for a shift in the way Liszt’s and Bartók’s Hungarian context is viewed, I am far from the fi rst to address the question of Liszt’s direct impact on Bartók. Biographical facts drive the study of this question, since aft er all Bartók the pianist played a good deal of Liszt’s music and studied piano with a former pupil of Liszt. Indeed, as a composer, Bartók claimed Liszt as an infl uence, particularly in the 1920s, when as he put it in his 1921 autobiography, “for the future development of music, I felt the signifi cance of [Liszt’s] works to be greater than that of Wagner or Strauss.” 23 Th is statement represents a shift away from his enthusiasm for Strauss in the fi rst decade of the century, when Strauss had been one of his chief models in works like the symphonic poem Kossuth (1903); indeed, when Bartók recalled this statement in his 1936 “Liszt-próblemák” (Liszt problems), he neglected to include Strauss at all. 24 Based in part on such statements, several authors have searched for ways that Liszt’s music may be seen as a model for Bartók’s music and have asserted that Bartók should be understood as a successor to Liszt. 25 Moreover, László Vikárius has traced the growing importance of Liszt in Bartók’s writings over time, as he “replaced Wagner with Liszt as his predecessor.” 26 Yet even at the time Bartók wrote his 1918 autobiography, Bartók stated that he “did not succeed via Wagner and Liszt in fi nding the new way so ardently desired,” suggesting that direct compositional infl uence by Liszt is less of a factor in an earlier period of Bartók’s output. 27

23. In “Önéletrajz [Autobiography] (1921–1923),” Bartók Béla írásai 1 (henceforth BBÍ 1), 32. Full titles for this and other bibliographic abbreviations are found at the beginning of the bib-liography. In the fi rst German edition, Bartók’s statement is even stronger: “Ich empfand bei ihm [Liszt] viel grösseren Genius als bei Wagner und Strauss” [I sensed in Liszt much greater genius than in Wagner and Strauss] (quoted in BBÍ 1 , 35). Also, in a 1929 interview with M.-D. Calvocoressi, Bartók stated that “Not only have [Liszt’s] masterpieces exercised a great infl uence on me (as they have on countless composers of all schools for the past eighty years or so), but the more I study them the more deeply I realize their loveliness and signifi cance” (Malcolm Gillies and Béla Bartók, “A Conversation with Bartók: 1929,” 557).

24. See Bartók összegyűjtött írásai (BÖÍ), 701. László Vikárius highlights Bartók’s faulty rec-ollection of his earlier statement in his Modell és inspiráció , 49, as one illustration of the way that Bartók dealt with the issue of infl uence throughout his career.

25. For example, Bence Szabolcsi’s 1974 book Th e Twilight of F. Liszt (an English version of the author’s 1956 Liszt Ferenc estéje ) characterizes Liszt’s late music as “characteristically Eastern European” and asserts that it established a path on which Bartók continued. Herman Sabbe’s “Qu’est-ce qui constitue une ‘tradition’? Liszt, Ligeti: Une lignée?”, 227, concludes that Liszt, Bartók, and Ligeti are “three stages . . . in a process of opening of the ‘tradition.’ ” Ben-jamin Suchoff ’s “Th e Genesis of Bartók’s Musical Language,” 118, briefl y discusses “Liszt’s innovative tonal language” that Bartók got to know through his preparation and performance of the Piano Sonata in B minor in 1905 and implies that Liszt’s use of “modal, nondiatonic, and pentatonic pitch collections” infl uenced Bartók.

26. As Móricz paraphrases Vikárius in “Th e Anxiety of Infl uence,” 465.

27. Quoted in Somfai, “Liszt’s Infl uence on Bartók Reconsidered,” 211. Th e 1918 autobiogra-phy, originally written in German for Universal Edition, is included in Hungarian translation in BBÍ 1, 27–30. A more extended treatment of the issues in Somfai’s article is found in his “Bartók és a Liszt-hatás” (Bartók and the impact of Liszt).

Introduction 13

We may surmise that one reason, though by no means the only one, that Bartók sought models in Liszt’s work was their shared identity as Hungarian composers. With this in mind, it is worth noting which of Liszt’s works Bartók considered most interesting. He listed several of these in his autobiography immediately before the previously quoted proclamation of Liszt’s signifi cance to the future development of music:

I began to study Liszt’s works anew—namely his less popular composi-tions, such as for example the “Années de pèlerinage,” the “Harmonies poé-tiques et religieuses,” the Faust Symphony, the Totentanz, etc.—and these studies led through certain superfi cialities which were less sympathetic to me, to the core of the matter: the true signifi cance of this artist was revealed to me. 28

Although Bartók did not name which of Liszt’s more popular compositions he was not studying, among those that loomed the largest in the consciousness of most Hungarian musicians both before and aft er Bartók’s time were the Hungarian Rhapsodies and other Hungarian-style works. Bartók was almost certainly familiar with these because of his background as a Hungarian com-poser who studied with a student of Liszt teaching at an institution where Liszt had served as the founding president. We also know he studied “23 Hungarian rhapsodies,” a few previously unpublished Hungarian-style piano pieces, and three of Liszt’s Hungarian-style orchestral works, Hungaria (1874), Ungarischer Sturmmarsch (1875), and the Ungarischer Marsch zur Krönungsfeier in Ofen-Pest am 8. Juni 1867 (1870), in some detail in his capacity as editor of these works for the Breitkopf & Härtel Liszt complete works edition between 1911 and 1916, just a few years before the publication of the fi rst version of his autobiography. 29 Given Bartók’s stated desire to create Hungarian art music, his omission of Liszt’s Hungarian-style works from his enumeration of that composer’s works that he found most interesting was clearly no accident. Bartók’s dismissal of Liszt’s more popular compositions was likely motivated in part by their popularity in itself, as it was an aspect most modernists found highly suspect. However, Bartók, Kodály, and their circle also rejected the

28. “Önéletrajz (1921–1923),” BBÍ , 32.

29. László Somfai provides a chronology for Bartók’s handling of Hungaria , the Hungarian rhapsodies, and the manuscript piano pieces in “Bartók és a Liszt-hatás,” 342. For the Un-garischer Sturmmarsch and Ungarischer Marsch für Krönungsfeier (or Krönungsmarsch ), see Franz Liszts Musikalische Werke , ser. 1, vol. 12: Kleinere Orchesterwerke (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1916). Although the only source Bartók names for the edition of the Ungarischer Sturmmarsch is the printed score, he states in that commentary that for the Krönungsmarsch he used a copy with Liszt’s remarks and corrections from the Liszt museum in Weimar. Th e three piano works, Csárdás macabre and two unnamed Hungarian-style items, were not pub-lished in Bartók’s lifetime (Somfai, “Bartók és a Liszt-hatás,” 342).


Hungarianness of these works and the style on which they were based, as is well known. Here I focus less on how Liszt may have infl uenced Bartók directly than on how the comments of Bartók, his supporters, and their successors challenge earlier views of musical Hungarianness—an approach that stresses how the broader discursive context can shape a composer’s work along with individual infl uences.

FOCUS AND ORGANIZATION

Exploring the development of a musical discourse of Hungarianness naturally requires that music be understood in the context of Hungarian political and cul-tural history in general. In Chapter 1 , I provide a brief précis of that history during the long nineteenth century. I then compare the history of national style in Hun-gary’s visual arts with the history of national style in music. Th e diff erences between those histories off er us a clue into the reasons that the development of national style in Hungarian art music spawned such intense debate, while parallel developments in the visual arts appear to have been less contentious: namely, while the folkloric sources visual artists drew upon in their works came largely out of the material culture of rural ethnic Hungarians, the primary models used in art music, as stated earlier, were musical material performed primarily by Roma (Gypsy) musicians, even if most of the core melodies used came from ethnic Hungarians. I also introduce “Hungarian-style” or “Hungarian-Gypsy-style” music here, including both a history of its cultural role in Hungarian society and a description of important stylistic elements.

Against the background of this history and description, I launch into a more detailed discussion of the “problem of Hungarian music” along with Liszt’s prob-lematic role in Hungarian musical life in Chapter 2 , using the 1911 celebrations of the centennial of Liszt’s birth as a narrative framework. While German forces identifi ed Liszt as a “universal” (that is, honorary German) composer, organizers of Hungary’s Liszt celebrations claimed Liszt as a Hungarian fi rst and foremost. Th eir claim acts as a metaphor for Hungary’s long struggle to create space for itself in the mainstream of European musical culture. Liszt’s utility as a standard-bearer for Hungary’s entry into that mainstream was complicated by three major issues: Liszt’s ambivalent national identity, since he lived abroad most of his life and lacked competence in the Hungarian language; his role as a virtuoso in an era when virtuosity was increasingly under attack; 30 and his scandalous contribution to Hungarian music scholarship, Des bohémiens et de leur musique en Hongrie , in which he had gravely insulted his countrymen by suggesting that Hungary’s national music, known as “Gypsy music,” was in fact created by its Gypsy

30. James Deaville’s “Th e Making of a Myth: Liszt, the Press, and Virtuosity,” Susan Bernstein’s Virtuosity of the Nineteenth Century , and Dana Gooley’s Th e Virtuoso Liszt document and critique the problem of virtuosity in Liszt’s career.

Introduction 15

performers. 31 While many in the Hungarian musical establishment labored to overlook these issues, Bartók and other members of his circle took them head-on, viewing Liszt’s legacy to “Hungarian style” not as something to celebrate and em-ulate but rather something to transcend or even discard. I close this chapter by assessing the Hungarian modernists’ take on Liszt’s legacy in the prewar period, as viewed through writings by Bartók and by critics and musicians who were close to him.

Chapter 3 , “From Gypsies to Peasants: Race, Nation, and Modernity,” explicates in more detail the “problem of Hungarian music” that lay beneath the reaction to Liszt’s Des bohémiens , the Liszt centennial, and the Hungarian modernists’ dis-content with the music scene around the time of the centennial. I use a body of largely unstudied music journalism and pedagogical publications, supplemented with relevant literature on contemporary concepts of race and nationality from inside and outside Hungary, to illustrate how musicians and critics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries dealt with these questions and to fl esh out the terms of this debate. Liszt, the international star revered in the cultural centers of Europe, could compose a comparatively small number of pieces in “na-tional style” as novelties; Hungarian style did not, and did not need to, carry the weight of his entire oeuvre. For musicians working in Hungary, on the periphery of European art music, the Hungarian style was more problematic. Th e strong association of Hungarian music with “Gypsy music” created two dilemmas for Hungary’s art-music composers: how could a light entertainment style be suffi -cient as “national music,” and how could a genre so strongly associated with im-ages of racial aliens represent the Hungarians as a European people? As the discourse on musical Hungarianness developed in the decades following the pub-lication of Des bohémiens , establishment music critics aligned images of Europe-anness with modernity and those of Asianness with backwardness, primitiveness, or tradition, creating an opposition between “German” and “Gypsy” between which Hungarian composers were to position themselves. Despite an eff ort extending nearly fi ft y years aft er the publication of Des bohémiens and reaching every corner of Hungarian musical life, many Hungarian composers were frus-trated by the creative constraints presented by this aesthetic model, and critics were unhappy that no one since Liszt had achieved anything like his international stature.

31. Liszt actually collaborated with companion Caroline von Sayn-Wittgenstein on this book; I discuss the nature of the collaboration in ch. 2.

“Roma” or “Romani” are the terms this group uses to identify itself offi cially, and words like “Gypsy,” “Zigeuner,” and “cigány” are oft en considered both incorrect and pejorative. Still, Gypsies in Hungary generally refer to themselves as “cigány” (Gypsy) even today. Th ough I try to use “Roma” and “Romani” to refer to actual people, I also (cautiously) use the word “Gypsy” here, in part to avoid anachronism and in part because I am also concerned here not with real Rom musicians but with a largely fi ctional Gypsy image.


Bartók and his circle cut the Gordian knot of the “problem of Hungarian music” by proposing alternative musical images of Hungary: the Transylvanian peasant rather than the Gypsy as Orientalist-cum-nationalist icon; the “perfectly plain, objective simplicity” of the “authentic peasant songs” they had collected rather than the Gypsy instrumentalist’s extravagant virtuosity; Bartók rather than Liszt as national composer. Instead of defi ning musical Hungarianness as somewhere between the uncivilized Gypsy and the hypercivilized German, they redefi ned Hungarian music around the ancient and “frightful” folk music notated and recorded on collecting trips, rejecting the Hungarian-Gypsy style as inauthentic because most of it was composed during the nineteenth century by dilettante Hungarian noblemen rather than real “folk.”

From the writings of Bartók, Molnár, and others discussed in Chapter 3 , we might conclude that Bartók and his circle completely rejected both Hungarian-Gypsy music and the recent past of Hungarian art music. However, once we exam-ine exactly what compositional practices they were rejecting, it is clear that their break with the “Hungarian style” of their predecessors, including Liszt, was not as clean as they claimed. Chapter 4 , “Writing Hungarian Music: Motive, Genre, Spirit,” explores the many “rules” establishment theorists formulated and argued over, par-ticularly those regarding rhythm and genre, in order to ensure an authentically Hungarian style. Th e discourse on rhythm emerged out of nineteenth-century Hungarian language reform and literary debate, and though it was transformed by musicians and music scholars, it also demonstrates the importance of folksong as it was understood in the middle of the nineteenth century to the development of Hungarian national literature. Th e rules of Hungarian rhythm, along with prob-lems associated with them, are illustrated with examples from Liszt and several of his Hungarian contemporaries; I then read certain works of Bartók, in particular passages from the Suite no. 2 for Orchestra, Suite for Piano op. 14, and String Quartet no. 5, and of Kodály, specifi cally the Galántai táncok (Dances of Galánta), through the lens of the compositional guidelines set out by the previous generation of Hungarian composers and musicologists. Although both Bartók and Kodály ridiculed these rules in their writings, an examination of their music suggests that certain of them remained in their consciousness. In some pieces, these late nineteenth-century musical Hungarianisms appear to be a general source of melodic inspiration for both composers; in some instances in Bartók’s mature com-positions, the “rules” themselves seem to be satirized or distorted, a musical version of Bartók’s rejection of the rules in prose.

An ongoing theme throughout this book is the discomfort Hungarian com-posers had with their marginality on the European music stage. In fact, they found themselves fi ghting for a place even on the concert stages of Hungary, a situation that in the fi rst two decades of the twentieth century was increasingly seen as a crisis. Hungary’s modernist musicians once again off ered a diff erent take on this problem. Like other contemporary writings on Hungarian music, the po-lemics Bartók and his colleagues published in this period emphasized the na-tional. Yet their view of the national was not only more modernist than that of their predecessors, as is well known, but also more cosmopolitan, which has less

Introduction 17

oft en been recognized. In Chapter 5 , I discuss how this circle ambitiously publi-cized their activities in the contemporary music scenes of Austria, Germany, and especially France, and how the Hungarian modernists worked to present a variety of international modernist music to the Hungarian public through a range of pro-jects, central among them the establishment of the New Hungarian Music Society ( Új Magyar Zene-Egyesület , abbreviated UMZE) of 1911–1912. Examples from writings and scores illustrate how musicians in Bartók’s circle and sympathetic critics not only made a case for modernist composition as an important expres-sion of Hungarian national identity but also highlighted the parallel between the Hungarian musicians’ use of folk music and the historicist modernism of com-posers in the German and French scenes.

Finally, as an epilogue, I address the commemoration in 1936 of the 125th anni-versary of Liszt’s birth and the fi ft ieth anniversary of his death to consider the changes in the Hungarian music scene in the years since Liszt published Des bohé-miens . Many of the changes in the Hungarian music scene since 1911 resulted from the eff orts of Bartók and his fellow Hungarian modernists. While some of the same questions continued to nag, particularly about the role of Gypsy musicians, Bartók considered that question essentially closed from the scholarly point of view. In his 1936 essay “Liszt Problems,” therefore, he focused particularly on the aesthetic shift from Romanticism to modernism as he perceived it: Liszt’s prefer-ence, along with that of many of his contemporaries, for “frills and decoration” over “perfectly plain, objective simplicity.” 32

Since the early twentieth century, the conventional view of nineteenth-century Hungarian-Gypsy style has been that it was a mistake, neither truly Hungarian nor truly Gypsy, and that the art-music composers of the Romantic era, including Liszt, who drew on this style for inspiration were indulging in a sort of deluded fantasy, if a sometimes creative one. Th e well-worn narrative of how Bartók, along with Kodály, “discovered” the “true” nature of Hungarian music conceals the complex nature of the debate into which he entered; without a deeper under-standing of that discourse, neither the vehemence with which Bartók asserted his claims nor the resistance he encountered makes much sense. Indeed the contro-versy over the defi nition of Hungarian music in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is a microcosm of Hungary’s deeply ambivalent vision of itself: whether it was to be the Eastern edge of Europe or the Western edge of Asia; whether “Hungarianness” would signify nostalgia for a feudal past or would an-nounce the country’s new role in the modern world. Understanding this debate both provides a fuller sense of Liszt’s relationship with the Hungarian musical world and also exposes the richness of the revolution Bartók brought about in national as well as modern music.

32. Bartók, “Liszt Problems,” in Béla Bartók Essays [henceforth BBE ], 506–507.

1

Rhapsody on Hungarian Themes

The Development of Hungarian Art and Music in Historical Context from the Reform Era to World War I

Néz nyugatra, borus szemmel néz vissza keletre A magyar, elszakadott testvértelen ága nemének . . .

Th e Hungarian, brotherless branch broken off of the tribe, Looks to the west, with gloomy eyes looks back to the east . . .

—Mihály Vörösmarty, Zrínyi (1828) 1

What is it that makes something, or someone, Hungarian? Th is question preoccu-pied Hungarian scholars, journalists, and politicians for centuries. One of the most famous examples, the 1939 volume Mi a magyar? (What is Hungarian?) edited by historian and political journalist Gyula Szekfű, gathered a number of authors “to get to know the essence of Hungarianness with objective methods and tools,” and viewed this essence as having an important role in a wide range of subjects, including “high and low culture, body and mind and soul, animal hus-bandry and organized society.” 2 Zoltán Kodály’s essay “Magyarság a zenében” (Hungarianness in music) in the same volume located the heart of this question in music as in the rest of Hungarian culture at the borderlands between Hungary’s folk tradition, which he linked to the Magyars’ nearest linguistic relatives in the Ural Mountains, and Western high culture, in this case European polyphony—what he

1. Vörösmarty, “Vörösmarty Mihály összes költeményei” [Complete poems of Mi-hály Vörösmarty], Magyar Elektronikus Könyvtár http://vmek.oszk.hu/01100/01122/html/vers0107.htm # 140 (accessed July 13, 2011). Translation by the author.

2. Szekfű, Mi a magyar , 12.

http://vmek.oszk.hu/01100/01122/html/vers0107.htm#140


Rhapsody on Hungarian Th emes 19

saw as an example of “the eternal battle between tradition and Western culture,” the creation of a “bridge” between the cultures of Asia and Europe. 3

We see this dialectic playing itself out repeatedly in the search for national character in Hungarian literature, art, music, and other fi elds. Oft en musical mag-yarság or “Hungarianness” has been treated as a descriptor; a handful of recent musicologists, Hungarian and non-Hungarian, have sought to defi ne it through the identifi cation of certain musical features, not only in the works of Liszt and Bartók but also in works of their contemporaries and predecessors, particularly the many Western European composers who availed themselves of Hungarian elements throughout the long nineteenth century. 4 But even a brief look at writings like Kodály’s reveals that stylistic problems are only one aspect of this issue. Knowledge about music “does not reside [only] at the surface of musical style”; it is also formed and reformed, asserted and contested, in the spaces in and around musical performance, physical and linguistic as well as aural. 5

In this study I seek not to answer the question of what makes music Hungarian through musical analysis but rather to situate the discourse of musical Hungarian-ness within its historical and cultural context. I begin this chapter with a brief sketch of the history of Hungary in the long nineteenth century, beginning not with the French Revolution as is customary but a few years earlier, with the Josephine period, glossing major political events and issues and their cultural impact in the Hungarian lands through World War I. I then discuss the idea of the national style as it developed in the visual arts in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and use this as a point of comparison for the problems specifi c to the development of national art music in the same period. Part of my discussion of the problem of Hungarian national music includes some defi nitions pertinent to the idea of “Hungarian style” as I will use them in this book.

A COUNTRY IN TRANSFORMATION

Th e epochal changes in Hungary’s arts communities during this period coincided with multiple political and social upheavals in the country as a whole. In 1784–1787, the dates of the fi rst reliable Hungarian census, the country had no political status of its own; the lands historically held by the Hungarian crown were ruled by

3. In Mi a magyar? , 416–417: “We have arrived at the eternal problem: the synthesis of Hungarianness and Europeanness . . . the eternal battle between tradition and European culture . . . . Th e Nogay-Tatar, the Votyak [Udmurt], Cheremis [Mari] [three Uralic-Altaic peoples] hold one of our hands, Bach and Palestrina hold the other . . . . Can we be not only a ferry between Europe and Asia, drift ing back and forth, but rather a bridge, and perhaps the land linking the two together?” Also included in Kodály, Visszatekintés (henceforth ZKV ) 2, 235–260.

4. See Bellman’s Style Hongrois ; Peth ő ’s “ Style Hongrois ”; and Schneider’s Bartók, Hungary, and the Renewal of Tradition .



the Austria of Joseph II, who sought to centralize and rationalize the administra-tion of his vast multiethnic empire in a variety of controversial ways. Th e census he ordered generated data on population and ethnicity that serves as a useful starting point for this discussion. More broadly, the census represents both Joseph’s centralizing and rationalizing approach and the controversy it generated, as the census was conducted in part to justify changes that would undercut the traditional feudal order. In Hungarian history, Joseph’s challenges to that order were read through a national lens, as he refused to accept the Hungarian crown (earning him the nickname “the hatted king”) since such acceptance implied def-erence to the Hungarian nobility’s claimed privileges, and he attempted to replace Latin, the historic language of imperial administration, with German. Th e Hun-garian elite argued strenuously in subsequent years for the institution of Hungar-ian instead, notwithstanding that Hungarian was not really used in advanced discourse at the time, and in fact many of the Hungarian nobility did not speak it well, if at all. At the turn of the century Hungary’s high culture lacked many for-mal institutions outside of aristocratic courts, and both those courts and what civic cultural institutions existed were dominated by foreigners.

In 1910, the date of the last Hungarian census carried out before the outbreak of the First World War, many things had changed: Hungary was in charge of its own internal aff airs under the so-called Dualist system that had transformed the Aus-trian Empire into the Austro-Hungarian Empire-Monarchy following the Compro-mise of 1867; the Hungarian language enjoyed almost exclusive use in literature and scholarship as well as popular culture both urban and rural; and the arts were in the midst of a golden age that touched almost every medium, from painting to architec-ture to music. But one important aspect that had not changed much was the propor-tion of the population that was considered Hungarian: according to the 1784–1787 census, 4.5 million out of a total population of 9.5 million inhabitants, or 47.4 percent, were ethnic Hungarians, or Magyars, whereas in 1910, aft er over a century of tremendous growth, it was 10 million out of 18.3 million, or 54.4 percent. 6 Th e context represented by this very brief sketch provides the frame for understanding the development of Hungary’s music institutions and its musical discourses.

Aft er the death of Joseph II in 1790, many of the reforms that he had introduced were rolled back under the “unenlightened absolutist” rule of Leopold II. Latin remained the primary language of instruction in education until the 1840s (although the Hungarian language became a required subject in secondary schools in 1806), and in 1819 the circulation of German-language periodicals in Pest-Buda (the conglomeration that increasingly acted as the hub of the country’s commerce and culture) was double that of Hungarian ones. 7 Since Magyars were

6. According to Molnár, A Concise History of Hungary , 149 and 216. Th e latter fi gures ex-cluded the population of semiautonomous Croatia.

7. Nemes, Th e Once and Future Budapest , 46–47, 84–85. Until their formal unifi cation in 1873, Pest, Buda (Ofen in German), and Óbuda (Alt-Ofen) were three separate entities with disparate governance and populations. Although they increasingly functioned as one


only one of many ethnic groups in the historical Hungarian crown lands ruled by the Habsburg Empire, many Hungarian elites feared that their unusual language, unrelated to that of any of its neighbors, might be extinguished from the linguistic map as Hungary had been from the political map. Th is fear was heightened by Johann Gottfried Herder’s casual prediction, following his recounting of the mi-gration of the Magyar tribes into Europe, that the Hungarian language would disappear into the sea of “Slavs, Germans, Vlachs, and others” that surrounded it. 8 Since, also according to Herder, it is “only through language [that] a people can exist,” 9 Herder’s prediction put a dire face on the future of the Hungarian people that came to be known as “national death” ( nemzethalál ). At a time when Hungar-ian was neither the language of administration nor the native language of many educated Hungarians, the urgency generated by ideas like Herder’s about the cen-trality of language to the formation of the nation called Hungarian intellectuals into action. 10

The subsequent reform of the language, known as nyelvújítás , that took place largely in the fi rst three decades of the nineteenth century began with the standardization of orthography and grammar and the expansion of vocabulary,

economic and cultural unit, the governing bodies of the three settlements oft en had diff ering agendas, and the lack of a permanent bridge until the 1849 opening of the Chain Bridge impeded further informal unifi cation. By convention, historians refer to this urban area pre-unifi cation (that is, pre-1873) as either Pest-Buda or Buda-Pest (Pest-Ofen or Ofen-Pest in German sources).

8. In Herder’s Ideen , 688: “part of [the Hungarians or Magyars] went in seven tribes to Europe . . . fi nally partly due to the plague, partly due to the most fearful discomfi tures of their armies in Saxony, Schwabia, and Westphalia, the German empire secured itself be-fore them, and the Hungarians even ended up becoming an apostolic kingdom themselves. Since then they are now the lesser part of the inhabitants of their country, under the Slavs, Germans, Vlachs, and others, and aft er [a few] centuries perhaps one will scarcely be able to fi nd their language.”

Alice Freifeld’s Nationalism and the Crowd , 25, mentions Herder’s prediction of “national death” as only part of a “litany [of] examples of foreign hostility, indiff erence, or callousness” dating “back to the Counter-Reformation when the Jesuits are said to have convinced Leopold I that it was necessary to render Hungary miserable, then Catholic, then German.”

9. Cited in Bauman and Briggs, Voices of Modernity , 169.

10. Except for the period in the 1780s when Joseph II replaced it with German, Latin was the language of administration until 1840, when Vienna consented to a law passed by the Na-tional Diet that required the use of Hungarian in the internal administration of the kingdom. Th is was one of a series of laws that marked the shift toward Hungarian: “Act 1830:8 required all public offi cials to know Hungarian and allowed counties to use it in their correspondence with the Hungarian Chancellery in Vienna; Act 1836:3 . . . widened the use of Hungarian in legislation and courts; . . . Act 1844:2, the crowning achievement of the 1843-1844 Diet . . . made Hungarian the primary language of administration, education, and the judiciary in the Hungarian lands” (Nemes, Th e Once and Future Budapest , 84).

Many Hungarian elites of this generation—notable among them Count István Széchenyi (1790–1860), known by the epithet “the Greatest Hungarian” for his many works promoting the modernization of Hungary—learned Hungarian as adults.


including the replacement of many foreign words with newly formed Hungarian ones in order that the language could support elevated literary, scholarly, and legal discourses that had previously taken place largely in Latin. It continued with the promotion of Hungarian in every aspect of public discourse. 11 Th is linguistic pro-ject was probably the most signifi cant precursor of the grand program of reforms and the expansion of Hungary’s civil society in the period known as the Reform Era, roughly 1825 to 1848, in which time many of the Hungarian elite dedicated themselves to modernizing Hungary’s “backward” society. 12

Th e modernization of the language and the literary boom that followed it were a rallying point at the outset of this period. In a country where, as in Poland, the nobility represented an unusually high percentage of the population, the leader-ship of the national movement was dominated by nobles, divided though they were by region, religion, and wide variations in wealth. 13 Th ese diff erences in background led to disagreements on the proper course reforms should take, par-ticularly in diffi cult political and economic matters like the broadening of suf-frage, the abolition of serfdom, the proposed end to the nobility’s tax exemption and a concomitant reduction of the tax burden on the peasantry; by contrast, promotion of the Hungarian language and culture was “one of the few issues on which conservatives and liberals agreed.” 14 Th e national movement in this period also swept up numerous non-noble writers, journalists, musicians, and artists, several of whom changed their names to illustrate their allegiance to the national cause. Th us poet Alexander Petrovics became Sándor Pet ő fi (1823–1849), painter Michael Lieb became Mihály Munkácsy (1844–1900), and composers Mark Rosenthal and Michael Brand became Márk Rózsavölgyi (1789–1848) and Mihály Mosonyi (1815–1870), respectively.

Th e Viennese administrators did not actively encourage these developments. When Archduke Joseph, the leading Habsburg in Hungary, rebuff ed an 1810 peti-tion requesting support for Hungarian-language theater in Pest, the reason given was lack of suffi cient audience for Hungarian productions; while those seeking to develop Hungarian theater as a venue for Hungarian public culture were indeed

11. For a brief history of Hungarian language reform ( nyelvújítás ), see Czigány’s Th e Oxford History of Hungarian Literature , 101–119.

12. Andrew Janos’ Th e Politics of Backwardness in Hungary demonstrates how the elite in early nineteenth-century Hungary increasingly saw Hungary as “behind,” so that “catching up” to the West became a key trope in Hungarian political and cultural life. Larry Wolff ’s Th e Invention of Eastern Europe traced the development of Western Europe’s Orientalizing of its Eastern counterpart in the late eighteenth century; in his earlier book, János argued that as “a handful of nations of the Occident emerged as the core of the rising modern world system,” the “‘backward’ societies of the periphery” would accept and internalize that they were in fact not only diff erent but in fact inferior, arriving at “a fi rm conviction that the only way to improve their condition was by following the examples set by their betters” (45–46).

13. See Nemes, Th e Once and Future Budapest , 22.

14. Nemes, Th e Once and Future Budapest , 85–86.


stymied by poor attendance at productions in those years, it also was convenient for the Habsburg authorities, as the development of enthusiastic national cultures was likely to run counter to their interests. 15 When in 1825 Count István Széchenyi (1791–1860) advocated substituting Hungarian for Latin as the offi cial language of the country, this along with other eff orts drew the ire of the archconservative Austrian chancellor Metternich and focused the attention of his secret police on the nascent national opposition that formed around Széchenyi. 16

Still, compared to petitions for social equality, tax relief, and freedoms of speech and press, “the language question ultimately appears to have been of secondary importance,” and for the offi cials of this quintessentially multicultural empire, “lin-guistic concessions were a relatively painless way of securing recruits and taxes.” 17 In this climate many new Hungarian cultural institutions thrived in the early nine-teenth century, from the scholarly—for example, the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (founded 1825) and the Kisfaludy Society (a literary group, founded 1836)—to the social, such as the National Casino (founded 1827) and horse races on the English model (fi rst held in Pest in 1827), both created at the instigation of reformer István Széchenyi as venues for developing “the intercourse of minds.” 18 Th e use of Latin in the public sphere vanished quickly, and growth of Hungarian-language civic life in this period increasingly eclipsed that in German.

Nationalism was front and center as popular discontent burst out into open rebellion in Pest on March 15, 1848. Hungary’s Revolution, part of the wave of uprisings across Europe that spring, combined the radical principles of the French Revolution with national feeling. Poet and revolutionary leader Sándor Pet ő fi once wrote, “Th e history of the French Revolution is my daily bread”; other connections to France included the motto of the Hungarian Revolution, “Szabad-ság, egyenl ő ség, testvériség” (Liberty, equality, fraternity), as well as the perfor-mance of the Marseillaise at some of Hungary’s revolutionary events. 19 Meanwhile,

15. Bisztray, “Hungary, 1810–1838,” 278–280, quotes an 1810 petition submitted to Archduke Joseph that argued for “the establishment and maintenance of the institution of a Hungarian theatre as the most eff ective tool for the civilizing of morality, national character, language, sciences and arts.” Th e archduke replied that “the population of the two cities [Pest and Buda] did not frequent Hungarian-language performances in such numbers as to . . . ensur[e] a proper basis for [the Hungarian company’s] continued existence.”

16. See Barany, Stephen Széchenyi , 123. Historians oft en mark Széchenyi’s speech at the Upper (Magnates’) Table of the Diet in 1825, the fi rst in that chamber in the Hungarian language, as the beginning of Hungary’s Reform Era.

17. Nemes, Th e Once and Future Budapest , 85–86.

18. Quotation from Kontler, A History of Hungary , 232. For dates, see Kontler, A History of Hungary , 231, 232, 243; MTA, “Az MTA története”; Nemes, Th e Once and Future Budapest , 53–54; and Pinfold, “Foreign Devil Riders.”

19. Pet ő fi quotation and revolutionary motto cited in Freifeld, Nationalism and the Crowd , 46, 325; Nemes, Th e Once and Future Budapest , 142, documents the performance of the French anthem.


illustrating the national aspects of these events, public buildings were decked with the colors of the Hungarian fl ag, more individuals changed their German or Slavic names to Hungarian-sounding ones, and women were urged to “speak the Hungarian language, purchase domestic goods, wear national costumes, and dance national dances.” 20

Th e heady year and a half of Hungary’s War of Independence, from the Pest uprising on March 15, 1848, to the Austrians’ execution of Hungary’s revolu-tionary prime minister, Count Lajos Batthyány, and thirteen Hungarian gen-erals on October 6, 1849, was followed by a wide-ranging “crackdown on public life.” During this crackdown, the government scrutinized every voluntary as-sociation in the country and closely monitored education, publishing, and public performances, purging “unreliable” personalities and opinions. Some charged that Austria’s authoritarian offi cials were attempting to suppress public culture in Hungarian, with a concomitant promotion of German cultural out-lets, going so far as to manipulate the report in the 1850–1851 census of the ethnic makeup of the country in favor of German speakers. 21 Hungarians’ po-litical role in this period was further diminished by the fact that many of the Hungarian elite who were not targeted directly by the Austrian government “withdrew to [their] estates and resisted ‘passively’ by refusing to speak Ger-man, by growing illegal tobacco, and by accumulating substantial arrears in taxes.” 22

Despite the dominance of German in the political arena and the heavy hand of censorship, however, in many ways Hungarian culture fl ourished in this period: by the end of the 1850s in Pest, for example, there were almost three times as many periodicals being published in Hungarian as there were in German. Mean-while, by the early 1860s, Pest’s Hungarian National Th eater, with a repertoire of Shakespeare and French dramas in Hungarian translation leavened with works by local authors, “had surpassed [Pest-Buda’s] German theaters in every respect—fi nancially, artistically, and professionally,” even though the German-language theaters had received two-and-a-half times the subsidy that Hungarian ones did from the city of Pest. 23 Th ese facts are representative of an overall trend: despite pressure from Vienna, Hungary’s cities, including those formerly dominated by German culture, were shift ing more and more toward Hungarian, both because of demographic shift s and because cultural events—from Hungarian-language theatrical performances to carnival-season balls to funerals and memorials for

20. Nemes, Th e Once and Future Budapest , 138–139, 141.

21. Th e census reported that Hungarians made up 41.4 percent out of a total population of 11.6 million inhabitants of the Hungarian crown lands, excluding Croatia and Fiume (Mol-nár, A Concise History of Hungary , 179). See Nemes, Th e Once and Future Budapest , 152–156, for discussion of the controversy over these numbers.

22. Janos, Th e Politics of Backwardness , 90.

23. See Nemes, Th e Once and Future Budapest , 156–157.


writers and politicians—were among the few outlets for the spirit of opposition to Austrian absolutism. 24

In the aft ermath of Austria’s military defeats at the hands of the Italians in 1859 and the Germans in 1866, Hungary’s elite, led by “sage of the nation” Ferenc Deák (1803–1876) and Count Gyula Andrássy (1823–1890), hammered out what came to be known as the Compromise of 1867, a constitutional settlement with the Empire that secured autonomy for Hungary in its internal aff airs and also fi xed in law liberal principles regarding churches, education, the emancipation of Jews, and protection of individual rights for national minorities, who constituted about half of Hungary’s population through World War I. 25 Th e Compromise that turned the Austrian Empire into the Austro-Hungarian Empire (or Dual Monarchy) was consecrated with great pomp on June 8, 1867, with the coronation of Franz Joseph as King of Hungary and his wife Elisabeth as Queen, fi rst with the actual crowning and solemn oaths before an exclusive congregation of magnates and clerics in the Mátyás Church in Buda, then with the king’s recitation of the constitutional oath before exultant crowds across the river in Pest. 26 Franz Joseph appointed Andrássy, whom he had ordered hanged in effi gy in 1851 for his activities during the revolu-tion, as the fi rst prime minister of Hungary under the Compromise, and it was Andrássy who actually placed Hungary’s historic Crown of St. Stephen (the one Joseph II had refused) on Franz Joseph’s head during the coronation ceremony. 27

24. Freifeld, Nationalism and the Crowd , 119–160, writes of the important ways that Hungarian- language theater, carnival, funerals of fi gures like playwright Mihály Vörösmarty and the “Greatest Hungarian” István Széchenyi, and the centennial celebration for poet and language reformer Ferenc Kazinczy provided venues for demonstration of nationalist feeling in the 1850s. Nemes points out that even a “reliable political conservative”-cum-Austrian col-laborator like (Hungarian) Count Emil Desewff y—who in 1848 had “submitted lists to Vienna of revolutionaries he thought should be punished or pardoned” and in the 1850s was installed by the Austrian authorities as president of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences—“could also speak approvingly of the ‘Magyarization of higher culture’ and the ‘intellectual battles that aim to sustain our nationality.’ Th us, Desewff y approved the academy’s plans to celebrate the [1859] centennial of the birth of Ferenc Kazinczy,” an event that then “turned into a noisy demonstration of Hungarian national pride” ( Th e Once and Future Budapest , 159).

25. Th e 1900 census reported that Hungary (not including autonomous Croatia) had 18.3 million inhabitants, with Magyars comprising 51.4 percent (Molnár, A Concise History of Hungary , 216).

Th e emancipation of Jews at the time of the Compromise was in fact incomplete until the passage of the 1894–1895 Civil Marriage Law, which transferred the role of registering births, deaths, and especially marriages from religious institutions to the state, offi cially instituted freedom of religious choice or of having no religious affi liation, and accepted Judaism on equal legal footing with historically “received”—or fully accepted—religions (Roman Ca-tholicism, Greek Catholicism (the Uniates), Lutheranism and Calvinism) and other formerly “tolerated” ones (Orthodoxy, Unitarianism) (Kontler, A History of Hungary , 291).

26. Freifeld, Nationalism and the Crowd , 218–219.

27. See Romsics, Hungary in the Twentieth Century , 9, and Freifeld, Nationalism and the Crowd , 218–219.


Following the Compromise both the social and economic elite of Hungary became fully engaged, and the country’s economy developed rapidly in the years following. Th ough some provincial cities acted as important cultural centers, es-pecially Kolózsvár (now Cluj, Romania), the unoffi cial capital of Transylvania, and Pozsony (now Bratislava, Slovakia), the former Hungarian coronation site for the Habsburgs and home of Hungary’s Diet until 1848, Hungary’s economic and cultural growth was driven primarily by the phenomenal growth of its cap-ital, Budapest, newly formed in 1873 by the unifi cation of the formerly separate municipalities of Pest, Buda, and Óbuda. Although Hungary as a whole lost about 1.2 million inhabitants to emigration (mostly to the United States) from 1869 to 1910, Budapest’s population more than tripled between the Compromise and the outbreak of the First World War, mainly due to the migration of people from the countryside seeking opportunity in the growing industries of the new capital. Budapest rose from being the sixteenth largest city on the continent in 1870 to being eighth in 1910, growing faster than any other European metropolis except Berlin. 28 Th is expansion of population and industry drove tremendous economic growth. Although most Hungarians still depended on agriculture for their income, technological advances also marked food processing as a modern, Westward-leading sector. Th e country was a world power in fl our milling, and the engineers and workers who had made that possible—a preponderance of them based in or around the capital—also manufactured the world’s fi rst electric-powered locomotive, internal combustion engines, and advanced weapons and ammunition for the monarchy. 29

Th ough the capital’s rapid growth created challenges in housing as construc-tion struggled to keep up with demand, the center of the city looked better than ever, thanks to an 1870s redesign around the Nagykörút (Grand Ring-Road) and the Sugárút (Radial Boulevard) (renamed aft er Prime Minister Andrássy by the 1890s), sometimes called the “Champs Elysées of Budapest.” Th e latter especially created (as it was intended to do) an “imposing,” “broad, spacious promenade expressive of Budapest’s status as a great city.” 30 Th ese new thoroughfares also reorganized transportation and commerce, as Budapest developed an electric tram around the Nagykörút and the fi rst underground rail system in continental Europe going under Andrássy Avenue. Th e new underground line began near the fashionable shopping district of Váci Street near the Danube, and its stops in-cluded the opera house, opened in 1884; the new building for the Royal Academy of Music at Vörösmarty Street, opened in 1879, four years aft er the institution was established; the splendid Heroes’ Square monument celebrating the 1896 millen-nium of the Magyar tribes’ arrival in the Carpathian Basin; and the Városliget (City Park), home of a spa, a zoo, and Gundel’s Restaurant, where elegant visitors

28. Gyáni, “Budapest,” 157.

29. Romsics, Hungary in the Twentieth Century , 20–27.

30. Hanák, Th e Garden and the Workshop , 12.


would come to experience that chef ’s famous blending of West and East as embodied in French and Hungarian cuisine. Th e grand public buildings that opened along the Nagykörút in the years following the Compromise included the Népszínház (Folk Th eater, opened 1875), the Eiff el-designed Nyugati Pályaudvár (Western Train Station, opened 1877), and the Vígszínház (Comic Th eater, opened 1896); near the bank of the Danube arose the gothic Parliament complex (built 1885–1904) and the Hall of Justice opposite it (built 1893–1896). All of these pro-jects exuded a sense of success and modernity suited to a country with modern European governmental and cultural institutions. 31 Th e rapid growth of popula-tion, industry, and social and cultural institutions together marked the fi n de siècle as Hungary’s Golden Age.

Hungary’s thorniest problem aft er the Compromise was its immense ethnic and linguistic diversity. Th e strategies used to ease ethnic tensions were rarely well received by minority groups. Together, the Compromise and Hungary’s National-ities Law of 1868 provided non-Magyar ethnic groups (the largest of which were, in alphabetical order, Croats, Germans, Romanians, Ruthenians, Serbs, and Slo-vaks) with civil rights guarantees before the law and in education, and combined with the provisions of the 1894–1895 Civil Marriage Law, they proclaimed the full civil and political equality of Jews. 32 Th ese laws followed the liberal principles of the ruling party and earned approval from watchful Western interests. However, with the exception of the Jews, each of these groups also had its own national as-pirations, for which neither the Compromise nor the Nationalities Law provided. 33

31. For brief histories of these historic buildings, see relevant entries in Endréné Tóth (ed.), Budapest enciklópedia . Th e company that occupied the Folk Th eater building was known primarily for productions of lighter genres of musical theater, népszínművek (folk plays with music) and operettas, but that company folded in 1907 due to fi nancial diffi culties; from that time until 1964, the building housed the National Th eater, aft er which it was torn down to allow for the construction of a new metro line. Th e building across from Parliament on Kossuth Square that was initially designed as the Hall of Justice has since 1973 served as the home for Hungary’s Museum of Ethnography (Museum of Ethnography, “Th e Institution”).

32. See n. 25.

33. Ethnic minorities were referred to as “nationalities” (in contrast to the Magyar “nation”). Many writers of the day commented on the strangeness of this locution. Nationality was counted by native language and not blood, so Jews’ prominent presence in the society is not refl ected in the census at all, but is instead absorbed into other groups—mostly the German and majority Magyar categories. Th e Zionist movement was founded by a Hungarian-born Jew, Th eodor Herzl (1860–1904), but he concluded that the foundation of a Jewish state was the only sure way for Jews to avoid or protect themselves against Europe’s rising tide of politi-cal anti-Semitism not in Hungary but in Vienna, where his family moved when he was young, and in Paris, where he covered the Dreyfus trial for a leading Viennese newspaper ( Encyclo-pedia Britannica ). Overall, Hungary’s Jews were oft en noted not only for their economic and professional leadership but also for their assimilation and Hungarian patriotism, even when the Christian majority did not fully accept them. (See among others Lupovitch, Jews at the Crossroads ; Romsics, Hungary in the Twentieth Century , 37–48; Nemes, Th e Once and Future Budapest , 162–165, 179.)


Although the Liberal Party ruled the country for almost forty years aft er the Compromise and passed some important laws asserting legal equality for citi-zens, there was constant tension between the theory and practice of these laws. Some Liberal politicians, such as Ferenc Deák, the chief negotiator of the Com-promise, and Sándor Wekerle, the fi rst prime minister not of noble blood (1894–1895), pursued civil rights issues such as freedom of religion, universal secret suff rage, and minority rights, considering them crucial to the modernization—the “Westernization”—of the country. Other Liberal Party leaders considered is-sues of increasing equality and civil rights far subordinate or even counter to Hungary’s more important goal of becoming a truly Magyar nation-state, also a “Western” goal.

Th e priority of Magyar national interests was due to the dominant role of the Hungarian nobility in local and national politics, from the wealthy magnates who dominated the upper echelons of government down to the middle nobility and impoverished landless gentry who made up most of the county bureaucracy. Th e nobles considered themselves the embodiment of the Hungarian national ideal, as the heirs of the Magyar chieft ains who, around 896 CE, had arrived from Asia to conquer the Carpathian Basin. Th e “nationalities” and non-nobles, on the other hand, were the heirs of the conquered, and thus deserved their subordinate status. Th e nobility’s hold on power ultimately led to further entrenchment of conserva-tive Magyar nationalism in the government.

Under post-Compromise education reform, the numbers of schools and stu-dents increased dramatically. Further reform in 1907 made elementary education free, greatly increasing rates of literacy in younger generations. With its 1910 rate of 33 percent illiteracy in the population more than six years old, Hungary was still well behind the Austrian half of the Dual Monarchy (17%) or the most advanced nations of northwestern Europe (around 10% or less), but it was ahead of Italy (38%) and its neighbors to the south and east. 34 Th e elite were able to receive a fi ne education at every level. Th is education system supported Hungary’s immense technological advances as well as the fl owering of culture in every fi eld, including music: with the 1875 opening of Budapest’s Royal Academy of Music, with Liszt as its fi rst president, Hungarian musicians could fi nally obtain their advanced education in their home country.

Th ere was a catch, however. Although native speakers of Hungarian and Ger-man were served well by the educational system, the nationalities were not. When Slovaks and Romanians attempted to expand education in their native language, they were oft en thwarted by administrative and legal maneuvers. 35 Universal Hungarian literacy was a basic requirement for the advancement of a true Hungarian

34. Romsics, Hungary in the Twentieth Century , 30.

35. In his Racial Problems in Hungary , particularly 70–82, Robert Seton-Watson railed against the agents of Magyarization, particularly as they worked against Slovak interests. Irina Livez-eanu’s Cultural Politics in Greater Romania , 143–151 describes some Romanian reaction and resistance to Magyarization pressure in pre-World War I Transylvania.


nation-state, but this goal ran counter to the aspirations of much of the population being educated; to receive funding, schools had to teach a certain number of hours in Hungarian, use certain approved textbooks, and implement “programmes in-culcating an ‘exemplary patriotic attitude,’” something that was anathema to activists among minority communities who sought their own autonomy or indepen-dence. 36 Requirements for education in Hungarian opened the reform law to com-plaints from ethnic minorities within Hungary and to criticism from Western European observers as well. Th ese and other confl icts around nationality questions continued to rise in the years leading up to the outbreak of World War I, whose initial spark came from the assassinations of Habsburg heir Franz Ferdinand and his wife, the terrorist acts of nationalists seeking to free Serbs from Austro-Hungarian rule.

NATIONAL ART IN NATIONALIST HUNGARY

Given the prominence of ideas of the nation and the national in nineteenth-century politics and society, it is not surprising that Hungarian expressive culture was also preoccupied by these concerns. Yet for Hungary’s artists, who aspired to international as well as local recognition, “greatness” was at least as important. Visual artists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries tried a variety of means to accomplish the dual goal of greatness and Hungarianness, from solemn scenes from Hungarian history to picturesque landscapes of landmarks and characteristic topographical features in the country to the genre scenes depicting peasants of the various ethnic groups of multiethnic Hungary to the colorful rein-terpretations of folk art motifs in both painting and architecture. Focusing on these elements alone, however, conceals the simultaneous aesthetic shift s, which in turn, as both Judit Frigyesi and Leon Botstein have also commented, had local political meaning in Hungary. 37

Th e nineteenth-century styles prevalent in various artistic spheres in Hun-gary, though oft en marked as Hungarian through topical choices, might be interpreted as “little more than a synthesis of modern English, French, and Ger-man elements led by an aristocratic elite.” 38 Th e challenge to this status quo by the so-called generation of 1900, 39 which included important fi gures in almost every major creative fi eld, worked to supplant these Hungarian adaptations of

36. Jeszenszky, “Hungary through World War I and the End of the Dual Monarchy,” in A History of Hungary , ed. Sugár, Hanák, and Frank, 282.

37. Judit Frigyesi and Leon Botstein write about the political meaning of appropriating West-ern European aesthetic modernism in the social and cultural context of fi n-de-siècle Hun-gary in Béla Bartók and Turn-of-the-Century Budapest , 68–95, and “Out of Hungary,” 22–24, respectively.

38. Botstein, “Out of Hungary,” 23.

39. See Lukacs, Budapest 1900 , 137–181.


Western norms through its own “appropriation of Western European aesthetic modernism”; unlike the social withdrawal advocated by promoters of l’art pour l’art to the West, though, the ardent “integration of politics and aesthetics” found in Hungary led artists and critics to measure every artistic innovation “in terms of its utility to the national cultural political project.” 40 Th is project was always fraught, for as Carl Dahlhaus has noted, “the very expression [‘national school’] implies, tacitly but unmistakably, that ‘national’ is an alternative to ‘universality’ and that ‘universality’ was the prerogative of the ‘central’ [artistic] nations. Th e term ‘national school’ is a covert admission that the phenomenon it describes is peripheral.” 41

Th ough common themes surely link the aesthetic innovations and national(ist) motivations of Hungarian musicians, visual artists, and writers, certain important factors mark the case of music, in particular the role of race and the development of an elite musical culture, as distinct from other arts. Th e contrast with the visual arts is for my purposes the most useful, so I sketch their nineteenth-century history briefl y here.

Many painters in the mid- to late nineteenth century emphasized grand his-torical subjects in the Western European academic tradition, but using subjects of national significance to Hungary. In the oppressive post-revolutionary pe-riod several subjects of major paintings highlighted the great tragedies of Hun-garian history; meanwhile in the more optimistic times aft er the Compromise of 1867, especially the years around the 1896 celebration of the Millennium of the Hungarians’ arrival in the Carpathian Basin, a number of important pain-ters created scenes of triumph. 42 Alongside this style of painting, increasingly viewed as old-fashioned, more and more artists became interested in creating a particularly Hungarian form of landscape and genre painting. Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, several Hungarian painters chose the sweep-pole well (seen in Figure 1.1 , Mihály Munkácsy’s At the Drinking-Trough (1869)) as the emblem of the Hungarian landscape, but this symbol was also challenged by “the folk” as more painters used peasants and folk arts among their subjects, for example, in István Csók’s Gathering Hay (1890) (see Figure 1.2 ). Csók’s paint-ings and those of his contemporaries also brought technical innovations to Hungarian art, including both a plein air approach and rougher brushstrokes and

40. Botstein, “Out of Hungary,” 24.

41. In “Nationalism and Music,” 89.

42. Works of tragedy dating chiefl y from before the Compromise include Vienna- and Mu-nich-trained Bertalan Székely’s Th e Discovery of the Body of King Lajos II (1860), Women of Eger (1861–1867), and Th e Battle of Mohács (1866) and several works by Vienna- and Paris-trained Viktor Madarász (1830–1917), including László Hunyadi on the Bier (1859), Felicián Zách (1858), and Dozsa’s People (1868). Triumphant historicist works dating from aft er 1867 include Gyula Benczúr’s Th e Baptism of Vajk (1875); Mihály Munkácsy’s Conquest (1893), for the assembly hall of the new Upper House of Parliament; and Árpád Feszty’s panoramic Conquest (1895), a featured attraction at the Millennium Exhibition.

Figure 1.1 Mihály Munkácsy (1844–1900), At the Drinking Trough (1869), oil on canvas [Hungarian National Gallery, reproduced by permission]

Figure 1.2 István Csók (1865–1961), Gathering Hay (1890), oil on canvas [Hungarian National Gallery, reproduced by permission]


light-fracturing similar to those found in Impressionism and Post-Impressionism in Western Europe. 43

Beginning a bit later, in the fi rst years of the twentieth century, the artists of the Gödöll ő Colony, led by Aladár Körösf ő i-Kriesch (1863–1920), mentioned in the Introduction, off er even richer examples of the artistic use of Hungarian folk ele-ments, as they not only depicted peasant subjects but coopted some peasant media as well, particularly tapestry, as in Kriesch’s Women of Kalotaszeg (1908) (see Figure 1.3 ). A landmark achievement of the Gödöll ő artists’ combination of Hungarian national elements with elements of the Art Nouveau is the Cultural Palace in Márosvásárhely (today Tîrgu Mureş, Romania), designed and built between 1910 to 1913. From the architectural design by Marcell Komor and Dezs ő Jakab to frescoes in the lobby by Körösf ő i-Kriesch to the array of splendid stained glass windows designed by Sándor Nagy (1869–1950) and Ede Th oroczkai Wigand (1869–1945), using motifs from folk costume in their depictions of scenes from Transylvanian Hungarian folktales (see Figure 1.4 for the black-and-white cartoon of Nagy’s Beautiful Júlia ), the team of Gödöll ő artists fi lled almost every aspect of the building with a modern reimagining of ancient Hungarian artistic motifs.

Th e representations of folktales in the Márosvásárhely Cultural Palace and the evocation of peasant arts and craft s by other artists of this period, whether those associated with Gödöll ő or not, emerged from the growing awareness of peasant arts and craft s both among scholars in the growing fi eld of folklore studies and among members of the public. Peasant craft s were publicized through displays both domestic and foreign. Th e Museums of Ethnography and Decorative Arts, both founded in 1872, and national fairs held around Hungary leading up to the landmark Millennium Exhibition in Budapest in 1896 all included major exhibits of this material, as did world’s fairs from the one in Vienna in 1873 onward. 44 To supply the demand among urban consumers at home and abroad for Hungarian peasant craft s, a handful of regions developed substantial cottage industries; the

43. Other paintings using the sweep-pole well include Károly Lotz’s Landscape with a Sweep-Pole Well (1868–1870), Mihály Munkácsy’s Dusty Country Road I (1874), and Vilmos Aba-Novák’s (1894–1941) Watering at the Well-Sweep (1927). Switzer provides an English-language discussion of the use of this symbol in her Nationalism in Hungarian Art . For other examples of genre painting featuring peasant subjects see János Jankó’s (1833–1896) Welcoming the Bride (1855), Simon Hollósy’s (1857–1918) Corn Husking (1885), Sándor Bihari’s (1855–1906) Before the Judge (1886), and several other works by Csók, among others. Th ough Budapest was the center for the dissemination of Hungarian art, these and other painters’ sojourns in the countryside—some associated with schools of painting at Nagybánya and Szolnok, some more solitary—recast the look of Hungarian painting.

44. For the history of the collection and study of folk art in Hungary, see the website of the Museum of Ethnography, “In-depth museum history” http://www.neprajz.hu/tartalom.php?menu2 = 22 (accessed July 11, 2011), and Kósa, A magyar néprajz tudománytörténete [Th e scholarly history of Hungarian folklore], 127–144. For the history of the display of such artifacts in the context of international exhibitions see Lackner, “Az els ő magyar néprajzi gyűjtemény” [Th e First Hungarian Folklore Collection], 101–7; Switzer, Nationalism in Hungarian Art , 167–212; and Éri and Jobbágyi, A Golden Age , 47–72.

http://www.neprajz.hu/tartalom.php?menu2=22



rich embroidery of the Kalotaszeg region became particularly popular aft er appearing at a Hungarian national fair in 1885 and in subsequent international exhibitions through the advocacy of patron, folklorist, and novelist Etelka Hóry Gyarmathy (1843–1910). 45

Th e organic integration of such folk elements with stylistic trends similar to those found in Western European modernist art, including Art Nouveau and Se-cession, appealed both to foreign sophisticates in search of the “primitive” and to Hungarians looking for achievements in national art. By the turn of the twentieth century, even though Hungarian artists and exhibitors still struggled against the

Figure 1.3 Aladár Körösf ő i-Kriesch (1863–1920), Women of Kalotaszeg , tapestry (1908) [Town Museum of Gödöll ő , reproduced by permission]

45. A brief biography of Etelka Hóry Gyarmathy appears in Erdélyi gyópár at http://erdelyigyopar .ro/1996--3/582-gyarmathy-zsigane-hory-etelka-1843-1910.html (accessed July 14, 2011).

http://erdelyigyopar.ro/1996--3/582-gyarmathy-zsigane-hory-etelka-1843-1910.html



international perception that they were “barbarians” or “Orientals” rather than part of “a large western cultural family of nations,” 46 they were praised at home and abroad for their combination of the modern and the national, as motifs derived from peasant arts and craft s were deployed and reimagined on a grand scale, for example, in the building designs of Ödön Lechner and Károly Kos and in the fl oral motifs that adorned the walls of Hungary’s domestic and international exhibition halls. 47 Th e scholarly disciplines that fed into some of the “national” literature and

Figure 1.4 Sándor Nagy (1869–1950), Lovely Júlia , black-and-white cartoon for stained glass triptych, Cultural Palace, Târgu Mureş/Márosvásárhely (1913) [Sándor Nagy House, Gödöll ő , reproduced by permission]

46. See quotations from reviews of Hungary’s world’s fair exhibits in Switzer, Nationalism in Hungarian Art , 169–176. Annegret Fauser’s Musical Encounters at the 1889 Paris World’s Fair , 254–268, discusses the reception of Hungarian exhibits and Gypsy musicians, the latter from Romania and Spain as well as Hungary. Bálint Sárosi cites Hungarian press accounts of Elek Vörös’ band’s success at the 1900 Paris fair in A cigányzenekar múltja , 387–390, and the Budapest Enciklopédia , 228, mentions crowds dancing to the music of Gypsy orchestras at the Budapest 1896 Millennium Exhibition.

47. See, for example, the mention of Ödön Lechner’s work in “Különfélék” [Miscellania], Magyar iparművészet III (1900), 76, cited in Switzer, Nationalism in Hungarian Art , 179; the photographs and descriptions of Hungarian pavilions in Éri and Jobbágyi, A Golden Age ,


visual arts, the study of folk poetry and of the material culture of the peasantry, also experienced their fi rst real blossoming in the fi n-de-siècle. 48

NATIONAL MUSIC IN NATIONALIST HUNGARY: THE “GYPSY QUESTION”

While Hungary’s self-representation in the visual arts evolved, however, its musical face was almost unchanged: in 1900 in Paris, as in Budapest in 1896, in 1893 in Chicago, in 1878 and 1889 in Paris, and in 1873 in Vienna, Gypsy bands serenaded the fair crowds. 49 Th e dominant role of “Gypsy music” in representing Hungary musically, both in these world’s fairs and elsewhere, typifi es not only a key way in which the case of Hungarian music diff ered from the case of other Hungarian art forms but also a way in which it diff ered from other national musics.

Like other composers from outside mainstream European traditions, Hungar-ian composers sought alternately to achieve a place in the canon and to fi nd an “authentic” marker of their singular identity, an “exotic native dress,” “a collective folkloristic or oriental mask” without which a composer is “faceless.” 50 Even the description of this collective face or mask can be elusive at best. In his exploration of “Czechness in music,” for instance, Michael Beckerman has noted that “every scholar who attempts to deal with nineteenth-century Czech music ends up trying to articulate that very element which makes Czech music Czech,” yet such eff orts oft en fall far short, “leaving the reader only with an idea of what Czechness isn’t.” 51

Th e Hungarian case is further complicated by a long history of the use of Hun-garian style as a “folkloristic or oriental mask” not only by Hungarian musicians but by many others as well. Th at is, Europe’s musical audiences as well as its com-posers had over the course of the nineteenth century developed fi xed ideas about what Hungarian music was. Beginning in the late eighteenth century, Hungarian “Gypsy music” had spread across Europe, both in informal settings like the café, restaurant, dance fl oor, and popular theater as well as in the concert hall. Similar

61–71; and the discussion of folklorism in Hungarian art and architecture in Frigyesi, Béla Bartók and Turn-of-the-Century Budapest , 98–103. Switzer notes that “Th e recognition awarded to Hungarian entries at the Paris Exposition [in 1900] in part paved the way for future success at other fairs over the next two decades” [ Nationalism in Hungarian Art , 179].

48. See Kósa, A magyar néprajz tudománytörténete , 48–66, 127–144.

49. Lackner, “Az els ő magyar néprajzi gyűjtemény,” 106, writes that “In 1873 the romantic picture of the Puszta stands complete with its full armament, with all the elements we still know today. Gulyás, paprika, csárdás, verbunkos, highwaymen, country inn, Gypsy music, stork nests, the numerous elements of shepherd culture . . . are the requisite ingredients that conjure up the image of Great Plain romanticism, in which the topos already spread through Lenau’s poetry can already be found, such as merry-making while weeping, ‘only the Gypsies understand the Hungarian soul,’ as well as the oneness of outlaws and shepherds.”

50. Taruskin, Defi ning Russia Musically , 48–49.

51. In “In Search of Czechness in Music,” 61.


cases are provided by the fl amenco song and dance of southern Spain and the performances of Russia’s Gypsy choirs. Both of these performance genres, like Hungary’s Gypsy music, began to become widely popular in the late eighteenth century: fl amenco with the spread of one of its subgenres, the fandango, and Rus-sia’s Gypsy choirs with the establishment of the fi rst such choir in 1774. 52 Th rough the agency of literary fi gures ranging from scores of largely forgotten travel writers to leading lights like Pushkin and Tolstoy in Russia and Beaumarchais and Méri-mée in France, Gitano fl amenco performers and Russian Gypsy choirs, like Hun-gary’s Gypsy orchestras, were the object of fascination at home and abroad, and their repertoire “became national music, veritable emblems of the country.” 53 For listeners beyond the borders of these countries, this fascination was enhanced by stereotypes of the Gypsy. Mysterious, cursed by ancient sins, 54 Europe’s most colorful racial Other had the allure of the forbidden. In a region where law and identity tied most members of the majority to the land, the Gypsy supposedly wandered according to whim. Stereotypes of wandering, unconventionality, and passion attributed to Roma clung to “Gypsy music” in the minds of their non-Roma audiences across Europe. Th e reality of Roma “wandering” was both more rational and complex, and less universal, than was commonly understood. Trav-eling groups oft en followed certain routes due to the availability of seasonal work, or moved on when expelled by authorities; meanwhile, more and more Roma

52. Th e fandango is described by several travel writers from the late eighteenth century as “grotesque” and “lascivious”; the infamous Casanova wrote “at length in his diary about ex-periencing a delirious pleasure at seeing it performed in a Madrid theater,” and reported, as some contemporaries also did, that the fandango “was best executed by Gypsies” (Lou Charnon-Deutsch, Th e Spanish Gypsy: Th e History of a European Obsession , 50–51). For many, though, fandango represented not Gitanos (Spanish Roma) specifi cally but rather exotic Spanishness more generally, as in Act III of Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro . Th ough fl a-menco was initially a Gitano expressive form, as it grew and became an established part of the Spanish entertainment industry with the appearance of cafés cantantes in Seville and Madrid beginning in the 1840s, more and more non-Gitanos also performed it (Chuse and Miles, “Spain,” 597–599). Th e fi rst Russian Gypsy choir was established by Count Aleksej Grigor’evich Orlov, who in 1774 assembled performers for the choir from among his Romani serfs; they and similar choirs and their repertoire of Russian romances became very popular among the Russian nobility (Alaina Lemon, Between Two Fires , 94–95, and Carol Silverman, “Rom (Gypsy) Music,” 286–287).

53. Silverman, “Rom (Gypsy) Music,” 270, and Chuse and Miles, “Spain,” 600–601.

54. Th ere were two popular legends that off ered Europeans religious excuses, though with no scriptural basis, to justify the Gypsies’ outcast status: that they had refused the Holy Family shelter on their fl ight to Egypt, and that one of their own had forged the nails to hang Christ on the cross when other smiths had refused. For these off enses, they were condemned to wander, much like the Wandering Jew. (Bellman, Style Hongrois , 69–72, summarizes some of these stories.) In Hungary, it could not have helped that they reportedly forged the instru-ments of torture used to kill György Dózsa, the leader of an early sixteenth-century peasant rebellion (see Crowe, A History of the Gypsies of Eastern Europe and Russia , 33, 70). Th e common Gypsy occupation of fortune-telling also associated them en masse with witchcraft .


lived a sedentary lifestyle—by the time of Hungary’s 1893 “Gypsy census,” more than 95 percent of Roma counted were partly or completely settled, and musi-cians, almost 10 percent of the adult men, tended to be the most settled and assim-ilated. 55 Moreover, with the rise of scholarly research into both folklore and the “Gypsy question” late in the nineteenth century and early in the twentieth, the art musicians of these three countries came to doubt that urban popular genres associated with the marginalized Roma were an “authentic” representation of the nation, even as “Gypsy music” maintained its widespread popularity.

For Central Europeans, “Gypsy music” usually meant “Hungarian-Gypsy music.” 56 Th ese terms encompass two main genres of Hungarian entertainment music that became known as Hungary’s national music: verbunkos (from the German Werbung , or “recruiting”) and magyar nóták (literally, Hungarian songs). Verbunkos, which several scholars have termed “the core of 19th century Hungarian national art music,” 57 refers primarily to the Hungarian recruiting and social dance reper-toire of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and it includes not only music for verbunkos dances taken from military recruiting practices from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries but also music for two national couples’ dances that developed out of them, the csárdás (“country inn [Hungarian dance]”) and the palotás (“palace [Hungarian dance]”). 58 Th is repertoire began to emerge from oral practice in the mid-eighteenth century, with its fi rst publications appear-ing in the 1780s. Th e style occurred in a range of tempi, most simply reduced to two distinct modes, slow and fast, with diff erent characteristics: slow (or lassú ) pieces might use so much rubato that they were less intended to be danced than to be listened to—or in Hungarian, hallgató ; quick, or friss , dances were much more regular in tempo. Contemporary sources describe a performance practice

55. Of those registered in the census, 89.2 percent were “permanently settled” and another 7.5 percent were “partly settled” (Dupcsik, A magyarországi cigányság története [Th e history of the Gypsies of Hungary], 82). Dupcsik cites as 9.6 percent the proportion of the adult male Roma population who were musicians; the number of Roma musicians had increased more than tenfold between the time of Joseph II and the 1893 census (83-84). Moreover, Hungary’s “musician Gypsies” were not distributed evenly, but were heavily concentrated in certain regions; notably, musicians constituted more than 35 percent of adult male Roma in Pest-Pilis-Kiskun County, where Budapest was located ( A Magyarországban 1893. Jánuar 31-én végrehajtott czigányösszeírás eredményei [Th e results of the Gypsy census conducted in Hungary on January 31, 1893] (Budapest: Atheneum, 1895, 72–73, Figure 4r.) http://kt.lib.pte.hu/cgi-bin/kt.cgi?konyvtar/kt04120202/0_0_3_ta_4r.html (accessed June 24, 2011).

56. One indication of this association is Carl Maria von Weber’s use of Hungarian-Gypsy stylistic elements to introduce Spanish Gypsy characters in his music for the play Preciosa (1820–1821), discussed in Bellman, Style Hongrois , 142–144.

57. Peth ő , “ Style Hongrois ,” 199.

58. David Schneider both summarizes the military policies that led to the development of verbunkos to recruit Hungarian peasants into the Habsburg army, from the early eighteenth century to the institution of universal conscription in 1849 (aft er the fall of Hungary’s revo-lutionary government) and describes its musical characteristics in Bartók, Hungary, and the Renewal of Tradition , 17–25.

http://kt.lib.pte.hu/cgi-bin/kt.cgi?konyvtar/kt04120202/0_0_3_ta_4r.html

http://kt.lib.pte.hu/cgi-bin/kt.cgi?konyvtar/kt04120202/0_0_3_ta_4r.html


that progressed from slow to fast or alternated: as Gergely Czuczor described a recruiting performance in 1843, “Aft er they have danced fi ve or six slow verses like this, it is time for something more showy, which is faster and more fi ery than what precedes it . . . . Th is goes on, alternating two or three times, until at a sign from the sergeant the merry group draws apart.” 59 Th is practice of progressing or alter-nating in tempo is refl ected in certain score publications from the early nine-teenth century, with and without attribution, which oft en grouped dances in a way that alternated tempi. 60 Period publications of magyar nóta also tend to pair a slow song at the beginning with a concluding fast song.

A manuscript of Hungarian dance music from 1757 shows that two other key stylistic elements of the verbunkos style, the augmented second and a profusion of instrumental fi guration, were already in place at that time. It is unclear with whom these characteristics originated, but extravagant ornamentation was associated with Romani performers from the beginning, and they were already being criti-cized for it by 1791. 61 As Chapters 2 and 3 will illustrate, those critiques increased in frequency and intensity in the latter half of the nineteenth century, partly in response to Liszt’s celebration of Gypsy performance in his book Des bohémiens .

Th e chordal accompaniments typical of Hungarian-Gypsy style also began to develop in the eighteenth century, as early verbunkos publications illustrate, 62 but attributions of their origin to either Hungarians or Roma are less convincing. Rather, scholars from the nineteenth to the twenty-fi rst centuries have generally seen this accompanimental style as a product of Western European infl uence. Un-like the German and Czech musicians who dominated the ensembles of churches, theaters, and courts, the Roma musicians who played most verbunkos had little formal training in this period and usually lacked music literacy skills, though some did read music. Nonetheless, they worked in close proximity to those more formally trained musicians and lived within the orbit of Viennese classicism. Bálint Sárosi has noted that the structural and harmonic principles and taste of European classicism

fundamentally infl uenced the structure of the melodies, too. In the earliest verbunkos publications—even in the Bihari pieces which are mainly of folk inspiration—it can already be seen that painful attention is being taken that the melody should be harmonizable and the broken chord continually appears as an important melody-building element. 63

59. Czuczor’s account is cited in Sárosi, Gypsy Music , 88.

60. See for example those included in Géza Papp (ed.), Hungarian Dances 1784–1810 .

61. Sárosi mentions the 1757 manuscript in Gypsy Music , 107. According to Sárosi, criticism of Gypsy extravagance begins at the latest in Ferenc Verseghy’s Rövid értekezések a muzsikáról [Short treatises on music], Vienna, 1791 ( Gypsy Music , 106).

62. Th ose included in Hungarian Dances 1784–1810 again provide good examples.

63. Sárosi, Gypsy Music , 111.


Beyond the “folk inspiration” of some verbunkos, leading composers in this genre included not only ethnic Hungarians like János Lavotta (1764–1820) and Roma like János Bihari (c. 1764–1827) but also representatives from many of Hun-gary’s other ethnic groups. Th e verbunkos composers of German, Jewish, and Slavic origin, including Antal Csermák (c. 1774–1822), who was probably from a Czech family, and Márk Rózsavölgyi (1789–1848), born Rosenthal, who was Jew-ish, indicate the signifi cance of assimilation in the culture of multiethnic nine-teenth-century Hungary. 64 Th e height of the popularity of verbunkos coincided with Hungary’s Reform Era, when eventually even the highest ranks of the no-bility danced Hungarian dances at their balls; from the mid-1830s on, Rózsavöl-gyi, the “last important master of the verbunkos and the fi rst of the more modern Hungarian dance, the csárdás . . . dedicated a csárdás to every great political, social or private occasion.” 65 Th e “torrent of csárdáses” by Rózsavölgyi and others contin-ued through the 1850s and 1860s. 66

During the latter half of the nineteenth century through the early twentieth century, the second main genre of “Hungarian-Gypsy music,” magyar nóta, became an increasingly important genre of national music. Th e texts and iconog-raphy of magyar nóta might evoke an idyllic rural atmosphere, with cover illustra-tions of for example a relaxed shepherd whiling away the time by playing the fl ute ( Figure 1.5 ) or a carousing horseherd singing to the accompaniment of a Gypsy band at a country inn ( Figure 1.6 ), and they were oft en referred to as folksongs, but the genre was basically a newly composed popular music—what Zoltán Kodály dismissed in 1906 as “the products of domestic folksong factories.” 67 Th e composers of these tunes were predominantly nonprofessional musicians—largely Hungarian gentry, to which class this genre mostly “belonged”—but pro-fessionals were also involved, including ethnic Hungarians like Kornél Ábrányi (1822–1903), an important critic, scholar, and cultural leader who takes a substan-tial role in later chapters of this book; assimilated Germans like Mihály Mosonyi (born Michael Brand, 1815–1870), who along with Ferenc Erkel (1810–1893) was

64. For brief biographies of these verbunkos composers, see the articles in New Grove Dictio-nary of Music and Musicians , 2nd ed., henceforth New Grove , on “Bihari, János”; “Csermák, Antal György”; “Lavotta, János”; and “Rózsavölgyi [Rosenthal], Márk.”

65. Bónis, “Rózsavölgyi,” 829. Sárosi, Gypsy Music , 85, and Szabolcsi, A Concise History of Hungarian Music , 63, among others, write about the periodization of the verbunkos. A vivid account of the introduction of the (unspecifi ed) “Hungarian dance” to a ball of the National Casino in the 1838-–1839 season at the insistence of none other than Count István Széchenyi appears in the diary of Baron Frigyes Podmaniczky (1824–1907), published as Egy régi gavallér emlékei [Th e memoirs of an old cavalier], 118–124. Robert Nemes writes about the development of “Dance Floor Nationalism” in the 1830s and 1840s in Th e Once and Future Budapest , 93–101, and in “Th e Politics of the Dance Floor,” 802–823.

66. Bálint Sárosi, “Everyday Hungarian Music in Pest-Buda around 1870,” 335.

67. “Népdalgyári portéka,” in the Preface to Magyar népdalok [Hungarian Folksongs] (his joint publication with Bartók); original of quotation found in ZKV 1, 10, and published in English translation in Th e Selected Writings of Zoltán Kodály , 9–10.


one of the leading art-music composers working in Hungary in the nineteenth century; and Roma like Pista Dankó (1858–1903), arguably the most popular composer in this genre at the turn of the twentieth century. 68

Th ough Romani musicians did not have a monopoly on the performance of Hungarian entertainment music in the nineteenth century, they were

Figure 1.5 Anonymous, pastoral illustration on cover of József Dóczy’s (1863–1913) publication Négy eredeti magyar dal [Four original Hungarian songs], n. d.

68. Frigyesi, Béla Bartók and Turn-of-the-Century Budapest , 55–60, documents the general association between magyar nóta and the gentry as well as the politics of this association.


recognized as the leading performers of both the verbunkos and the instrumen-tal versions of or accompaniments to magyar nóta. In Baron Frigyes Podma-niczky’s account of István Széchenyi’s request for a “Hungarian [dance]” at a late 1830s ball, the band, made up of “German” musicians and led by a certain Morelly, played “one of the classical palotás Hungarian [dances] by Bihari” from sheet music; Podmaniczky’s comment on this band’s performance was “Poor Bihari! It’s good that there’s a fathom of earth above your coffi n!” He also quoted the remarks of some of the aristocratic would-be dancers on the musi-cians’ eff orts:

Figure 1.6 Anonymous, image of carousing in a country inn on cover of Kornél Ábrányi Sr.’s Legujabb Budapest dalok és népdalok [Newest Budapest songs and folksongs], n. d.


—Your excellency, this can’t be danced to! —And you can see how much we miss those simple Gyöngyös Gypsies. 69

Th e common perception of Romani musicians’ superior skill in entertaining Hungarians only intensifi ed over time. In 1864 a commentator opined that “it is the Gypsy and only the Gypsy, who for centuries has felt with us and has completely comprehended our pleasures and our sorrows . . . only the Gypsy is capable of calling to the Hungarian’s heart and of earning our support”; in 1903, a Hungarian lawyer who had acted as a member of the jury in a “Gypsy competition” (cigány-verseny), before giving out the prizes, extolled Romani musicians’ role in perform-ing Hungarian music by stating “You, Gypsies, are the chosen children of this blessed sweet Hungarian land. Your mission is great in the development of Hungar-ian culture.” 70

For those composers and critics dedicated to developing Hungarian music culture on a more elevated level, though, the popularity of the performances of Hungarian Gypsy bands and the repertoire for which they were best known was both a blessing and a curse. Th eir vigorous style became inextricably entwined with Hungarian vernacular musical performance over the course of the century in all but the most isolated settlements and became famous not only in Hungary but abroad. Th e repertoire they played, both songs and dance music, was the only widely known source for nineteenth-century Hungarian art-music composers, particularly those working in the Austro-German sphere (for example, Haydn, Schubert, Weber, and Brahms), looking to infuse their work with Hungarian character. Th is trend thus had begun before the founding of leading musical insti-tutions that came to defi ne Hungary’s musical life later on, including the National Th eater, the fi rst home of regular opera performances in Pest-Buda, founded in 1837; the Philharmonic Society, composed of members of the National Th eater orchestra, established in 1853; and the Royal Academy of Music, established in 1875. 71 While Czech musicians and critics laboring to defi ne musical Czechness

Ábrányi’s primary role in this genre was not as an originator of melodies but as a writer of piano accompaniments for their publications, particularly of the songs of popular mid-century song composer Kálmán Simonff y (c. 1831–1888) (see Sárosi, “Everyday Hungarian Music,” 341). Mosonyi’s composition of the magyar nóta “Felleg borult az erd ő re” [Th e forest is overcast] is noted by Sárosi, “Everyday Hungarian Music,” 343. Sárosi names Dankó as one of Hungary’s three “outstanding song composers” of the latter half of the nineteenth cen-tury (“Everyday Hungarian Music,” 341); the other two, Elemér Szentirmay (1836–1908) and Kálmán Simonff y (1831–1888), both country gentry, government offi cials, and “naturalists” rather than highly trained musicians, were past their heyday in the fi n de siècle.

69. Podmaniczky, Egy régi gavallér emlékei , 121. Podmaniczky credited Széchenyi’s persistent request with making the csárdás “fi t for polite society” ( szalonképes ).

70. In Sárosi, A cigányzenekar múltja , 187 and 440, respectively. First appeared in Vasárnapi levélféle (Arad) (June 19, 1864) and Aradi közlöny (Arad) (November 3, 1903), respectively.

71. Dezs ő Legány, “Budapest,” New Grove 4, 544–547.


might fi nd themselves struggling to put something as yet little known on the map, Europe’s musical audiences already “knew” Hungarian music. Yet for those working to cultivate art music in Hungary, their preconceptions were highly problematic: they were associated with low rather than high cultural forms, and because of the prominent role of Romani performers in this genre, its national and racial connotations were confusing. Many non-Hungarian composers used labels of Hungarian and Gypsy— ongherese and zingarese —more or less indis-criminately, to the increasing consternation of many in the Hungarian music world. In this context a debate over the nature of Hungarian music developed, and it is this debate that provides the material for much of the present study.

Digging deeper into a debate that took place at least as much in prose as through performances and scores reveals certain problems with the terminology that has developed in Hungarian music scholarship, and thus I diverge somewhat from the current conventions of that terminology. Many authors use the term verbunkos not only for Hungarian recruiting and social dance repertoire but also for the use of stylistic elements from that repertoire in art music composition by Hungarian com-posers; the use of these elements by foreign composers has generally been termed style hongrois . 72 One issue with using the term verbunkos is that it minimizes the increasing importance of magyar nóta in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the period that is the focus of this study. It would be appropriate to refer throughout to “elements of verbunkos and magyar nóta style” used by Hungarian composers, but this is cumbersome. Additional issues are more fundamental. First, even if the division between verbunkos style and style hongrois is a convenient marker of the national source, I, like previous authors, have largely concluded that Hungarian and non-Hungarian composers used much the same lexicon of stylistic markers, though with varying degrees of sensitivity. 73 Although all the repertoire I discuss in this book is by composers who could be constructed as Hungarians, Hungary’s multiethnic history, and in particular that of its musicians, meant that

72. For instance Frigyesi, Béla Bartók and Turn-of-the-Century Budapest ; Peth ő , “ Style Hongrois ”; and Schneider’s Bartók, Hungary, and the Renewal of Tradition , among others.

73. Peth ő ’s “ Style Hongrois ,” for example, uses both the faithfulness of various non-Hungari-an composers’ representations of verbunkos and the quality she perceives in the composers’ works to evaluate various early examples of style hongrois . She writes that in Haydn’s works of Hungarian character, “it is striking how precisely the tiniest motivic detail and rhythmic construction tally with the elements of verbunkos music of the time” (223); in Beethoven, “the Hungarian episodes carry intonations, or perhaps extra[-]musical concepts that were so far alien to the style” (227); in Weber’s works with some Hungarian or Gypsy element (with the exception of the Andante e Rondo ungarese , with its “apt, natural and unlaboured” Hungaricisms (239)), “Hungarianized polonaises, polonaise-like Spanish dances, marches, choruses all add up to the conclusion: Weber’s exoticisms . . . appear cross-referentially, serv-ing to create a variegated but basically homogeneous exotic colour” (234); in Schubert, clear references to Hungarian elements in the early String Quartet in g minor “giv[es] way to an ambition to use the verbunkos material merely as raw material indeed and not the target of stylistic imitation” (281).


identities were complex, as the previous listing of the ethnic backgrounds of the leading composers in the early verbunkos period illustrates.

Stressing the division between in-group and out-group composers terminolog-ically underlines a national essentialism that whitewashes those complexities and the ways in which music crosses boundaries. For example, should Ödön Mihalov-ich’s opera Toldi szerelme (Toldi’s love) (1888–1890) (discussed in Chapter 4 ), which combines certain “Hungarian rhythms” with Wagnerian principles, be called ver-bunkos or style hongrois ? Th e “Hungarian” stylistic elements used are fairly min-imal, though they favorably impacted the reception of this piece by a Hungarian citizen of Slovenian descent. Labeling Toldi as style hongrois might be considered akin to calling Mihalovich un-Hungarian, thus endorsing a purist view of style and ethnicity that I do not favor, but calling the work verbunkos also seems inappro-priate. Th is example is one of the most extreme in this study, but it illustrates the way some of the repertoire I discuss defi es simple categorization.

In the interest of neutrality, I tend to use the English phrase “Hungarian style,” or, in order to stress the role of Romani performance practice, “Hungarian-Gypsy style.” Th e phrase “Hungarian style” is, of course, the translation of the French style hongrois , and thus it might be read as the equivalent of the French phrase; but “Hungarian-style” is also an appropriate translation of the Hungarian magyaros , which several critics of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries used to refer to Hungarian stylistic elements drawn from the verbunkos. Interestingly, some in Bartók’s circle viewed the term magyaros negatively, at least as it was applied to art music, as Antal Molnár’s 1914–1915 essay “Nemzeti zene” (National music) makes clear:

Liszt’s music is not Hungarian [ magyar ], only in Hungarian style [ magyaros ], because he got the material from here, but he shaped it for foreign tastes. And as long as there is no Hungarian society hungry for Hungarian art music, the musicians working in our country will not write Hungarian music either, only Hungarian-style music. 74

Molnár’s use of the term magyaros , or Hungarian-style, indicates how an in-creasingly infl uential group of young musicians had come to see this lexicon that Hungarian composers had derived from Hungarian-Gypsy music as a collection of homegrown trimmings on an essentially foreign body. In this article he lumped Brahms’ and Schubert’s eff orts in this style together with Liszt’s and Erkel’s, while original verbunkos composers like Lavotta, Csermák, and Rózsavölgyi were not worth serious contemplation because their music was “only occasional in charac-ter,” an accompaniment to the nobility’s drunken revelries rather than something artistic. 75 Molnár’s dismissal of Hungarian-Gypsy music does not diminish the

74. A. Molnár, “Nemzeti zene” [National music], 21.

75. “Nemzeti zene,” 20. Context of quotation: “Let us not forget that Lavotta’s music and all of the genuine Hungarian-made music of that period is not artistic, [but] only occasional in character . . . . Th ey played pretty music for the lords who wanted to be amused . . . . Art, on the


historical importance of this repertoire; however, his appropriate separation of this functional music from art music that used elements derived from it is a dis-tinction at least as if not more important than the nationality of the composers who used those elements. Also, for English-language readers the term “Hungar-ian style” or “Hungarian-Gypsy style” highlights more than the term verbunkos the fact that the topic of this argument was not only the use of certain technical features but also the issue of how national style related, or did not relate, to national essence. 76

Th is brief survey highlights some of the major issues in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Hungarian culture, some of which were common themes in many fi elds and others of which were unique to music. Hungary’s intellectuals and artists were almost universally aff ected by the quest to develop an internationally recognized high culture and to determine the place of the national in that high culture. This quest was characterized by a preoccupation with Hungary’s po-sitioning between the West, or Europe, and the East, or Asia. Th e role of ethnic minorities, a major issue in Hungarian politics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was more prominent in addressing these questions in music than in some other artistic fi elds, both in vernacular music, in which Romani performers played such a prominent role, and in art music, much of whose devel-opment was led by ethnically German, Slav, and Jewish performers, composers, and pedagogues.

Th e prominence of these non-Hungarian ethnic groups in Hungary’s musical life was already a source of consternation to some in the early nineteenth century. When Liszt, as a world-famous yet nonresident Hungarian musician, highlighted the role of Romani musicians in his book Des bohémiens , it not only sparked a heated discourse over Liszt himself and over the role of the Roma in Hungarian music but also meant that the subsequent debate over the future of Hungarian composition and Hungarian musical institutions would have to address ethnic and racial issues alongside stylistic ones. In the following chapters, I explore details of this debate.

other hand, begins where it becomes its own goal . . . where without a view to anything else the crowd, silenced by artistic respect alone, gets drunk on the delight it absorbs [from the music]. Th e gentlemen’s music also serves to get people drunk, but it only becomes a narcotic with the addition of wine.”

76. Similarly, Ralph Locke chooses the term “Hungarian-Gypsy music” over verbunkos; as he points out, “the phrase ‘ verbunkos music’ (preferred by some Hungarian scholars) risks nam-ing a varied repertoire for one particular dance type. More problematically still, it renders invisible the many Rom performers who were largely responsible for developing the style in question and who even composed some of its most beloved tunes.” ( Musical Exoticism , 137)

2

The Liszt Centennial and Liszt’s

Legacy in Hungarian Musical Life

Hírhedett zenésze a világnak, Renowned musician of the world, Bárhová juss, mindig hű rokon! Faithful kinsman, wherever you may go! Van-e hangod e beteg hazának Have you a note for this sick fatherland, A vel ő ket rázó húrokon? A sound on the strings to shock the

marrow? Van-e hangod, szív háborgatója, Have you a sound, disturber of the

heart, Van-e hangod, bánat altatója? Have you a sound, soother of grief? . . . Zengj nekünk dalt, hogy mély

sírjaikban Sing us a song so that our ancestors, too,

Őseink is megmozdúljanak, Deep in their graves, shall move, És az unokákba a halhatatlan And their immortal souls Lelkeikkel visszaszálljanak. Shall fl y back to their grandchildren. . . . Állj közénk és mondjuk: hála égnek! Stand among us and let us say: thank

heaven! Még van lelke Árpád nemzetének. Árpád’s nation still has a soul.

—Mihály Vörösmarty, Ode to Ferenc Liszt (1840) 1

Our little exhibition . . . aims to bring our great compatriot closer to us, to better acquaint us with him, whom some of our neighbors would like to dispute away from us . . . . as if he had known that . . . he would have to defend his own Hungarianness, that he would have to establish it with

1. Mihály Vörösmarty, “Vörösmarty Mihály összes költeményei” [Complete poems of Mi-hály Vörösmarty], Magyar Elektronikus Könyvtár http://vmek.oszk.hu/01100/01122/html/vers0303.htm#82 (accessed July 25, 2011). Translation by the author.



Th e Liszt Centennial and Liszt’s Legacy in Hungarian Musical Life 47

aides de memoire , Liszt left us his music, his writings and the memories of his noble deeds.

—Kálmán d’Isoz, “Ferenc Liszt: Celebratory Lecture at the Hungarian National Museum” (1911) 2

In 1911, the European musical world celebrated the centennial of the birth of Franz/Ferenc Liszt, one of the greatest musical personalities of the previous cen-tury. Th is occasion prompted an intense outburst of memorialization: musical and civic organizations placed plaques, raised money for statues, and opened museums and museum exhibits. Along with these memorials of stone and metal, various items on Liszt dotted the daily and weekly press, and several music journals—the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik out of Leipzig, Signale and Musik out of Berlin, Musica out of Paris, and each of the three major music journals published in Budapest at this time—featured special Liszt issues, as did at least one Hungar-ian general-interest journal, Népművelés (Popular education). Th e Weimar-based Franz-Liszt Stift ung had inaugurated its complete-works project, a real Denkmal der deutsche Tonkunst , in 1907 in anticipation of the centennial, and in response, the Hungarian cultural ministry commissioned a Hungarian version of the edi-tion, which was scheduled to begin publication by the opening of the centennial celebration (though no volumes actually appeared in time). 3 Perhaps the most prevalent and important memorials were the dozens of concerts dedicated to Liszt’s works and honoring his compositional genius.

It was in this context, in the Liszt issue of Népművelés , that the thirty-year-old Béla Bartók wrote:

It is curious that so many musicians, perhaps even the prevailing number, have so little sympathy with Liszt’s music . . . . In his youth [Liszt] imitated the

2. Original title: “Liszt Ferenc. Ünnepi el ő adás a Magyar Nemzeti Múzeumban,” 575.

3. Th e struggle over the Hungarian-language edition of Liszt’s complete works, commis-sioned from Breitkopf & Härtel in 1907, is a case in which we can fi nd some trace of the (literal) negotiation between the nation and the power structures of the “global music indus-try” of the time. Th e majority of Hungarian musicians and scholars likely to consult the Liszt complete works could have used the German edition with no problems, but many of them found it symbolically unacceptable for German music scholars to take complete ownership of Liszt Ferenc. As an outraged reporter noted when Breitkopf ’s delinquency revealed problems in the contract, not only were the publishers not going to deliver any of the promised edition in time for the centennial; he also claimed that they had chosen not to include the revised edition of the “Hungarian” works, prepared by Hungarian scholars, in the German edition. Th e issue was not just a national one but a transnational one: it was not just claiming Liszt as a Hungarian composer—it was ensuring that the rest of the musical world, primarily the German musical world, thought of Liszt as a Hungarian composer (“Visszélések Liszt összes műveinek magyar kiadása körül” [Abuses around the Hungarian publication of Liszt’s com-plete works], 183–185).


bad habits of the mediocre artists of the period . . . . Th e imprint of these ap-pears throughout his work, and it is just this that gives his music what is usually called its triviality. 4

It is a bit startling to fi nd Hungary’s aspiring national composer attacking his predecessor—and on no less an occasion than the latter’s hundredth birthday. Most of the other participants in the centennial celebration approached the task with a degree of reverence. Yet any such event is always at least as much about those who are doing the celebrating as about what they are celebrating; as one toast to Liszt put it, a place and a people “honored itself when it honored Liszt.” 5 Studies of commemorations have demonstrated “the performative aspects and the reception of generating collective memory . . . the complex relationship between offi cial discourses on national identity, democratic values, or patriotism and the cultural practices aimed at mobilizing popular support for these values.” 6

Th is chapter uses the commemoration of Liszt as a framework for the study of Liszt’s role in Hungarian music scene and of problems that remained unresolved in that scene aft er Liszt’s death. While centennial organizers on the national and local level put on public events on a grand scale and labored to shape Liszt’s image to serve their vision of the Hungarian nation and Hungarian national art, the Liszt centennial prompted Bartók along with many other musicians and critics to refl ect on the issues in early twentieth-century Hungarian musical life that most concerned them: where did Hungary fi t into the artistic map of Europe, how could Hungary’s musical institutions and musical public be improved, and above all, what exactly did it mean to compose Hungarian music?

Recent musicological studies of two Beethoven festivals, the 1845 dedication of the Bonn Beethoven monument and the 1870 Beethoven centennial, off er a useful comparison for study of the Liszt commemoration. In his study of these festivals, Ryan Minor argues that the performance of Beethoven’s music “off er[ed] [the col-lective] . . . the unifying means to express communal identity[,] as well as a place in posterity.” 7 Liszt himself played a leading role in both of these festivals, writing enormous cantatas for each, conducting the 1845 cantata himself, and contrib-uting to the organizational and fi nancial needs of the events. 8 By taking part in these festivals Liszt not only served Beethoven’s memory but wrapped himself by

4. In “Liszt zenéje és a mai közönség” [Liszt’s music and today’s public], 359–360. Th e origi-nal text of this article is also included in BÖÍ , 687–689. My translation adapted from that in BBE , 451.

5. Lajos Haynald (1816–1891) toasting Liszt and the newly united city of Budapest at a ban-quet in honor of the fi ft ieth anniversary of Liszt’s concert debut, November 9, 1873; reported in Pesti Napló (November 11, 1873), cited by Legány, Liszt and His Country, 1869–1873 , 216.

6. Bucur and Wingfi eld, “Introduction,” Staging the Past , 2.

7. In his dissertation National Memory, Public Music , 3.

8. See WFL 1 , 270–272, 417–423, and WFL 3 , 205–209.


association with the mantle of Beethoven’s genius; in Alexander Rehding’s words, through his cantatas he “consolidated his reputation as the chosen heir” to Beethoven. 9

But the tropes of transcendence and timelessness that Rehding cites as charac-teristic of the writing of “monumental history,” tropes that apply so well in the case of Beethoven, seem to fi t Liszt’s commemoration less well. Aft er all, what memorials were appropriate, what kind of communal identity should be per-formed, for the celebration of a man whose own public identity was so mixed: who told tales of midnight revels in rustic camps but who also frequented refi ned salons from Paris and London to Budapest and St. Petersburg; who conceived children out of wedlock but who also took holy orders; who provocatively called himself “half Franciscan, half Gypsy”? For Hungarian musicians still struggling to establish Hungary’s reputation as a place for fi rst-class music-making, commem-orating the Hungarian Liszt raised particular narratological problems. How should one fête a native son who only briefl y lived in his native land, and who did not really know the language? What even should he be called—Franz Liszt, fol-lowing his usual signature, or Liszt Ferenc, his Hungarian name? Th is study of the Hungarian celebrations of the Liszt centennial off ers a provocative frame to refl ect on Liszt’s complex role in the historiography of nineteenth-century Hungarian music and to understand how that role was understood in the early twentieth century.

LISZT PROBLEMS DURING THE LISZT CENTENNIAL

All the contradictions in Liszt’s biography hung in the air as various publics per-formed their “communal identity” through the commemoration of Liszt’s centen-nial. Th e centennial was an immense complex of events, spread over months and planned over years, with a rich public dialogue around their planning and review-ing. Musical organizations around Europe took this opportunity to elevate them-selves by associating themselves with “the master.”

Commemorative concerts of Liszt’s music, especially in the week of Liszt’s hun-dredth birthday, October 22, 1911, illustrate this phenomenon particularly well. A close reading of concert reviews, announcements, and a variety of articles touching on the Hungarian Liszt centennial from those contemporary publica-tions shows, on the one hand, a country aglow with pride about their native son and, on the other, some profound diff erences of opinion over the meaning of Liszt in late Habsburg-period Hungary—in fact, over the meaning of Hungarian concert music itself.

Th ough the primary focus here is on Hungary, these issues cannot, of course, be understood in isolation. I consider Hungarian events in an international context not only because of the extraordinarily international scope of Liszt’s career, but also because Hungarian musicians strove throughout the approximately sixty-year period under consideration to create a music scene in Hungary that would be

9. In his article “Liszt’s Musical Monuments,” 67.


considered the equal of those in more developed musical centers of Europe. Th e centennial celebration brought this international competition into focus, as Budapest-based music periodicals reviewed other large-scale Liszt festivals abroad and foreign journals reviewed events in Budapest. In fact, the New York-based Musical Courier provides one of the most detailed descriptions of the Budapest Liszt commemoration.

Th e three largest centers of Liszt celebration in 1911 were Weimar and Budapest, where Liszt spent many of his later years, and Heidelberg, where the Allgemeine Deutsche Musikverein, co-founded by Liszt, celebrated both Liszt’s centennial and its own fi ft ieth anniversary. Table 2.1 summarizes the repertoire of the Liszt concerts held in each of these cities during the centennial week. But the celebra-tion of Liszt spilled far beyond these major events, particularly in Hungary, where many provincial towns proved themselves simultaneously in culture and in patri-otism by commemorating Liszt. Liszt’s birthplace in western Hungary and its environs were a natural locus for some of the more elaborate events in the prov-inces, so they are also included in Table 2.1 , even though they occurred on November 7, more than a week aft er Liszt’s actual birthday. But many other towns also joined in the enthusiastic celebration of their compatriot. Table 2.2 is a listing of Liszt concerts of many shapes and sizes in Hungary from late 1911 to which I have found references in contemporary Hungarian publications.

Th roughout this section I explore a series of historiographical issues raised by the Hungarian Liszt centennial, issues crucial to Hungarians’ understanding of Liszt as an artist and of what it meant to be a cosmopolitan Hungarian musician of international stature, by alternating elements of Liszt’s biography and of Hun-garian history with descriptions of centennial events and analyses of debates drawn from some of those contemporary publications. Critics internationally saw the role of virtuosity in Liszt’s career as a problem, though the Hungarian music world had a particular take on it. Th e other issues addressed here are more specif-ically Hungarian questions: the question of Liszt’s Hungarian identity and the way Liszt used the idea of “Gypsiness” in relation to his roles as both a Hungarian musician and a virtuoso. Th ese three problems form the nexus of two binarisms that recur throughout Hungarian music criticism in the nineteenth and early twentieth century: the divisions between serious and light music and between “central” and “peripheral” music. Bartók’s commentary on each of these questions highlights another binarism that this book explores: the contrast between mod-ern and traditional.

1. Nationality / Cosmpolitanism

A critical recurring question about Liszt, both during his lifetime and aft er his death, was the problem of his national identity. Hungary’s longings for interna-tional prestige had all been fulfi lled in the person of Franz Liszt, who was not only one of the most prominent musicians in nineteenth-century Europe but a true patriot, and in that period of nation-building, Hungarian audiences tended to perceive his deeds through a national(ist) lens. Liszt had not always been such a

Table 2.1. Comparative concert calendar of Liszt centennial events

Heidelberg Weimar Budapest Doborján/Sopron Oct. 14, 1911

Hungarian National Museum “Die drei Zigeuner,” “Tristis est anima mea,” B minor Ballade, others

Oct. 21, 1911

AM: Matthias Church (site of premiere) Coronation Mass PM: Royal Opera House Legend of St. Elisabeth

Oct. 22, 1911 (Liszt’s birthday)

Christus Matinee: Sonata in B minor Played by Bertrand Roth

St. Stephen’s Basilica Esztergom (Gran) Mass

Oct. 23, 1911

Dante Symphony Faust Symphony

Hungaria Faust Symphony Totentanz Conducted by Peter Raabe

Academy of Music Gala piano evening I “Liszt’s noted students interpret the Master”

Oct. 24, 1911

AM: B minor Sonata Leonore Ballade other piano works PM: “Ce qu’on entend sur la montagne” 2 Episodes from Lenau’s Faust Tasso Totentanz Piano Concerto in A ( Ferruccio Busoni , soloist) Conducted by Richard Strauss

Legend of St. Elisabeth Academy of Music Gala piano evening II (featuring more Liszt students– from Scotland, Russia, Germany, and Hungary)

Nov. 7, 1911: commemoration at birthplace, service at Doborján village church, ceremony at Sopron Liszt statue

(continued)

(same evening:) orchestral concert at Sopron Casino: Liszt’s arrangements of Hungarian national anthems 2 scenes from Faust Concert Solo in E minor Psalm 13 Rákóczi March

Oct. 25, 1911

AM: Psalm 129 French and German songs Piano pieces played by Camille Saint-Saëns

Hungarian Coronation Mass Conducted by Waldemar von Baussnern

Royal Opera House Faust Symphony Piano Concerto in E-fl at ( Sophie Menter , soloist) Psalm 13 Conducted by Siegfried Wagner

PM: Bells of the Strasbourg Cathedral Elegy for violin and piano (Off ertory from Coronation Mass, from manuscript) Choruses from Tell with orchestra Humoresque on Gaudeamus igitur

Heidelberg events sponsored by the Allgemeine Deutsche Musikverein

Weimar events sponsored by the Franz Liszt Stift ung

Performers from Sopron Music Society, Pozsony Music Society, and three local choruses

Table 2.1. (continued)

Heidelberg Weimar Budapest Doborján/Sopron


Table 2.2. Hungarian concerts/events commemorating Liszt centennial

Date Location Description Oct. 21–25 Budapest see Table 2.1 Oct. 22 Salgótarján Coronation Mass Oct. 26 Kolozsvár

[now Cluj-Napoca] concert of local Music Society closes with Liszt’s arrangement of the Himnusz (national anthem)

Oct. 28 Arad concert to benefi t raising of Liszt statue featuring István Th omán, Liszt’s student and Bartók’s teacher, as piano soloist

Nov. 4 Budapest fi rst orchestral concert of the National Conservatory featuring Liszt’s Piano Concerto in A Major

Nov. 5 Temesvár [now Timișoara]

sponsored by cathedral featuring sacred music and music for organ

Nov. 7 Doborján/Sopron

see Table 2.1

Nov. 8 Budapest Philharmonic’s fi rst subscription concert featuring the Dante Symphony

Nov. 11 Eger celebration in city theater mixed program: lecture, piano pieces, songs, melodrama, unspecifi ed rhapsody, chorus: “Tu es Petrus”

Nov. 15 Budapest Buda Music School’s fi rst orchestral concert mixed program: Angelus from Christmas Oratorio , Les préludes for two pianos, Romance oubliée for cello and piano, songs, 13th Psalm

Nov. 19 Budapest Royal Opera House Die Legende von der heiligen Elisabeth (for St. Elisabeth’s Day)

Nov. 19 Pozsony [now Bratislava]

Coronation Mass

21 Requiem for men’s choir 23 “Grand concert”: arrangements of Hungarian

national anthems, Festklänge , “Gretchen” from Faust , Mephisto Waltz #1, Rákóczi March

26 Mass for the Esztergom Cathedral Nov. 27 Kolozsvár [now

Cluj] celebration at the Kolozsvár Music Conservatory mixed program: lecture, Tasso , Mephisto , unspecifi ed rhapsody, Benedictus from Coronation Mass


great advocate of his homeland, however, and the biographical evidence for his Hungarianness was in fact mixed. He was born in the German-speaking village of Raiding on the western edge of historical Hungary in 1811. Despite the Hungarian spelling of his family name, Liszt grew up speaking German, as did many resi-dents of this border region. 10 He left Hungary at age eleven to study in Vienna with Czerny and Salieri, then embarked on the life of the touring virtuoso, with his home base in Paris. He did not return to Hungary for seventeen years.

To be sure, it would have been impossible for Liszt to develop his talents fully in early nineteenth-century Hungary, as musical life there was still not as developed as in Western Europe. Th e twin cities of Pest-Buda held concerts only occasionally until the Vigadó (Redoute) concert hall was opened in 1833 and regular seasons of concerts began there and at the National Casino in 1834. Opportunities for music education were also limited early in the century; the fi rst quasi- comprehensive institution of music education was the Hangászegyleti Énekiskola (Singing School of the Society of Musicians), which opened in 1840 with Liszt’s support. 11 Until these developments, no musicians who hoped for international careers stayed in Hungary past childhood.

An anonymous author writing in an 1834 issue of Honművész (Native artist) lamented Liszt’s long absence from home, but blamed Hungarian society, partic-ularly its elite, for failing to foster the young pianist as both artist and patriot:

Has his homeland shown any considerable partiality to him? While the seed could still be seen in him, did any among his fellow countrymen support him properly, in such a way that he could have lived off of that assistance and could have perfected himself either in his homeland or abroad . . . . Does not the child who is sent away by his parents, and whom a compassionate stranger nurtures, raises, educates and shapes into a person, lose every fi lial feeling toward his merciless parent and instead embrace his guardian with fi lial love? As the parents and children are in a family, the fatherland and its sons [pa-triots] are in society. Now Liszt is not even Liszt any longer, but Lists, which the French say as “Liczcz.” 12

10. In Hungarian, “Liszt” means “fl our.” Th e family was apparently of German extraction, though, only acquiring the “z” that marks the name as Hungarian in the late eighteenth cen-tury ( WFL 1 , xviii–xxi). Walker correctly points out that many patriotic Hungarians of Liszt’s time, including Count István Széchenyi and the Eszterházy princes, were not native speakers of Hungarian ( WFL 1 , 48–49).

11. See Legány, “Budapest,” 547. Th e Singing School was founded by the Pestbudai Hangásze-gyesület [the Pest-Buda Society of Musicians]; its fi rst director was musicologist Gábor Mátray. Both the Society and Mátray reappear later in this story. Th e School was renamed the Nemzeti Zenede [National Conservatory] aft er the Ausgleich , but many musicians and critics felt that the Conservatory should be complemented by a more advanced institution, so they lobbied for the creation of the Academy of Music.

12. Cited by Fabó, “Liszt Ferenc visszamagyarosodása” [Ferenc Liszt’s re-Hungarianization], 288.


When Liszt demonstrated his reawakened commitment to his homeland in response to the 1838 fl oods, the Hungarian elite—then consumed by a passion for national reform in almost every aspect of society—naturally hoped to co-opt this favored native son to their cause. In late 1839, when he was back in Vienna, he accepted the invitation that Count Festetics had extended the previous year. By October the Hungarian press began to anticipate his arrival; when illness delayed him, Honművész , which happened to be edited by the secretary of the Society of Musicians, Gábor Mátray, not only remarked on it but published the entire text of Liszt’s letter to Festetics informing him of this news. 13 Aft er three successful per-formances in Pozsony, Liszt proceeded to Pest accompanied by a “caravane aris-tocratique” consisting of Counts Festetics and a handful of other aristocratic music lovers. 14 According to the travelogue of Englishwoman Julia Pardoe, Liszt’s impending arrival stirred not only the nobility, the press, and music lovers but also the tradesmen of Pest into activity:

Every Hotel prepared a suite of rooms in the fond hope that theirs might be the proud roof destined to shelter him; print-sellers sent to Vienna for engraved portraits of all dimensions of their gift ed countryman; extempora-neous antiquaries made researches to verify his genealogy; and even the pas-trycooks [ sic ], unwilling to be excelled in a patriotism which, moreover, promised to be very profi table, invented a new description of sponge-biscuits, shaped like a grand piano, and graced with the name of “Liszt” in spun sugar. At length he really came . . . . Daylight had no sooner merged into night than he was greeted by a serenade—and such a serenade! Nothing out of Germany could be compared to it. 15

Th e Hungarian public praised “the fellow feeling with which [Liszt] met his compatriots, all with the highest nobility”; 16 meanwhile, civic authorities every-where he went eagerly and ceremonially embraced their famous, if long-absent, compatriot, and capitalized on his presence to promote national feeling: “Th e cities of Pest and Sopron named him their honorary citizen, the county of Sopron asked for a patent of nobility for him, and in Pest, with great solemnity, a sword [or saber] of honor was presented to him: a souvenir from the martial race, to its noble-hearted and world-famous son.” 17 Th e conclusion H. and Imre Vahót drew in their 1854 Hungarian biography of Liszt, which focused on the composer’s Hungarian activities and especially his 1839–1840 tour of Hungary, was that Liszt

13. Honművész 97 (December 5, 1839), 775.

14. WFL 1 , 321.

15. Th e City of the Magyar , 345–346.

16. H. and Imre Vahót, “Liszt Ferenc,” 95.

17. H. and Imre Vahót, “Liszt Ferenc,” 95. Th e pursuit of a patent of nobility for Liszt was ultimately unsuccessful.


recognizes and honors his nation in front of the entire world. We moreover are proud that Liszt is our native son, our brother; and he is prouder still that he was born a Hungarian,—which he succeeds in expressing most beauti-fully in his electrifying performance of the Rákoczy-March etc. 18

Th e presentation of the saber, in particular, became “one of the most famous episodes of [Liszt’s] career” 19 and the saber became a symbol of Liszt’s links to the Hungarian nation, not only in the Vahóts’ biography but also in many other com-mentaries written by both Hungarian and non-Hungarian authors. In his 1911 article, Bertalan Fabó highlighted the concert at the National Th eater in January 1840 as the occasion on which Liszt got to know the Hungarian nation as “more than magnates, the noble class, the patrons: [there] he saw an audience of thou-sands, Hungarians, those burning for Hungarianness.” 20

But the depictions by Fabó and the Vahóts of this trip as an unalloyed triumph for the Hungarian nation and the Hungarian Liszt gloss over the mixed meaning of the trip, and of Liszt’s national identity both in Hungary and abroad. Th ough Liszt repeatedly emphasized his Hungarian identity, both his supporters and his critics noted not only his French manners but also his lack of facility in the Hun-garian language. His language limitations became particularly problematic during the saber ceremony. Liszt could perhaps have given his acceptance speech in Ger-man, which most of his audience would have understood; but given that the rai-son d’être of the National Th eater was to replace German with Hungarian as the language of high culture in Hungary, the use of German was forbidden on its stage. Th us Liszt off ered his thanks in French. In this way, as Dana Gooley writes, “At the moment the Hungarians were most trying to bring him inside their coun-try, his alien qualities revealed themselves most fully.” 21

Not only did Liszt’s language insuffi ciencies during this event call his Hungar-ian identity into question, but they came at a time when the issue of language—particularly in Pest-Buda—was on everyone’s mind. Th is city, the site of the famous saber incident, was developing rapidly and embracing its unoffi cial status as the cultural capital of Hungary; yet linguistically and ethnically it was decidedly less Hungarian than the country overall. According to the estimate of one contempo-rary statistician, only a fi ft h of the city’s population was ethnically Hungarian, so that, in the words of Baron Frigyes Podmaniczky (1822–1887), “If a Magyar came


19. Gooley, Th e Virtuoso Liszt , 129.

20. Fabó, “Liszt visszamagyarosodása,” 290. Th ough Liszt may have connected with the Hun-garian masses during this event, those with whom he associated the most during this trip were members of the Hungarian nobility, in particular “the president of the Pest Music So-ciety, Count Leó Festetics, [who] hospitably opened his home to him for the duration of his sojourn” (Schober, Briefe , 27).

21. See Gooley, Th e Virtuoso Liszt , 133.


to Pest and did not know German, he was lost.” 22 In Habsburg Central Europe, “to be urban . . . was by defi nition to be ‘German,’ a capacious category defi ned by education, social status, and language rather than by ethnicity or origins.” 23 Th is was the situation that the cultural leaders of Reform Era Hungary sought to change: to further native Hungarian economic, civic, and cultural development, with the eventual goal of greater self-determination and equality of Hungary with other European nations.

As noted in Chapter 1 , both the reform and the propagation of the Hungarian language were central to the advances sought by political leaders and cultural fi gures of the time. Yet while many embraced Magyarization as the duty of every patriot, a smaller number of German speakers resisted the “blind, benighted pas-sion” of “Magyar-mania” 24 —whether because of distaste for the extremes of the movement or dismay over their own displacement and that of their culture. Th e account of Liszt’s 1839–1840 trip to Hungary by Franz von Schober, an Austrian poet who frequented the same Hungarian aristocratic circles as Liszt, represents those views, expressing his scorn for the “race-pride” and “patriotic enthusiasm” of the Hungarians and for their short-sightedness in “abandon[ing] the great lyric poet Lenau, the genial Beck . . . who are all Hungarians—because they wrote in German”; meanwhile, Schober pointedly reminded his readers, “the German language is also the language of that nation on which Hungary is in a manner of speaking dependent, for her king himself belongs to it.” 25 In relating how Liszt accepted the saber “with French tongue, but Hungarian heart—with a toast to the advancement of the Fatherland” 26 —Schober was also emphasizing that those who did not know the national language could also be Hungarian patriots. Given the ascendance of the idea of the culture nation in the nineteenth century, however, he was fi ghting a losing battle.

22. Cited by Nemes, Th e Once and Future Budapest , 208 and 101, respectively.

23. Nemes, Th e Once and Future Budapest , 15.

24. Nemes, Th e Once and Future Budapest , 73, citing István Fried, “Haza, állam, nemzet” [Homeland, state, nation], 250.

25. Schober, Briefe , 22–23. Schober (1796–1882) was a close friend of Schubert in the fi rst part of the nineteenth century and provided texts to several of his songs, plus the libretto to Schubert’s opera Alfonso und Estrella (1821–1822); he moved to Hungary in 1839, where he served as a member of the household for aristocratic families, namely, Brunswick, Erd ő dy, and Festetics (the household that hosted Liszt in 1839–1840) (Mária Eckhardt, “Franz von Schober,” 71). Th ough Schober clearly found Magyar fanaticism distasteful at best, he was not anti-Hungarian, and in fact he provided the poem “Aus Osten aus der Sonne Tor” that Liszt set as his cantata Hungaria , a piece for soloists, male choir, orchestra, and piano which was fi rst planned in 1842 and fi nished in 1848. Th is work was not performed until 1912, in the aft ermath of the 1911 centennial celebration, and was not published until its inclusion in the Editio Musica Budapest collected edition in 1961.

Gooley, Th e Virtuoso Liszt , 137, also cites Schober’s Briefe .

26. Schober, Briefe , 32.


Outside Hungary, the “saber incident” and the reports of Liszt parading through the streets of Pest in “dress Hungarian” seemed more a backward oddity than an aff ront. Viennese journalists dismissed the gesture as the insignifi cant act of a small number of “ enthusiastic admirers ” (italics in original), while Parisian critics viewed the presentation of the saber not as a noble expression of patriotism but as “bizarre and distasteful.” 27 For the music press around Europe, Liszt’s Hungarian saber of honor became an object of ridicule, an emblem both of backward pom-posity and chauvinistic nationalism. Liszt himself acknowledged obliquely the likelihood of such a reception in a letter to Marie d’Agoult dated January 6, 1840, that is otherwise fi lled with superlatives: “You cannot imagine the seriousness, the grave and profound impression of this scene, which, anywhere else, would have been ridiculous, and which could easily have become so here, at least for a certain malicious minority.” 28

To the elite of Paris, any nationalist fervor—not just Hungarian—might have been seen as provincial and backward. German nationalism was also potentially threatening, given the ongoing disputes over the Rhine territories; and in Ger-many, as in Hungary, Liszt was willingly co-opted by nationalist forces. In the fall of 1841, at the invitation of the Cologne singing society, Liszt gave concerts in the Rhineland for the benefi t of the reconstruction of the Cologne cathedral, the most important cathedral in Germany and a major national and cultural symbol. From that time through 1842 and into 1843, Liszt appeared oft en in Germany, on occasion playing for the benefi t of two important national musical causes, me-morials to Beethoven and Mozart, and oft en accompanied by members of singing societies. Two 1841 compositions inspired by those singing societies set nationalist texts, “Das deutsche Vaterland” and the Rheinweinlied , both of which included anti-French sentiments. 29 French critics became more and more suspi-cious of Liszt as news reached them of his repeated performances of “Das deut-sche Vaterland” and the rapturous responses of his German audiences to those performances.

As the French music public debated where Liszt’s loyalties lay, Liszt’s strategic Germanness 30 convinced patrons in Germany, most notably the ruling family of the Grand Duchy of Sachse-Weimar-Eisenach, to off er him a post. It was aft er he moved to Weimar that he wrote most of the works that made his reputation as not “only” a pianist, but also a composer—a composer whom leading critic Franz Brendel labeled one of the leading members of the “New German School”: “it is

27. Gooley, Th e Virtuoso Liszt , 130, 141.

28. WFL 1 , 330, citing Daniel Ollivier (ed.), Correspondance , 351–352.

29. Gooley, Th e Virtuoso Liszt , 168–189. Gooley dissects the public enthusiasm for Liszt in Berlin in particular in his chapter 5 , “Anatomy of ‘Lisztomania’: Th e Berlin Episode.”

30. Dana Gooley documents Liszt’s shift in manners and attitude in fascinating detail in Th e Virtuoso Liszt , 156–164 and 173–179. Of particular note are Liszt’s remarks in letters to Ma-rie d’Agoult about his strategic use of nationalism, that is, how he was “pushing hard for this Germanic appearance” (Ibid., 187).


common knowledge that [he] took Beethoven as [his] point of departure and so is German as to [his] origins . . . [he] would never have become what [he is] today had [he] not from the fi rst drawn nourishment from the German spirit and grown strong with it.” 31 Th e organization to which Brendel fi rst made these comments later became the Allgemeine Deutsche Musikverein, which Liszt served as its fi rst president. 32 In this context, especially given the German origin and orientation of so many early musicologists, it is not unexpected that Liszt became known to most as a quasi-German composer.

Yet even as he became increasingly associated with Germany, keeping his primary residence there from roughly 1848 to 1861, he also continued and developed his asso-ciations with Hungarian fi gures and institutions. Proceeds from one of his 1840 con-certs had supported the founding of the Singing School of the Pest-Buda Society of Musicians, unoffi cially known as the National Conservatory (Nemzeti Zenede), with Mátray as its fi rst director; during his extended tour of Hungary and Transylvania in 1846, in addition to playing many concerts and raising funds for the support of the Conservatory and other charities, he was hosted by various noble members of the Society of Musicians and corresponded with them, sometimes even in Hungarian, about the progress of the Conservatory. 33 Th ough he stayed away in the aft ermath of the fall of the 1848–1849 Hungarian Revolution, in 1855 he accepted a commission from an old acquaintance, János Scitovszky (1785–1866), newly elected the Primate of Hungary, to compose a mass for the consecration of the new basilica at Esztergom (known as Gran in German). Liszt conducted two open rehearsals of the mass in the National Museum in Pest plus the consecration performance in Esztergom in August 1856 in an environment fi lled with “fl ags, gala costumes, state carriages, triumphal arches, and crowds of people,” notably including Emperor Franz Joseph. 34

In 1862, while Liszt was living in Rome, the board of the Conservatory invited him to return to Pest, 35 and though the time was not yet right for Liszt to establish residence in Hungary, it was the beginning of a courtship. Later that year he began

31. In Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 50 (1859), 271–272; quotation from translation in Weiss and Taruskin (eds.), Music in the Western World , 384. Also discussed in James Deaville, “Th e Allgemeine Deutsche Musikverein,” 482–483. Brendel’s original text referred to Berlioz as well as Liszt, but Berlioz distanced himself from the “music of the future,” while Liszt was intimately involved with it.

32. See WFL 2 , 511.

33. See WFL 1 , 429–439, and Legány, “Liszt in Hungary, 1820–1846,” 3–16, for descriptions of this tour. Major’s “Liszt Ferenc magyarsága” [Ferenc Liszt’s Hungarianness], 193–198, de-tails the endowments Liszt granted to the Society and reproduces in facsimile Hungarian-language letters concerning the development of the conservatory. Some of these letters are signed by Liszt but written in another hand, but Liszt wrote one in 1846 to Baron József Eötvös, president of the Singing Society at that time, “in his own hand in Hungarian from beginning to end” (ibid., 195).

34. Legány, “Liszt in Hungary, 1848–1867,” 6, citing Hölgyfutár , September 2, 1856.

35. Major, “Liszt Ferenc magyarsága,” 198.


writing an oratorio on the life of a Hungarian-born saint, Die Legende von der hei-ligen Elisabeth , into the score of which he incorporated plainchants of Hungarian origin for the Feast of St. Elizabeth and a seventeenth-century Hungarian-language song “To Saint Elizabeth” that he had requested and received from Gábor Mátray; aft er fi nishing the piece, he wrote to composer Mihály Mosonyi that he hoped it would “form an integral contribution to a new Hungarian musical literature .” 36 Despite the fact that he wrote the piece to a German libretto, it was performed fi rst in Hungarian, in a translation by pianist and writer Kornél Ábrányi (1822–1903), in August 1865, the year that also marked the twenty-fi ft h anniversary of the founding of the National Conservatory, in the recently opened Pest Vigadó (or Redoute) con-cert hall. 37 Despite the fact that its chromatic “Music of the Future” harmonic language was not easily accessible to some listeners, Pest’s musical public embraced the oratorio, in large part because of its namesake, the beloved “Magyaromaniac” Empress Elisabeth. 38 As relations between the Hungarian elite and Vienna improved, Liszt again responded to a personal appeal to compose a Mass for a major occasion—the coronation of Emperor Franz Joseph as King of Hungary to seal the Ausgleich in 1867; when in Pest-Buda to conduct his mass at the coronation, Liszt was “a crowd hero . . . fêted with emotional ovations everywhere he went.” 39

When political and military events in Germany and Italy drove Liszt to Hun-gary in 1870, his countrymen once again welcomed him happily, securing him an appointment as Royal Hungarian Councillor in order to tie him more closely to the Hungarian cause. Aft er a lengthy campaign, 40 Hungarian statesmen, musicians,

36. Mentioned in Liszt’s September 1862 letter to Mihály Mosonyi, included in Frederick Martens’ translation in Béla Bartók, “Two Unpublished Liszt Letters to Mosonyi,” 524. Italics in original. Th is article is also included in BBE , 481–487.

37. WFL 3 , 91.

38. Freifeld, Nationalism and the Crowd , 208.


40. In an 1862 letter, Liszt writes that he recently received a “very friendly letter, in the name of the Pest Conservatory, and signed by the Baron Pronay, in which I am invited to visit Pest” (Bartók, “Two Unpublished Letters,” 525). Liszt goes on to excuse himself for his inability to visit at that point, detailing his many responsibilities in Rome and Weimar, but also states that “Possibly, however, sooner or later, something will turn up—perhaps a task like that involved in the Gran Mass—which would once more bring me nearer to Hungary. Th en I will gladly come (to Pest), and can promise you that I shall bring along no worthless occasional music” (idem). During an 1869 concert of Liszt’s music, as Liszt himself mounted the po-dium to conduct a performance of the Coronation Mass , a delegation of musicians including composer and conductor Ferenc Erkel (1810–1893), violinist Ede Reményi (1828–1898), and Kornél Ábrányi Sr. (1822–1903) presented Liszt with a laurel wreath, and Ábrányi made a brief speech asking Liszt to remain in Hungary (Legány, Liszt and His Country, 1869–1873 , 34). In 1871, Count Gyula Andrássy, the Hungarian prime minister, secured for Liszt an appointment from the Emperor as “Hungarian Royal Councillor” with a 4000-forint annual stipend (ibid., 109). Legany’s book includes many other details of the linkage between the twin campaigns in the late 1860s and early 1870s to establish the Academy of Music and to secure both Liszt’s assistance in running it and his continuing presence in the country.


and critics including Ábrányi persuaded Liszt to throw his considerable weight behind the opening of a full-fl edged conservatory on the German model, one more comprehensive than the National Conservatory. When the Academy of Music opened with Liszt as honorary president, he then became, and arguably still is, the most famous member of the faculty. Liszt continued to practice a “national and cultural eclecticism”—also in 1870, as mentioned earlier, he had composed a cantata in honor of the centennial of Beethoven’s birth, which was celebrated in the triumphant context of German unifi cation. 41 Budapest was only one of the parts of his “tripartite life,” along with Weimar and Rome. Yet many members of the Hungarian musical public overlooked Liszt’s part-time status and welcomed his leadership of this important new institution as his “exchange of a German identity for a Magyar one”; his residencies in Budapest were events, beginning with “regal-like arrivals . . . accompanied by festive receptions at the railroad station.” 42 When the Academy of Music found permanent quarters in Vörösmarty Street, its facilities included an apartment for Liszt. By the early twen-tieth century, the Academy had outgrown this building too, and in 1907 it moved into its current location on, naturally, Ferenc Liszt Square (Liszt Ferenc tér). 43

Given Liszt’s lengthy investment in Hungarian musical institutions along with his Hungarian birth, many Hungarian musicians may fi nd it irksome to see writers from the early nineteenth through the early twenty-fi rst centuries count Liszt as German, or to read that “the notion that Liszt was Hungarian . . . must not be taken too seriously.” 44 But Liszt’s catholic approach to nationality, at least in part to please his audience, resulted in a store of biographical evidence that allow us to interpret Liszt as both Hungarian and German—among other nationalities. Orga-nizers of the 1911 centennial celebrations in various places had the task of con-structing the kind of Liszt they wished, in particular as regarded his nationality.

Germany and Hungary took rather diff erent approaches, however, to their re-spective commemorations, as viewed through the music press of the time. Over the course of the nineteenth century, German critics and scholars had ascribed to German composers the unique ability to create music that was intellectually rigorous and aesthetically pure, not merely beautiful but instead sublime and spiritual—a “modern art of ‘subjective introspection.’” 45 Th ese standards, symbol-ized by the canon of German composers like Bach and Beethoven, were accepted in art music scenes throughout the world.

41. Ryan Minor, “Prophet and Populace,” 158.


43. Th e school itself was renamed the Liszt Ferenc Zeneművészeti F ő iskola [Ferenc Liszt High School of Musical Art] in 1925, to commemorate the fi ft ieth anniversary of its opening and Liszt’s role in its establishment. Th en and now, it is commonly referred to as the Zeneaka-démia [Music Academy].

44. Rehding, “Liszt’s Musical Monuments,” 66. Rehding also cites Berlioz as referring to “Spohr and Liszt, both of them Germans” [idem., citing Evenings with the Orchestra , 331].

45. Bernd Sponheuer, “Reconstructing Ideal Types of the ‘German’ in Music,” 55.


German discourse at the time of the centennial generally placed Liszt’s works within this modern, universal canon, perhaps with a passing nod to his Hungar-ian origins. At least one German author did assert that Liszt, despite what the Hungarians might claim, was more German than Hungarian; 46 the Liszt issues in the Neue Zeitschrift der Musik of 1911, however—probably the leading German music periodical of its time—did not try to prove that Liszt or his music are German. For the most part, they simply ignored evidence to the contrary. Arthur Liebscher’s “Franz Liszt, was er seinen Zeitgenossen war” (Franz Liszt, what he was to his contemporaries), the lead article in the issue immediately before the centennial, is a good example. Liebscher wrote about Liszt almost exclusively in the German context but did not call attention to this fact; Liszt’s signifi cance to German music was a matter of course that emerged from his residence in Weimar, his role in the Allgemeine Deutsche Musikverein, and his signifi cance to the New German School, while Liszt’s activities in other countries, particularly Hungary, were merely absent. 47 Th e Germans’ strategies did not go unnoticed by the Hun-garian music press: as one Hungarian critic noted, “Supposing Liszt was not Hun-garian, the Germans have not yet dared to assert that he was German—rather they arrange the thing with the labels ‘cosmopolitan,’ ‘citizen of the world.’ In a word, according to them, Liszt, as an individual, was not Hungarian either.” 48 Along with this press strategy, the monumental works of Liszt scholarship that appeared around the fi n de siècle, particularly Lina Ramann’s multivolume biog-raphy and Gesammelte Schrift en and the edition of Liszt’s collected works inaugu-rated by Breitkopf & Härtel a few years before the centennial, implicitly made Liszt an honorary German.

Hungary, by contrast with Germany, was known in international art music not primarily for the intellectual rigor and spiritual depth of its composers but for the “Hungarian style.” Liszt, like other composers of concert music before and aft er him, both Hungarians such as Ferenc Erkel (1810–1893) and Mihály Mosonyi (1815–1870) and non-Hungarians like Schubert and Brahms, marked musical Hungarianness using a common lexicon of rhythmic, melodic, and ornamental fi gures that grew out of the repertoire played by popular Hungarian-Gypsy bands. (Th is lexicon was discussed briefl y in Chapter 1 ; its rhythmic component is exam-ined more extensively in Chapter 4 .) Though Erkel and Mosonyi achieved a

46. Th e anonymous writer of a biographical article opened his piece with this statement: “Th e Hungarians endeavor on the occasion of the centennial to stake a claim on Franz Liszt as their compatriot. According to his mode of thinking and his outlook on life, one could most aptly term him a cosmopolitan. But by parentage and descent he was a German, who never denied his origins” (“Lisztiana,” 584). Th is piece quickly reviews the complicated national web of Liszt’s family history, including a mention of the recent change of the spelling of the family name from List to Liszt, Liszt’s German mother, his acceptance of a knighthood from the Austrian government in 1859, and the mixed French and German origins, names, and associations of his children, before launching into the rest of his biography.

47. “Franz Liszt, was er seinen Zeitgenossen war,” 566–570.

48. “Liszt származása” [Liszt’s origin], 222.


modicum of international recognition, no Hungarian composer (except the prob-lematic Liszt) was as well known as the Hungarian-Gypsy style, whose very pop-ularity made it less prestigious. Th e newness of Hungary’s musical institutions and the continuing prominence of Austro-German fi gures in the country’s mu-sical life posed additional challenges. Th e Hungarian Liszt celebrations of 1911 were driven less by the desire to solidify Liszt’s place in a universal canon than by the need to remind both Hungarians and international observers of the impor-tance of Liszt’s Hungarian origins and activities, and to demonstrate the high quality and cosmopolitan character of Hungary’s music scene.

Th e catalogue of the Liszt memorial exhibition presented by the Hungarian National Museum for the centennial, published in both Hungarian and German, illustrates some of the ways these diff erent goals manifested themselves in the way artifacts were displayed. A handful of items described in the catalogue demon-strate Liszt’s role in French and (Austro-)German musical life, such as caricatures of Liszt that appeared in French and German publications in the early part of his career, a silver laurel wreath presented to Liszt by the Allgemeine Deutsche Musikverein for the fi ft ieth anniversary of the beginning of that career, and a small bronze copy of the Vienna Beethoven monument Liszt received in 1877 in thanks for his eff orts on its behalf. 49 Th e vast majority of items in this exhibition, though, illustrate Liszt’s status as a Hungarian artist and his role in Hungarian musical life.

D’Isoz underlined Liszt’s Hungarian identity from the very beginning of the catalogue, reproducing Miklós Barabás’ 1847 portrait of Liszt in a Hungarian-style coat above his signature in Hungarian order and spelling, “Liszt Ferencz,” opposite the title page. 50 Also displayed in the exhibition were dozens of letters from Liszt to Hungarian musicians and patrons touching on Liszt’s activities in Hungary and several manuscripts and fi rst editions of compositions, almost all of them works on Hungarian topics, or what d’Isoz more simply called “Hungarian compositions.” Th ese included Liszt’s settings of Erkel’s Hymnus and Egressy’s Szózat (Hungary’s primary and secondary national anthems); the Heroischer Marsch in ungarischen Styl ; a few diff erent csárdáses; works memorializing two leading Hungarian cultural fi gures, poet Sándor Pet ő fi and composer/music critic Mihály Mosonyi; and selections from the Hungarian Rhapsodies, including no fewer than fi ve versions of the Rákoczi March, from original autographs of both piano and orchestral versions to an incipit included in a letter to a colleague in Belgium. 51 Next to these documents of Liszt’s creative embrace of his Hungarian identity were artifacts of Hungarian leaders’ embrace of Liszt: among others, a

49. See d’Isoz, Katalog , 15–16, 36–38. Unlike the Hungarian-language version of d’Isoz’s catalogue, Magyar Nemzeti Múzeum: A Liszt Ferencz emlékkiállitás lajstroma , the German edition includes an introduction with acknowledgments about the source of the artifacts in-cluded in the exhibition; otherwise the two versions diff er only in language and layout.

50. D’Isoz, Katalog , frontispiece.

51. D’Isoz, Katalog , 19–20, 26–28.


silver laurel wreath presented by the Pest National Singing Circle (Pesti N. Dalkör), a gold and silver vessel presented by Count and Countess Festetics, a golden goblet “To the famous artist from the ladies of his homeland,” and perhaps most important the famous “saber of honor.” 52 Of course, this exhibition could most easily draw on Hungarian collections of artifacts and expected a mostly Hungarian audience; in all likelihood the curator, Kálmán d’Isoz, was off ering his public what it was most interested in. Lest we doubt that the exhibit implied a national and nationalist narrative, however, d’Isoz’s own comments about the ex-hibition (cited in the second epigraph to this chapter), that the artifacts assembled represent Liszt’s own defense against those who would doubt his Hungarianness, contrast strikingly with the lack of comment on national issues in German docu-ments of the centennial.

Liszt’s Hungarian identity and “Hungarian” compositions were also at the cen-ter of many of the centennial concerts and related events in 1911. Events in and around Liszt’s birthplace in the western Hungarian village of Doborján (formerly Raiding), for example, used Liszt as the central icon in a patriotic pageant. At the grand opening of the museum at Liszt’s birthplace in March 1911, journalist Alajos Halmos called for the “Hungarian nation” to “hurry to Doborján, gaze with pious devotion at the village, . . . the birth house, and at everything that harbors the memory of your celebrated son.” 53 Th e centennial commemoration on November 7 in Doborján and the nearby city of Sopron contained all one might expect of the solemnifi cation of a national idol. Pupils from Sopron were taken out of classes to join the pilgrimage to Liszt’s birthplace. As on a saint’s feast day, Mass was cele-brated, then the party went in solemn procession from church to museum. Aft er the pilgrims had signed the guest book and viewed the relics, including the very bed in which Liszt was born, a special train conveyed them back to Sopron, where the festivities continued. Representatives from the county, the city, and various musical societies and school groups placed wreaths at the Liszt statue, and the Sopron Men’s Singing Circle (Soproni Férfi dalkör) Hungary’s two anthems, the Himnusz and the Szózat. Th at evening works of Liszt were played at a gala concert in the great hall of the city casino, on the site of the building in which Liszt had given his fi rst public recital as an eleven-year-old prodigy. 54

Both the religious and quasi-religious events of this celebration and the language with which they are described indicate to us the high esteem, bordering on idolatry, in which the Hungarian public held Liszt. By imagining Liszt’s birth-place as a pilgrimage shrine, both the organizers of these events and Halmos, who

52. D’Isoz, Katalog , 31–32, 34–35. Th e Rákoczi March is a tune associated with the early eighteenth-century rebellion that Prince Ferenc Rákoczi II led against the Habsburgs; in a quotation cited earlier, Vahót singled out Liszt’s performances of this tune as “electrifying.”

53. In his “Liszt Ferencz emlékezete” [Remembrance of Ferencz Liszt], 2.

54. Th e events in Doborján and Sopron are recounted by Alajos Halmos in two short arti-cles, “A Liszt-múzeum felavatása Doborjánban” [Th e grand opening of the Liszt Museum in Doborján] and “Liszt emlékezete Sopronban” [Liszt commemoration in Sopron]. Th e Casino building in which Liszt actually made his debut burned down in 1834 ( WFL 1 , 68).


reported on them, aimed to make “peripheral” Hungary, and specifi cally this even more peripheral village, into a center. 55 For the brief period surrounding the cen-tennial, they argued, the proper observance of Liszt’s memory demanded that attention be paid to this generally irrelevant place.

Th e appeal of this celebration, however, was made almost exclusively to Hun-garians on the basis of patriotism, and the repertoire chosen for the evening con-cert refl ected this emphasis. In the border region where Liszt was born, perhaps as a metaphorical guard against claims from the neighboring Austrians on this territory and from the Germans on this composer, the Liszt festival concert in Sopron on November 7, 1911, prominently featured some of Liszt’s most obviously “Hungarian” works: it began with his orchestral arrangements of the Himnusz and Szózat and ended with that most militaristic of the Hungarian Rhapsodies, the one based on the Rákóczi March. 56

In contrast with the overtly nationalist tone, small scope, and perhaps provin-cial character of the Liszt events in Doborján and Sopron, the festivities in the Hungarian capital of Budapest were decidedly cosmopolitan and grand in scale. Instead of just one day of events, there were fi ve, from October 21 to 25—a day longer even than the Heidelberg festivities—and events featured many dignitaries both domestic and foreign. Th e Budapest festival off ered the opportunity to show off this rapidly growing modern city and all its Lisztian associations: the Royal Academy of Music, where Liszt had been the fi rst president; the Matthias Church, where Liszt had conducted the premiere of the Coronation Mass; and the 1884 opera house, whose doors were fl anked by statues of Liszt and Ferenc Erkel. Th e Budapest musical establishment strove to put its best foot forward for its interna-tional audience, and by claiming Liszt it implicitly declared Budapest and Hun-gary a modern part of the mainstream of European art music.

Like the organizers and participants in Doborján and Sopron, the organizers in Budapest imagined their Liszt festival in part as a pilgrimage. Two gala piano re-citals on October 22 and 23 in the great hall of the new Music Academy building brought together the “congregation of the Master in the Liszt Hall of the Royal Academy of Music, where a goodly number of the most famous students of the Immortal One brought a catechism of the choicest piano works of his composi-tion.” 57 Th is pilgrimage, like that to Liszt’s birthplace, attempts to reconfi gure

55. As Philip Bohlman puts it in his essay “Pilgrimage, Politics, and the Musical Remapping of the New Europe,” 381, “the conceptual pair [of ‘center’ and ‘periphery’] quite accurately describes the geography of pilgrimage, in which a single shrine inevitably possesses the cen-tripetalizing power of a center. Th e sacredness of the shrine, moreover, eliminates the diff er-ences of those from diff erent parts of the periphery or from diff erent peripheries altogether, for it is the nature of the experience at the sacred center that this experience ultimately may be, sometimes must be, shared by all.”

56. Halmos, “Liszt emlékezete Sopronban,” 2.

57. Dr. Eduard Ritter v. Liszt, “Epilog zur Liszt-Zentennarfeier,” 5. Th e author was Liszt’s fi rst cousin.


Hungary, which many guests surely still thought of as the Wild East, as a center of European musical life. But where both the Sopron concert and the memorial ex-hibition at the National Museum emphasized Liszt’s musical Hungarianness through presentation of “national” repertoire, overtly “national” pieces in the fi ve days of concerts in Budapest consisted of exactly two rhapsodies buried in these piano evenings, neither of them played by a Hungarian, plus the Coronation Mass and Die Legende von der heiligen Elisabeth . 58 Th is program off ered no more “Hun-garian” repertoire than could be heard in Weimar, where Hungaria led off an orchestral concert on October 23, and the Coronation Mass and Elisabeth were performed on the evenings of October 25 and 24, respectively. 59

Instead of (over)emphasizing the national, the Budapest festival highlighted large-scale works indicative of Liszt’s contribution to the “Music of the Future.” To remind the public of Liszt’s role, and thus Hungary’s role, at the forefront of music history, organizers engaged Siegfried Wagner, Richard Wagner’s son and Liszt’s grandson, to lead the concert on October 24, 1911. As shown in Table 2.1 , he led a performance in the Royal Opera House of Liszt’s Piano Concerto in E-fl at, with one of Liszt’s most distinguished disciples, German pianist Sophie Menter, as soloist; his setting of Psalm XIII; and the Faust Symphony . As Table 2.1 also shows, this last work and two others featured in the Budapest festival—the oratorio Th e Legend of St. Elisabeth –were also cornerstones of the Liszt festivals in Weimar and Heidelberg. Th ree of the large-scale works featured in the Budapest centennial concerts, the two masses and Th e Legend of St. Elisabeth , all were Hungarian in origin, the Masses emerging from landmark events in Hungarian history (the 1856 consecration of the cathedral at Gran, known as Esztergom in Hungarian, and the 1867 crowning of Habsburg Emperor Franz Joseph as the King of Hun-gary) and Elisabeth telling the story of a Hungarian-born saint; yet to non- Hungarian audiences, the Hungarian origins of the Gran/Esztergom Mass were somewhat obscured by the German name by which the piece was known outside of Hungary, and in Germany, many associated Elisabeth more with her German life and deeds than her Hungarian birth. Th ough Elisabeth and the Coronation Mass both feature sections that are clearly marked by “Hungarian” musical

Several Hungarian authors writing about the Liszt commemoration also used sacralizing language to describe the events or to exhort the Hungarian public to take part; to give but one example, Dezs ő Járosy described those same piano evenings as “his virtuoso students animat[ing] the spirit of the master” and concluded his commemorative article by calling to the “ Genius of Liszt ” to “ inspire Hungarian music culture, so that it may be worthy of your great national legacy! ” (in “Liszt Ferenc,” 2; italics in original).

58. Th e most complete sources of programming for these events that I have found are the unsigned articles “Az országos Liszt-ünnepélyek,” 239–243; and “Th e Franz Liszt Centenary Celebration at Budapest,” 5–9. Th ough the title of the Hungarian article provides incorrect dates, the body of the article does refer to the correct October dates. A less detailed account of the events appears as “Liszt Ferencz jubileumi ünneplése,” 1.

59. “Zu Ehren Liszts: Weimar,” 612.


characteristics, 60 neither they nor the Gran/Esztergom Mass are as dominated by the “Hungarian” style as the Rhapsodies; through their chromatic musical language, their sacred texts in German and Latin, and their titles, these sacred works pointed as much to “the Master’s” association with Weimar and Rome as to his links with Hungary. Highlighting the more serious and international face of Liszt’s “Hungarian” compositions in turn implicitly made the claim that Hungary and Hungarian music were to be taken seriously.

Indeed, in this context we can read even Faust as part of the programmers’ na-tionalist agenda, as our conception of Hungarian musical nationalism must oper-ate within a transnational discourse of what constituted signifi cant music. Th is discourse is refl ected not only in Budapest’s Liszt festival but also in Liszt concerts across Hungary (see Table 2.2 ). Again and again, concert organizers emphasized not the obvious, crowd-pleasing nationalism of the Rhapsodies but the more in-ternational side, oft en the more “diffi cult” side, of Liszt’s oeuvre. In the former Hungarian capital of Pozsony, three Liszt evenings featured large-scale sacred works, including the Hungarian premier of his Requiem for male voices; a fourth evening in Pozsony, the “grand concert,” was a purely orchestral event, which in-cluded the orchestral versions of the Rákóczi March, the Himnusz , and the Szózat alongside representative Zukunft smusik : the fi rst of the Mephisto Waltzes, the tone poem Festklänge , and “Gretchen” from Faust . 61 At the Kolozsvár (now Cluj-Napoca, Romania) Conservatory of Music, the Liszt centennial celebration fea-tured the symphonic poem Tasso , the Mephisto Waltz, the “Benedictus” from the Coronation Mass, the virtuoso showpiece La Campanella , and a rhapsody—but the reviewer did not feel the need to specify which one. 62

One sign of how much ordinary music-loving Hungarians embraced the celebra-tion of Liszt’s music in all its complexity was a performance of the Coronation Mass in the Roman Catholic church of Salgótarján, a relatively newly developed coal-mining town in north-central Hungary with no major musical institutions and no particular reputation for art music. Th e reviewer in the Budapest music journal A zene (Music) recognized the signifi cance of this feat, crediting the conductor “for the diffi cult work of teaching [the choir] and the great success of the beautiful per-formance.” 63 By immersing themselves in one of Liszt’s large-scale sacred works, music lovers in Salgótarján engaged the composer as promoter of “noble communal subject,” who, as Ryan Minor writes about other choral works, “employ[ed] ‘the people’ as guiding muse and participants rather than audience alone.” 64 Unlike vir-tuoso performance, choral singing carried connotations of moral uplift for the

60. I discuss Elisabeth further in Chapter 4 . Th e Gran/Esztergom and Coronation Masses use fewer prominent “Hungarian” features than that work.

61. See Neue Freie Presse (Vienna), Abendblatt, December 23, 1911.

62. According to “Tudósítások” [Reports], 282.

63. In “Tudósítások,” 282–283. Italics in original.

64. Minor, “Prophet and Populace,” 114.


masses; and as the choral movement in Germany did, choral groups in Hungary took part in the public discourse of nationality through musical participation.

Music criticism was the locus of most of that discourse, though. Despite the mixed evidence, as they saw the German press “pry[ing] into the question of Liszt’s origins[,] naturally only in order to dispute the Hungarianness of the immortal Hungarian composer as much as possible,” 65 many Hungarian critics felt it was in-appropriate to dwell on any doubts. Music critic Aurél Kern’s front-page article in the daily Budapesti Hírlap the day before Liszt’s hundredth birthday demonstrates one of the most sophisticated assertions of Liszt’s Hungarianness. Kern began by establishing Liszt’s Hungarian bona fi des, citing his passionate reaction to the 1838 fl oods. 66 He then asserted more generally that Liszt must not be considered a French composer, since though “France was the homeland that truly brought him up . . . it cut him off early on,” or a German one, since Liszt “felt instinctively how much his blazing temperament separated him from the sober, cold Germanic race”; instead, he must be considered Hungarian above all, since Hungary was the country “that he could call his own according to his heart. It was easy for him to discover the nation that cherished him, showered him with its love, swarmed around him and paid homage to him like a prince.” 67 But Kern then went beyond these recollections of nineteenth-century Hungarians’ passionate embrace of their national composer and essentialisms about national character to lead into a discussion of what made music Hungarian, not just for Liszt but, Kern implied, for his compositional heirs:

It is not necessary, however, for us to attribute Liszt’s Hungarianness only to the consequences of these external actions. We may seek the racial features in Liszt’s works as well. We are not thinking of the Hungarian rhapsodies, marches, etc. Th ese are Hungarian in their form, artifi cially, superfi cially. Today’s musicology in research on racial character probes deeper and re-searches the emotional, physiological characteristics. One can scarcely dem-onstrate those melodic and rhythmic characteristics that in combination grant a decided racial stamp to a work of art. In Liszt’s works a trenchant individu-ality rings out, whose affi liation, whose school, we cannot completely establish. Traces of French, German, Italian infl uence show themselves, but these adapt themselves into Liszt’s style, so that an entirely foreign eff ect absolutely must appear as nothing other than Hungarian. Liszt’s free, rhapsodic forms, his tying together of interrupted melodies, his propensity for homophony, his strongly pulsating rhythms, the colorfulness and sensuality of his sound- fantasy: all can be viewed as Hungarian racial characteristics. Th e resulting aesthetic will seek Ferenc Liszt’s Hungarianness in these [characteristics]. 68

65. “Liszt származása” [Liszt’s origins], 222; italics in original.

66. Kern, “Liszt Ferenc,” 1, citing Liszt’s letter to Lambert Massard.

67. Kern, “Liszt Ferenc,” 1–2.

68. Kern, “Liszt Ferenc,” 1–2.


Th is strategy allowed Kern not only to claim Liszt but also to claim a more prominent place for Hungary in the European music world: if “Hungarian racial characteristics” in music consisted of sophisticated techniques and not only “su-perfi cially” exotic fl avorings from lighter compositions, then Hungarian compo-sition had to be regarded as more than a colonial département of the German musical juggernaut. In fact, Kern suggested that in Liszt’s case, “traces of French, German, Italian infl uence” are superfi cial and the Hungarian characteristics are the most fundamental and personal—therefore, that Hungarian style at least could be a basis for musical composition superior to the “panromanogermanic mainstream.” 69 Th rough such interpretations of Liszt and the Liszt centennial, Hungarian music critics like Kern argued that the world should accept Hungarian musical institutions that he had helped build and the Hungarian composers that followed him as world class, as equal to German ones.

Beyond the interesting musical insight in Kern’s argument for broadening the defi nition of musical Hungarianness, it was still conventional in accepting the basic premise of the Liszt centennial—that this event was fi rst and foremost a time to celebrate Liszt. In this context Bartók’s 1911 essay “Liszt zenéje és a mai közönség” (Liszt’s music and today’s public) borders on the radical from its decep-tively rational beginning: “It is curious that so many musicians, I may say most of them, cannot come to terms with Liszt’s music, in spite of all its originality and greatness.” 70 In his assessment of Liszt’s national character, Bartók, almost alone of his compatriots, called attention to the obvious problems:

As a man, too, he showed purely heterogeneous characteristics . . . every-where he remembered Hungary as his beloved home, for which he brought off erings; he occupied himself with the special music he heard in Hungary with great enthusiasm, but he did not learn Hungarian, although he had a great talent for languages. 71

Th is approach stood out enough that a contemporary commentator chastised Bartók for his blasphemy, especially, the author implied, since as a professor at the Academy of Music he should have had more respect. 72 But as a modernist and a composer, Bartók had a diff erent goal from that of many of the other authors writing at the time of the centennial: rather than bow reverentially to this icon of

69. Th is argument speaks to a literature on “racial music” that was quite active at the begin-ning of the twentieth century and that is one of the main themes of Chapter 3 .

70. BBE , 451; translation adapted on basis of original text.

71. BBE , 451; translation adapted on basis of original text.

72. Th e unnamed author of “Az országos Liszt-ünnepélyek,” 242, does not mention Bartók by name, only that he is a “ professor at the Academy of Music ”; but he does cite Bartók’s article, pointing out an error in Bartók’s quotation from a Wagner letter and refuting Bartók’s claim that Wagner, the only composer qualifi ed to judge Liszt in his time, did not take Liszt seri-ously (enough).


the past, Bartók worked to “achieve strength by confronting the anxiety of infl u-ence, by wrestling with [his] great precursors.” 73 In fact, Bartók’s own ideas about originality and greatness demanded that he reject the past: as he himself put it, “dissatisf[action] with the order of the world” was necessary for him to “create original work, [to] think in an original way.” 74 As I show in later chapters, ques-tioning Liszt’s Hungarianness and thus his role as national composer was but one front in Bartók’s eff ort to transform the idea of what Hungarian composition should be.

2. Virtuosity

Liszt fi rst made his name not as a composer but as a virtuoso pianist, arguably the virtuoso pianist of his age. His peerless status as a performer, and the roles of phi-lanthropist and master teacher that emerged from that status, drew people of many nationalities into his sphere of infl uence; musicians, scholars, and memoir-ists from this sphere created many of the early writings on Liszt, a body of litera-ture that may justly be considered hagiographic. 75 At the same time, however, critiques of virtuosity multiplied over the course of the nineteenth century, partic-ularly in the German-speaking music world 76 —which still included most of Hun-gary’s music world.

Although virtuoso performance was undeniably important in the nineteenth-century European concert scene, this was also a period of growth for the ideal of the autonomous artwork and its corollary, the cult of the composer, sometimes at the expense of the performer, who was now more frequently admonished to be “transparent” or “obedient,” embodying the “soul of the composer.” 77 According to Richard Wagner’s essay “Der Virtuos und der Künstler” (Th e virtuoso and the artist) (1840), the proper role of the performer in this belief system was as acolyte, as “mediator of artistic intention.” 78 Th e ideal virtuoso was therefore

73. Korsyn, “Towards a New Poetics of Musical Infl uence,” 9, discussing Harold Bloom’s Th e Anxiety of Infl uence .

74. Letter to Stefi Geyer, July 27, 1907, quoted by Vikárius, Modell és inspiráció , 69; translation from Móricz’s review of Vikárius, “Th e Anxiety of Infl uence,” 466.

75. See Deaville, “Liszt and the Twentieth Century,” 47, and Altenburg, “Eröff nungsvortrag: Auf dem Weg zu einem neuen Liszt-Bild,” 10.

76. See Gooley’s “Th e Battle against Instrumental Virtuosity in the Early Nineteenth Cen-tury” for the rise of anti-virtuoso polemics in German-language literature.

77. See Hunter, “‘To Play as if from the Soul of the Composer,’” 357–361. One fi gure that Hunter cites as advocating the “disappearing” of the performer in service of the composer is Carl Czerny, Liszt’s piano teacher (357–358). Hunter argues through the rest of this article that the “conceptual ‘disappearing’ of the performer” (361) was not at all universal. I discuss further Liszt’s challenge to this “disappearing” later in the chapter.

78. In his Gesammelten Schrift en , 169, or Richard Wagner’s Prose Works , 53; cited in Bern-stein, Virtuosity of the Nineteenth Century , 86.


endowed with a special loving pliability [ liebevolle Schmiegsamkeit ] . . . . Th is performer would have to have enough modesty to keep his own characteris-tics and properties . . . out of play so that in the execution, neither his good nor his bad points would attract any attention: for, fi nally, only the art work, in a pure reproduction, ought to appear before us, while the particularity of the executor should not draw any attention to itself, that is, should not divert from the art work in any way. 79

Virtuosity for its own sake, by contrast, was dismissed as “superfi cial,” “trivial,” “empty,” or “shallow,” 80 “the triumph of form over the ideal, divine content,” 81 or, simply, in “bad taste.” 82 At a time when music was seen as the path to the tran-scendental, some found emphasis on the virtuoso performance too earthy and too corporeal, “all sensual pleasure, devoid of moral or intellectual engage-ment.” 83 Th e 1820s, 1830s, and 1840s marked a period of growing anti-virtuosity, when music critics in England, France, and especially Germany “made opposi-tion to instrumental virtuosity a cornerstone of their aesthetic and professional platforms.” 84

In this intellectual environment, the virtuoso Liszt appeared suspect. First, his performances of the works of other composers were incapable of being invisible; in fact, through his transcriptions, Liszt oft en fundamentally and deliberately transformed works of other composers, even masters whom some thought un-touchable. One critic, writing in 1840 about concerts in Frankfurt and Mainz in which Liszt played works of Hummel, Weber, and even Beethoven, praised Liszt’s ability to “rise above” the composer, his “genuinely spirited interpretation and representation of classical works, in which there lies a far greater service than to always give his own echo.” 85 But when Liszt played his transcription of Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony in a Leipzig concert that same year, another critic concluded that Liszt had “a demonic desire to dissolve, to tear to shreds this work of a divine procreativity [i.e., Beethoven], to mix up confusedly its tempos, to hunt dead the spirits living within it.” 86

79. Wagner, Gesammelten Schrift en , 170, or Richard Wagner’s Prose Works , 53–54; cited in Bernstein, Virtuosity of the Nineteenth Century , 87.

80. See the account in Deaville, “Th e Making of a Myth,” 188–189.

81. Gooley, Liszt and His Audiences, 319, quoting Berlin critic Beta writing in 1842.

82. Taruskin, “Liszt and Bad Taste.”

83. Gooley, Liszt and His Audiences, 300.


85. Carl Gollmick, Frankfurter Konversationsblatt , August 16 and 17, 1840, cited by Gooley, “Th e Battle against Instrumental Virtuosity,” 104.

86. In Zeitung für die elegante Welt , March 20, 1840, cited by Gooley, Th e Virtuoso Liszt , 159–160. Gooley argues that this poor beginning to his fi rst Leipzig concert caused such resistance that it led to the failure of the entire visit to Leipzig.


Second, Liszt’s performance style relied heavily on physicality. As Robert Schumann wrote, “he must be heard—and also seen; for if Liszt played behind the scenes, a great deal of the poetry of his playing would be lost.” 87 Th is aspect of Liszt’s performances “scandalized and yet titillated audiences,” 88 while critics opposed to Liszt considered the bodily abandon of his performing style to be distracting and self-indulgent, “the result of a willful bizarrerie that he had adopted through his association with the romantics.” 89 Th ese aspects of Liszt’s performance style were a subject of debate in Paris as well, where in the mid-1830s they were contrasted—and oft en not to Liszt’s advantage—with the more controlled style of rival Sigmund Th alberg. 90 Th e controversy over Liszt’s playing style was further highlighted by the extreme reactions of some of his audiences, behaviors Heinrich Heine pathologized as “Lisztomania.” 91 Th e frequent depic-tions of Liszt’s audiences as led by hysterical women further delegitimized Liszt’s virtuoso persona.

Anti-virtuoso rhetoric also colored reports of the young Liszt in early nineteenth-century Hungary, with a few local peculiarities. Bulletins sent from Paris published in Hungarian periodicals praised Liszt’s peerless talent and noted his skill in mingling with the aristocracy, but they criticized his aff ected manner, his unnaturalness, the strangeness of his Parisian friends, and his fl am-boyant stage gestures. In marginalized Hungary, where the music scene and its constituent institutions were still very much under construction, these elements were all read through the lens of nationality, as this item published in an 1834 issue of Honművész illustrates. According to this author, Liszt compounded the faults of the “superfi cial virtuoso” with the greater off ense of leaving his home-land behind:

It is an irrecoverable shame that his playing (as others have already men-tioned) is connected with such strain and even with excess. Th is is why I would have preferred to hear him play without seeing, because I prefer nature and simplicity, but in him I fi nd exactly the opposite . . . . Our young compatriot spoke so prettily in this situation and truly displayed a beautiful mind and cultured sensibility, but there was such unfortunate aff ectation in him. Th ey say that one or two years ago he carried himself completely diff er-ently . . . . If only he would perceive his mistake and not forget about his home! But this latter, it seems, does not interest him. 92

87. Quoted by Gooley, Liszt and His Audiences, 58.

88. McClary, Feminine Endings , 200.


90. See Gooley, Th e Virtuoso Liszt , 18–77.

91. See Gooley, Th e Virtuoso Liszt , 203–206.

92. Cited in Fabó, “Liszt Ferenc visszamagyarosodása,” 287–288.


Only a few years later, when Liszt responded to the call of his Hungarian roots in the aft ermath of the disastrous Pest fl oods of 1838, 93 the Hungarian reception of his virtuoso performances shift ed. In 1838 he donated large sums earned in benefi t concerts to the relief eff ort, and in late 1839 and early 1840, he fi nally returned to Hungary aft er a long absence to adoring crowds in Pozsony/Pressburg (now Bratislava) and Pest. His supporters hailed him as “the artiste who had earned for their country a name among the virtuosi of Europe,” as well as “a patriot who loved that country better than his own fame.” 94 Th e enthusiastic reception of Liszt’s com-patriots persuaded him to stretch a planned two-week stay into more than a month. H. and Imre Vahót’s biography describes how he rushed from Venice, where he had been sojourning with Marie d’Agoult, to the aid of his home country:

All at once the sweet and holy pain of homesickness awakened in him. In one minute he sat in a coach and hurried toward Hungary . . . . It was impossible to describe the fellow feeling with which he met his compatriots, all with the highest nobility. He gave concerts fi rst in Vienna, then in Pest, and old and young spoke only of him. In his homeland he laid aside all selfi shness, he turned over the pro-ceeds of his concerts all to charitable and patriotic causes. Likewise, his gener-osity did not fail to make an impact on the noble-spirited nation . . . motivated by his Hungarian feeling, [he] presented a donation of nearly 100,000 forints to the National Th eater, [National] Conservatory, [Pest] Music Society, and the poor. 95

Recent researchers have pointed out several dubious elements in this descrip-tion. First, the timeline implied by its authors is somewhat misleading: though Liszt did travel to Vienna in spring 1838, within months of the fl oods, and was in-vited to Pest by Count Leó Festetics, president of the Pestbudai Hangászegyesület (Pest-Buda Society of Musicians), he traveled aft er that series of concerts from Vienna to Italy and to the Countess Marie, who was awaiting the birth of their third child and had become ill. 96 Second, descriptions of Liszt’s pure altruism and

93. As is documented in his emotional letter written to friend Lambert Massard: “Th is alarm-ing news truly shook me up. An extraordinary sympathy, an irresistible inner need, com-pelled me to help the many unfortunate people. Th ese spiritual processes brought home to me the concept of home. In my heart I stumbled on the pure, untouched memories of my childhood. I myself also belong to this strong people, I too am a son of this primeval nation. Oh the distant land of my birth! My unknown friends! My far-fl ung family!” Th is letter is cited in two diff erent Hungarian translations by Fabó, “Liszt visszamagyarosodása,” 289–290, and by Kern, “Liszt Ferenc,” 1. WFL 1 , 254–255 cites a similar (if not identical) passage from Lina Ramann’s Franz Liszts Gesammelte Schrift e 2, 223–224; Ramann in turn drew on letters published under Liszt’s name from 1835–1840 in the Revue et Gazette Musicale .

94. According to the eyewitness account in Pardoe, Th e City of the Magyar 2, 353–354; cited by Gooley, Th e Virtuoso Liszt , 133.


96. See Watson, Liszt , 45, and WFL 1 , 259–267.


almost saintly generosity are likely exaggerated, and even Liszt’s most generous acts surely included an element of self-fashioning. Dana Gooley attributes Liszt’s “rushing” to Vienna not only to Liszt’s outpouring of patriotic sympathy but also to his need to shore up his reputation against rival virtuoso Sigmund Th alberg, who resided in that city; in addition, as Gooley argues convincingly, Liszt probably do-nated a smaller percentage of the proceeds of his concerts to charitable causes than is sometimes presumed. Still, he managed through the strategic use of charity to give the impression that his playing served a higher purpose—an impression that bathed him in a glow of Christian goodness and patriotism that served him throughout his career. 97 Th e emphasis on the charitable aspect of Liszt’s 1839–1840 Hungarian tour in the account cited above illustrates how eff ective that strategy was in refuting earlier accusations that Liszt was a self-absorbed performer.

Liszt also used his musical skills to endear himself to his audience: part of his recital arsenal was improvisation on tunes favored by or suggested by his audi-ence, and during his 1839–1840 and 1846 tours of Hungary he used popular Hun-garian repertoire in such improvisations. Some of these improvisations became the Magyar dallok and the Rhapsodies hongroises , and Liszt believed that the ex-otic material should be explained to his non-Hungarian audience. 98 As he wrote to Marie d’Agoult on July 17, 1847, a “ tout petit essai ” was “extremely necessary” to convey “the profound and intimate meaning of this series of compositions . . . to the public,” but he “felt himself completely unprepared” for this task, and he asked d’Agoult to assist him in writing it. 99 When d’Agoult, whose relationship with Liszt had ended by that time, understandably refused, Liszt draft ed his new compan-ion, Carolyne von Sayn-Wittgenstein, into the eff ort. Th is tout petit essai was pub-lished as Des bohémiens et de leur musique en Hongrie in Paris in 1859. Hungary’s Gypsy musicians thus share a distinction with Chopin: Liszt thought enough of them to (co-)write a book about them. Des bohémiens and Liszt’s Chopin biogra-phy have two other important similarities: in both he relied heavily on the work of his collaborator, Carolyne Sayn-Wittgenstein, and both are fi lled with stereo-types and Romantic eff usions that have caused them to be largely dismissed. 100

97. See Gooley, Th e Virtuoso Liszt , 234–239, for a discussion of the strategic benefi ts of Liszt’s charity performances.

98. Gooley, Th e Virtuoso Liszt , 138–139, describes the process of choosing tunes for improvi-sation during one of his Pest recitals.

99. Liszt’s letter to d’Agoult is included in Correspondance 2, 389. Emile Haraszti cites the fi rst quotation in his “Franz Liszt—Author Despite Himself: Th e History of a Mystifi cation,” 495; Klára Hamburger cites the second in RLGB 1 , 20.

100. See WFL 2 , 379–380, for one such dismissal. Cécile Reynaud-Burkardt urged a revisiting of Liszt’s Chopin biography in “Le Chopin de Liszt,” 119–129; Irena Poniatowska examined diff erent threads in the reception of Liszt’s biography, ranging from the indignant responses in Chopin’s family immediately surrounding its publication through the 1960s, at which time Liszt’s book had become “a signum temporis , a document of a Romantic emotional response to the art of a great artist by another creator” (in her “Th e Polish Reception of Chopin’s Biog-raphy by Franz Liszt,” 275).


Th e reception of these books has been negatively aff ected not only by stylistic and content issues but also by their collaborative genesis, something which vio-lates “traditional notions that privilege individual, ‘original’ authorship.” 101 At the extreme, Emil Haraszti stated fl atly in 1937 that “Liszt never wrote anything except his private correspondence” 102 –a claim he made in part, other evidence indicates, to “to save Liszt, ‘the victim of blue-stocking,’ from the clutches of women who even aft er his death controlled his legacy.” 103 More recent scholarship by Alan Walker and Mária Eckhardt, however, has brought forward new evidence, partic-ularly Liszt’s own manuscripts of a handful of items. While some have used these documents to mount a vigorous defense of Liszt “before the bar of history” against any accusations of literary theft , 104 Eckhardt brought a more dispassionate tone to the question, writing, “It is now accepted that Liszt’s two companions took an active part in the genesis [of his writings] . . . . For a small number the two women’s authorship can be clearly demonstrated; in the case of others it is equally clear that they can only have come from Liszt, while the majority were obviously joint pro-ductions both in content and form.” 105 Most informative on how this process worked between Liszt and Princess Carolyne is the recollection of her daughter, Princess Marie Hohenlohe, who stated:

He would dictate his literary works to her, and she would write down his words in pencil on a large quarter-sized sheet. If there was any type of mu-sical discussion involved, he would insist upon his exact wording. At other times, she received only his suggestions, and she worked it out on her own. Th e next day she would read aloud her complementary notes, and there would be much quarreling. 106

Th is process also changed over time with changes in the collaborators’ relation-ship. Liszt’s letters to Princess Carolyne around the second edition of the Chopin biography shows his eff orts “not only to spare the printer Carolyne’s almost illeg-ible handwriting, but also to regain control of his own work”–ultimately unsuc-cessfully. 107 In the preparation of the second edition of Des bohémiens , Eckhardt

101. Goldberg, “Franz Liszt, F. Chopin ,” 92. Th e collaboration with Princess Carolyne, unac-knowledged in print and (in this and other ways) ideal examples of “privatized or domesti-cated feminine authorship” (idem.), is distinct from those clearly attributed sections of Des bohémiens by Hungarian colleagues Gábor Mátray and Count István Fáy, biographical essays on verbunkos period composers Bihari and Csermák, respectively.

102. “Liszt n’a jamais rien écrit, sauf ses lettre[s] privées” (Haraszti, “Le problème Liszt,” 130).

103. Goldberg, “Franz Liszt, F. Chopin ,” 90.

104. WFL 2 , 372.

105. In “New Documents,” 53–54.

106. Cited in Goldberg, “Franz Liszt, F. Chopin ,” 91.

107. Eckhardt, “New Documents,” 62.


concludes that in his old age, Liszt “no longer felt strong enough to take the work of revision out of Carolyne’s hand, which led to . . . . unfortunate consequences” in the form of the expansion of anti-Semitic sections of the volume. 108 During the resulting scandal, Liszt declined to disavow these sections, but this may have been out of chivalry toward his companion. 109 Many agree with Klára Hamburger, who in 2000 called Princess Carolyne simply “the author of the book,” 110 and they rely on this conclusion to disregard the entire thing.

Despite all these issues, close examination of Des bohémiens off ers much of in-terest. Especially signifi cant are passages salient to Liszt’s role as an artist and containing musical insights and commentary in which the Princess would have been less likely to interfere. One such passage, in my view, is that commenting on the relationship between the virtuoso performer and the composer. Th e following could be read as a response to Wagner’s “Der Virtuos”:

Musical works which have been dictated by inspiration are, fundamentally, only the touching or tragic scenario of feeling . . . . To [the virtuoso] it also falls to give life and animation to the inert body of his text, as well as to vary the tints of its glances and turn the whole presentment into that of a goddess of grace. To him, again, it falls to change a mute and motionless form into a living being, a seductive Galatea; and to endow the still lifeless form with an adamantine nature into which he may infuse life at his own given moment . . . . Of all artists, the virtuoso is not only directly called upon, but perhaps more directly than any other, to reveal the subjugating strength of the gods; and from whom it is expected that the inspiring muse can never have any secrets . . . . How could it possibly be maintained that the virtuoso is not the representative of an art so evidently his own. 111

To some degree this passage is sympathetic with the early Romantic perfor-mance discourse discussed by Mary Hunter, which “sets up an opposition” between composer and performer “and then promptly blurs or collapses it” as it urges the performer “to develop his own imagination.” 112 But where the opposition

108. Eckhardt, “New Documents,” 62.

109. See WFL 2 , 389.

110. RLGB 1 , 21.

111. From Th e Gipsy in Music , 266–267. Corresponds to Des bohémiens , 281–283, in the original French.

Opinions on the problem of the authorship of Des bohémiens vary widely. Des bohémiens is a keystone of Hungarian music history, but given the lack of a critical edition, I treat it with caution.

112. In “‘To Play as if from the Soul of the Composer,’” 375. Dana Gooley also discusses this article in “Th e Battle against Instrumental Virtuosity,” 92.


found in most performance discourse of this period places the “mighty com-poser” above the “devout performer,” 113 Liszt here makes little show of deference to the composer, whose creation is “mute and motionless” without the contribution of the genius virtuoso.

In the end, Liszt’s defense of the virtuoso did little to turn the intellectual tide of anti-virtuosity. By the late nineteenth century the ideal of the performer as obedient vessel for the genius composer had solidifi ed, and “the critique of virtu-osity,” particularly virtuosity that did not submit, had “seep[ed] into the con-sciousness of the general public and achieve[d] . . . international hegemony.” 114 Liszt earned his reputation as a composer almost in spite of his virtuosity and virtuoso works, particularly aft er his death, when his own performances of those works could no longer act as the most eloquent advocates for the power of perfor-mance. Th us in the programming of the 1911 celebrations virtuoso piano reper-toire took a back seat to more “serious” works, as the listing in Table 2.1 illustrates. In Heidelberg and Weimar, piano recitals were relegated to the morning or aft er-noon; even in Budapest, where organizers showcased notable students of Liszt from around Europe interpreting his works in two “gala piano evenings,” these events were overshadowed by performances of large-scale orchestral and choral works that opened and closed Budapest’s Liszt week.

Of course we need not overinterpret the prominence granted those grander events. Th e larger forces required for a performance with choir and orchestra create a sense of monumentality that a single piano would have diffi culty match-ing, even if a pianist could be found that was the equal of Liszt. But even in a mostly reverent article like “Liszt Ferenc visszamagyarosodása és magyar működése” (Ferenc Liszt’s re-Hungarianization and Hungarian activities), author Fabó, a lawyer turned amateur musicologist, allowed himself some condescen-sion to Liszt the virtuoso. Before his return to Hungary in 1839–1840, Fabó wrote, “Liszt was still only a pianist; the composer in the other two-thirds of him, the incomparable agitator of great modern music and at the same time of Hungarian music, still lay completely dormant.” 115

Bartók, in his decidedly less reverent article, invoked the tropes of the standard critique of virtuosity as “empty” or “uncontrolled” in his criticisms of Liszt. According to Bartók, Liszt “‘corrected, and transcribed,’ made brilliant, such mas-terpieces that not even a Liszt had any right to touch,” and he picked up the “triv-iality” of any musical infl uence he came across, from Berlioz and Chopin to unnamed Gypsy musicians. 116 Chief among Bartók’s complaints against Liszt are charges of “empty pomp” and “empty fi reworks,” “routinized sequences” and “sen-timentality,” ideas that—“although they are brilliantly dressed—are still mere

113. Hunter, “‘To Play as if from the Soul of the Composer,’” 375.

114. Gooley, “Th e Battle against Instrumental Virtuosity,” 104.

115. Fabó, “Liszt visszamagyarosodása,” 289.

116. In “Liszt’s music . . . ,” BBE , 451, with translation adapted on basis of original text.


salon music.” 117 Th ough Bartók himself earned his daily bread for most of his career as a piano virtuoso, as a modernist, he put “empty” virtuosity in the same category as conventionality and sentimentality—qualities to be forgiven as unfor-tunate characteristics of their time, or to be overlooked in order that we might better admire Liszt’s “fanatical striving toward something rare and new.” 118

3. The “Gypsy Question”

Bartók hinted at a critical issue in Hungarian composition when he wrote in “Liszt’s Music and Today’s Public” of the unfortunate infl uence of Gypsy musi-cians on Liszt’s work. Th e fact that Kern made his case through the language of race, too, was no accident. Although the so-called Gypsy question was central to neither Kern’s nor Bartók’s piece, both authors touched on a discourse about “racial music” in Hungary that had been going on for decades.

Liszt himself had activated the discourse on Gypsy music when his controver-sial book Des bohémiens prompted a national reconsideration of the proper role of Romani (Gypsy) musicians in Hungarian music. 119 As discussed in Chapter 1 , Gypsies (or Bohemians) began to assume the role of performing most popular music in Hungary as early as the late seventeenth century, and by the early nine-teenth century, Hungarian-Gypsy style had spread throughout Europe, both as performed by Hungarian Gypsy bands and as evoked by art-music composers like Schubert and Weber. Its ethos drew not only on stock musical fi gures and topoi, 120 but also on largely stereotyped associations of “Hungarian” and “Gypsy.”

Which of these sets of (overlapping) images prevailed depended in part on the listener. Most non-Hungarians simply did not need to make as great a distinction between the Hungarian and the Gypsy. An 1873 review in the Milanese Gazzetta Musicale of a performance of Liszt’s Hungarian Fantasia mixed references to Hungarian literature and Gypsy stereotypes, and it appeared to suggest that these labels became masculine and feminine versions of the same phenomenon:

Th is fantasia is certainly one of the most forceful compositions of the Gypsy-Abbé [zingaro-abate], and so is almost worthy of a place alongside the symphonic ode entitled Hungaria . It is as if it were a canto of the Zrinyiad , [or] a hymn by Timódi [ sic ]; Hungarian solemnity and Gypsy fi re



119. Des bohémiens was published in József Székely’s Hungarian translation in 1861; a Ger-man translation was published the same year, and an English one came out two decades later, about the same time as the German second edition. Th ough questions about the authorship of this book remain unresolved, these questions had not yet been widely raised during Liszt’s lifetime and thus have little bearing on the controversy that ensued on the publication of the book, so I refer to it simply as Liszt’s work.

120. I write about these more in Chapter 4 .


alternate in a fantastic way. In places it is as if we heard in the quiet that ensues aft er the cracking rhythms the languishing voice of a despondent Gypsy woman. 121

For Hungarian listeners, though, Hungarian-Gypsy music was a homogenous symbol of the nation, one of many areas in which folk symbolism became popular among both the gentry and the growing and increasingly Magyarized urban pop-ulation in Hungary during the nineteenth century. 122 As discussed in the previous chapter, the rhythms of this music emerged from both the Hungarian language 123 and specifi c Hungarian dances; those composers who can be identifi ed were mainly (though not exclusively) ethnic Hungarians or assimilated, and all of the songs, both in verbunkos with text and in magyar nóta, used Hungarian texts, usually with folklike style and nostalgic lyrics evoking a Hungarian past. For these reasons, most Hungarians understood the label “Gypsy music” as applying only to the race of the performers, not the origins or essence of the music. By the middle of the nineteenth century, many believed that “the Hungarian soul . . . express[ed] itself in gypsy music.” 124 Yet this paradox, that the “Hungarian national music” was performed primarily not by ethnic Hungarians but by Romani musicians, was a source of discomfort already by 1854, when Gábor Mátray warned of the pos-sible misunderstanding that could ensue from “trusting the preservation and distribution” of the national music

only to Gypsies; therefore, one cannot be surprised if foreign musicians begin to doubt the true Hungarian character of the national music custom-arily performed by our Gypsies, taking it for Indian Gypsy music rather than Hungarian music . . . we cannot doubt that the Gypsies of previous centuries also occupied themselves not with Indian Gypsy [music] but rather with real Hungarian music. 125

At this time when Liszt was still preparing his book, we might even speculate that Mátray aimed these remarks at Liszt: Liszt had consulted him while writing

121. Cited by Katalin Szerz ő , “ Contemporary Reports on Liszt,” 249.

122. On Magyarization in the rapidly growing cultural capital of Hungary, see Nemes, Th e Once and Future Budapest , among others. Th e rise of folklore studies and of folklorism in Hungary’s visual arts is discussed in Chapter 1 .

123. In his 1866 book A hang mint műanyag [Sound as artistic material], philologist Emil Ponori Th ewrewk (1838–1917) aimed to “prove the relationship between the Hungarian language and the rhythm of national music with strictly scientifi c arguments, logically” (quo-tation from RLGB 1 , 23). Th e discourse on the relationship between the accentuation of Hun-garian verse and the rhythm of Hungarian music is discussed in Chapter 4 .

124. Frigyesi, Béla Bartók and Turn-of-the-Century Budapest , 55.

125. “A magyar zene és a magyar cigányok zenéje” [Hungarian music and the music of Hun-garian Gypsies], 120–121. Th e fi rst part of this quotation appears in Sárosi’s Gypsy Music , 144.


Des bohémiens . 126 Even though Hungarian musicians’ claim on Liszt was a matter of national importance, among these musicians his violation of the normative views on the relationship between Hungarian music and Gypsy musicians drew attention to his “foreignness” at least as much, perhaps more, than speaking French ever did.

To be sure, though Liszt’s life coincided with the golden age of Hungarian Gypsy music, he had much less exposure to it than the average Hungarian simply because he lived most of his life abroad. Th e encounters he did have with Gypsy music and musicians, however, were recorded in detail by him, his companions, and the press. In 1822, before he left Hungary, he heard János Bihári, one of the great virtuosos and early popularizers of the verbunkos, perform, an experience he recalled vividly in Des bohémiens . 127 His return trips to Hungary were cele-brated not just by speechifying aristocrats, men’s choruses, and pastry chefs, but also by Gypsy musicians: press accounts specifi cally mention Liszt hearing Gypsy bands in Arad and Vienna in 1846, in Pest in 1856, 1872, and 1873, and in Szek-szárd in 1870. 128 Nor was Liszt just a passive recipient of off erings of Gypsy music: at certain moments, he went out of his way to hear and acknowledge Gypsy music and musicians. In 1846, Liszt (in)famously allowed a group of his “charming and excellent colleagues, the Gypsies” free admission into one of his concerts in the Pest Vigadó; when he hosted dinners in Budapest or received guests from out of

126. Mátray sent to Weimar, at Liszt’s request, a German version of “A magyar zene és a mag-yar cigányok zenéje,” plus a biographical article on János Bihari that Liszt included in Dés bohémiens (297–306). (See Várnai, “Mátray Gábor élete és munkássága a szabadságharctól haláláig” [Gábor Mátray’s life and work from the War of Independence to his death], 180). No correspondence between Liszt and Mátray survives, but Liszt did mention that he “need[ed] another memorandum about Bihari, the great Gypsy-Paganini, whom I heard in year [18]22 in Pesth” ( Franz Liszt Briefe , 78). See also Franz Liszt Briefe , 312, cited in RLGB 1 , 24.

127. He wrote that he “was just more than a child when, in 1822, I heard that great man among the Gypsy virtuosi . . . to have been struck and impressed by him, at the point of guard-ing faithful remembrance of his inspirations, which infi ltrated themselves into my soul . . . he used to play for hours on end, without giving the slightest thought to the passing of time . . . . His musical cascades fell in rainbow profusion, or glided along in a soft murmur . . . . His performances must have distilled into my soul the essence of some generous and exhilarating wine; for when I think of his playing, the emotions I then experienced were like one of those mysterious elixirs concocted in the secret laboratories of those alchemists of the Middle Ages” (in Des bohémiens , 294–295). WFL 1 , 63, cites an English translation of the German edition; this translation borrows somewhat from the earlier one but adapts it based on the French original.

128. Th e Arad and Pest incidents are cited in Legány’s “Liszt in Hungary, 1820–1846,” 14; “Liszt in Hungary, 1848–1867,” 5; and Liszt and His Country , 1869–1873 , 205 and 215, respec-tively. Th e Vienna incident is cited in Sárosi’s A cigányzenekar múltja , 73; Székszárd events are cited in Legány, Liszt and His Country, 1869–1873 , 65. Liszt also attended at least two per-formances of folk plays by Ede Szigligeti featuring Gypsy orchestras: A cigány [Th e Gypsy] in 1871 and A csikós [Th e horseman] in 1873 (referred to in Legány, Liszt and His Country, 1869–1873 , 265 and 217).


town, he would hire a leading Gypsy band or seek out specifi c musicians, oft en ones he had long admired, at their regular performance venues. 129

Th e most compelling evidence of Liszt’s fascination with Hungarian Gypsy music is his musical engagement with it, particularly during and aft er his 1839–1840 Hungarian tour. He had played a few Hungarian pieces, including the Rákóczi March, at one of his childhood recitals in Pest in 1823, 130 but throughout the 1839–1840 tour he added more “Hungarian” tunes to his repertoire, sometimes through suggestions off ered by members of the audience, and elaborated on them through improvisation. 131 In his enthusiasm for the repertoire of Hungarian Gypsy bands, Liszt published his versions of some “Hungarian songs,” or Magyar dallok , in 1840, quite soon aft er his fi rst triumphant return; he then elaborated that material into fi ft een Rhapsodies hongroises , which appeared between 1848 and 1853. Before publishing these pieces, as earlier scholars have established, Liszt accessed a va-riety of published and manuscript sources for the numerous tunes found in those works, 132 but the improvisatory impulse remained a driving force in their develop-ment. Improvisation was an important part of Liszt’s artistic arsenal throughout his performing career, 133 as it was for most virtuoso pianists of the day, and these “Hungarian” works shared their improvisatory origins with many of his other successful works. What appears to set Liszt’s Hungarian-style pieces apart is not the Hungarian origin of the tunes nor the fact that Liszt used improvisation to develop them but his modeling of his improvisations at least in part on the style of other performers—the Gypsy virtuosi of Hungary, the performers that brought

129. Th e Vigadó incident was reported in the May 7, 1846, edition of Nemzeti újság [National news], quoted in Sárosi’s A cigányzenekar múltja , 71. Legány cites an occasion when Liszt hired Gypsy musicians to play for a dinner he hosted in Budapest in 1872 ( Liszt in Hungary, 1869–1873 , 153), and recounts a long-standing relationship with cimbalom player Pál Pinter and his brothers József and Zsiga, beginning in November 1873 when Liszt heard Pál Pinter playing with Pál Rácz’s orchestra at a grand banquet held to celebrate the fi ft ieth jubilee of Liszt’s concert debut ( Liszt in Hungary, 1869–1873 , 205, 257).

130. Legány, “Liszt in Hungary, 1820–1846,” 5; see also above. Oddly, Legány states a few pag-es later that Liszt fi rst played his transcription/elaboration of the Rakóczi March at a recital in Pozsony (Pressburg) on December 20, 1839 (“Liszt in Hungary, 1820–1846,” 8)—clearly a mistake.

131. As Gooley discussed in Th e Virtuoso Liszt , 138, cited previously.

132. Including popular songs (magyar nóta), theater songs, dance music by composers like Bihari and Rózsavölgyi, and Hungarian rhapsodies composed by his Hungarian colleagues, such as Kornél Ábrányi. For details about the Hungarian sources of Liszt’s rhapsodies, see Zoltán Gárdonyi, “Paralipomena zu den ungarischen Rhapsodien von Franz Liszt,” and Ervin Major, “Liszt Ferenc rapszódiai” [Ferenc Liszt’s rhapsodies]. Whatever the sources of these tunes, all were made famous in performance by Gypsy musicians, fi rst in Hungary and later elsewhere in Europe.

133. In fact, there is evidence that Liszt improvised on themes provided by members of the audience at least as early as his April 13, 1823 concert in Vienna. (See Allan Keiler, “Liszt Research and Walker’s Liszt ,” 387.)


Hungary’s national music to life. Arguably only Paganini and Chopin played sim-ilarly prominent roles in Liszt’s compositions.

Des bohémiens off ers more insight into how he conceived of their role. With Liszt’s virtuoso’s bias toward the performer, the book separates the Gypsy perfor-mance practice from the musical material that might still be Hungarian, as most commentators have done then and since. It describes some essential features of the musical material, namely, the Gypsy scale and characteristic rhythms, but these technical descriptions are relatively short. Much longer are the exoticist imaginings around the unfettered lifestyle of the Gypsies and, as a corollary, the fanciful descriptions of their musical style, as in the following passage:

It is quite natural that a people leading a debased and cruel existence should have chosen this art in preference to any other, when it desired for itself some means of ennobling those primitive instincts of its being which had remained so long buried in silent mystery. Moreover, did it not thus dis-cover, without the painful eff ort of any laborious intellectual labor, the only language it could employ . . . . In the very act of passing the bow across the violin-strings a natural inspiration suggested itself . . . there came rhythms, cadences, modulations, melodies, and tonal discourses. Th is was therefore the discreet form of art in which the Gypsy confi ded—this the enigmatical mould to which he consigned that talisman which keeps him free of our occupations . . . . In his music he revealed that golden ray of interior light proper to himself, which otherwise the world would never have known or suspected; he made it dance and glitter in the fascination of a wild harmony, fantastic and full of discords; and thus, by a mixture of unexpected outline, glaring color, sudden change and quick transformation, endowed it with its many seductive features. 134

Th e Romantic extravagance of such descriptions may have been overlooked had not Liszt committed a grave sin against the Hungarian racial order by assert-ing that the repertoire known as Gypsy music, played almost exclusively by Gypsy musicians, was actually the work of the Gypsies:

Indeed the Gypsies—if it was really they who were the fi rst composers of these songs, these rhythms, the fi rst to introduce this style . . . , and the fi rst owners of these intervals which make their music distinct—would never have developed this to such an extent if their masters had not given them an opportunity to do so; . . . even these who even beyond this remain in favour of the view that it was the Hungarians who taught their own songs and dance songs to the Gypsies cannot deny that it is only thanks to the Gypsies alone that these songs were saved . . . from the impoverished fragmentary condition

134. Liszt, Th e Gipsy in Music , 13 (corresponding to Des bohémiens , 11–12). See also excerpts quoted by Bellman, Style Hongrois , 100–103, 179.


in which the majority of the national music traditions remained in other countries. 135

Elsewhere he is even more open about the taboos he is breaking, at the same time somewhat clarifying what it might mean actually to attribute “Gypsy music” to the Gypsies.

We do not have any illusions that the hypothesis that would attribute a purely Bohemian origin to Hungarian songs is still a great deal more audacious than that which would view the Gypsies as authors of their dance tunes; that it would be in fl agrant contradiction with the generally established ideas at present in this respect, and that it is only supported by deductions of a quite vague order. Nevertheless, [these deductions] are suffi cient for us to arrive at this opinion, and among the considerations that decide for us, there is one that is especially decisive in our eyes. Let us remark before all that the mel-odies called “national” are not composed by the totality of a people, but by some individuals who form part of it, and that the similarity of the inspira-tions of these individuals, contributes, as much as their popularity, to give a national character to the collection of their songs. When the sum of the songs spread within a nation off er a remarkable monument through their qualities of feeling and form, it would be a great surprise had there never been a personality in its breast exceptional enough to affi x attention on him by his superiority . . . we see from the earliest times the Bohemians prized and renowned for their musical provisions and executions. 136

Here we fi nd a simple claim, if one that might have been considered radical in its time: that music, even folk music, is not truly the product of an entire nation, be it Hungarian or Gypsy, but of individual performers.

It is perhaps not surprising that not much attention has been paid to this argu-ment in Des bohémiens , given the book’s many fl aws: in addition to such insights, we also fi nd in it a surfeit of Romantic and Orientalist fl ights of fancy, enraptured as Liszt was by the Gypsies’ “‘defi ant-melancholy’ playing, their unrestrained character, and their ‘delirium of gaiety.’” 137 His quixotic effort to envision Hungary’s instrumental “Gypsy music” as a “Gypsy national epic” seems a stretch even in the context of Herderian emphasis on the epic as the foundation of na-tional culture. 138 Liszt’s, and his collaborator’s, numerous errors in Hungarian

135. Sárosi, Gypsy Music , 142, quoting Liszt, A czigányok , 269–270 (corresponding to Des bohémiens , 284–285).

136. Liszt, Des bohémiens , 270–271. Th anks to Anna-Lise Santella for her assistance with this translation.

137. Klára Hamburger, “Franz Liszt und die ‘Zigeunermusik,’” 87, quoting Liszt.

138. See Th e Gipsy in Music , 11–18, corresponding to Des bohémiens , 9–17. On Herder and the epic, see Philip Bohlman, “Herder’s Nineteenth Century,” 15–17.


orthography further undermined the credibility of this text, and to some, his offh anded claims of quasi-Gypsy identity for himself and his somewhat out-landish and possibly fabricated tales of “Personal Relations with Gipsies” merely seemed ridiculous. 139

Yet by focusing too closely on the errors, inconsistencies, and off enses of Liszt’s book we risk missing a reasonable argument that Liszt makes in this passage, insisting that the contributions of his fellow virtuosi be acknowledged. Mihály Mosonyi (1815–1870) summed up this argument with similar reasonableness:

If a poet makes a dramatic picture out of a folktale, who gets the credit? Is it the folk, since it is their tale? Or the poet, because of his elaboration [of the tale]?—And weren’t the Gypsies the elaborators of these folksong-fragments in the same way? For my part this is the sense that I drew out of Liszt’s book. 140

Most Hungarians who commented on Liszt’s book, however, found it not at all reasonable and well beyond “audacious” (to use Liszt’s word)—perhaps even trea-sonous. Whether or not they had read the book, commentators repeated and bewailed Liszt’s inaccurate and unpatriotic conclusions in the press. A columnist in the popular weekly Vasárnapi Újság [Sunday News] in August 1859 refl ected on the disappointment of the hopes of the Hungarian public and on Liszt’s lack of Hungarianness by stating that he had never expected much in the fi rst place from Liszt, a Hungarian in name only.

Th e papers long ago announced that Ferencz Liszt was laboring on a work that would acquaint Hungarian music with the world. It seems that many

139. Th e story Liszt tells in his chapter “Personal Relations with Gipsies” ( Th e Gipsy in Music , 131–133; original in Des bohémiens , 165–167) of visiting a Gypsy camp on his 1839–1840 return to Hungary is unsubstantiated in the press of the day. Some have found this lack of press documentation highly suspicious, since Liszt attracted such attention wherever he went, particularly in Hungary (see Legány, “Liszt in Hungary, 1820–1846,” 3–16). However, Liszt’s aristocratic patrons, one of whom was sympathetic enough to Liszt’s interest in Gypsies to make him a “present” of the young violinist “Josy the Bohemian” (see Th e Gipsy in Music , 141), could easily have facilitated such a visit unobserved by the press on a visit to a country estate. On the orthographic problems, see, among others, Klára Hamburger’s “Erroneously Printed Names in Des bohémiens ” (unpublished MS). Hamburger’s personal communication with the author states that the Polish orthography appearing in some of these errors “prove that their ‘author’ was a Polish speaking person (Carolyne von Sayn Wittgenstein) who had no idea of the Hungarian language. Unfortunately Liszt himself did not speak either Polish or Hungarian” (April 27, 2007). I have already cited Liszt’s self-appellation of “half-Gypsy, half-Franciscan”; elsewhere, in an August 5, 1846, letter to Count Leó Festetics, he called himself “the fi rst Gypsy of the kingdom of Hungary” (published in Franz Liszt Briefe , 57; cited by Hamburger, “Franz Liszt und die ‘Zigeunermusik,’” 85).

140. In his review of Liszt’s book, published as “Levelek Paulina kisasszonyhoz” [Letters to Mademoiselle Paulina], 23.


were awaiting this work with great anticipation and rejoiced in advance that Ferencz Liszt would raise Hungarian music above every other music . . . I however never had such hopeful expectations:—because insofar as I have had the opportunity to know Ferencz Liszt, I have been convinced that F. Liszt . . . is Hungarian only in that he was born in the Hungarian home-land,—but he is missing everything else that makes a Hungarian a Hungar-ian. For exactly this reason I awaited Liszt’s work more with a certain anxiety than with pleasure, fearing that he would give a false overview of Hungarian music before the world. And behold, my anxiety has in large measure been fulfi lled.—Liszt writes not about Hungarian music but about Gypsy music.

I certainly have not read Liszt’s work, but the papers unanimously state that Liszt in this work asserts that Hungarian music is actually Gypsy music, and the Hungarian only received it from the Gypsy . . . . Hungarian music, Hungarian song, Hungarian song was what still electrifi ed the slow-blooded Germans, what the English, the French, in a word every nation to whom it was introduced, shared in with unanimous appreciation, and I am hardly mistaken when I say that Hungarian music, song, dance is one factor in win-ning the sympathy of the nations.—And now F. Liszt says to them: what you have applauded so many times, what you have shared in with appreciation, the reason why you came to love the Hungarian, that does not belong to the Hungarian, he stole it from the Gypsy, the world’s most uncultivated people, and distributed it as his own. 141

Th e ensuing uproar confi rmed that Liszt had been right to anticipate objec-tions. He was still taken aback at the vigor of the response, however. Leading popular song composer Kálmán Simonff y (1831–1888), with whom Liszt had pre-viously corresponded quite collegially, upon reading reports of what he referred to as “Liszt’s national scandal” in the press “immediately lodged protests in for-eign newspapers” and wrote to Liszt in tragic tones:

141. S–y J., “Liszt Ferencz és a magyar zene” [Ferencz Liszt and Hungarian music], Vasárnapi Ujság 6, no. 34 (August 21, 1859), 403. Th is is far from the only “review” published with-out the benefi t of reading the text; in fact, before the book was released in France, reports of Liszt’s conclusions began to appear, as in this item in Budapesti hírlap (August 9, 1859), 2: “[Liszt] endeavors to show that that so-called Hungarian national music actually is not the Hungarians’ property, but the Gypsies’ . . . however at the end of the book, as an appeasement, he writes that Hungary is the nurturer and preserver of this wonderful music and thus in a certain view holds a common right to it.” With the “appeasement” comment, the author could be referring to the section in Liszt, Th e Gipsy in Music , titled “Th e helpfulness of Hungarian sympathy,” that ends with the sentence, “It is clearly therefore to the Hungarian’s sympa-thetic intuition of the value of their art that the Bohemians owe the opportunity of carrying it amongst them to its most fl ourishing condition” [208; 220 in the French original].

See Sárosi, Gypsy Music , 129–135, and RLGB 1, 22–25, for more contemporary responses to Liszt’s book.


What have you done? . . . I must advise you that I am charged with refuting you with all the severity that you deserve. I regret infi nitely being forced to write against you, monsieur, who have been so good to me, but this is my patriotic duty. From this moment our roads part. Adieu. 142

Simonff y then published this letter in the daily Pesti Napló [Pest Daily], along with Liszt’s somewhat wounded response to it, as proof of Liszt’s lack of remorse:

You tell me that you have not read my book on the Gypsies, which in any case has not yet been published; but relying on an ill-intentioned rumor spread by a few newspapers . . . you declare you will deal with me “with all the severity I deserve” . . . because they say (without having read me) that I have done harm to Hungarian music and consequently to my sense of patri-otism. Rest assured, sir, that this is not the case, and it is really I who have been completely wronged in this matter. 143

Although there were those who considered Simonff y’s rebuke extreme, 144 it was generally not because they were sympathetic with Liszt’s arguments. Attacks fl owed freely in public discourse; one of the most interesting of these was an indignant verse diatribe by leading novelist and statesman Mór Jókai (writing under a pseudonym), beginning “Et tu mi fi li Brute!” 145 In Mosonyi’s sympathetic review of the book, written in the form of a letter to his fi ancée, the author illus-trates the strength of the public opinion against Liszt by relating a chance meeting with his correspondent’s uncle on Pest-Buda’s chain bridge:

142. Pesti Napló , September 6, 1859, includes the original French along with a Hungarian translation. English version based on that published in WFL 2 , 385–386.

143. Pesti Napló , September 6, 1859, original French along with a Hungarian translation. Liszt’s letter, dated August 27, 1859, is also published in Franz Liszt: Briefe aus ungarischen Sammlungen (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1966), 105. English version based on that pub-lished in WFL 2 , 386. Sárosi, Gypsy Music , 130–131, also quotes Simonff y’s article.

144. Walker notes that when Simonff y’s letter was reproduced in Hölgyfutár on September 15, the editor inserted the wry comment, “A remarkable expression! We never knew until now that Simonff y had been moving along the same path as Liszt” ( WFL 2 , 385–386). Violinist Ede Reményi’s defense of Liszt ( WFL 2 , 387) may have earned him this comment in New Grove : “Reményi’s playing combined technical mastery with a strongly pronounced individu-ality . . . . However, like Liszt, he confused true Magyar music with gypsy music (consequently Brahms’s Hungarian Dances, strongly infl uenced by Reményi’s playing, are indebted to the gypsy tradition)” (Heron-Allen, “Reményi [Hoff man], Ede [Eduard],” New Grove 21, 177).

145. Hamburger includes Jókai’s poem in RLGB 1 , 22. Mosonyi referred to this item in his review of Liszt’s book: “I was deeply saddened by the view that also mingling with the mob was our most celebrated and most witty writer, who . . . said this to Liszt: ‘you too, my son Brutus?’” (“Levelek Paulina kisasszonyhoz,” 23).


Liszt wound into our conversation, and your uncle was very agitated and spoke thus: this name is no longer worth mentioning, because Liszt is a . . .

Pardon me, dear mademoiselle! if I do not write this horrible word. Only I am now persuaded above all what deep roots this false opinion about Liszt has struck into every breast. 146

Many responses to Liszt made little specifi c reference to the actual book, unsur-prising since their authors oft en had not read it. Sámuel Brassai was exceptional in quoting Liszt’s text extensively in his Magyar- vagy czigány-zene? Elmefuttatás Liszt Ferencz “Czigányokról” irt könyve felett (Hungarian or Gypsy music? A short essay about Ferencz Liszt’s book “On the Gypsies”). Brassai’s 1860 pamphlet both brought a more “objective” point of view to a topic on which Liszt was notably subjective, and also focused on an important but generally unspoken problem many Hungarians had with Liszt’s book—granting too much credit to a marginal racial group for their contribution to Hungary’s national music. A necessary part of Brassai’s critique is a rejection of Liszt’s argument for the creative contribution of the virtuoso:

When you, in your so-called “Fantasias,” added fl ourishes and sighs to Sonnambula, Puritani and other operas, or to Schubert’s songs, decked them out with frippery and trimmings, you did not thus expropriate the honor of their coinage, their creation, from the original composers, did you? See, we are just the same [have the same relationship] with the Gypsy musicians. 147

Brassai’s skepticism toward the virtuoso not only fi t in with the anti-virtuoso rhetoric that was in the air during the period; it was also an important part of his overall argument for the rejection of the Gypsy musicians’ contribution to Hungarian music. Earlier in this volume, Brassai addresses Liszt’s rhapsodic praises of Gypsy ornamentation practices with similar dismissiveness. Whereas Liszt associated Gypsy ornamentation with Oriental mystery, Brassai considered Gypsy ornamental style a mere shadow of the exaggerated practices of European virtuosi 148 —like Liszt. Moreover, the Gypsy musicians did not even obey the rules required to make those practices eff ective:

the irregularity that you [Liszt] praise so much does not originate in the inde-pendence of the ideal Gypsy character but rather in the imperfection of

146. “Levelek Paulina kisasszonyhoz,” 23. Ellipsis (expletive deleted?) in original.

147. Samuel Brassai, Magyar- vagy czigány-zene? 52. Hamburger discusses Brassai in RLGB 1 , 23.

148. Brassai, Magyar- vagy czigány-zene? , 48: “All the instrumental music of the Gypsy bands proceeded in parallel with the more strongly exaggerated fi orituras of the European virtuosos (instrumental and vocal).”


bungled teaching, and we experience it in every so-called “naturalist” whether he is Gypsy or not. 149

Another passage illustrates most clearly the cultural prejudice behind not only Brassai’s writings but most other Hungarians’ revulsion at Liszt’s conclusions: despite the fact that Romani musicians were essential to Hungarian cultural life, they were emphatically not equals.

Th e only disposition which exists—at least among us [in Hungary]—on the part of other peoples towards the Gypsies, that is for the majority, in general, is detestation . . . this antipathy, in spite of the Author’s [Liszt’s] every tirade on behalf of the Gypsy, is against them. Th is is a characteristic feeling, mix-ing together pride and disgust, which is nearly completely identical to the Americans’ disposition toward the Negroes. Every nation, every class, every age has used the familiar “you” (NB: without reciprocation) with the Gypsy, as with an animal. Th e following proverb off ers further evidence of this: “Th e Transylvanian nobleman must have his hound, his cattle [buff alo] and his Gypsy.” 150

While Liszt celebrated the “exotic” and “natural” elements of Gypsy perfor-mance from his home base in Weimar, Brassai wrote in part to correct Liszt’s factually fl awed, “nonsensical picture of the Gypsy nation” and in part to enforce the proper social and racial order in Hungary. Given the degradation that Bras-sai described, the idea that these abased, animalistic beings could have contrib-uted creatively to Hungarian national music was not just illogical; it was abhorrent. However, it was not only the racial hierarchy that placed the Gypsies at the bottom, but lack of formal musical training—and in a country still building its musical institutions, arguing for the importance of formal training was critical.

Th e controversy over Des bohémiens reawakened in the fall of 1881 with the publication of the second edition, in which Princess Carolyne had without Liszt’s knowledge expanded her rather nasty comparison between the Gypsies and the Jews. Liszt, perhaps to protect the Princess, never disowned these additions, and in fact when Lina Ramann inquired about leaving out the most off ensive parts of the book from the version she was including in volume 7 of her edition of Liszt’s Gesammelte Schrift en , he specifi cally instructed her to “not leave out one word, not even a single comma.” 151 Th e resulting public outcry both against Liszt’s per-ceived anti-Semitism and on behalf of the Hungarian nation whose music had

149. Brassai, Magyar- vagy czigány-zene? 52.

150. Brassai, Magyar- vagy czigány-zene? 26. Klára Hamburger uses the saying that Brassai cites at the close of this passage in RLGB 1 , 21.

151. Quotation from Ramann, Lisztiana , 195, cited by RLGB 2 , 16.


once again been insulted stirred up protests that even reached into the Parlia-ment. 152 Klára Hamburger has argued,

Th ese writings, off ending the understandable sensitivities of these exceed-ingly awkward times in Hungary . . . poisoned his last year, and even outlived [Liszt]. When he died on July 31, 1886, in Bayreuth, no one indicated offi -cially on behalf of his country that they wished to have him buried at home [in Hungary]. For this reason they put him into the grave in Wagner’s city. 153

Still, Liszt had reputedly retracted some of his earlier statements, 154 and his role in building Hungary’s musical institutions allowed, even required, that he be offi -cially forgiven. According to Bertalan Fabó’s centennial article, although “Hun-garian public opinion bore a grudge against him” in the aft ermath of Liszt’s publication of the off ending volume, “in 1865, when he returned home for and appeared at the quarter-century celebration of the National Conservatory, [the country] forgave him completely and received the genius again into its love even though he had caused it grief.” 155 He also threw himself into building the Academy of Music, placing himself and his reputation at the service of the development of Hungary’s musical life in a way that instantly made it a place to be reckoned with internationally.

As a composer, moreover, Liszt was far too important a precedent for Hungar-ians to discard, even for those who disagreed with him strongly over his book. Philologist Emil Ponori Th ewrewk (1838–1917), who wrote extensively on Hun-garian rhythm in the 1860s and 1870s in an eff ort to refute Liszt, is representative: three years aft er Liszt’s death, he wrote in an essay on “Th e Origin of the Hungar-ian Music” that “if Liszt was wrong concerning the origin of our music, still he earned an immortal fame as the earliest interpreter of this national treasure of ours to all the world, as well by his peerless art as by his brilliant pen.” 156

152. According to both RLGB 2 , 16, and Bence Szabolcsi, “Liszt Ferenc estéje,” in Szabolcsi Bence válogatott írásai , 364.

153. RLGB 2 , 16.

154. Liszt’s retraction is diffi cult to document. Shortly aft er his death, in the debate in the parliament over whether to work to bring Liszt’s remains back to Hungary, prime minister Kálmán Tisza brought up the claims of the recently republished Des bohémiens as a reason not to do so; in response, “a left -wing representative exclaimed ‘It has been refuted!’” [ RLGB 2 , 16.]

155. In “Liszt Ferenc visszamagyarosodása,” 297. Liszt’s contributions to the National Con-servatory’s jubilee included conducting the première performance of Die Legende von der heiligen Elisabeth on August 14, 1865, and conducting his Rákóczi March and a movement of the Dante Symphony on August 17, 1865; he also gave a charity piano recital on August 29, 1865, before departing for Rome (Legány, “Liszt in Hungary, 1848–1867,” 11–14).

156. In “Th e Origin of the Hungarian Music,” 317. Th ewrewk’s writings on Hungarian rhythm are examined in Chapter 4 .


Still, the controversy Liszt’s book had provoked over the relationship between Hungarian music and Gypsy musicians echoed in Hungarian discourse on music for decades. Even in the festive atmosphere of 1911 many authors of memorial ar-ticles to Liszt felt compelled to address the problem of Des bohémiens . A common approach was to make regretful mention of the off ending volume, but then to minimize its importance somehow in contrast to Liszt’s many signifi cant contri-butions to Hungarian music and musical life. Bertalan Fabó’s centennial article exemplifi es this tack: it makes a show of forgiving Liszt, crediting him for “expi-ating” the “sin” of his book “with his works, his activities, and—as he had prom-ised in 1840—by establishing the Music Academy and standing at its head.” 157 Aurél Kern took a similar approach, but was less forgiving, stating that “we do not want to turn away from a much-debated, painful question of Liszt’s Hungarian-ness even on this celebratory occasion . . . . We must accept the truth as it is: the Gypsy-theory was a regrettable mistake of Liszt’s.” 158 Still,

We must not estrange ourselves from Liszt because of his mistakes . . . . Liszt’s genius once paid homage to Hungarian art; it is fi tting that now Hungarian art pay homage to Liszt’s genius . . . . Let us not harp any longer on this matter [of the mistakes of the book] here at home, moreover let us refute it for the outside world with real scholarly facts and—with good Hungarian music. 159

In a brief discussion of the role of the Princess in Liszt’s book, Kern may have drawn on a lecture of a week earlier by Kálmán d’Isoz, the curator of the National

157. Fabó, “Liszt Ferenc visszamagyarosodása,” 303. Th e creation of the Music Academy was, of course, the work of many, including composers Mihály Mosonyi and Ferenc Erkel, writers led by Kornél Ábrányi, and music supporters in prominent social and political positions, such as Count Albert Apponyi and Baron Antal Augusz; Liszt, as a world-renowned musical powerhouse, gave the eff ort artistic legitimacy. Mária Eckhardt sketches out the early history of the Academy and Liszt’s involvement in it in her “A Zeneakadémia Liszt Ferenc leveleiben” [Th e Music Academy in Ferenc Liszt’s letters].

158. Th e relevant passage: “We do not want to turn away from a much-debated, painful ques-tion of Liszt’s Hungarianness even on this celebratory occasion . . . . It is well known that Liszt in [his Gypsy] book attributes Hungarian music to the Gypsies, calls our entire treasure of folksongs ‘the fragmented epic of the Gypsies in melodies’ and lists the most Hungarian masters of Palotás music, even Lavotta and Csermák, as Gypsies . . . . Doubtless, a great part of [the book] is not by Ferenc Liszt, rather Princess Wittgenstein . . . ; but the master still bears the responsibility . . . . It is a shame to make excuses for Liszt in this matter; he writes the same thing that is in the book in letters to Heckenast and Baron Augusz, here the princess’ co-authorship is unlikely. We must accept the truth as it is: the Gypsy-theory was a regrettable mistake of Liszt’s” (Kern, “Liszt Ferenc,” 2).

Another centennial-period article commenting on Liszt’s book is Géza Molnár’s “Liszt Fe-rencz és a magyar cultura” [Ferencz Liszt and Hungarian culture]; like Kern’s article, this item upbraids Liszt for his inaccuracy but then salvages Liszt’s role as a key Hungarian musical fi gure, concluding that “the nation lives in Liszt’s language” (7).

159. Kern, “Liszt Ferenc,” 2.


Museum’s Liszt exhibit, which deferred fi nal judgment on the value of the book because of the problem of authorship:

It is undeniable that this book has gross errors, which only intensify in the later second edition. / But this latter was “corrected” and “completed” by the Princess Wittgenstein. Liszt, however, assumed responsibility—though out of chivalry—for the points in it; we may not condemn him for it. It is diffi -cult, thankless and perhaps even inappropriate to defend this book, but the main problem rests in this, that out of the many—and I can add to them—vehement attackers no one has resolved this question. Th is is still the task for the future. 160

Although this item is the fi rst Hungarian writing that I have found discussing Princess Caroline’s role in the book, d’Isoz also seems to imply that this fact was known, even though the precise extent of the Princess’ intervention was not. (Un-fortunately, almost one hundred years later the resolution of this question is “still the task for the future.”) Like the other authors cited, d’Isoz, despite Liszt’s “gross errors,” moved away from this awkward topic to a more commemorative tone, concluding that “Th e course of [Liszt’s] entire life proves that he remained faithful until death to the oath he made in 1847, he never lost sight of the Pole Star and fulfi lled [the oath], so that Hungary should be proud of him.” 161

Amid this celebratory atmosphere, Béla Bartók’s attitude again stands out. Un-like so many of the Hungarian writings of this period, Bartók’s “Liszt’s Music and Today’s Public” barely addresses Liszt as a Hungarian composer, saying only that

the Hungarian Rhapsodies, which should stand nearest to us, are his least successful works (which is perhaps just why they are so widely known and admired). Beside many strokes of genius, there are for the most part pure stereotype; Gypsy music—sometimes even mixed with Italianisms (no. 6), sometimes in a veritable formal conglomeration (no. 12). 162

Th e rest of this essay briefl y discusses other works and ideas from Liszt’s oeuvre from the point of view not of his Hungarianness but of his innovation: “together with this triviality, [Liszt] displays almost everywhere amazing boldness, either in form or in invention. Th is boldness was really a fanatical pursuit of the new, the rare.” 163 Bartók’s concerns as a modernist taking stock of Liszt’s contribution to the canon eclipse his role as Hungarian. In “A magyar zenér ő l” (On Hungarian music), another important Bartók essay from earlier in the centennial year, Liszt,

160. D’Isoz, “Liszt Ferencz: El ő adás” [Ferencz Liszt: Lecture], 577–578.

161. D’Isoz, “Liszt Ferencz: El ő adás,” 581.

162. BBE , 452–453, translation altered on basis of Hungarian original.

163. BBE , 452, translation altered on basis of Hungarian original.


his contribution to Hungarian music, and the controversy over his book are no-table chiefl y for their absence, and in fact Bartók’s statements on “Gypsy music” in this essay come dangerously close to repeating Liszt’s slander: where Liszt’s mes-sage was everywhere summed up as “there is no Hungarian music other than Gypsy music,” Bartók wrote that the works of foundational nineteenth-century Hungarian composers Bihari, Lavotta, Csermák, Rózsavölgyi, and Pecsenyánszki “are not representative of national music, since they are not Magyar-type but Gypsy-type music.” 164

Th ough Bartók’s 1911 statements on Liszt’s Hungarian character and the prob-lem of his “Gypsy book” were sketchy, Pongrácz Kacsóh (1873–1923), one of his earliest supporters and a close associate during this period, spoke directly to this point in his December 1911 essay “On Ferenc Liszt,” the lead article in an issue of Magyar dal (Hungarian song) dedicated to Liszt. From the outset Kacsóh dissoci-ated himself from the “fl ood of celebration” poured out by “posterity’s little op-portunists and dilettantish grandchildren,” the many authors of conventionally celebratory Liszt articles, who “want to associate themselves with the master.” 165 Moving swift ly to the topic of the “Gypsy question” in Liszt’s Hungarian compo-sitions, and indirectly to his “Gypsy book,” Kacsóh diverged radically from those who simply stated that Liszt was simply wrong (if well-intentioned); he blamed Liszt’s mistake on the misconceptions of the entire Hungarian musical milieu:

Liszt’s treatments [of Hungarian themes] were not Hungarian-like, but rather Gypsy-like. Liszt himself believed for a long time in good faith that Hungarian music is actually just Gypsy music because here in Hungary he really always heard only Gypsy music . Not only when the Gypsy bandleaders fi ddled into his ears at restaurants or banquets, but also when someone in his circle of friends and pupils played a Hungarian song for him . . . . If even the most noted Hungarian pianists and professors only presented such things [to him] that were not essentially diff erent from that which the bandleaders produced, is it possible to take off ense at Liszt, who never knew Hungarian perfectly, who did not know the Hungarian texts of Hungarian songs, who had no idea of Hungarian prosody—if he could not discover from the view-point of rhythm the subtle border that distinguished the pure folksong from the Hungarian song phrased in a Gypsy manner? 166

Kacsóh’s article off ers an outline of the split then emerging in Hungarian mu-sical criticism between two diff erent conceptions of what Hungarian music should be. Th ough this split would come to divide a basically Romantic tradition from modernist objectivity and innovation, it would be argued largely through the

164. BBE , 301, altered on basis of Hungarian original.

165. Kacsóh, “Liszt Ferencr ő l (Postludium),” 147–148. Details of Kacsóh’s association with Bartók are elaborated in Chapters 3 and 5 .

166. Kacsóh, “Liszt Ferencr ő l (Postludium),” 147–148. Italics in original.


language of nationality: distinguishing the “subtle border” between the Gypsy-like and the pure Hungarian folksong—the emblem long associated with Bartók and Kodály, and championed in the press not only by them but also by associates like Kacsóh who are now mostly forgotten. Th e arguments of writers like Kacsóh emerged from their interest in and support for a Hungarian musical modernism based on genuine folk music, in particular as practiced by Bartók, as becomes clear in the conclusion of Kacsóh’s article:

When Liszt . . . moved home . . . and began his lessons for the Academy, that was the time when European music culture truly set its foot on our home-land. / Moreover, we had an urgent need for this. Love of the homeland, Hungarianness, invention was enough here at home, but the skill to do things as in Weimar, the art of creating Beethovenian form were closely guarded secrets to the pioneers of Hungarian art . . . . / Without Liszt’s prepa-ratory work there would be no Volkmann, Mihalovich, Kössler and Her-zfeld, [and] without these the Buttykays and Bartóks could not have grown. 167

Th at is, in Kacsóh’s eyes, Liszt’s greatest importance was to be found not in his own compositional output but in the groundwork he laid for a Hungarian musical art worthy of the European tradition—an art that was culminating only in 1911 in the work of Bartók and his contemporaries.

CONCLUSIONS

Before, during, and aft er the Liszt celebrations of 1911, Liszt was viewed as an es-sential fi gure in the history of nineteenth-century music across Europe. In Hun-gary, therefore, scholars writing about Liszt regularly emphasized his Hungarian origin; major scholars of the twentieth century, including Ervin Major, Zoltán Gárdonyi, Margit Prahács, and Dezs ő Legány, have developed the topic at great length. 168 Somehow, though, the same problems that dogged Liszt during his life-time cast a shadow over his postmortem scholarly reception. Outside of Hungary, Liszt scholarship was ghettoized, as many of the composer’s champions defended him explicitly or implicitly against the label of “empty virtuosity,” until recent scholars like Dana Gooley and James Deaville went beyond the defensive mode of writing and made virtuosity and the discourse about it the long-overdue subject of their research. Scholars from Hungary, the country that sponsors the Neue Liszt Ausgabe and houses so many important Liszt documents, oft en fi nd themselves in

167. Kacsóh, “Liszt Ferencr ő l (Postludium),” 148–149.

168. See Major’s “Liszt Ferenc magyar rapszódiái” [Ferenc Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsodies]; Gárdonyi’s Die ungarischen Stileigentümlichkeiten in den musikalischen Werken Franz Liszts ; Prahács’ “Liszt Ferenc és a magyar műveltség” [Ferenc Liszt and Hungarian cultivation], and Franz Liszt: Briefe aus ungarischen Sammlungen , cited earlier; and Legány’s Liszt Ferenc Magyar-országon [Ferenc Liszt in Hungary], vol. 1 and 2, along with their English translations.


the same double bind that their predecessors were in at the turn of the century: defending the claim on Liszt as a Hungarian, rather than German or “universal,” composer while distancing themselves from Liszt’s inaccuracy and perceived in-sensitivity on the “Gypsy question.” Bartók’s ambivalence toward Liszt and his role in Hungarian music history has excited comment only fairly recently.

Th e issues posed by the defi nition of “Hungarian music” of course go well beyond the life of any one composer; understanding what it means to claim either Liszt or Bartók was a Hungarian composer, or wrote “essentially Hungarian music,” depends heavily on the context of the claim. Th e context of Liszt centen-nial celebrations of 1911 is a particularly interesting nexus between Liszt studies and Bartók studies because it practically demanded comments on Liszt at a his-torical moment when Bartók and several other young composers were struggling to fi nd their own place in the Hungarian and European musical landscape. As modernists, they wished to defi ne that landscape in very diff erent terms from those applicable to Liszt.

In fact, the defi nition of the Hungarian musical landscape and its relationship to that of the European musical mainstream were, I argue, the defi ning issues that faced Hungarian composers and critics in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries—issues that were contested both around these two “great composers” and by several composers and writers in between. Th e debate stemmed from a widely shared frustration with the available model of “Hungarian-style” compo-sition, which posited a rhetorical opposition not just between high art and low art, but between high art and national (Hungarian) art, at least as it had been understood so far. Th at opposition is refl ected in the marginalization of Liszt’s most “Hungarian-style” music from the centennial festival in Budapest: for if the national art music was based on a low, popular style associated so strongly with racial aliens, how could it legitimately be considered art music? Yet if Hungarian national music was not to be based on the Hungarian-Gypsy style, what was going to distinguish it sonically from the German symphonic tradition?

Th e next two chapters of this book demonstrate how this debate evolved out of the Liszt controversy in the nineteenth century, and how Bartók and his circle in a sense “solved” it—but not without introducing problems of their own.

3

From Gypsies to Peasants

Race, Nation, and Modernity

Tanulj dalt a zeng ő zivatartól, Learn a song from the sounding tempest,

Mint nyög, ordít, jajgat, sír és bömböl,

As it groans, screams, moans, cries and bellows,

Fákat tép ki és hajókat tördel, Rips out trees and wrecks mighty ships, Életet fojt, vadat és embert öl; Chokes out life, slaughters beast and

man; Háború van most a nagy világban, Th ere is war now in the wide world, Isten sírja reszket a szent honban God’s grave trembles in the sainted

homeland, Húzd, ki tudja meddig húzhatod, Play, who knows how long you may

play, Mikor lesz a nyűtt vonóbul bot. When your bow may turn back to a

stick. Szív és pohár tele búval, borral, Heart and cup, so full of wine and woe, Húzd rá cigány, ne gondolj a gonddal! Strike up Gypsy, let your troubles go!

–Mihály Vörösmarty, Th e old Gypsy , 1854 1

Th e Gypsies . . . play operetta, couplets, dances, Gypsy melodies and also Hungarian national songs, but these also are be-gypsied, i. e. ornamented in their Indian way, divesting them of their primeval appeal, their fragrant purity. [Th e Gypsies] even endow with a foreign character the kind of melodies which, un-harmonized, create another, new world for the ear attuned to it. Th is embellished Hungarianness, wheezing heavily in foreign stereotypes, is the main element of Lisztean national splendor.

–Antal Molnár, “New Hungarian music,” 1911 2

1. Translation adapted from that by Peter Zollman in Dávidházi et al. (eds.), Th e Lost Rider , 87.

2. New Hungarian music: “Neu-ungarische Musik,” 1416.


Th e legend of Béla Bartók is founded on the claim that he, with friend and colleague Zoltán Kodály, created Hungarian art music anew, more or less from scratch. Th is claim dismisses all previous Hungarian composers, including Liszt, the most successful of them all. For Bartók and his circle, the nationalist credi-bility Liszt gained by championing Hungarian music was diminished by his long-time residency outside Hungary and by his minimal knowledge of the Hungarian language. Moreover, the “Hungarian” status of the music he championed was highly questionable. Where Liszt wrote “imitation” Hungarian music, Bartók and Kodály based their compositions on “genuine” folk music, taken directly from the people. Th ey stepped into a void and created national music where none had existed before.

Th is origin myth that Bartók and Kodály created for themselves obscures the rich dialogue about Hungarian music that surrounded them. Far from living in an absence of national music, Bartók and Kodály matured as artists in an environ-ment where “Hungarian-style” music was all but inescapable. Equally ubiquitous was the discourse about its defi nition and improvement. Given the time and place, Bartók and Kodály “could not have bypassed the debates around [them] about the creation of Hungarian music even if [they] wanted to.” 3 Th is discourse began in the fi rst half of the nineteenth century, on the heels of the reform of the Hungarian language, when intellectuals and writers worked out theories about folk and national song alongside works on Hungarian poetics. 4 With the develop-ment of the Hungarian press, there were more and more voices weighing in on the role music should play in the national project. To invoke Benedict Anderson’s well-known formulation, the music criticism of the period combined with musical composition to imagine how Hungary, as a national “community,” should sound. 5

Th e discourse about national music should always be viewed within the inter-national context. As the musical elite developed ideas of how their nation should be portrayed in music, they looked to the practices of the “center”—precisely the culture from which they wanted to distinguish themselves—for models. 6 Hungar-ian musical institutions were established, and Hungarian composers nurtured, just so that music marked “Hungarian” might be recognized as “great” on the interna-tional concert stage. Th ese goals carried two risks: on the one hand, embracing these models might obscure whatever independent Hungarian musical identity a

3. Dalos, Forma, harmónia, ellenpont [Form, harmony, counterpoint], 67.

4. I elaborate on these issues in Chapter 4 . For more on language reform, see Czigány, Oxford History of Hungarian Literature , 101–110.

5. In his Imagined Communities .

6. Th is analysis follows Ernest Gellner’s defi nition of nationalism as “the imposition of a high culture on society, where previously low cultures made up the lives of the majority . . . the general diff usion of a school-mediated, academy-supervised idiom” [ Nations and National-ism , 57]. Gellner points out some of the diffi culties of this subcategory of nationalism in his typology of nationalism, Nations and Nationalism , ch. 7, esp. 97–101.

From Gypsies to Peasants 97

work may have contained; on the other, even if a peripheral fi gure worked under the models and institutions of the center, central (Western) audiences might value the result as mere exoticism, or as having “tourist appeal,” judging it according to their expectations of the naïve Easterner as well as their always-changing concep-tions of those models. 7 Richard Taruskin illustrates these problems with powerful examples from Russian music, as he writes of the iconicization of the Milan- and Berlin-trained Glinka as a thoroughly Russian naïf, and of how Chaikovsky was ghettoized by Western critics for not being quite Russian enough. 8

Th e arguments over the development of Hungarian style show many parallels to the Russian case, and analysis of this critical discourse reveals a better under-standing of its high stakes. Behind each piece, whether an aesthetic polemic or a “scientifi c” analysis, was a proposed answer to some big question about Hungary, its music, and its musical institutions. Was Hungary an Eastern (Asian) country or a Western (European) one, and what might that choice imply for its music? What would music be if not Hungarian national music? How could Hungarian music take its “rightful place” on the world concert stage and still protect its identity from the taint of foreignness? Who was qualifi ed to serve as an arbiter of musical taste? If only music professionals were, what about those professionals not trained “according to European standards”? Were those who were trained according to European standards still truly Hungarian?

Th e prominent role of “Gypsy music” introduced an important variable into Hungarian music criticism that was not nearly as prominent in the Russian case. Gypsy musicians had a signifi cant role in Russian vernacular music, particularly the choirs mentioned in Chapter 1 , but their mainly local popularity did not match the continent-wide fame of Hungary’s Gypsy style and touring Gypsy bands. Gypsies were central to important nineteenth-century literary works of both countries; but whereas Pushkin’s seminal Th e Gypsies (1824) contrasts a Rus-sian protagonist with Gypsies as quintessential romanticized Other, 9 at least two major Hungarian works from the nineteenth century linked the Gypsies’ fate to that of the Hungarian nation: Mihály Vörösmarty constructed his tragic A vén cigány (Th e old Gypsy) (1854), excerpted in the fi rst epigraph to this chapter as a lengthy apostrophe to a Gypsy violinist; and János Arany’s mock epic A nagyidai cigányok (Th e Gypsies of Nagyida) (1851), depicts a band of Gypsies celebrating extravagantly before being crushed by their enemies, as stand-ins for the Hungar-ians and their defeats. 10 Moreover, using metaphorical Gypsies in literature or referencing them in music was entirely diff erent from allowing the international

7. See Taruskin, “Nationalism,” New Grove 7, 699–701.

8. In Defi ning Russia Musically , ch. 2–4.

9. Lemon, Between Two Fires , 31–32.

10. Both works deal tacitly with the failure of Hungary’s 1848–1849 War of Independence. In Vörösmarty’s poem, Gypsy music becomes a way to cope with the unspecifi ed violence and sor-row of the world. Th e pompous and overambitious Gypsy leader in Arany’s A nagyidai cigányok is generally understood as symbolizing Hungarian revolutionary leader Lajos Kossuth.


audience to think of the Asiatic Gypsies as the source of the national music. Th us while musicologists have not noted a signifi cant role for Gypsiness in nineteenth-century Russian music criticism, Gypsies’ role in the performance of Hungarian vernacular music, combined with the arguments made in Liszt’s Des bohémiens , made Gypsies and Gypsiness all but unavoidable in Hungarian criticism.

Th ough these factors made race and hybridity a chief point of contention in the critical discourse on Hungarian music, it sometimes became entangled with issues of education and professional training. Some writers made an eff ort to depict the Hungarian content of Hungarian style as European and to separate it from the ra-cially polluting force of Gypsy performance practice, which was extravagant and took too many liberties, like the Gypsies themselves; but according to one observer, János Sepr ő di (1874–1923), the “learned man of European fame who, however, does not know Hungarian” who distanced himself too much from the Hungarian-Gypsy style was unlikely to contribute successful and recognizably Hungarian composi-tions to the repertoire, and moreover, such a composer would “see the cause of his lack of success [with his one or two attempts at Hungarian composition] not in himself, but in Hungarian music.” Sepr ő di contrasted this type with the “dilletante, the naturalist, well-meaning and ready to do anything, . . . to whom it makes no diff erence whether the matter at hand is arranging a nóta medley from Kalotaszeg or introducing Hungarian music in Paris—but in his lack of scholarly ability [he is] not competent [to do] any of it.” 11 Th is category included not only Gypsy musicians but also some Hungarian dilettantes, whose music and scholarship alike would be of little consequence despite its Hungarian foundations.

Th ese existing confl icts over education, cultural level, nation, and race in the Hungarian music scene laid the groundwork for the argument over modernist aesthetics in music, both for and against. Certain “establishment” critics claimed that the extended harmonic and rhythmic language beginning to seep into the country in the early twentieth century was not only anti-classical, but also anti-Hungarian or “anti-racial”; a composer who went outside the accepted bound-aries was criticized for giving in to the seductive example of “hypermodern” foreign composers. Meanwhile, Bartók’s modernist circle pointed out (as some of their predecessors had also observed) that the Hungarian-Gypsy style was not the opposite of earlier German style, but an extension of it, and unlike their largely German-trained elders, the younger generation rejected the notion that Hungar-ian music could be built on a German foundation. In their view, to create a truly Hungarian music, it was necessary to start all over with a new, unimpeachably Hungarian source: “peasant music in the strict sense,” 12 music created by and col-lected directly from Hungary’s isolated peasants, which was to lead to a whole new understanding of what it meant to write Hungarian music.

11. Sepr ő di, “Föladatok a magyar zene körül” [Problems about Hungarian music], 261.

12. As Bartók refers to it in, among other places, his 1921 essay “La Musique populaire Hongroise.” It appears in translation in BBE , 58–70.


As those familiar with the literature on Bartók or Kodály already know, this change was not easy. Until recently, music historians both in Hungary and the West have accepted Bartók and Kodály’s accounts of the diffi culties they encoun-tered: that they were thwarted both by foreigners (mainly Germans) in the “estab-lishment” and by complacent domestic audiences content to let Hungarian music be represented by popular and dilettantish “Gypsy slop.” 13 While this assessment contains much truth, hindsight makes the conclusion the modernists reached look inevitable and blurs the degree to which their arguments drew on the exist-ing discourse of Hungarian national music and identity.

Th is chapter uses a wide-ranging body of music criticism and pedagogical writing to illuminate that discourse. As a result, little of it focuses directly on the role of either Liszt or Bartók, but still, understanding it can teach us much about the environment in which Liszt and Bartók worked. It is also of interest for its own sake, as notes on “fi eldwork in the ethnomusicological past”—a method to “encounter the ways in which . . . inhabitants [of this world] constructed their self-knowledge.” 14 Th emes that emerge here illustrate how ideas of nation and race were at the center of the debate on Hungarian national music, and how a new-found emphasis on ancient folk music paradoxically became the emblem of the modernists’ attack on the traditional conception of those ideas.

THE SIGNS OF A NATIONAL CULTURE

Th e primary sources that shape this depiction of the debate on Hungarian na-tional music come largely from the country’s music journals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, plus occasional pieces that appeared in other outlets, whether daily, weekly, or less frequent. In books and articles, concert reviews and previews, announcements of coming events and side remarks, dozens of com-mentators from almost every Hungarian musical institution, plus scholars from other fi elds and interested amateurs, argued with varying degrees of eloquence for their vision of music’s magyarság (Hungarianness), on national music, or on the role music should play in Hungarian society. Table 3.1 lists over a hundred books

13. As Bartók wrote in a December 26, 1904, letter to his sister concerning the taste of “our good Hungarians”: “Th ey fi nd the usual Gypsy slop [megszokott cigányos slendrián] much more to their taste” [ Bartók Béla levelei (Béla Bartók letters, henceforth BBL ), 83]. Judit Frigyesi has off ered some nuance to our understanding of the situation, demonstrat-ing how late nineteenth-century “Hungarian” art forms—emphatically including music in the Hungarian-Gypsy style—were oft en used to represent chauvinist politics, with both its grand Magyar myth-making and its ethnic and class prejudices; in Frigyesi’s view, the youn-ger generation was thus not simply correcting scientifi c error but also expressing their disgust at the political associations of this music by attacking its sometimes nostalgic, sometimes triumphalist aesthetic, and this resistance to Bartók and Kodály’s research program should thus be seen in the context of this ideological struggle ( Béla Bartók and Turn-of-the-Century Budapest , chapters 2 and 3 ). I cover the background of nationality and racial politics in turn-of-the-century Hungary in more detail in chapter 1 of my dissertation.



Table 3.1. A selected list of articles and books on Hungarian musical life and the “problem of Hungarian music,” 1844–1914

1844 1. János Erdélyi: “Magyar népdalköltészetr ő l” [On Hungarian folksong poetry],

A regél ő pesti divatlap (Jan. 25), 103–106. 2. János Erdélyi: “Egypár korszerű szó nemzeti zenénk ügyében” [A few timely

words in the matter of our national music], A regél ő pesti divatlap (Feb. 25), 251. 1847

3. János Erdélyi: “A magyar népdalok” [On Hungarian folksongs], end of El ő ször a magyar népköltési gyűjtemény—népdalok és mondák II. [First collection of Hungarian folk poetry—folksongs and sayings] (Pest 1847).

1851 4. Mihály Füredi: 100 magyar népdal [100 Hungarian folksongs] (Pest 1851).

1854 5. Gábor Mátray: “Bihari János, magyar népzenész életrajza” [Biography of

János Bihari, Hungarian folk musician], Magyar- és Erdélyország képekben II, ed. Ferencz Kubinyi and Imre Vahot (Pest: Emich Gusztáv, 1854), 156–161.

6. Gábor Mátray: “A magyar zene, és a magyar czigányok zenéje” [Hungarian music and the music of Hungarian Gypsies], Magyar- és Erdélyország képekben IV, ed. Ferencz Kubinyi and Imre Vahot (Pest: Emich Gusztáv, 1854), 118–125.

1855 7. Gusztáv Szénfy: “Greguss Ágost ‘magyar verstan’-a zenészeti szempontból”

[Ágost Greguss’ ‘Hungarian prosody’ from a musical point of view], Magyar sajtó 1, no. 34, 37, 39, and 41 (Aug. 9, 12, 15, 18, 1855).

1859 8. Franz / Ferenc Liszt: Des bohémiens et de leur musique en Hongrie [On the

Gypsies and their music in Hungary] (Paris: Librairie Nouvelle, 1859). 9. S–y J.: “Liszt Ferencz és a magyar zene” [Ferencz Liszt and Hungarian music],

Vasárnapi ujság 6, no. 34 (Aug. 21, 1859), 403–404. 10. Count István Fáy: “Volt-e a czigányok között zeneszerz ő ?” [Was there a composer

among the Gypsies?], Vasárnapi ujság 6, no. 42 (Oct. 16, 1859), 500–501. 1860

11. Sámuel Brassai, Magyar-vagy-czigány zene? Elmefuttatás Liszt Ferenc “Czigányokról” írt könyve felett [Hungarian or Gypsy music? Short essay about Ferenc Liszt’s book “On the Gypsies”] (Kolózsvár [Cluj]: Az Ev. Reform. F ő tanoda Könyvnyomdája, 1860).

1861 12. János Arany: “A magyar népdal az irodalomban” [Th e Hungarian folksong in

literature], Arany János hátrahagyott prózai dolgozatai [János Arany’s posthumous prose works] (Budapest: Ráth Mór, 1889), 7–30.

13. László Hajdú: “Nemzeti táncunk és népzenénk amint van s kellene lennie” [Our national dance and folk music as it is and as it should be], Zenészeti lapok 22, 169–172; 23, 177–179; 24, 185–186.


1862 14. Gusztáv Szénfy: Excerpts from his “Magyar zenekönyv”: “Keleti zene s zenészet”

[Eastern music and musical art], Zenészeti Lapok 2, no. 36 (June 5), 281–284; no. 37 (June 12), 290–293; “A magyar zene rendszere s fejleszthetési módja” [System and mode of development of Hungarian music], no. 38 (June 19), 298–301; 39, 306–309.

15. Ifj . S. Bertha: “Hazánk zenészeti pártjairól” [On the musical parties in our homeland], Zenészeti lapok 2, no. 37 (June 12), 293–295.

16. “A nemzeti zene fentartási szükségér ő l” [On the necessity of supporting national music], Zenészeti lapok 3, no. 1 (Oct. 2), 2–5.

1863 17. Mihály Mosonyi: “ Népdal” [Folksong], Zenészeti lapok 3, no. 15 (1863). 18. Gusztáv Szénfy: “Nemzetiség a zenében” [Nationality in music], Zenészeti

lapok 3, no. 50, 396–398. 1864

19. Ede Reményi: “Hazánk művészeti viszonyairól” [On the artistic conditions of our homeland], Zenészeti lapok 5, no. 1 (Oct. 6), 1–3; no. 2 (Oct. 13), 9–11; no. 3 (Oct. 20), 17–18.

1865 20. Aurél Wachtel: “Eszmék a magyar zenér ő l” [Th oughts about Hungarian

music], Zenészeti lapok 5, no. 25, 194–196. 21. I stván Bartalus: “A czigány és viszonya zenénkhez” [Th e Gypsy and his

relationship to our music], Budapesti szemle [Budapest journal] 3 (1865), 107–119, 290–308; 4 (1866), 35–73.

1866 22. Emil Ponori Th ewrewk: A hang mint műanyag. Költészet-zenészeti értekezés

a magyar zene eredeti magyar voltának bebizonyításával [Sound as artistic material. Poetic-musical treatise with a demonstration of the Hungarian origin of Hungarian music] (Pest, 1866).

23. Gusztáv Szénfy: “Zenészeti s költészeti magyar mértéktan” [Musical and poetic study of Hungarian meter], Zenészeti lapok 6, nos. 29 (Apr. 22), 225–227; 30 (Apr. 29), 233–236; 31 (May 6), 241–244.

1867 24. Kornél Ábrányi: “A forradalom befolyása a magyar dalra” [Th e infl uence of

the revolution on Hungarian song], Zenészeti lapok 8, no. 3 (Oct. 20), 33–36. 25. János Zelenka: “A zenészeti nevelés ügye hazánkban” [Th e matter of musical

education in our homeland], Zenészeti lapok 8, no. 13 (Dec. 29), 196–198. 1872

26. Gyula Stettner: A nemzeti elemr ő l a magyar zenében [Th e national element in Hungarian music]. Programm der öff entlichen evangelischen Schulanstalten zu Oberschützen für das Schuljahr 1871–1872, 1–18.

27. József Harrach: “A nemzetiség a zenében” [Nationality in music], Figyel ő 2, no. 46: 541–543, 47: 554–557, 48: 565–567.


(continued)


1873 28. Emil Ponori Th ewrewk: “A magyar rhythmus rendezése. Els ő rész. A

magyar zene rhythmusa” [Th e organization of Hungarian rhythm, part I: Th e rhythm of Hungarian music], Nyelvtudományi közlemények 10, 366–390.

1877 29. Kornél Ábrányi: A magyar dal és zene sajátságai: Nyelvi, zöngidomi, harmoniai

s műformai szempontb ő l [Characteristis of Hungarian song and music: From the viewpoint of language, melody, harmony, and genre] (Budapest: A Magyar Királyi Egyetemi Nyomda Tulajdona).

1881 30. Emil Ponori Th ewrewk: A magyar zene rhythmusa [Th e rhythm of

Hungarian music], 2nd corrected edition. 1882

31. Sándor Czeke: “Magyar zenét művel ő szövetkezet/Egy új alakuló egylet” [Alliance for the cultivation of Hungarian music/A newly formed society], Zenészeti közlöny 1, no. 5 (Feb. 20).

1886 32. “Liszt Ferenc magyar szelleme” [Ferenc Liszt’s Hungarian spirit], Magyar

szalon 5 (Sept.), 564. 1889

33. Emil Ponori Th ewrewk: “Musique tsigane ou musique hongroise” [Gypsy music or Hungarian music], La revue de l’Orient [Budapest] 4, no. 29 (July 21, 1889).

34. János Arany: “A magyar népdal az irodalomban” [Th e Hungarian folksong in literature], Arany János hátrahagyott prózai dolgozatai (Budapest: Ráth Mór), 7–30.

35. E.: “Magyar zene” [Hungarian music], Budapesti hirlap 9, no. 73 (March 14), 1–3.

1890 36. Emil Ponori Th ewrewk: “A magyar zene tudományos tárgyalása” [Scholarly

treatment of Hungarian music],” Értekezések az MTA Nyelv- és Széptudományi Osztály köréb ő l 15, no. 7 (Budapest 1890).

1891 37. Ödön Mihalovich: “Nemzeti opera- és zeneviszonyainkról” [About the

conditions of our national opera and music], Műbarátok könyve (Budapest 1891), 91–99.

1900 38. Kornél Ábrányi: A magyar zene a 19-ik században [Hungarian music in the

19th century] (Budapest: Rózsavölgyi és Társa).



(continued)

1901 39. Dr. Gy ő z ő Modeszt: “Egy új magyar dalmű” [A new Hungarian opera],

Zenevilág 2, 31–33. 40. “Magyar zenét!” [Hungarian music!], Zenevilág 2, no. 2 (Sept. 10), 9–11. 41. Sándor Kovács: “A nemzeti zene művelése Temesvárott” [Th e development of

national music in Temesvár], Zenevilág 2, no. 17 (Dec. 17), 147–149. 1902

42. Pál Erdély: A magyar népdalokról [About Hungarian folksongs], Nemzeti szemle [National journal] 5, no. 79 (Jan. 12).

43. “Magyar muzsika” [Hungarian music], Pesti hirlap 24, no. 139 (May 23), 7–8 and no. 141 (May 25), 2–3.

44. “Magyar muzsikus” [Hungarian musician]: “’Nincs más magyar muzsika, mint a czigánymuzsika’” [Th ere is no other Hungarian music than gypsy music]. Zenevilág 2, no. 42 (June 10), 450–451.

45. “Hazafi ság a művészetben” [Patriotism in art], Zenevilág 3, no. 4 (Sept. 23), 31. 46. “Eine ungarische Oper in Berlin” [A Hungarian opera in Berlin], Zenevilág 3,

no. 11 (Nov. 11), 111–112. 1903

47. József Vietorisz: “A magyar zenér ő l” [About Hungarian music], Zenevilág 4, no. 5 (Feb. 4), 41–42; no. 6 (Feb. 10), 53–54; no. 8 (Feb. 24), 69–70; no. 9 (March 3), 77–78.

48. Ödön Farkas: “A magyar művészi zenér ő l” [About Hungarian art music], Zenevilág 4, no. 26 (July 16), 219–221, and no. 27 (Aug. 1), 227–229.

1904 49. “Magyar zeneművek” [Hungarian musical works], Zenelap 18, no. 2 (Jan. 15), 1. 50. “Magyar zene, műzene” [Hungarian music, art music], Zeneközlöny 2, no. 17

(May 25), 231–232; no. 18 (June 7), 240–243; and no. 19 (July 11), 251–253. 51. “ A magyar dal-ügy a f ő városban” [Th e Hungarian song matter in the capital],

Zeneközlöny 2, no. 20 (Aug. 10), 264–267. 52. Lajos Bátori: “A magyar népdal” [Th e Hungarian folksong], Zeneközlöny 2,

no. 24 (Oct. 8), 307–310. 53. “Magyar zenei művel ő dés” [Hungarian musical education], Zenevilág 5, no.

38 (Oct. 25), 271–272, and no. 39 (Nov. 1), 279–280. 54. Otmár Ságody: “Alkalmasak-e a magyar motivumok műzenében való

felhasználásra?” [Are Hungarian motives appropriate for use in art music?], Zenevilág 5, no. 46–47 (Dec. 20), 331–333.

55. Géza Molnár: A magyar zene elmélete [Th e analysis of Hungarian music] (Budapest: Részvény Társaság).

56. János Sepr ő di: “ A magyar zene elméleté r ő l” [On Th e Analysis of Hungarian Music [review]], Budapesti szemle 118, no. 328–330, 119–127.

57. Ignác Gábor: “A magyar ő si ritmus” [Ancient Hungarian rhythm], lecture held at the Oct. 20 meeting of the Kisfaludy Society, Magyar nyelv ő r 33, 537–545.



1905 58. Sándor Kárpáti: “Stilizált magyar motivum” [Th e stylized Hungarian

motive], Zenevilág 6, no. 1–2. (Jan. 8), 1–3. 59. Otmár Ságody: “A czigányos magyar zenér ő l” [About Gypsy-style Hungarian

music], Zenevilág 6, no. 9 (Feb. 25), 63–64. 60. “A magyar dal a nemzeti eszme szolgálatában” [Th e Hungarian song

in the service of national spirit], Zenevilág 6, no. 29–30 (May 27), 165–166.

61. János Muzsi: “A magyar népdal” [Th e Hungarian folksong], Zenevilág 6, no. 29–30 (Aug. 12), 222–224, and no. 31–32 (Sept. 11), 242–244.

62. “A magyar zene és a czigányok” [Hungarian music and the gypsies], Zenevilág 6, no. 34 (Sept. 23), 157–159 (translation of an article that originally appeared in the Berlin journal Die Musik in August 1905).

63. “Magyar nemzeti közművel ő dés” [Hungarian national public education], Zenevilág 6, no. 43 (Nov. 25), 335–336.

64. “‘Magyar zene’” [ ‘Hungarian music’] Zenevilág 6, no. 43 (Nov. 25), 337. 65. Otmár Ságody: “A magyar zene metrikai sajátosságáról” [Th e metric

characteristics of Hungarian music], Zenevilág 6, no. 47–48 (Dec. 23), 368–370.

66. “Az új magyar opera” [New Hungarian opera], Zenelap 19, no. 6 (March 15), 2–3.

1906 67. János Sepr ő di: “Föladatok a magyar zene körül” [Problems about

Hungarian music], Budapesti szemle 126, no. 353 (May), 214–263. 68. Géza Molnár: “Ezer népdal” [One thousand folksongs], Zenevilág 7, no. 18

(April 28), 149–151, and 7, no. 19 (May 5), 159–160. 69. Kornél Szkladányi: “Zene a nemzeti kultusz szolgálatában” [Music in the

service of the national cult], Zenelap 20, no. 9–10 (May 10), 1–2. 70. Otmár Ságody: “A magyaros műzene formájáról” [About the form of

Hungarian-style art music], Zenevilág 7, no. 24–25 (June 12), 195–196. 71. János Sepr ő di: “A magyar zenér ő l (Levél a szerkeszt ő höz)” [About Hungarian

music (Letter to the editor)], Zeneközlöny 5, no. 1 (Oct. 15), 9–10. 72. Lajos Szekerke: “A magyar operettr ő l” [On Hungarian operetta], Zenevilág 7,

no. 45 (Dec. 8), 369–370. 73. Döme Lugosi: “Az els ő magyar szinjátszó társaság zenekara és ennek fi zetése”

[Th e orchestra of the fi rst Hungarian theatrical society and paying for it], Zenevilág 7, no. 45 (Dec. 8), 370.

74. Géza Molnár: “Franczia hang a magyar zenér ő l [A French voice on Hungarian music], Zenevilág 7, no. 47–48 (Dec. 24), 389–391.

75. Zoltán Kodály, “A magyar népdal strófa-szerkezete” [Th e strophic structure of the Hungarian folksong], Nyelvtudományi közlemények 36, 95–136.

76. Zoltán Kodály and Béla Bartók, Magyar népdalok [Hungarian folksongs] (Budapest: Rozsnyai).



1907 77. “Weiner Leó: Magyar szerenád” [Leó Weiner: Hungarian serenade],

Zeneközlöny 5, no. 8 (Jan. 7), 105–106. 78. Otmár Ságody: “Magyaros érzés, magyaros hangulat a zenében” [Hungarian

feeling, Hungarian atmosphere in music], Zenevilág 8, no. 4 (Jan. 27), 31–32. 79. B. M.: “Nemzeti irány a zeneművészet terén” [National direction in the fi eld

of musical art], Zenevilág 8, no. 6 (Feb. 10), 47–48. 80. István Kereszty (?): “A magyar zene a nagyvilág el ő tt” [Hungarian music

before the wide world], Zenelap 21, no. 4 (Feb.10), 1–2. 81. Lajos Hackl: “A nemzetköziség alkonya a zenében” [Th e twilight of

internationalism in music], Zenevilág 8, no. 9–10 (March 7), 68–70, and no. 13–14 (March 30), 92–93.

82. Géza Molnár: “Magyar táncok a XVI. századból” [Hungarian dances from the 16th century], Zeneközlöny 5, no. 22 (Sept. 28), 273–283; no. 23 (Sept. 29), 285–302; no. 24 (Sept. 30), 305–310.

83. “A czigányzene és a budapesti kir. Ítél ő tábla” [Gypsy music and the Budapest royal High Court], Zenevilág 8, no. 31–32 (Oct. 27), 215–216.

84. Lajos Hackl: “A magyar zenei szaksajtó jelenlegi állapotáról” [About the present condition of the Hungarian musical press], Zenevilág 8, no. 31–32 (Oct. 27), 216–217.

85. Dezs ő Demény: “Nándor Rékai: Variations on a Hungarian theme,” Zeneközlöny 6, no. 5 (Dec. 16), 52–54.

1908 86. “Antalff y-Zsiros Dezs ő : Magyar szvit” [Dezs ő Antalff y-Zsiros: Hungarian

Suite], Zeneközlöny 6, no. 11 (March 2), 124–125. 87. Rezs ő Hoppe: “Magyar Zenei Múzeum” [Hungarian Music Museum],

Zeneközlöny 6, no. 19 (Aug. 8), 200–202. 88. Otmár Ságody: “Népzene—Műzene” [Folk music—art music], Zenevilág 9,

no. 25 (Sept. 27), 165–166. 89. István Kereszty (?): “Nemzeti zene” [National music], Zenelap 22, no. 15

(Sept. 20), 3–4. 90. Dezs ő Járosy: Faji zene és magyar zene: Zeneesztetikai tanulmány [Racial

music and Hungarian music: A music-aesthetic study] (Timișoara: Csanádegyházmegyei).

91. Géza Molnár: A faji elem a zenében [Th e racial element in music] (Budapest: Athenaeum).

92. János Osváth: Nemzeti zeneművészet: Történetkritikai tanulmány [National Musical Art: Historical-Critical Study] (Budapest: Ármin Fritz).

93. Bertalan Fabó: A magyar népdal zenei fejl ő dése. Ezer kottapéldával [Th e musical development of Hungarian folksong. With a thousand musical examples] (Budapest).

94. János Sepr ő di: “A magyar népdal zenei fejl ő dése” [Th e musical development of Hungarian folksong][review of Fabó], Erdélyi múzeum 25, 293–327, 349–367.


(continued)


1909 95. Kálmán d’Isoz: “Osváth János: Nemzeti zeneművészet” [János

Osváth: National Musical Art [review]], Zeneközlöny 7, no. 7 (Jan. 9), 83–84.

96. “Szendy Árpád: Magyar poémák” [Árpád Szendy: Hungarian poems], Zeneközlöny 7, no. 11 (April), 124–128.

97. Bertalan Fabó: “Vitás kerdések a magyar népdal, népzene és táncz terén (Válasz Sepr ő di János czikkére)” [Debated questions in the area of Hungarian folksong, folk music, and dance: Answer to an article by János Seprdi], Erdelyi múzeum 26, 215–232.

1910 98. István Kardos: “Népi és faji jelleg a modern műzenében” [Folk and racial

character in modern art-music], Zenelap 24, no. 1 (Jan. 10), 4–7; no. 2 (Jan. 20), 2–4; no. 3 (Feb. 1), 2–4; no. 4 (Feb. 20), 2–4; no. 5 (March 1), 2–3; no. 6 (April 1), 2–3.

99. “Országos Magyar Zene-Egyesület” [National Hungarian Music Society], Zenelap 24, no. 8 (May 1), 1–3.

100. Bertalan Fabó: “A zene, mint nemzetgazdasági tényez ő ” [Music as a factor in enriching the nation], Zeneközlöny 9, no. 1 (Nov. 1), 17–18.

101. Dezs ő Járosy: “A magyar zenei kultura er ő forrásai” [Th e sources of strength of Hungarian musical culture], Zeneközlöny 9, no. 1 (Nov. 1), 5–10; no. 2 (Nov. 15), 56–58; no. 5 (Jan. 1, 1911), 148–153.

102. Géza Molnár: “A faji zene három törvénye” [Th e three laws of racial music], A zene 2, no. 12 (Dec.), 213–223.

103. Lajos Lakatos: “Magyar zsidó cigányok” [Hungarian Jewish Gypsies], Az Izr. Magyar Irodalmi Társulat évkönyve 31, 197–206.

104. Aurél Kern (ed.): Modern magyar zene: 12 zongoradarab [Modern Hungarian music: 12 piano pieces] (Budapest: Rozsnyai).

1911 105. Béla Bartók: “A hangszeres zene folkloreja Magyarországon” [Th e folklore of

instrumental music in Hungary], Zeneközlöny 9, no. 5 (Jan. 1), 141–148; 9, no. 7 (Feb. 1), 207–213; 9, no. 9 (March 1), 309–312; 10, no. 19 (April 11, 1912), 601–604.

106. “A magyar nemzeti zene multja” [Th e past of Hungarian national music], Zenelap 25, no. 3–4 (Feb. 1), 2–3, and no. 5–6 (Feb. 20), 4–5.

107. Jen ő Sztojanovits: “A magyar dalosok szereplése a római művészeti kiállitáson” [Th e appearance of the Hungarian singers at the Rome artistic exhibition], Zeneközlöny 9, no. 8 (Feb. 15), 246–249.

108. Béla Bartók: “A magyar zenér ő l” [On Hungarian music], Aurora 1, no. 3 (March 1911), 126–128.

109. V. R.: “A czigányok zenéje” [Th e music of the Gypsies], Zenelap 25, no. 15–16 (July 10), 3–4.



(continued)


110. Otmár Ságody: Magyar zene [Hungarian Music] (cited in Zenei lexikon ).

111. László Torkos: “Gábor Ignác: A magyar ő si ritmus. Bp., 1908” [Ignác Gábor: Th e ancient Hungarian rhythm [review]], Egyetemes philologiai közlöny 35, 479–485.

112. Sándor Kovács, “La jeune école hongroise,” S. I. M. revue musicale 7, no. 9 (Sept.), 47–59.

113. “Visszaélések Liszt összes műveinek magyar kiadása körül” [Abuses around the Hungarian edition of Liszt’s complete works], A zene 3, no. 9 (Sept.), 183–185.

114. Marion: “Liszt Ferenc magyar tanítványai” [Ferenc Liszt’s Hungarian pupils], A zene 3, no. 10 (Oct.), 221–222.

115. Andor Somssich: “Liszt Ferenc magyarsága” [Ferenc Liszt’s Hungarianness], Zeneközlöny 11, no. 18 (Oct. 20, 1911), 560–562.

116. Béla Bartók: “A magyar nép hangszerei” [Instruments of the Hungarian folk], Ethnographia 22, no. 5 (October), 305–10; 23, no. 2 (March), 110–114.

117. Anton [Antal] Molnár: “Neu-ungarische Musik” [New Hungarian music], Jung Ungarn 1, no. 12 (Dec. 15), 1416–1418.

118. Bertalan Fabó: “Liszt Ferenc visszamagyarosodása és magyar működése” [Ferenc Liszt’s Re-Hungarianization and Hungarian activities], Népművelés 6, no. 17–18 (1911), 287–288.

1912 119. “Hubay Jen ő : Magyar változatok” [Jen ő Hubay: Hungarian variations],

Zeneközlöny 10, no. 9 (Jan. 15), 291–293. 120. Otmár Ságody: “A magyar zene sajátosságai” [Th e characteristics of

Hungarian music], Zeneközlöny 11, no. 20 (July 15), 668–673; no. 21 (Aug. 15), 692–699; 12, no. 1 (Oct. 15), 13–15; 12, no. 10 (Jan. 15, 1914), 254–258; 12, no. 13 (Feb. 15, 1914), 328–333; 12, no. 18 (April 15, 1914), 457–462; 12, no. 19 (May 15, 1914), 508–514.

121. Rezs ő Kemény: “Egy magyar pedagógus” [A Hungarian pedagogue [Jen ő Hubay]], Zeneközlöny 11, no. 4 (Nov. 15), 99–100.

122. Egon Wellesz: “Ungarische Kammermusik” [Hungarian chamber music], Der Merker 3, no. 17, 672.

1913 123. Antal Molnár: “A variáció a nemzeti zenében” [Th e variation in national

music], A zene 5, no. 1 (Jan.), 2–4. 124. Antal Molnár: “A népdalról” [About folksong], A zene 5, no. 3 (March),

54–57. 125. Jen ő Hubay: “Pet ő fi befolyása a magyar zenére” [Pet ő fi ’s infl uence on

Hungarian music], Zeneközlöny 11, no. 17 (April 15), 543–546.


1914 126. Pál Aranyossy: “Új magyar zene Párizsban” [New Hungarian music in

Paris], Zeneközlöny 12, no. 18 (April 15), 467–468. 127. “Országos Magyar Zeneművészeti Társulat” [Society for National

Hungarian Musical Art], A zene 6, no. 6 (June), 111. 128. Antal Molnár: “Nemzeti zene” [National music], Zeneközlöny 12, no. 19

(May 15), 499–502; 12, no. 20 (June 15), 539–541; 12, no. 21 (July 15), 575–578; 13, no. 1 (March 15, 1915), 10–11; 13, no. 2 (April 15, 1915), 19–21.

Frequently cited journals: Zenészeti lapok [Musical pages], a weekly published in Budapest from 1860

to 1876 Zenevilág [Music world], a weekly (with frequent double issues) published in Budapest

from 1890 to 1891 and in a later incarnation from 1900 to 1911 Zeneközlöny [Music journal], a biweekly (approximately) published in Budapest from

1902 to 1918 Zenelap [Music page], a biweekly published in Budapest from 1887 to 1914 A zene [Music], a monthly published in Budapest from 1909 to 1914 and

1925 to 1941


and articles whose titles alone referred to some aspect of the “problem of Hungar-ian (or national) music”; many other items that address this “problem” under less obvious titles are not shown. 15 Th e wide variety of authors discussed here, appear-ing in diverse publication outlets, all concerned themselves at some time and in some way with “that holy goal before us, the question of the future of Hungarian

15. Th e phrases “problem” or “question of Hungarian music” turn up frequently in this dis-course. For example, as part of a review in Zenevilág 1, no. 4 (October 15, 1900), 32, on Géza Kováts’ collection Kilencz magyar népdal [Nine Hungarian folksongs], the unnamed author fi nishes by writing, “In any event it is desirable in the interest of a solution to the problem of Hungarian music, that Géza Kováts show an example with such a delightful, precious collec-tion to those that will follow.” Similarly, an uncredited staff writer, possibly Dezs ő Demény, the journal’s founding editor, mentions how many composers “have tried to solve the ques-tion of Hungarian style” in a preview of Leó Weiner’s “Magyar szerenád” printed in Zenekö-zlöny 5, no. 8 (January 7, 1907), 105, and Aurél Kern states that “the question of Hungarian music stands before the government” in “Zenei kérdések” [Musical questions], Aurora 1, no. 1 (January 31, 1911), 6.

Discussion of the “problem”—with changing forms and points of focus, of course— continued at least through the early years of Hungary’s communist government, during which Hungarian composers attempted to fulfill Stalin’s dictum to create music that was “socialist in content and nationalist in form.” The place of Bartók’s music in this schema was hotly contested, as Danielle Fosler-Lussier discusses in her article “Bartók Reception in Cold War Europe” and in her book Music Divided: Bartók’s Legacy in Cold War Culture .


music.” 16 Th e titles of their books and articles alone allow us to tease out certain more specifi c themes from this question: • Th e development of Hungarian musical institutions. • Th e issue of foreign infl uence, particularly from Western countries. • Th e role of Gypsy music and musicians. • Th e defi nition of Hungary’s national (or “racial”) music according to

some objective scientifi c or musical standard. • Th e role of folksong and folk style in national music. • Th e relationship between national music and art music. • Th e place of “modern” expression in national music. Most of the music press in which these themes were discussed were published in Pest-Buda, called Budapest aft er the 1873 unifi cation; speaking practically, these texts act as fi eld notes on a musical past centered there— the written remnant of discussions that occurred in Budapest institutions like the Nemzeti Zenede (Na-tional Conservatory) and, aft er its founding, the Music Academy, at public concert halls and aristocratic salons, in cafés and clubs where people might gather aft er a performance, or in the browsing areas of music stores like Rózsavölgyi. But these dialogues were not limited to the capital. Th e fi rst important music journal in Hungarian, Zenészeti lapok (Musical pages), was based in Budapest, launched by editor-in-chief, owner, and fi nancial backer Kornél Ábrányi Sr. in 1860 and sup-ported by Hungary’s “most outstanding resident musical experts of the time,” including composer Mihály Mosonyi (1815–1870), music publisher Gyula Rózsavölgyi (1822–1861), and musicologists István Bartalus (1821–1899) and Gusz-táv Szénfy (1819–1875); but the journal had subscribers and shareholders from every region of Hungary, including “the landed gentry, the clergy, teachers, lawyers, and minor offi cials.” 17 According to Katalin Szerz ő , the journal analyzed new works based on the ideal of a composer who “by modern standards [used] the highest level of musical technique and who, by using the Hungarian folksong and the verbunkos as sources—would create a Hungarian national style of art music of comparable caliber to that of the German, French, and Italian national schools.” 18

Although Zenészeti lapok ceased publication in 1876, over the course of the rest of the nineteenth century and leading up to the war a number of Hungarian-language music journals came and went. By 1909, at least eleven diff erent music journals were being published. 19 Th ese journals gave provincial writers and readers

16. Ábrányi, “El ő fi zetési fölhivás” [Invitation to subscribe], 17.

17. According to Szerz ő , Introduction, x, xii.

18. Introduction, xii.

19. In alphabetical order, A zene , Apollo, Katholikus egyházi zeneközlöny , Magyar cigányzenészek lapja , Magyar dal- és zeneközlöny , Magyar zene-ujság , Református zeneközlöny , Zeneközlöny , Zenelap , Zenél ő Magyarország , and Zenevilág (based on a survey of “Zenei folyóiratok” in Zenei lexikon 2, 724–725).


a share in the debate over the shape of Hungarian music and musical life despite the increasing centralization of elite culture in Budapest. Kornél Ábrányi’s asser-tion in 1877 about the ubiquity of this discourse could apply from the launch of Zenészeti lapok in 1860 well into the twentieth century: “Th ere is no Hungarian person, no Hungarian or foreign musician . . . who would not speak about, form an opinion on, or argue over this or that characteristic of Hungarian song or music.” 20

Just as daily newspapers were associated with certain political parties, publishers of musical periodicals pushed particular aesthetic agendas, though these might change depending on circumstances. In its prime, Zenészeti lapok , in addition to developing Hungarian musical terminology and promoting elevated concert cul-ture in Hungary, worked to popularize the work of Liszt (a personal acquaintance of editor-owner Ábrányi and his associate Mosonyi) in Hungary; promoted com-posers (particularly Wagner) of the New German School with which Liszt was as-sociated; summarized current German musicological literature in Hungarian; and criticized the repertoire selections of Hungarian musical institutions and their leaders, particularly the National Th eatre, the country’s primary venue for opera, and its principal opera conductor, Ferenc Erkel, for giving short shrift to Wagner in favor of Italian and French works. 21 By contrast, the short-lived journal Zen-evilág (Music world) (1890–1891) promoted French opera and attacked Gustav Mahler, then the director of the Hungarian Royal Opera House (opened 1884), for “German prejudice.” 22

In the early twentieth century, an increasing area of disagreement was the role of “hypermodern” musical language, including dissonance, and of advocates for this kind of musical language. Zeneközlöny (Music journal) (1901–1917, 1924–1925) and a newly constituted Zenevilág (1900–1910, 1912, 1916) were both edited by associates and advocates of Bartók—Dezs ő Demény and Pongrácz Kacsóh, respectively—and featured Bartók, Kodály, and other associates regularly in news columns and elsewhere. By contrast, Zenelap (Music page) (1886–1912) and A zene (Music) (1909–1914) could be judged more aesthetically conservative, in that they tended to acknowledge modernist expression less and minimized the role of forward-looking musicians, led by Bartók, in their news columns; but journals cannot be defi ned only by their relationships to Bartók’s circle. For instance, Zenelap tended to emphasize the importance of Hungarian composers, events in the Hungarian provinces, and populist Hungarian music-making more generally (including the choral movement and operetta), while A zene more frequently highlighted elite composition and criticism and canonical German composers.

20. In his A magyar dal és zene sajátságai, nyelvi, zöngidomi, harmoniai s műformai szempon-tból (Th e characteristics of Hungarian song and music from the viewpoint of language, tone profi les, harmony, and genre), 3–4.

21. According to Szerz ő , Introduction, x–xii.

22. Kárpáti, Introduction, xviii.


Moreover, authors sometimes contributed to journals on what would seem to be the “wrong end” of the spectrum. Th is discourse gives the impression not just of two opposed sides, but of an ongoing conversation, with commentators trying to poke at the “problem” at hand from all directions.

How does this conversation expand our knowledge of Liszt and Bartók, the com-posers who form the end points of this book? Largely indirectly. Liszt played a central role in the debate, since as already mentioned, a key part of the agenda of the fi rst major Hungarian-language music journal, Zenészeti lapok , was the promotion of his music, and the controversy surrounding his Des bohémiens , discussed at length in Chapter 2 , was one of the catalysts for some of the development of this discourse. Th ough he contributed little of his own prose to Hungarian issues beyond Des bohémiens , his monumental role on the musical stage, literal and fi gurative, in Hungary and internationally, meant that in this age of nationalism Hungary’s music critics simply had to come to grips with what he meant to them. Th e way Bartók and the other artists and scholars of his circle engaged with it was more direct: as they worked to fi nd a place for themselves in Hungarian musical life, the way in which they framed their aesthetic and scholarly program was thoroughly em-bedded in ongoing debates and discussions on the “problem of Hungarian music.”

Th e richness of the debate on this “problem,” however, speaks to questions beyond immediate relevance to the biography of any individual; rather it illus-trates a long-term conceptual struggle over the construction of the nation’s music. Th is chapter explores how Hungarian musicians and critics reconsidered ideas of musical classicism and modernism, concepts conventionally defi ned from the “center” of European culture, as applied to their nation, given Hungary’s location in the borderlands between West and East, and its positioning always already “behind” the examples of the center. 23 In part because of the indispensable role of Gypsy musicians and the stigma associated with the Gypsies in European society, ideas about race feature prominently.

Few of the authors discussed here had lasting infl uence inside or outside Hungary. But these previously dormant sources off er a powerful tool for under-standing the circumstances in which the music of Liszt was received and in which Bartók came of age. Th rough this body of music journalism, scholarship, and ped-agogical writing, we can see how Hungary’s musicians and critics, along with their audiences and readers, “repeatedly turned the scraps, patches, and rags of daily life into the signs of a national culture”: 24 looking at what these authors wrote

23. In particular, the Hungarian eff ort to establish advanced musical institutions included an implicit eff ort to “catch up” to institutions in the “center” in ways that recall the process discussed in János’ Th e Politics of Backwardness , cited more extensively in Chapter 1 .

24. As Homi Bhabha wrote, “Th e scraps, patches, and rags of daily life must be repeatedly turned into the signs of a national culture . . . . In the production of the nation as narration . . . the conceptual ambivalence of modern society becomes the site of writing the nation .” In “DissemiNation,” 297.


about the “problem of Hungarian music” is in essence seeing how they defi ned themselves and their others. By understanding more about the confl icts that lie beneath the conventional narratives, we can better understand the aspects of Bartók’s “revolution” that were truly revolutionary and the ways in which he and his circle participated in a dialogue that had defi ned the Hungarian music scene for decades before, including during the latter half of Liszt’s career.

RACE IN THE “PROBLEM OF HUNGARIAN MUSIC” AS THE LEGACY OF THE LISZT CONTROVERSY

Prompted by the work of scientists like Darwin, Broca, Topinard, and Gobineau, race was an increasing preoccupation of scientists around the world in the late nineteenth century, and it also fi gured prominently in discourse about Hungarian music. Th e widespread idea of the races as “internally homogeneous and biologi-cally discrete” 25 was a poor fi t for Hungary, with its undeniable multiethnic com-position, as too much emphasis on purity of blood would not harmonize well with the overall eff ort to assimilate all the citizens of Hungary into one Hungarian identity. As discussed in Chapter 1 , the creators of Hungarian “high art” in the nineteenth century drew on the country’s many ethnicities by using rural motifs not just from ethnic Hungarians but also from the other nationalities as well. Music, however, was an exception: it relied on a more homogenous source, Hungarian-Gypsy music, that had been embedded in Hungarian culture for many years. Gypsy instrumentalists were the only ones considered qualifi ed, as literary fi gure János Erdélyi wrote in 1844, to “handle [the national music] cleanly, and retain its original ancient character”; although “no one would consider it cultured scholarly musical art,” at mid-century a number of Hungary’s intellectual and artistic leaders believed that “Gypsy music [was] the only foundation . . . on which in time the art market of cultivated, ennobled Hungarian music can be built in an original, characteristic national direction.” 26 On the other hand, although some

25. See “Race,” Encyclop æ dia Britannica Online , http://search.eb.com/eb/article-279656 (accessed August 11, 2010).

26. Erdélyi, “Egypár korszerű szó nemzet zenénk ügyében” [A few timely words in the matter of our national music], 215, reproduced in Erdélyi János válogatott művei [Selected works of János Erdélyi], 64–65. Interestingly, the text considers that the Gypsies’ role in “retaining the original ancient character of Hungarian music” in instrumental performance is “exactly like our [Hungarian] peasants’ in the folksongs”; Erdélyi’s remarks are a simple acknowledgment of the Gypsies’ role in providing vernacular instrumental music.

Th e sentiment that Gypsy musicians were uniquely qualifi ed to play the national music was typical of the age. Another such example appeared in a newspaper in Arad in 1864 (thus aft er Liszt’s book caused some to rethink the topic): the writer complained that two stingy innkeepers should hire Gypsies instead of the less expensive military musicians they had been employing, stating that “it is the Gypsy and only the Gypsy, who felt the centuries with us and completely comprehended our pleasures, our sorrows, [who] did not desert us for bright[er] conditions even in our saddest days, only the Gypsy is capable of speaking to the heart of the Hungarian and of deserving our partiality” (cited in Sárosi, A cigányzenekar múltja , 187).

http://search.eb.com/eb/article-279656


Hungarian musicians and writers acknowledged and even celebrated the role of Gypsy musicians, the publication of Liszt’s book in 1859 set off a journalistic fi re-storm from indignant defenders of Hungary’s musical honor, as was discussed in the previous chapter. Whereas Liszt, as the most acclaimed musician Hungary had ever produced, could not be forsworn, none of Hungary’s musical commen-tators appear to have had any such scruples about the Gypsies, who became the scapegoats for Liszt’s error. From the very beginning, writers attacked Liszt’s argument in part by criticizing or dismissing Gypsy performers. One of the milder examples was the comment from a periodical in Temesvár that “we thought (and we continue to think) that the music is Hungarian whereas its principal guardian is the Gypsy (although this is not always to its advantage).” 27 Kálmán Simonff y, whose public break with Liszt over Des bohémiens was discussed in Chapter 2 , wrote in particularly strong terms about this topic:

I who have made the national music and the Gypsy performers of it the sub-ject of my studies for many years . . . am in a position to know the customs, ways of thinking, conceptions of this people and their relationship to our music, and their tricks and abuses in connection with copyrights, from Bihari to the latest Abony gypsy, better than Mr. Liszt. 28

In the aft ermath of the publication of Liszt’s book, it became almost impossible to write about the subject of Hungarian music, which was increasingly considered a “problem,” without referring to the Gypsies and their role in it. Sámuel Brassai’s 1860 Magyar- vagy czigány-zene? (Hungarian or Gypsy music?) and István Barta-lus’ 1865 “A czigány és viszonya zenénkhez” (Th e Gypsy and his relationship to our music) are two critical early examples; both of these authors demonstrate by a survey of Gypsies’ history in Hungary that most of the elements of “Gypsy music” were in place in Hungarian music before the Gypsies had begun to per-form the repertoire. 29 “Magyar muzsikus” (Hungarian musician), the pseudony-mous author of the 1902 article “Th ere Is No Hungarian Music Other Th an Gypsy Music,” still felt it necessary to attack the idea that Gypsy musicians had added or could add anything original or intelligent to Hungarian music. 30

By the turn of the century, the popular Hungarian-Gypsy style had also acquired a reactionary political coloring against which forward-thinkers rebelled. Some authors felt that the “Gypsy music” that was played at every café, club, and fancy party had become a symbol of decadence, the compulsory window-dressing of

27. Sárosi, Gypsy Music , 143, citing Delejtű (August 16, 1859). (Bellman, Style Hongrois , 178, also cites this item.)

28. Simonff y, in Pesti napló (September 14, 1859), quoted by Sárosi, Gypsy Music , 145.

29. Sárosi, Gypsy Music , 147.

30. “Nincs más magyar muzsika, mint a czigány muzsika,” 450–451. “Magyar muzsikus” ar-gued against crediting Gypsy musicians too generously, since they don’t use large ensembles or write their scores down; their musical illiteracy, in this author’s view, is due to laziness.


the backward, indeed feudal, lifestyle of the Hungarian gentry with which Gypsy music became synonymous. Judit Frigyesi has stressed the political connotations of this association, arguing that “Gypsy music was talked about almost as an an-thropological feature of the true Hungarian, and this accorded well with Hungarian chauvinist ideology.” 31 For enthusiasts, Gypsy music might be a musical expres-sion of authentic Hungarian character. For social progressives, it was a symbol of everything that was wrong with the society, the Magyar gentry’s rejection of pro-gress, cities, capitalism, and in some interpretations anything that would require work. 32 But though some commentators’ rejection of Gypsy music spoke to the genre’s perceived role in Hungarian politics writ large, racial anxiety and artistic politics, specifi cally the rejection of popular music and dilettantism performed outside conservatory-style discipline, played at least as important a role, as this passage from Kornél Ábrányi’s A magyar zene a 19-ik században (Hungarian music in the 19th century) (1900) illustrates:

Th e Gypsy musician always imagines that he has no need for systematic training, because for him composition also just fl ies into his mouth like a roast pigeon [i.e., is handed to him on a platter]. Nor does he bother about analytical technique. He picks up certain song meters and phrases by ear, has it carried out with someone in notation and the composition is done . . . . Th e weight of responsibility for the extreme Gypsy cult may also make an im-pression on the spirit of the celebrated lady singers, and on that of the music publishers too, who think to ensure greater marketability for their Hungar-ian publications if they have printed on them: “in Gypsy style!” As if that would be the only real Hungarian music! 33

Many other writers also viewed the sentimental popular music played by Gypsies inadequate as a source for “high art.” Yet this was the version of Hungar-ian music that had succeeded in the West, in works by both native sons like Erkel,

31. In Béla Bartók and Turn-of-the-Century Budapest , 60.

32. Short stories by two great modernist Hungarian writers from early in the twentieth cen-tury use Gypsy bands to set scenes of wealth and hypocrisy: in Endre Ady’s 1906 “Joba, a k ő tör ő ” [Joba the stone crusher] (in Neighbors of the Night , 27–32), the Károlyi counts have hired a Gypsy band as part of the entertainment to get peasant voters drunk and infl uence their choices; in Dezs ő Kosztolányi’s 1912 “Délutáni tea” [Aft ernoon tea] (in April Fool , 5–11), Gypsy musicians are also part of the setting in an over-luxurious party as observed by a four-year-old girl.

33. A magyar zene a 19-ik században [Hungarian music in the 19th century], 129–130. Th e comment on “lady singers” may be a reference to Lujza Blaha, the prima donna at Buda-pest’s folk theater. Th e novel Th ey Were Counted by Count Miklós Bánff y (1873–1950), 46–49, uses interactions with Gypsy musicians among Transylvanian aristocrats to comment on the pleasure-driven society in which they played such an important role and on the aesthetic conservatism they represented, as contrasted with one of the protagonists of the novel, László Gyer ő ff y, who as a student at the Academy of Music and a composer represents both high art and a more modernist outlook.


Goldmark, and Liszt and “Western” composers like Schubert, Weber, and Brahms. 34 Bartók and his supporters would argue in the early twentieth century that Hungarian-Gypsy music had nothing to do with “genuine” Hungarian folksongs, but that music was completely foreign to many if not most Hungarians.

CLASSICISM IN THE “PROBLEM OF HUNGARIAN MUSIC”

Developing Hungarian art music was a twofold problem: to create composers who would write music that would be respected and relevant to the international concert scene, and to cultivate a musical environment at home that would both nurture such composers and raise the overall cultural level in Hungary. But both the international appeal and the development of a local audience required a rec-ognizably Hungarian music. Ödön Farkas (1851–1912), an opera composer and the director of the Kolozsvár Conservatory, stressed this requirement in his 1903 ar-ticle “A magyar művészi zenér ő l” (About Hungarian art music): he wanted Hun-garian music to arrive at an international (mainly German) standard of excellence, or as he put it to produce works of “signifi cance and worth,” but rather than objecting to the infl uence of the unavoidable vernacular (Gypsy) tradition, he complained that “music education all over the country is still in foreign hands” and considered that the “blind faith that the public’s taste can be developed by German music in the fi rst place” was misplaced. Instead, he urged that the culti-vated Hungarian public could only

be won over to musical art . . . with the magic of Hungarian music and then they will not say aft er one or two concerts with German programs: ‘we’ve seen this already, now let’s go to the pub or the Orpheum to listen to music.’ . . . Only with Hungarian art music can a large Hungarian audience be created and only with a Hungarian audience can Hungarian music be raised to the level of the age .

. . . the guiding [principle] is that the cultivated Hungarian public should accept [Hungarian art-music] as [Hungarian] and fi nd beauty in that. 35

Farkas considered acceptance by a Hungarian audience the litmus test for music’s magyarság , and he viewed German infl uence, particularly the continuing hegemony of the symphony and sonata form, as alienating to the Hungarian con-certgoer, even the “cultivated” one. Of course audiences would prefer Gypsy music (the likely music of the pub or the Orpheum) over symphonies and sonatas; why should they care for concert music while it was still so inherently foreign?

Yet Hungarian composers were at a loss to create large-scale works that would, in the words of composer and critic Otmár Ságody (1881–1945),

34. Bellman’s Style Hongrois explores the emergence of this style in Western European concert music and discusses its use by Weber, Schubert, Brahms, and Liszt.

35. Farkas, “A magyar művészi zenér ő l,” 219–220. Italics added.


really make Hungarian music a force in the more developed, larger-scale instrumental genres . . . . By this, I naturally mean the kind of triumphant conquest for Hungarian music in general (international) music, like for ex-ample that of Norwegian or Russian music. Not taking into account those attempts of petty signifi cance, which manifest themselves in one or two “Hungarian-style” sonatas or chamber works. 36

It is worth noting that Ságody conceived of Hungarian music competing only with other exotic fl avors like Norwegian and Russian, not with German, French, or Italian. Here and elsewhere, in explicit and implicit ways, writers reveal the tension between pride in the particular and attraction to the cosmopolitan, the need for compositions to be marked as Hungarian but the fear that if they were so marked they may rise only to the level of “petty signifi cance.”

One interesting solution to this problem appears in the writings of Dezs ő Járosy (1882–1932), a priest, choir director, and critic from the Transylvanian city of Temesvár. Járosy brought together a focus on the “racial, national power” of Hun-garian music with an emphasis on “classicism” and “musical learnedness”—that is, in ideals that transcend national boundaries—as the three main aesthetic prerequi-sites for the development of Hungarian musical culture. 37 Although the classicism he proclaimed parallels that of the usual music history narrative in its foundation on that “immortal trio of classicists (Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven),” Járosy, like Farkas, emphasized not the universality of their music but its overarching German character, as well as the Germanness of the sonata and symphony. 38 Haydn was important in this narrative because, with the sonata, he “brought German genre to the light of day”; for Járosy, Haydn was the “most racial representative in music history” because he had “raised folk-like [ népies ] music up to [the level of] classi-cism.” 39 For Járosy’s purposes “German” was a racial, not a national category; Haydn’s and Mozart’s Austrian origins were not even mentioned.

For Járosy, these composers achieved greatness in part because they worked in racially appropriate genres. As supporting evidence for his argument that race and racial character are the key to classic greatness, he added to this group of

36. In his article “Alkalmasak-e a magyar motivumok műzenében való felhasználásra?” [Are Hungarian motives suitable for use in art music?], 331.

37. He identifi es these three characteristics in his article “A magyar zenei kultura er ő forrásai” [Th e sources of the power of Hungarian musical culture], 56, 148–149.

38. Quotation taken from Faji zene és magyar zene [Racial music and Hungarian music], 23: “Haydn therefore is a German musician and at the same time the fi rst great fi gure in the immortal trio of classicists (Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven).” “Central” musicology has rec-ognized more recently what the “peripheral” Járosy and Farkas wrote in the fi rst years of the twentieth century, that the German ideology of “universal” genres and styles is in fact both German and an ideology (see the work of Margaret Notley and Sonna Pedersen). I return to the issue of “Hungarian” genre in Chapter 4 .

39. In Faji zene és magyar zene , 23.


“classical” composers Carl Maria von Weber, about whom (Járosy wrote) “Wagner himself even says . . . that [Weber] is the most German musician.” 40 By grouping Weber with Haydn and the rest of the Viennese Classicists, Járosy is implicitly re-periodizing music history, and we might well inquire into his motivations. If Weber, whose few symphonies and sonatas form a decidedly minor part of his output compared to his prototypical German Romantic opera Die Freischütz , is “classical,” then surely the ideal of classicism has been racialized. On this basis, Hungarian music might “win admittance to the Pantheon of the world’s music literature,” as long as it is both classical—“written in the strict spirit”—and racial—“truly and completely in the Hungarian manner.” If the Hungarian composer achieves these goals, then “Th e foreign nation, if its musical sensitivity is at the necessary level, cannot have less respect for such a typical racial music like the Hungarian.” 41

Járosy unsurprisingly found it necessary to put Gypsy musicians and Gypsy music in their place at some point in his defi nition of a classical “racial music.” One passage describes Gypsy music as “the eloquent prototype of the Hungarian’s musical anti-classicism,” though this section emphasized the negative impact of “dilettantism” and low culture as much as the race of the performers. 42 Járosy di-rected more venom toward the Roma in a section of his 1908 book Faji zene és magyar zene (Racial music and Hungarian music) devoted to “the period of Bihari, Lavotta and Csermák , that is in Hungarian music what the Bach-Handel period is in universal music history” (i.e., Hungarian music’s classical age). 43 His mention of Bihari, “the most outstanding of the Gypsy violinists,” acts largely as an introduction to a rant on the decline of the worth, artistic and moral, of Gypsy

40. Járosy, Faji zene és magyar zene , 23.

41. Járosy, Faji zene és magyar zene , 53. Th ese quotes are taken from the following passage: “For two years I have listened to Hungarian premieres in the capital at the Philharmonic, the Music Academy, and the National Conservatory, and I always arrived at the observation that we still cannot compose truly and completely in the Hungarian manner. It is a false objection that a Hungarian work written in the strict spirit, in spite of its classicism, cannot win ad-mittance into the Pantheon of the world’s music literature. Th e foreign nation, if its musical sensitivity is at the necessary level, cannot have less respect for such a typical racial music like the Hungarian. Our Rákóczi March stirs up the enthusiastic praise and wonder of every nation; moreover, doubt does not fall on its Hungarian character.”

42. Th is statement appears in “A magyar zenei kultura er ő forrásai,” 57, in the following con-text: “And here I must mention in the fi rst place Gypsy music, as the eloquent prototype of the Hungarian’s musical anti-classicism. It has become a cliché that our intelligentsia stick thick bankrolls into the hand [?] of the Gypsy, while at a serious, quality concert a ticket price of 3-4 crowns is already too high for them to bear. Indeed, here [in Hungary] the Gypsy makes musical dilettantism popular . . . . Abroad, mainly for the Germans, the enthusiast and the demonstrative, reverential lover of serious classical music is well known in the concert hall. But there the Gypsy doesn’t play in every coff ee house, rather in the worst case it is military music, which despite all its music-social faults harbors one hundred percent more classicism that the best Gypsy here.”

43. In Faji zene és magyar zene , 42.


musicians between Bihari’s time and Járosy’s, and a reiteration of the rejection of Liszt’s Des bohémiens :

Th e Gypsy of the eighteenth century is diff erent from that of the twentieth century. Th en the Gypsy was an artist, today he is a tradesman. Th en the Gypsy had musical artistry and a rare Hungarian temperament, today most Gypsies are venal; they copy and work to order. Th en Hungarians were proud of the Gypsy, today [those] abroad . . . wrongly believe that all of our music culture consists of Gypsy music. Th ey stress as an illustration of the low level of our music culture that we have placed our music culture in the hands of a vagrant, uncultured, nomadic people . . . . It is true that Liszt in [ Des bohé-miens ] falls victim to a tragic error when he states that the Hungarian people borrowed its music from the Gypsy . . . . [W]e take the position as a matter of history as well as aesthetics that Gypsy music only provided ornamental character to Hungarian racial music. 44

In isolation, Járosy’s references to Bach and Handel, like his references to the Viennese classicists, seems out of step with his overall aim of encouraging compo-sition “truly and completely in the Hungarian manner”; but passages like this one show that he makes these references at least in part to separate Hungarian music from Gypsy pollution. His choice of Bach and Handel may draw on similar pas-sages in the 1904 textbook A magyar zene elmélete (Th e analysis of Hungarian music) by Géza Molnár (1870–1933), a Leipzig-trained musicologist who taught at the Academy of Music beginning in 1900 (when Bartók was a student there) and who, like Járosy, claimed the infl uence of Bach and Handel to counter that of the Gypsies:

Th e original music of the Gypsies, that which is really theirs, hardly resembles Hungarian music . But . . . they soon caught on to the music of every environ-ment . . . . “Gypsy music” changes according to the milieu . . . . Hungarian church songs of the 16th century and earlier centuries are not at all Gypsy products and do not even come close to the original music of the Gypsy, if one could even speak of such a thing.

Certain elements of Hungarian music from the period before the Gypsies settled [in Hungary], the 14th–15th centuries, have their origin in the church music from the previous centuries, while other elements were born in the period of Bach and Handel . In these two soils Hungarian music has its roots. 45

By establishing connections between Hungarian music and what Járosy called “universal music history,” not only Bach and Handel but also the music of the

44. In Faji zene és magyar zene , 43, 45.

45. Italics in original. Molnár, A magyar zene elmélete [Th e analysis of Hungarian music, henceforth Analysis ], 234–235, 238.


early church, Molnár not only claims the prestige of “universal music” but also distances Hungarian musical style from Gypsy performers. Like Járosy, Molnár did not limit his eff ort to making links to Western (mainly German) music tradi-tion but also resorted to simple racial slurs: the Gypsies were racially polluting and ignorant, they “have as many types of music as homes,” 46 and in a context that idealized the absolute, “unfalsifi able” nature of racial character, their sidling up to the music of whichever people they live among was highly suspect.

Compared to salacious accusations of cannibalism in the 1865 article “A czigány és viszonya zenénkhez” (Th e Gypsy and his relationship to our music) by István Bartalus (1821–1899), a major Hungarian music scholar of the previous genera-tion, 47 Járosy’s and Molnár’s comments might be considered mild—but only by comparison. Th eir slurs against the Gypsies hold a double irony. First, while Molnár is suspicious of the Gypsies for adopting the music of their neighbors and Járosy decries their “copying,” they simultaneously uphold foreign models for Hungarian music—the German Baroque and the Viennese Classic—as proof against any infl uence from the dangerous East. Second, despite their rejection of the nameless, faceless mass of Gypsy musicians, they could not completely deny the role of these performers in Hungarian music. Signifi cantly, Molnár drew a number of his musical examples from Bihari’s work. 48 Járosy’s argument that the eighteenth-century Gypsy musician was more artistic, and more Hungarian, than his “venal” twentieth-century counterpart may be seen as a way to allow for the irrefutable importance in Hungarian music history of Bihari, who had played to the acclaim of Beethoven and Liszt as well as a wide swath of the Hungarian public.

THE SCIENCE AND MUSIC OF THE HUNGARIAN RACE

Th ese passages are not, however, the most illuminating use of the concept of race in the discourse on Hungarian music in this period. Molnár’s textbook went beyond simplistic attacks on Gypsy musicians and attempted a sophisticated reshaping of the race science of the day to suit his ideology and aesthetic ideals, positing a specifi cally “racial” (in this case, Hungarian) mode of hearing as the justifi cation for racial music. As with many writings that draw on race science, Molnár’s work is interesting less for its enduring scientifi c insight than for what it reveals about its context—in this case the peculiarities of Hungary’s place on the borders of the “Europe” as well the “problem of Hungarian music.”

We gain some insight into Molnár’s approach when we consider how it drew on the anthropology of his day. Th is academic fi eld was coming into its own in the latter half of the nineteenth century in Hungary as in the rest of Europe—both phys-ical anthropology, in the vein of contemporary French scholars like craniologist

46. Molnár, Analysis , 234.

47. Bartalus’ section on cannibalism appears in vol. 3, no. 8, 300–307, as part of his history of the Gypsies in Europe, and more specifi cally in Hungary, before it turns to his critique of Liszt (mostly at the end of the third chapter of his article: vol. 4, no. 11, 60–73).

48. For example, on pages 231, 276, and 325.


Paul Broca (1824–1880) and his disciple Paul Topinard (1830–1911), and cultural an-thropology, following German scholars’ search for the “distinct Volk character, which was embodied in the totality of its outward manifestations: traditions, cus-toms, religion, language, and art.” 49 Exchanges with French and German anthropol-ogists ushered in the development of scholars and institutions in the fi eld in Hungary, and Hungarian scholars kept pace with their counterparts, hosting the VIIIth International Congress in Anthropology and Ancient History in 1876 and establishing the fourth Department of Anthropology in the world at the University of Budapest in 1881. 50 Still, this was not a dialogue between equals, but rather a fi eld that “confi rmed all the common prejudices of comfortable white [Western] males—that blacks, women, and poor people occupy their subordinate roles by the harsh dictates of nature.” 51 According to the fi ndings of at least some of the Western leaders of this “science,” these subordinate roles were shared by those from subject or “pe-ripheral” nations. Correcting misconceptions of Hungarians’ inferior status within the framework of this scientifi c discipline then became a motivating factor for Hun-garian craniologist Aurél Török (1842–1912): attending an international conference in Paris held in conjunction with the 1878 World’s Fair there, he

found photographs of murderers and Gypsies under the title “genuine Hun-garian types.” Th e next day he visited the leader of the French Anthropolog-ical Society, Paul Broca, who snapped at him thus: “So you noble Hungarians come here to protest, can you do anything other than talk? Here one may step forward only with facts. Has the professor brought crania with him, to refute Dr. Benedikt (who sent the above mentioned skulls)? Do you not fi nd it worthwhile to study your own racial types? Where are the skull collections in Hungary? . . . ” Under the infl uence of these [remarks] Aurél Török upon returning to Hungary opened an anthropological section of the Hungarian Royal Society of Natural Sciences in the fall of 1878 and beginning in 1879 held regular lectures on anthropology. 52

At this apex of colonialism, we see French scientists using anthropological methods to confi rm the place of Hungary, along with the rest of Eastern Europe, among the “less cultivated nations” 53 at the same time as the World’s Fair envi-sioned Others from all across the globe as fodder for consumption and “stimulus of fantasy” for the West. 54

49. Bunzl, “Franz Boas and the Humboldtian tradition,” 22.

50. See Frank, “Anthropology and Politics,” 23–25, and Turda, “From Craniology to Serol-ogy,” 362.

51. Gould, Th e Mismeasure of Man , 74, cited by Frank, “Anthropology and Politics,” 17.

52. Kiszely, A magyar ember [Hungarian man], 28.

53. Wolff , Inventing Eastern Europe , 14.

54. Taylor, Beyond Exoticism , 90.


Meanwhile, such events prompted Hungarian scholars like Török to renew their claims on Europeanness, with the Magyar ethnic group equated not with the “tricky,” animalistic, or “naturalist” 55 Gypsies but with Western colonial overlords. Marius Turda’s studies of the interrelationship between politics and Darwinist an-thropology in fi n-de-siècle Hungary confi rms an internal colonialist stance among Hungarian scientists: whether they emphasized the purely physical aspects of racial diff erence or the “ Nationalcharakter . . . . embodied in the totality of its out-ward manifestations,” 56 they “assumed that anthropology should preserve in situ ethnic diversity, while simultaneously romanticizing the ‘primitivism’ of various [non-Magyar] groups inhabiting the Austro-Hungarian monarchy,” 57 including Gypsies.

Th is scientifi c context served as a point of reference for Géza Molnár’s discus-sions in his book on the analysis of Hungarian music, particularly in the introduc-tion, which he titled “Th e racial element in art” and in which he cited works on the topic by both physical anthropologists and ethnologists of the time, thus exhibiting his familiarity with the scientifi c advances of “Europe” and justifying his positioning of “music science” alongside them. Despite his frequent use of the word “race,” however, he rejected the defi nitions of the word “race” as used in those fi elds as inappropriate for the discussion of art and for the “Hungarian race.” 58 Indeed, the institutions and defi nitions of anthropology and ethnology of the time, focused as they were on the study of “all phenomena of the life of people without culture,” were ill-suited to studying the self. 59

Given Molnár’s rejection of prevailing defi nitions of race, it is important to inquire into why he continued to use the term, even though had to fi nd, or invent,

55. Gypsies are equated to domesticated animals in the proverb, “Th e Transylvanian noble-man must have his hound, his cattle [buff alo] and his Gypsy,” cited by Brassai [ Magyar- vagy czigány-zene? , 26, see fuller context in Ch. 2]. Fuller discussion of the Gypsies’ “naturalness” also appears in Ch. 2 (see n. 152). One can easily read parallels between these descriptors and the attribution of “childishness” and “savagery” to colonial subjects (including musically useful ones) in Taylor’s Beyond Exoticism , 74–77.

56. Bunzl, “Franz Boas and the Humboldtian Tradition,” 22.

57. Turda, “From Craniology to Serology,” 362, citing Turda, “Race, Politics and Nationalist Darwinism in Hungary, 1880–1918,” esp. 144–155.

58. See this passage from Molnár, Analysis , vi: “I do not use these words ‘race’ and ‘racial character’ with the same meaning as a [physical] anthropologist. My distinction therefore is independent from skin color, hair growth, and head shape. Since the word refers to art, groups other than the Caucasians do not interest us. In the defi nition of ‘race’ I depart from the ethnologist also, who lately does not like this concept and rather classifi es humanity into groups according to degree of culture or economic conditions. It goes without saying that I am not thinking of Darwin’s ‘race’ either. Out of the generalities of organic life I look only at the families of peoples [ethnic groups].”

59. Benoit Massin cites this phrase from liberal ethnologist Rudolf Steinmetz’s 1903 discus-sion of cultural hierarchies as understood by turn-of-the-century German anthropology in his article “From Virchow to Fischer,” 97.


a defi nition more appropriate to the art music practitioners that he discussed. His discussion of why he preferred “race” over other alternatives is thus illuminating:

Th e word “race” cannot here be replaced with tribe, nation or nationality. Tribe means commonality of origin; in our family of people this is not a strict re-quirement, because another element may also be assimilated into the “race.” Foreigners can instill the customs of the race into their own blood. Th e [word] “nation” stands quite close to our concept, but it does not refl ect it exactly . . . [because] Races do not need to be sovereign powers. [Th e word “nationality”] is doubtless almost kin to our idea, but it is still not quite it . . . . Th e essential element of belonging to a race, however, is the emotional community. Do not mistake the word “emotion.” It can be both community of intellect and of desire; intuitive or conscious. Race can also extend off shoots into distant countries. Th e spiritual connection with the race is more important than the linguistic one .

. . . [W]hether or not these peoples are capable of establishing a state, whether or not its members are of homogenous blood, and whether or not they reside in the land of their birth or in a foreign country [,] Th eir artistic mode of expression is what matters to us . When in the [artistic] creations of some kinds of peoples, particular inclinations come to expression beyond international principles—persistent and common, therefore not passing or sporadic signs, —then we include these tendencies under the heading of racial art. Th is name is more correct the more organically those artistic ten-dencies grow out of the spiritual world of the race . 60

It would appear, then, that one goal of Molnár’s narrow defi nition of race was to divorce it, at least in theory, from the terms “nation” and “nationality,” politi-cally explosive words in late Habsburg Hungary, full of potentially distracting echoes of debates over minority rights, suff rage, and language. In fact, Molnár’s defi nition of race seems tailor-made for defi ning the Hungarians as a (potentially) united people, whose “heterogeneous character” could, according to Transylva-nian ethnographer Antal Herrmann (1851–1926), allow the emergence of a certain ethnic homogeneity based on the “common fatherland, the common natural and biological relations, the continual contact with one another, the mixture of the blood, and the innumerable reciprocal infl uences of culture.” 61 Like Herrmann, Molnár specifi cally discounted a defi nition of race based only on pure blood. One can become a blood brother, so to speak, by “instilling the customs of the race into one’s own blood”—by taking on the language and customs of the race and be-coming a loyal member of its “emotional community.”

60. Italics added. Molnár, Analysis , vi–vii.

61. In “Th e Ethnography of the Population” (1897), cited by Turda, “Race, Politics, and Na-tionalist Darwinism in Hungary,” 145. Hungary’s controversies over nation and nationality are described in Chapter 1 of my dissertation. At least one other music scholar found Mol-nár’s defi nition of race particularly apt: Dezs ő Járosy defi nes race in almost exactly the same terms in his Faji zene és magyar zene , especially 8–10.


For artists, then, as for all loyal Hungarian citizens, blood did not defi ne cul-tural behavior and identity; rather, identifying oneself as a member of the “race,” and behaving appropriately, allowed one to claim its blood. As Molnár defi ned it, a “racial artist” was one who used a certain “artistic mode of expression” common to the race; the “emotional community” of a race was imagined through the use of a common language—in this case a set of common musical features, as well as a prose discourse about them. Th is discourse in music and prose participated in, even created, Molnár’s common “emotional community,” just as Benedict Ander-son saw print cultures as critical to the formation of the culture nation as “imag-ined community.” 62 Molnár’s description of this process strategically deploys the terms of political controversies of the time. Ethnicity is offi cially downplayed in favor of patriotism, as we saw in the “new homogenized national culture” Tamás Hofer described. 63

Yet even though Molnár’s statement that one could assimilate into the “spiritual community of Hungarian racial art” might seem to privilege “nurture” over “nature,” he clung to the idea of racial character as a natural force with empirically verifi able rules. Th roughout the discussion of a music’s racial character in his in-troduction, Molnár mustered citations from Darwin, Spencer, and a list of other scientists—anatomist Alfonso Corti (1822–1888), neurophysiologist Hermann von Helmholtz (1821–1894), and especially Topinard—to refuting his readers’ possible objections, especially the proposal that common characteristics may be the result of a composer’s conscious alliance with a “school.” 64 Molnár’s argument rests on the assumption that “ there are positive laws of racial art ”: 65 following those physical anthropologists who “believed that heredity was more important than environment in shaping human communities,” 66 Molnár claimed that biological diff erences determine the way diff erent races perceive sound, and consequently the way they hear and make music. Th e statement by Topinard, craniologist, author of a standard mid-nineteenth-century book on anthropology, and an important theorist of social Darwinism, that racial diff erence manifested itself in hearing in particular was especially relevant for Molnár’s purposes. 67 Using these

62. In Imagined Communities .

63. See Chapter 1 for a discussion of the celebration of multiethnic folklorism, both by pro-fessional ethnographers and by (mostly Magyar) laymen, detailed in Hofer’s “Construction of the ‘Folk Cultural Heritage,’” 145–170.

64. See especially xiii–xvi.

65. Italics in original. Molnár, Analysis , xvii.

66. Turda, “Race, Politics, and Nationalist Darwinism in Hungary,” 144.

67. See Topinard’s Anthropology , 408: “there are languages profoundly diff erent from one an-other, which require organs of a special construction to pronounce them, and special powers of intellect to comprehend them. In the same way we must view the various methods of appre-ciating the musical gamut in the several quarters of the globe. Th at which is harmony to the au-ditory fi bres of the brain in some races is not so in others . Education here has nothing to do with it; the thing has been so from the fi rst, and is, therefore, an anatomical fact.” (Italics added.)


authorities as his starting point, Molnár concluded that variations between sub-jects’ understanding of music—which he acknowledged were unquantifi able—had to come down to diff erences between races:

According to Topinard, musical harmonies aff ect the nerve cells of every race diff erently. Th e savage, who has only four rows of Corti fi bers, does not hear music like us at all . . . . [A]mong the European peoples, receptivity and disinclination is not uniform in view of certain intervals. Th e nervous system of cultivated races also shows deviations . . . . Th e nerve in all likelihood does not follow periodic motion in a strict, mathematically precise way; therefore audition is not regulated uniformly across all of humanity. But it is easily possible that groups belonging to the same race have similar dispositions toward certain nerve excitations.

Many diff erent factors—it goes without saying—direct racial music. Ges-ture, language, way of speaking, poetry: all leave an imprint on musical rhythm. One or another of these factors also molded Hungarian music. 68

Molnár did not always exhibit a clear understanding of the neuroscience of his time, and the fi eld itself was in its earliest stages. Th e social Darwinism at the heart of some of Molnár’s sources has been discredited, although we should rec-ognize how diff erent its defi nition of the term “race” was from the way the word is generally used today. 69 What is most relevant about Molnár’s citations of these prominent scientists is not whether or not their theories hold up but that he used them at all, and that he then used them to design his own armchair experiments for diff erentiating “racial” (in this case, Hungarian) versus “non-racial” music, to further bolster his thesis that diff erent races hear diff erently, and therefore that Hungarian music must be unique.

Beneath the scientifi c lingo, however, these experiments imply an aesthetic agenda. First and foremost, Molnár decided that the best way to determine that music is “Hungarian racial music” was to measure whether a critical mass of Hun-garians agrees that it is:

If over time a considerable part of a people’s unifi ed disposition arises toward certain rhythm, accentuation, dynamics, and melodic type, then this music is racial music. Th e disposition of the race may be rising or falling in such measure as its disposition falls or grows toward the music of another race. 70

68. Molnár, Analysis , viii.

69. For example, Topinard’s racial categories could be as crude as “the white, the yellow, and the black” ( Anthropology , 202); but he also referred to minute distinctions between ethnic-ities, e.g., between the “Gallo-Bretons” and “Low Bretons,” as racial diff erences ( Anthropol-ogy , 250).

70. Molnár, Analysis , xv.


Molnár argued simultaneously for and against assimilation of new elements. On the one hand, he viewed such assimilation as a natural, logical process; on the other, he saw it as a corrupting force. Th e ostensibly objective tone of Molnár’s musical science hints at a common anxiety of the “peripheral” nation, that Hun-garian music, as a metaphor for the Hungarian people, could become so polluted that it would “cease to be, or rather be assimilated into the art of another race.” 71 Underlying this abstract description of how art evolves, we fi nd the nationalist justifi cation for a conservative, perhaps ( pace Járosy) “classicist” aesthetic: to keep the Hungarian people from disappearing, we should maintain those features that the people already agree are Hungarian and discourage the addition of new ones. Yet the ideological Molnár was troubled by the “scientifi c” Molnár, who then allowed the possibility that racial art could be “born again” out of a combination of foreign and native elements which eventually develop a “uniform [and recog-nizably Hungarian] disposition.” 72

The most striking of all Molnár’s references to Western science (to some of his contemporaries as well as to the modern reader) was the description of an experiment in which he proposed playing for so-called primitive listeners songs that had been manipulated into what he considered more or less purely Hungarian form. His conclusions led him to the following, an analogy to Ohm’s Law to determine how “racial” (in the Hungarian sense) a particular song might be:

If I play nótas in front of a primitive son of the folk and he tries to intone every melodic step aft er me: then it turns out that he takes up that nóta more quickly in which there are the most Hungarian-like [magyaros] and the few-est foreign elements . . . .

In experimenting with primitive listeners, the result will come close to Ohm’s law in electrochemistry. What is electromotor current there, is here the sum of racial formulas inherent in the song; what is resistance there , is here the sum of foreign formulas inherent in the song, and what there is the intensity of electrical current, is here the eff ect, the intensity of sensation. If we denote the level of racial [faji] formulas in our experimental song with an F , the sum of foreign [idegen] elements with an I , and the eff ect [hatás] with an H , then the eff ect of a Magyar song on a listener predisposed exclusively

71. See particularly Molnár, Analysis , xviii: “Even when the inclination toward the foreign racial element is of equal rank with the disposition toward Hungarian racial elements, then it still does not change into a Hungarian racial element, because a disposition towards it in the fi rst rank does not spread to the main body of the family of Hungarian people. If it does spread [to them], then the racial art of this family of people up until now ceases to be, or rather it is assimilated into the art of another ‘race.’”

72. Molnár, Analysis , xviii: “If it can pull certain parts out of this foreign art, if it can divide these into groups according to their characteristics, so that in time the uniform disposition of the family of people rises towards these and towards the elements plucked out of the foreigner and worked out, then a racial art is born again.”


or predominantly in a Magyar racial direction is this: H = F/I , on the listener worst disposed in the Magyar racial direction then is H = I/F. Th ese formulas—it goes without saying—have only symbolic meaning, because the quantities here cannot be established. I stress again, though, that it is possible to show precisely, from measure to measure, the racial, race-destroying, and neutral elements of a Magyar song (its rhythmic, accentual, melodic ele-ments), as I endeavor to do in my lectures. 73

Here are just two of the problems underlying Molnár’s quixotic eff ort: a formula strictly relating elements which “have only symbolic meaning,” and the assump-tion of opposition—musical elements must be divided up into the (empirically dubious) categories of “racial, race-destroying, and neutral.”

Molnár’s proposed experiment and his general concern with racially specifi c music psychology appear to be very much in the mainstream of the comparative musicology of the period, particularly that of Carl Stumpf and the Berlin School. Molnár’s quantifi cation of racial character is merely an extension of cross-cultural listening experiments that were the standard practice of the time. 74 His quaint version of Ohm’s Law has certain value as an analogy, a way to describe the diff er-ences in the diff erent eff ects of music—not on races per se, but on listeners who are more or less familiar with them. Moreover, Molnár’s descriptions of how infl u-ences may combine to create a new musical language are not without merit. If we substitute “national style” (or regional style, or group style) for “race,” Molnár presents a plausible description of how one style subsides and another emerges. Th e general public would not usually accept new elements immediately upon their introduction, but eventually such elements might indeed come to be thought of as cornerstones of that style. Th is description might even summarize, in ex-tremely rough outline, the improvement in the Hungarian reception of Bartók’s music over time. Molnár lacks only a realistic sense of the agency through which this transformation might occur. 75

It is precisely the neglect of agency, however, that is so striking in Molnár’s writing. His use of quasi- or pseudo-scientific language and his omission of

73. Molnár, Analysis , xvii. Italics in original. No more specifi c results for the experiment are published in this volume or other Molnár writings I have examined, nor does Molnár describe any contact with actual “primitive sons of the folk.” Ohm’s Law relates current (I, movement of an electric charge), voltage (V, electric potential energy), and resistance (R) in any electrical circuit according to the equation I = V/R.

74. See Christensen’s “Erich M. von Hornbostel, Carl Stumpf, and the Institutionalization of Comparative Musicology” and Schneider’s “Psychological Th eory and Comparative Musicol-ogy,” 293–317. In a personal communication of October 13, 2000, Philip Bohlman told me of the common practice of cross-cultural listening experiments at this time; during the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago, for instance, ethnologists recorded the musics of several “native villages” on the Midway, then played the music of one ethnic group to another, care-fully recording their reactions.

75. Th anks to Judit Frigyesi for suggesting this alternate, soft er interpretation of Molnár.


individual subjects combine to achieve something of the tidiness of the labora-tory. Individuals are conceived only as representatives of groups that are defi ned in terms of the biological destiny of their race rather than the ethnic culture their individual members create. In Molnár’s formulation, every new element a com-poser or musician uses already has some determinate racial character, whether native or foreign. Th e racial classifi cation of musical elements is thus inherently anti-modernist: if an element is not immediately recognized as native—as such a hypothetical novelty would likely not be—then it must be foreign. A veneer of objectivity conceals a battle raging, just below the surface, over the “true” defi ni-tion of national style.

Molnár’s suspicion of innovation, though expressed through novel scientifi c language, was not that diff erent from the views expressed by a number of his con-temporaries. For example Ödön Farkas, cited earlier, also rejected what he saw as modernists’ “excess in invention and in taste” and “feverish” search for the new not just as a distortion of nature, but also as a symbol of the decadent West, some-thing unsympathetic to good Hungarian audiences. 76 While he believed that Hun-garian music should develop new forms “which fuse Hungarian rhythm with [Hungarian] inner ideological content,” at the same time, he warned against ven-turing too far afi eld: “Why should we search for new artistic material, when our own is right here?” 77 Farkas’ meditation on the state of Hungarian art music typ-ifi es the dialectical tangle in which writers sometimes found themselves: he resisted the experimental new as too Western, but nevertheless called for new Hungarian forms and materials that would distinguish Hungarian composers from the West.

Dezs ő Járosy was even less sympathetic to anything new, and his writing lacks even Farkas’ suggestion of the need for a breath of fresh Hungarian air. His defi nition of “racial music” as “classical,” discussed earlier, was formulated at least partially in response to what he disliked in the contemporary music scene; his 1909 article “A zeneesztétikai szép a zenetörténelemben” (Th e music-aesthetically beautiful in music history), an archetypal reactionary tract remi-niscent of Eduard Hanslick, condemned the “hypermodern school” of Richard Strauss and Max Reger for “cast[ing] away beautiful harmony as the chief crea-tive element of the musically beautiful, and bas[ing] a school on cacophony, therefore on discord and dissonance. Everyone is clear that this trend arose out of the perverse nerve-sickness of the twentieth century and is not the off spring

76. In “A magyar művészi zenér ő l,” 219.

77. In Farkas, “A magyar művészi zenér ő l,” 221: “We also need new forms which fuse Hungar-ian rhythm with [Hungarian] inner ideological content. Precisely what sort of forms these new forms will be is the task of the future. Th e form should not just be held together and set out by musical elements, the inner ideological content should also hold it together. If more well-taught Hungarian musicians wider sphere of vision stand up for this cause, they will also give birth to new forms. / Why should we search for new artistic material, when our own is right here, which relatively few among us know and still fewer respect.”


of a normal aesthetic.” 78 Some of this diatribe could have been penned by any aesthetic conservative from any nation. Th e lengths to which Járosy went to entwine Hanslickian classicism with his idea of “racial music,” however, show the inseparability of the national from any debate in a “peripheral” culture like Hungary’s.

It is diffi cult to assess the impact of fi gures like Farkas or Járosy, who quickly slipped into obscurity. But at least one author, Géza Molnár, was clearly in posses-sion of power over an important segment of Hungary’s musical community—the students at the Academy of Music, where he taught from 1900 to 1933—and per-haps at other schools where his textbook may have been used. 79 Molnár’s textbook on Hungarian music shows how distrust of the new was not only an essential com-ponent of conventional nationalist aesthetics but had also become embedded in pedagogy.

Molnár’s 1904 book adopts a point of view later decried by progressive writer and editor Ignotus in the modern- and Western-leaning journal Nyugat (West): “in language, in literature, in art,” patriotic Hungarians “should experience [only] the specifi cally folk-like as completely Hungarian.” 80 Molnár promotes his method of “folk-like” composition as the one sure way to avoid sounding like a foreigner. Th is agenda emerges most clearly at the end of his chapter 12, com-paring and contrasting “Our music and the music of other races,” where he cau-tions his student-readers:

Even the most independent personality to be born in our circle cannot demolish the healthy traditions of Hungarian music , for he becomes great and original precisely in that he is able to develop the song of the past into new rhetoric.

78. Járosy, “A zeneesztétikai szép a zenetörténelemben,” 176. Th is passage occurred un-der the subheading “A hüpermodern zenei szép” [Th e hypermodern musically beauti-ful], which, it turned out, he considered a contradiction in terms. In the context of the scientifi c and cultural anti-Semitism prevalent in fi n-de-siècle Austro-Hungary, Járosy’s contrast between the “perverse nerve-sickness of the twentieth century” and a “normal aesthetic” might also be viewed as an evocation of the Jewish question. See Gilman, Th e Jew’s Body , esp. ch. 3, “Th e Jewish Psyche: Freud, Dora, and the Idea of the Hysteric,” and Brown, “Otto Weininger and musical discourse in turn-of-the-century Vienna,” among other writings.

79. Molnár served on the Academy faculty during this period except for a hiatus from 1919 to 1925, when he was removed from the faculty for political reasons aft er the fall of the Hun-garian Soviet Republic (a problem that others, including Kodály, Bartók, and Dohnányi, also faced to varying degrees). According to Melinda Berlász’s “Zenetörténet tanítás a Zeneművészeti F ő iskolán (1875–1945)” [Music history teaching at the Academy of Music (1875–1945)], 258–259, Molnár fi rst taught only Hungarian music history and analysis, then in 1906 began teaching general music history and aesthetics as well. Berlász states that despite the controversy over Molnár’s approach, “it should be noted that Géza Molnár was the fi rst professor at the Academy who was occupied almost exclusively with the teaching of music-historical matters” (259).

80. Ignotus, “A magyar kultura s a nemzetiségek” [Hungarian culture and the nationalities], 226.


If this continuity between him and the aff ective past of our music does not exist, then the universe of the Hungarian people will not recognize him as a representative of itself. 81

To sum up on Molnár’s behalf, you are free to do as you like, and we hope you will do well—but your work can only be successful if it is not too original. If you stray too far, borrowing too much from the “now-still-foreign,” 82 you won’t be able to destroy what has gone before; you will only show yourself too headstrong to learn from the experience of your nation’s history, and what’s more, you will not be recognized as a Hungarian if you depart too far from these rules. In practice, though (as discussed in more detail in Chapter 4 ), the rules amounted to no more than an infl ection of the Western harmonic system—what has become known as Hungarian style—and the preservation of that style was not the protection of Hungarian style from foreign infl uences but rather the preservation of familiar elements, domestic and foreign.

Th e resulting straitjacket around creative expression rankled, and not just among younger artists. Music analyst János Osváth (1858–1920), who joined the faculty of the Academy of Music a few years aft er Géza Molnár, wrote a particu-larly poignant account of the Hungarian composer’s dilemma in his 1908 book Nemzeti zeneművészet (National musical art):

In vain national music-scholars discover for credulous youth independent racial elements divided up according to an unknown and unprovable unit of value; . . . in vain they strive to recruit followers to the side of a mission pre-sumed to be patriotic, if the dense net of racial limitations surrounds this mission; in vain would they in all good faith, against their most noble inten-tion, send the artists of the homeland into the arena of the wider world with their hands tied: . . . only on the wings of inspiration will the talented com-poser rise up to the poetic heights, where no racial tendentiousness nor mas-terfully constructed musical system can reach, and he will take up there with him that which fi lls his heart and soul. 83

Osváth seized on the fatal fl aw of ideals like Géza Molnár’s “racial” method of composition and Dezs ő Járosy’s “classicist” aesthetic: their prescriptions violated the ideal of the genius composer to which almost any composer in the Western art-music tradition aspired. Hungarian composers striving to rise to the challenge of that ideal faced charges of insuffi cient patriotism as they strayed from Hungarian-style models, even as critics moaned at the lack of inspiration of composers who did follow them. With aesthetic and institutional parochialism shackling Hungary’s musical establishment, it was probably inevitable that someone would rebel.

81. In Analysis , 194. Italics in original.

82. Analysis , 194.

83. Nemzeti zeneművészet , 168–169.


REDEFINING THE FACTS OF NATIONAL MUSIC: BREAKING DOWN THE OLD MODEL

Th e form this rebellion took was no less than an epistemological break in the defi nition of knowledge about national, or “racial,” music. Previously, national music had been defi ned around what was familiar: as Géza Molnár put it, the people had a “unifi ed disposition” toward certain stylistic features, what was understood as “Hungarian(-Gypsy) style”; “serious” composition was dominated by German models taught by the largely German or German-trained Academy faculty, even if those models might incorporate some Hungarian features, while works inspired more directly by Gypsy performance were seen as mere popular throwaways. None of the resulting works drew lasting praise. János Sepr ő di com-plained of the bitterness of the resulting divide: the “Ábrányi-Liszt school” acted

as a tool of a foreign tendency, and instead of continuing the [national] her-itage left to it, it slaughters its own kind with fi re and sword . . . more clear-eyed persons saw the naturalists’ ignorance, but they felt that the roots of Hungarian music are in folk poesis; thus they could despise this worker, whether Gypsy or musical illiterate, but they could not leave him out. And these more clear-thinking persons have done this in the worst way. If they stick with the Ábrányi-Liszt school, they are lavished with splendor, with power, with honors; they become professors at the H[ungarian] R[oyal] Academy of Music; they will manage the H[ungarian] R[oyal] Opera and conduct concerts of the Philharmonic Society. If they remain of one persua-sion with the naturalists and the Gypsies, they will win renown with the greater Hungarian public; the publishers will snap up their works. In the acrimonious battle-noise of the two combatants, hardly anyone pays atten-tion, which has slowly embittered them; they have pulled back and fi nished their careers in undeserved silence. 84

Many writers commented on the need to separate Hungarian music from the music of the “center” while still elevating it above the earthy excesses of Gypsy style. Th e proposed scientifi c measurement of musical Hungarianness in Molnár’s book off ered the illusion of an objective solution to the way such hybrids were created. Th e problems with this way of studying “musical science” were both sci-entifi c and aesthetic. First, the actual task of quantifi cation—whether of musical elements or of responses to them—turned out to be impossible. János Sepr ő di understood that many of Molnár’s readers placed a similarly high value on this “empirical” assessment of the racial qualities of music, however dubious; Sepr ő di himself, however, judged Molnár’s scientism as a mere cover: “Right away in the

84. Sepr ő di, “Föladatok a magyar zene körül,” 233–234. In fact, the relationship between these seemingly opposed camps was far closer than one would expect from Sepr ő di’s description. Some of the musicians churning out “naturalist” material were in fact “offi cial musicians,” including Kornél Ábrányi himself.


introduction, at Ohm’s Law, [Molnár] creates darkness around himself like the inkfi sh [squid], although no one pursues him.” 85 Moreover, the strategy Molnár drew from his “research” was similar to earlier unsuccessful eff orts: in essence, they hybridized existing popular and concert idioms. 86

Th e alternative Sepr ő di proposed to earlier understandings of the national music, including “scientifi c” justifi cations of it like Molnár’s, also justifi ed itself through science, but instead of armchair speculation like that found in Molnár’s book, Sepr ő di called for more investigation on musical artifacts themselves, called for more comparative research into Hungarian music, especially folksong, with the publication of the data according to “European” standards. 87 His specifi cations for how folksongs should be recorded and published foreshadowed Bartók’s and Kodály’s work: as many songs should be collected as possible, they should be col-lected from informants of the “lowest social strata,” there should be a focus on items that are known in isolated localities rather than those that are commonly known, and data should be published in a “faithful and exact” manner, rather than in “artistic” arrangements. 88 Like other critics of the time, Sepr ő di felt that it

85. Sepr ő di, “A magyar zene elméletér ő l” [About Th e Analysis of Hungarian Music ], 126. An earlier part of the same review indicates the book’s initial positive reception: “specialist jour-nals and daily papers alike, uni sono , sing its praises . . . . Reviewers so far have unanimously stressed that this book was prepared using methods of rigorous science” (ibid., 119).

86. Or as Frigyesi wrote, “If not the verbunkos , then what music could represent adequately the Hungarian nation?” ( Béla Bartók and Turn-of-the-Century Budapest , 59).

87. In “Föladatok a magyar zene körül,” 214–263. Th is article also appeared as a separate monograph with the title Emlékirat a magyar zene ügyében [Memorandum in the matter of Hungarian music]. Th e purpose of its publication was the advancement of Hungarian music: the title page states that the board of directors of the Kolozsvár Music Conservatory com-missioned the article “to study the conditions of Hungarian music, to endeavor to fi nd out the explanation for today’s situation and on this basis to prepare a plan which will serve as a starting point in looking at what further things there are to do.”

88. See Sepr ő di’s critiques of István Bartalus’ folk music collections in “Föladatok a magyar zene körül,” 258–259: “We may be most grateful to István Bartalus [for his collection, but] . . . instead of desiring to serve purely scholarly goals with his collection, [he] sets about the artis-tic preparation of every single piece, and for these slender tunes he makes an artistic accom-paniment, introduction, and conclusion which can satisfy even the Wagnerians’ demands; but for Hungarian music scholarship, for which faithful and exact publication is what is necessary, all of this is superfl uous, at the very least . . . . [H]e did not collect enough material and did not descend as far as the task requires. In his notebook for example he says that in Csík he didn’t get anything (according to this, therefore, the folk don’t sing at all there). In Háromszék, though, he wrote down 74 pieces from the substitute schoolteachers , therefore second-hand. Th erefore we fi nd a few items from the music of the lowest social strata only in the fi rst three of his seven-volume collection, and the rest are fi lled with commonly known and less local tunes.” In the same article, Sepr ő di complained about the folk tunes included in the fi rst fi ve years of the journal of Hungary’s Folklore Society, Ethnographia , that “in the whole fi ve-year run, with the exception of my publications, there is not a single tune whose tempo is specifi ed; on the contrary, we fi nd more in which neither the key nor even the meter is notated” (“Föla-datok a magyar zene körül,” 260).


was important to “win people to the cause of Hungarian music” and to heal “the harmful symptoms of foreign infl uence,” and like Molnár, he aimed to determine the “positive laws of racial art”; but his idea of what constituted a fact in the scien-tifi c study of those “laws” was very diff erent from some of his leading contempo-raries, including Molnár. 89 In Sepr ő di’s view, “so-called musical scientists” 90 only muddied the waters with their obscure references to Ohm’s Law or rhythmic cal-culations, whose examples from cosmopolitan art-music composers “could only be examples of how the foreign soul shapes and arranges Hungarian material” and not of a truly Hungarian music. 91 Where Molnár conceptualized abstract stylistic features that made up the pure style , with their racial qualities tested by hypothet-ical “sons of the folk,” Sepr ő di, and later Bartók, Kodály, and others, focused on more concrete data points, folksongs collected from actual peasants: the scholarly idea—and the Romantic ideal—of the pure source , one that was “more reliable” than either Gypsy musicians, or foreign-born, -trained, or -oriented Hungarian art-music composers, who together provided the vast majority of Géza Molnár’s examples. 92

As we examine this discourse, we can see that the emphasis on the “pure source” allowed Bartók and his compatriots to have it both ways, eff ectively bridging the divide between East and West. Th e object of study, the mystical music of the back-ward Hungarian peasant, had both the virtues of the “noble savage” and the allure of an Eastern Other; researching it illustrated “the Orientalist’s desire to possess the Orient by ‘knowing’ it in exhaustive documentary detail; it was something to be analyzed and to have its connections and infl uences traced by educated, urban, and West-looking Hungarian[s].” 93 Th e precise manner in which Bartók’s circle studied this music did not even have to come from the West; Bartók pointed out that educated people from the fringes of Europe could also contribute to the great central scientifi c tradition when he stressed that he had adapted his cataloguing system not from a German but from another Finno-Ugric scholar, the Finn Ilmari Krohn. 94

With their new store of evidence, forward-thinking writers, including Bartók, could refute their older opponents’ contentions about the “Hungarian racial char-acter” in music. Logical fl aws in the scholarship of writers like Géza Molnár then

89. Th e fi rst two phrases come from Sepr ő di, “Föladatok a magyar zene körül,” 263: “Th e main concern, however, is to win people to the cause of Hungarian music . . . . If we lay into it with all our strength, and if the powers that be recognize their national responsibility, I strongly believe that the harmful symptoms of 50 years of foreign infl uence that one can observe today will slowly, slowly subside, and that Hungarian genius, which is nowhere more specifi c and therefore nowhere more worthy than in music, will gain strength.”

90. Adapted from translation in BBE , 302.

91. From Sepr ő di, “A magyar zene elméletér ő l,” 125.

92. Sepr ő di, “A magyar zene elméletér ő l,” 125.

93. Brown, “Bartók, the Gypsies, and Hybridity,” 127.

94. See “Comparative Musical Folklore” (1912), in BBE , 156.


became part of the argument for discarding the Hungarian-Gypsy style. Where Sepr ő di’s review of Géza Molnár’s book took on that scholarship directly, Bartók’s 1911 “On Hungarian Music” was indirect, but no less scathing in its criticism:

Our “musicologists” . . . accept any melody sung in Hungarian as a Hungarian folksong. Th ey attempt to prove in bulky volumes, sometimes with comical zeal, how characteristically Hungarian some melody is that is actually of for-eign origin . . . . Of course, they also believe that listening to the Gypsy band in a Budapest coff ee-house suffi ces for the study of Hungarian folk music. 95

Th e critique of earlier scholarship on Hungarian style in music ruptured the dichotomy around which Hungarian style had previously been understood: where earlier writers had conceived of the Gypsy element in Hungarian music as the opposite of the German element, for Bartók and his colleagues—whether scholars like Sepr ő di or fellow modernist composers—the chief characteristic of both ele-ments was that they were foreign. Th is observation, they argued, required a new conception of national style, substituting those foreign elements with something truly Hungarian—the folk music of Hungary’s rural peasantry.

PURITY, RACE, AND FOLKSONG IN THE DISCOURSE OF MODERNIST NATIONAL COMPOSITION

Also embedded in the argument about the scientifi cally correct basis for national music was a debate between rules and classicism on the one hand and modernist style and technique on the other, between the creation of something new for its own sake and the preservation of tradition for its own sake. What marked Bartók to his contemporaries was not so much his nationalism —nationalist music was, aft er all, ubiquitous—but his “hypermodernist” stance. Yet unlike the discourse surrounding the musical avant-gardes of “central” countries like Austria and France, in Hungary the tensions over modernism were masked by the discourse of nation and race. Th e logical thread that led to “genuine peasant music” began with a rejection of the Gypsies.

Th e arguments Hungary’s modernist musicians advanced against the status quo refl ected the same anxieties over the “purity of the national character” expressed by the many critics discussed earlier in this chapter. 96 Indeed, it was the

95. Adapted from translation in BBE , 302. Tibor Tallián has argued convincingly that Géza Molnár was one of the leading “musicologists” (scare-quotes in original) to whom Bartók referred; the notes to Tallián’s edition of “A magyar zenér ő l” [On Hungarian music] in BBÍ 1 , 101, cite Bartók’s indignant marginal scribble in his copy of Molnár’s book: “We will not fi rst discover Hungarian-like eff ects in analysis! ” Th anks are due to Tallián for directing me to the relationship between this essay and Molnár’s book. Th e rhythmic theories of Molnár and others, along with their connections to Bartók, are discussed in Chapter 4 .

96. Folklorist Dezs ő Malonyay (1866–1916) cited by Turda, “Race, Politics, and Nationalist Darwinism,” 158.


confusion created by those very concerns that off ered a rhetorical opening to Bartók and his circle. Just as their elders did, members of this circle strove to put distance between Hungarianness and Gypsy performers, for example, when Bartók, in criticizing listeners ignorant of “real” folk music in “On Hungarian Music” (1911), condemned the pollution introduced by Gypsy performance style:

Out of the bulk of [Hungarian folk] music [our compatriots] know only those one to two hundred songs which our Gypsy bandleaders had the kind-ness to take over from the peasants and drum into the ears of the Hungarian gentry, and which are unimaginably marred, almost past recognition, by their oriental fantasy. 97

Kodály, though he has been applauded for his sympathy with the Gypsy musi-cian’s diffi cult working conditions, also made occasional remarks about the “exag-gerated cult of the Gypsies” and their “clever mimicry.” 98

Such discomfi ting racial references are elaborated in some of Antal Molnár’s writings. Antal Molnár (1890–1983) was then the founding violist of the quartet that premiered Bartók’s and Kodály’s fi rst quartets, a composer, folksong collector, and prominent fi gure in the New Hungarian Music Society of 1911–1912; he is now best remembered as a musicologist. 99 Between 1911 and 1914 he published at least fi ve articles viewing the “problem of Hungarian music” from slightly diff erent angles; because Molnár worked so closely with Bartók and Kodály during this period, we may almost think of these articles as the new-music manifesti that Bartók or Kodály might have written, had they been so inclined.

Th eir close relationship may give the twenty-fi rst century reader pause when encountering the strong racial language in Molnár’s 1911 “Neu-ungarische Musik,”

97. Adapted from BBE , 301–302, based on the original text. All quotes from “On Hungarian Music” use this translation unless otherwise noted. Th is brief article appeared fi rst in the short-lived avant-garde journal Aurora , then in 1916 also appeared in German translation in the Viennese journal Der Merker , a predecessor to Musikblätter des Anbruch . BBÍ 1 , 99–101, provides the complete original text, with citations for reappearances in the Merker and notes on links between this essay and other documents, including Géza Molnár’s Analysis .

98. Respectively, these quotes come from his essays “Béla Bartók” (1921), reprinted in trans-lation in Th e Selected Writings of Zoltán Kodály , 87, and “Mi a magyar a zenében?” [What is Hungarian in music?] (1939), in translation in ibid., 30. Trumpener’s “Béla Bartók and the Rise of Comparative Ethnomusicology” paints Kodály as the hero to Bartók’s quasi-fascist villain. While I agree with Trumpener, Michael Beckerman, Julie Brown, and others that Bartók’s saintly image should be moderated, the contrast Trumpener draws between Bartók and Kodály is exaggerated. Kodály cannot be credited for class and race sensitivity before World War II on the basis of post-1945 writings published under the compulsory egalitari-anism of state socialism. Also, Trumpener’s description of their opposed actions from 1919 onward (see p. 415) is an oversimplifi cation of the biographies and ethnomusicological approaches of both men.

99. See Várnai, “Molnár, Antal,” New Grove 16, 907. Th ere is no indication that Antal Molnár was related to Géza Molnár; Molnár (= Miller) is a fairly common name in Hungarian.


which, according to its author, contained “the fi rst lines in German about new Hungarian music.” Molnár used this article not only to praise the Bartók-Kodály program but to contrast it with Hungarian-Gypsy performance—in part through racial stigma, in part through the dismissal of the middlebrow taste of its audience—and to attach that stigma to art-music composers like Liszt and his followers:

Among us, the Gypsies, these notorious people, play an important role in the daily use of the wealthy, music-loving classes; they play operettas, couplets, dances, Gypsy melodies and also—Hungarian national songs, but these also are Gypsifi ed, i.e. ornamented in their Indian way, divested of their primeval appeal, their fragrant purity. Th e Gypsies must pay homage to the fashion of the day, which . . . has no sensitivity to Hungarian national style, since the au-dience only now begins to get an idea about what is generally called Hungarian music. Th e harmonization of the Gypsy is something borrowed . . . from the West (putting aside their primitiveness, which sometimes still allows a correct note to be found unconsciously). [Th e Gypsies] endow with a foreign character even the kind of melodies which, un-harmonized, would create a new and diff erent world for the ear attuned to it. Th is embellished Hungarianness, puff ed up on foreign models, is the chief element in Lisztean national display. 100

Molnár again combined the phobia of Gypsy degeneracy with the anxiety over foreign infl uence in his 1914 “Nemzeti zene” (National music). He emphasized the foreignness of Liszt’s “Hungarian-style” legacy by lumping it in with Brahms, and highlighted his concern over the “corrupted Hungarianness” introduced into Hungarian music by “the Gypsy.” 101

Alongside his problematic racial language, though, Molnár employed a pro-gressive critique of class snobbery in Hungarian society, which prevented most musicians from mingling with the lowest classes, where they might fi nd what he considered the real musical treasures. Hungarian music’s catalogue of ills, accord-ing to Molnár, did not stop at the corruption of the Gypsies, although he directed his most strident remarks at them. He also railed at the general lack of under-standing of the musical sources of Hungarian character—a lack created by the foreigners and those whose academic and class prejudice kept them from seeing past the surface to the true treasures of folk music. 102

100. For the complete text of this article in the original and translation, see Appendix B of Hooker, Modernism Meets Nationalism, 271–275.

101. See “Nemzeti zene,” 500: “Liszt’s and Brahms’ so-called Hungarian-style pieces have made our nation’s name into a sound beloved throughout the world. Yet for the most part, they only knew the Gypsy’s corrupted Hungarianness.”

102. A. Molnár, “Nemzeti zene,” 19: “What Liszt and those going in similar directions have done is just a promise of the potential of national music. Without deep consideration or immersion [in true folk music], they snapped up for their mixed treasuries just the most superfi cial motives, whatever turned up in front of them, what was swimming about on the surface of the upper layer of society.”


Grouping remarks about the Gypsies with those about elitism and foreign in-fl uence made them equally responsible for the problems besetting the Hungarian music scene. Molnár used this strategy to discredit nearly every major fi gure from that scene, both those operating in the sphere of art music and those who wrote for a larger, less elevated audience. From the fi rst category, the excessively cosmo-politan Liszt was lumped in with Brahms; Erkel himself “only broke our language” (presumably with his sometimes awkward text-rhythms); as for Doppler, Moso-nyi (born Brand), Huber (the birth name of prominent violin pedagogue and composer Jen ő Hubay as well as the name of his father, violinist Károly Huber), and others—their backgrounds all suggested their Germanness, not Hungarian-ness, and given the constraints of Budapest’s limited music scene, none of them “grew beyond the appetites of this place.” 103 From the second category, even non-Gypsy composers of early nineteenth-century verbunkos, like Csermák, Lavotta, and Rózsavölgyi, wrote music that was “not artistic,” only functional material for the accompaniment of the nobility’s wine-soaked amusement. 104 Other than Hubay, Molnár named no active Hungarian composers, a choice that must be seen as deliberate.

In this and other ways, the “Gypsy question”—both the impact of popular Hungarian-Gypsy music and the way its style was used by art-music composers—receded in importance alongside other issues: the political and aesthetic back-wardness of gentry patronage, the mass production of kitsch, “establishment” musical training practices, foreign infl uence, the distance between urban and rural lifestyles, and the fact that the popularity of this repertoire might obliterate the rarer, and (to the modernists) far more valuable, peasant song. 105 Bartók wrote derisively of the “supercilious Hungarian squires” who praised songs with Hun-garian texts but Slavonic musical characteristics “with the compulsory national enthusiasm” while “they face as strangers, uncomprehending, the recently discov-ered and very valuable ancient Hungarian melodies from Transylvania, which are unlike any folk melodies they have heard before.” 106 Kodály hinted at the schism between the jaded urban listener and the pure, naïve peasant singer in his preface to the 1906 collection Magyar népdalok (Hungarian folksongs), when he declared, “Th e overwhelming majority of Hungarians are not yet Hungarian enough, no longer naïve enough and not yet cultured enough to take these songs to their hearts.” 107 Kodály’s criticism of urban Hungarian audiences for not being Hungar-ian enough echoes Járosy and other traditionalists. But like Bartók, Kodály judged

103. In “Nemzeti zene,” 500, 21, 576–77.

104. A. Molnár, “Nemzeti zene,” 20. See context cited in Chapter 1 , n. 75.

105. See Brown, “Bartók, the Gypsies, and Hybridity,” for a critique of this transformation in Bartók’s language about Gypsy musicians.

106. Adapted from BBE , 301–302.

107. “Hungarian Folksongs: Foreword,” in Selected Writings , 10. Th is was the 1906 collection Kodály co-edited with Bartók.


that it was the loss of the peasants’ naïveté, the corruption of urban life, that caused city listeners to embrace nótas like “ Ritka búza ” and “ Ityóka-pityóka ,” the “products of domestic folksong factories,” instead of rarer and fi ner songs. 108

Th e emphasis on rarity and purity in both scholarly and polemical writings by Hungary’s musical modernists indicate that these scholars were interested in more than the documentation of musical folklore. Th ese were also composers looking for new sounds, and nationalists interested in sounds that were still grounded in their home soil. In old-style Hungarian melodies, Bartók found a source both ancient and modern, rooted in the East and off ering a novel direction for a Western composer:

[Th ese songs’] formal diff erentiation, in every aspect, from the ordinary forms of Western Europe, their sublime simplicity, the exotic features of their melodic lines, all bring them much closer to the soul of the musician in search of “novelty,” who, in this fi eld as in many others, will discover the “new” amid the relics of the past. 109

Th e “real” Hungarian folksong resolved some of the rhetorical contradictions of the German/Gypsy problem and gutted the traditional justifi cation for the con-tinuity of the sentimental Hungarian-Gypsy style. Th e logical power of this argu-ment eventually made it one of the most successful weapons available in advancing modernist composers: the aesthetic privileging of raw Eastern European folk music over sentimental Hungarian-style Schlager has inspired generations of Hungarian composers, from Bartók and Kodály to Ligeti and Kurtág and their students. In time, the elevation of musical folklore as “pure source” seemed to fulfi ll the promise about which Sepr ő di wrote hopefully in 1906: it was indeed “that little mustard seed out of which the wide-branching tree of Hungarian musical art will blossom.” 110

Although critics like Adorno and composers like Stravinsky have oft en con-cluded from Bartók and Kodály’s heavy investment in folksong, with its claims to ancient origins and traditions, that they could not have been true modernists, the dismissal of the prevailing Hungarian style just described performed the kind of iconoclasm that defi nes modernism. When Bartók wrote in his 1911 “On Hungar-ian Music” that “We have not had, hitherto, a valuable and yet distinctive art music, characteristically Hungarian,” his annihilation of the past clears the stage for his

108. Kodály, “Hungarian Folksongs: Foreword,” 10.

109. In “Hungarian Peasant Music,” 287. Th e notes on this article in BBÍ 3 , 165, demonstrate that despite the article’s 1933 publication date, it originated as early as March 1920; the ideas in this article also have much in common with Bartók’s book A magyar népdal [Th e Hungar-ian folksong], published in 1924 (see BBÍ 5).

110. Sepr ő di, “Föladatok a magyar zene körül,” 263, wrote this about a new music journal that he proposed that would be more scholarly in character than the others then available (seven music journals were then being published in the capital alone).


own work—creating a need for his own valuable and distinctive art. 111 Th e (usually) Magyar peasants, instead of the Gypsies, would represent the East, primitive and pure, the remnants of Árpád’s, or even Attila’s, ancient legacy from the steppes of central Asia. 112 In championing rough, “primeval” peasant songs over what they saw as the fl awed Hungarianness of Gypsy-style Hungarian music, he and his col-leagues claimed that the most Hungarian music was something unfamiliar, and thus they took the banner of patriotism for the aesthetically progressive.

According to Bartók and Antal Molnár, “real” folk music had none of the fl aws of the German or the Gypsy: it was tainted neither by the foreign infl uences of the West nor by the “oriental fantasy” of the Gypsies. As Antal Molnár wrote in his 1913 article “A népdalról” (About folksong), the “true artist” would fi nd the true reason to compose, would in fact fi nd himself, in folksong:

Today it is already obvious that the school of folksong is the most necessary and gives the most power, whether the artist attends it unconsciously or de-liberately. Th at incomprehensible fl avor, spirit, whose recognition eff ects racial diff erentiation among us, is the gift of folksong . . . . [T]he prevailing mood which resides in the true artist as his consciousness, which gives a strength and a mark and provides an inexhaustible reserve of invention: that racial character —is the air of the simple, monophonic folksong. 113

Antal Molnár thus claimed, as Géza Molnár, Dezs ő Járosy, and others before him had, that signifi cant works were by defi nition distinctly national, or “racial,” works. Unlike those old-guard writers, Antal Molnár argued that to create such works, composers had to become engaged in collection of monophonic folksong. Engage-ment with folksong, the musical expression of a simple Hungarian soul, had the power to overcome great obstacles, to combat even “the all-powerful spell of the music of the West” 114 to which Hungarian music had been subject for so long. Antal Molnár drew a deliberate contrast between this way of drawing on folksong and the more usual way, the way that Géza Molnár taught, in which, sadly, “the motives were not always Hungarian and their harmonizations moreover were always German.” 115

111. From Bartók’s “On Hungarian Music,” BBE , 301.

112. As in Sepr ő di, “A magyar zene elméletére, 122: “What barrier could there be to that principle according to which Árpád brought that language and together with it that music, along with other possible culture, here between the Danube and the Tisza [Rivers]?” Also ibid., 123: “Th us the memory of Hungarian music is roused in literary-historical data which speak about Attila’s feast, about the merry-making of Árpád’s Magyars, . . . all the way to the lamenting song for [King] Mátyás” [Matthias Corvinus, learned fi ft eenth-century king and a patron of artists and scholars].

113. A. Molnár, “A népdalról” [About folksong], 56. Italics in the original.

114. A. Molnár, “A népdalról,” 57: “In those countries which have stalled out in their musical development, collection is especially important because it gives [such peripheral] countries an opportunity to emerge from the all-powerful spell of the music of the West.”

115. A. Molnár, “A népdalról,” 56.


Since the past of Hungarian art-music was compromised by foreignness, the younger Molnár emphasized change. In the place of the “classical values” of some-one like Járosy, he prophesied in almost apocalyptic terms about the coming of a true genius—could it be Bartók?—who, by combining his innate creative powers with the magic of folksong, would “create the kind of beauty for which thereaft er nothing can substitute, combining artistic enjoyment with that certain something which fi lls [us] with self-consciousness and pride and brings the blood to such a boil as [we’ve] never known before.” 116

In a shift both subtle and profound, Molnár’s folksong propaganda planted the seed of the future fi rmly in the rural past, as peasants use folksong to “greet the Sun,” to “forget their monotonous work in song,” to “sing from the heart,” that is, as an organic part of everyday life. 117 Th e nostalgic picture of rural music-making Molnár paints in his article on folksong accomplished what nóta composers and publishers accomplished by illustrating their sheet-music covers with happy peas-ants: he packaged composition based on folk elements, however loosely, in “authentic” garb. But Molnár’s rhapsodies about “Natural Man” had a diff erent purpose: like Bartók, he used these images to sweep away the long-standing tradition of the verbunkos and nóta, which they found to be valueless, mass-produced popular forms, corrupted by both Western European musical elements and extravagant Gypsy performance. It was not just the musical power of “peasant music in the strict sense” 118 that appealed to Bartók and his followers, but also the rhetorical power lent by its “authenticity.” In the eyes of the modernists, the tacky glitz of urban popular music could not compare with this mystical story of or-ganic genesis. For them, peasant music—especially the ancient pentatonic Székely (Transylvanian Hungarian) song—had an unquestionable legitimacy that nóta and verbunkos lacked. Moreover, since it operated outside common-practice to-nality, it also off ered a way out for composers looking for alternatives. In worship-ping this new icon of the quasi-mythic Hungarian past, avant-garde composers remained undeniably Hungarian, yet were released from the stifl ing bounds of the existing Hungarian style.

Once they had torn down the old Gypsy model of Hungarian music and replaced it with the icon of ancient folksong, the stage was set for promoting the compositions inspired by this new model: a framework in which being new was as important as being Hungarian, was in fact an essential part of being Hungarian. Bartók was the acknowledged spiritual leader of this group, especially as he began to draw notice from abroad. In addition to Antal Molnár and Zoltán Kodály (who

116. A. Molnár, “A népdalról,” 57.

117. A. Molnár, “A népdalról,” 54. Th is article and others by Antal Molnár prefi gure Bartók’s writings from the 1920s (especially the 1921 “Th e Relation of Folk Song to the Development of the Art Music of Our Time”), particularly in their understanding of the aesthetic ideal embodied in folksong, conceiving of the folksong as “just as much a natural phenomenon as, for instance, the various manifestations of Nature in fauna and fl ora.” [From “Th e Relation of Folk Song . . . ”, originally published in English in 1921; quote appears in BBE , 321.]

118. In Bartók’s “Th e Relation of Folk Song . . . ” in BBE , 321.


wrote much less before World War I than aft er), two other Hungarian writers, Aurél Kern (1871–1928) and Pongrácz Kacsóh (1873–1923), stand out as Bartók’s champions in this early period. A description of some of their activities in support of nationalist and modernist music in general, and Bartók in particular, can serve as a corrective to the general impression of Bartók living alone in the wilderness with no friends save Kodály.

Aurél Kern was known chiefl y as a newspaper critic, but also trained as a com-poser (under Koessler) and worked at various times in the administration of the National Conservatory, Budapest’s Royal Opera House, and the National Radio. His credentials as a nationalist musician go back at least to 1902, when, Bartók reported, he suggested out loud that the Academy of Music should be closed for being too full of foreigners. 119 Kern refi ned his criticism in a 1911 article in Aurora (the same short-lived journal that published Bartók’s “On Hungarian Music”), in which he argued that the Academy needed to focus its mission so it could “live intensely for the highest standard of musical instruction, on a strongly national and racial basis .” 120 Kern called for an administrative and curricular overhaul to make Hungarian music more relevant to the culture and to allow more freedom of expression. Already, changes in this direction were allowing Hungarian music to be both more Hungarian and more vigorous:

Until now, music here was a patriarchal little kingdom, with tyrants, deferen-tial subjects, and a public that stood restlessly and indiff erently against art’s inner circle. Now the limits are expanding and an artistic and social renais-sance is beginning . . . . Hungarian music . . . is no longer a sickly, foreign, non-productive orchid, but the splendid, powerful bud of Hungarian cul-ture, which must be pruned and nurtured, must be grown into a wide-branching tree. 121

Kern took on part of the task of nurturing Hungarian music himself as editor of a volume from 1910 called Modern magyar zene: 12 zongoradarab (Modern Hungarian music: 12 piano pieces). Th is volume includes Bartók’s “Th ree Folk-songs from County Csík” as well as works by Leó Weiner, Ákos Buttykay, Kern himself, and others. 122 Th ough none of these composers wore the label of musical modernist quite as boldly as Bartók, both Kern’s inclusion of Bartók and his

119. As Bartók reported in a letter to his mother, November 12, 1902 ( BBL , 31): “What do you say to Aurél Kern’s outburst on Sunday! To his suggestion that they should close the music academy!” Bartók continued that Kern was “partly right,” but continued that the Academy had to continue for there to be hope for Hungary’s future musical life.

120. Italics added. In “Zenei kérdések” [Musical questions], 5–6.

121. Kern, “Zenei kérdések,” 6.

122. Kern’s volume is not actually marked with a date, but Malcolm Gillies’ works list gives a publication date of 1910 for Bartók’s 1907 composition (in appendix to Stevens, Life and Music , 327).


juxtaposition of the words “Modern” and “Magyar” at a time when some, in-cluding Járosy and Farkas, insisted the two were contradictory make the volume stand out. In addition, the lack of traditional markers of Hungarian style in a “Magyar” collection could be seen as fl outing that standard of musical patriotism.

Pongrácz Kacsóh, a mathematics teacher as well as a composer and critic, was best known for writing the popular folk-operetta János vitéz (János the hero), a work Bartók singled out privately (along with Th e Merry Widow ) to symbolize popular pabulum. 123 Although such a credit would seem to make Kacsóh an unlikely cheerleader for Hungarian musical modernism, Kacsóh also had the distinction of being the author responsible for the earliest pub-lished Bartók profi le, in July 1903, just aft er Bartók’s graduation from the Music Academy. Th e profi le, signed “Floresztán,” was the cover story for its issue of Zenevilág (Music world), which Kacsóh edited at that time. In this profi le, he off ered this initial judgement of Bartók’s Kossuth symphony, six months before it was played by Budapest’s Philharmonic: “Completely modern and completely Hungarian!” 124 Aft er Kossuth ’s premiere, he became one of few reviewers who praised the audacity of the music as well as the patriotism of the program. 125 For Kacsóh, unlike many other reviewers, Kossuth was important because of, not in spite of, its harmonic adventurousness, and it would be Bartók’s musical boldness, not anyone’s mere studiousness, that would bring Hungarian music to the international level.

Not only this article but Kacsóh’s entire critical output has a decidedly pro-modernist cast. Kacsóh, like Géza Molnár before him, measured the success of Hungarian music largely by comparison to an international standard; but Molnár measured that standard according to Bach and Handel, while Kacsóh’s choice—Strauss and Debussy—could have hardly been more different. Kacsóh’s work also indicates to us that such an international comparison carried tremendous nationalist importance. At the end of his 1912 article “Új utak a zenében” (New

123. In a letter to his mother in early 1907, Bartók wrote “let the locals [Budapest audiences] drown in János vitéz and Th e Merry Widow ” ( BBL , 116). Although the two operettas were and are both very popular, they are quite diff erent. By contrast with the urbane Merry Widow , the János vitéz is descended from the Hungarian népszínmű (or “folk play” with music) and parts of it foreshadow Kodály’s Háry János .

124. In “Bartók Béla,” 213. Another quotation from this article: “Th is young person starts off with his fi rst work at a depth and technical profi ciency where the most modern of the moderns, Richard Strauss, arrived in his artistic deeds at the noon of a rich compositional career . . . . Béla Bartók could not bear to wait until that deep void which has separated Hungar-ian folk music from the complicated apparatuses and forms of European symphonic music was fi lled in with the industrious work of honestly working Boy Scouts; he galloped into the depths for himself–and jumped across them, leaving behind him a large piece of artistic his-tory and opening up a newer era.” János Demény attributes this article to Kacsóh in “Bartók Béla tanulóévei és romantikus korszaka” [Béla Bartók’s school years and Romantic period] (henceforth referred to as ZT II ), 397.

125. See Kacsóh, “Bartók Béla,” 18.


roads in music), a piece mainly devoted to a survey of the cutting edge of music in Europe’s “centers” (Berlin and Paris), Kacsóh suddenly looked homeward:

And still! Th ere is someone who resembles neither Debussy, nor Strauss, nor anyone else. He goes forward on his own road and does not care about those who scold or laugh at him. I do not know where he will head next; I cannot even guess where he will end up. But I take my hat off to him. He is a Hun-garian. His name is Béla Bartók. 126

In his earlier review and in this article, Kacsóh placed value on Bartók’s doing new things for no other reason than that they were new, and saw even more value in this direction as Bartók was forging ahead without the support of his audience. Kacsóh combined his promotion of Bartók’s modernist language with nationalist pride: his reports on Strauss and Debussy were dispassionate, but he concluded his article by waving the fl ag in honor of a homegrown rebel who “doesn’t care who laughs at him.”

One of Hungary’s most compelling proponents of musical modernism in the period before was Antal Molnár, who argued vigorously for greater aesthetic openness in reviews of Bartók’s music as well as in the articles on folksong and national music cited earlier. Like Kern and many others before him, Antal Molnár criticized the stifl ing climate created by “navel-gazing” and “aimless doddering” by composers and critics in the ivory tower; he called for a new direction based equally in “the knowledge of folklore, [and] composers who possess enough power for new trajectories.” 127 In Molnár’s 1911 “Neu-ungarische Musik,” we fi nd the clear linkage between folk music research (as contrasted with more “usual” approaches to “folkishness”) and new compositional ideas in Bartók and Kodály:

Now the time has come . . . . With Bartók and Kodály the truly national has broken forth. Since we have had no satisfactory collection of our folk music until now, both of them had to roam all over the land themselves; they sought out songs and found their dream themselves: an authentic national music. As students of classical music, they aspire to create forms appropriate to the new color; as full-blooded men of the future, they draw the newest ideas into their art; as individuals, they have their own most personal things to say. In this they are like the greats running ahead of their time, unfurling their ban-ners, who radiate a colorful mixture of beauty and martyrdom. Th us here we cannot speak of a folkishness [ Volkstümlichkeit ] in the usual sense. 128

126. “Új utak a zenében,” 108.

127. “Nemzeti zene,” 577: “our music-aestheticians and critics navel-gaze, like the composers. And because an unformed public spirit consigns them, they dodder aimlessly in the thou-sand-hued grove of their own intuitions, and they don’t really concern themselves with each other.”

128. A. Molnár, “Neu-ungarische Musik,” 1417–1418.


Th roughout, Molnár emphasized breaking new ground, the “hypermodern,” great men “running ahead of their time”; but at the same time, he vested not just Bartók and Kodály’s compositions but also their folksong research with revolu-tionary power. New collections of ancient folk music were a prerequisite for pow-erful new pieces; it was by tapping the “Ur-Musik” of the folk that these “men of the future” could break free from the navel-gazing past.

However strongly Molnár rejected that past, he was also intensely aware of the critics he was addressing; his article “National music,” serialized in Zeneközlöny (Music journal) from 1914 to 1915, went so far as to point out who some of them were by providing a brief bibliography, a feature almost completely absent from that and every other Hungarian music journals of the period. Th ough he clearly disagreed with many ideas in two of the sources he listed (namely, Géza Molnár’s and Dezs ő Járosy’s books), his upholding of folksong as the “ancient source of music” appealed to the same ideals of classicism and beauty that they upheld, albeit for a very new purpose.

Th e folk perform the human soul in their songs and these are beautiful , because the concept of beauty is also the secret of the soul. Just as Nature is the master of the painter, the folksong, the ancient source of music, teaches about the musically beautiful. Th e folk’s syntax, accentuation, rhythm, weaving of song: the song of Man . Art-music seeks its teachings as sculpture seeks those of the human body. 129

Th e last sentence of this quotation suggests a telling comparison. It points toward the classical image of the artist and model, but this image of a practicing art looks forward in a way that Járosy’s idolization of past works did not. Th e model, whether a human body or a folksong, might not change very much, but as long as the artist returns to a natural source, his art could go in very diff erent di-rections from that of his predecessors. Where Járosy explicitly denied the possi-bility of a “hypermodern music-aesthetically beautiful,” Molnár advanced exactly that when he connected ancient, “natural” folksong to Bartók, as in the following:

Bartók’s Second Hungarian Suite is like a natural phenomenon, primal, strong, fresh, sublime . . . . He is a hypermodern, insofar as the new of inven-tion is concerned, who stands high over daily critique. Scriabin works next to him like a wan little dream-fl ower next to a marvelous fl ower garden. Richard Strauss’ eff ects are deepened with him, they have necessity of soul, they are imposed not through simple appearance from above, but are the consequence of thematics and development. His style is integrated, he does not devise, he never experiments. He wills and can, and what he can is art, music, beautiful and new. 130

129. A. Molnár, “A népdalról,” 54–55.

130. A. Molnár, “Neu-ungarische Musik,” 1417–1418.


Here, writing about Hungarian art for a German-language audience, Antal Molnár focused particular attention on positioning Bartók in the international sphere. Like Géza Molnár before him, the younger Molnár compared a Hungarian to composers who were better known in the West. But whereas Géza Molnár implied that his students someday might hold a candle to the great central com-posers, in Antal Molnár’s comparison the Hungarian fared better: he saw Bartók’s music as both more robust than the “wan” Scriabin and more profound than Strauss. Th e way Molnár’s comparison to Strauss turned the tables on the usual hierarchy of center versus periphery is particularly interesting: Molnár intimated that Bartók was more in command than Strauss of the depth and “integrated” technique that are traditionally considered the province of German composers, whereas he considered superfi cial eff ect, more stereotypically a feature of the peripheral exotic, more a feature of Strauss than Bartók.

In the minds of fi ery enthusiasts like Antal Molnár, Aurél Kern, and Pongrácz Kacsóh, then, the cause for excitement was that Hungarian composers, led by Béla Bartók, were ready to vault into the international modernist arena, with modes of expression that satisfi ed on a nationalist basis because they came out of Hungary’s rural life and because they were original. What had passed for Hungarian music thus far—dismissed as “what the Gypsies have collected randomly, or what a few composers have arranged”—could not take the revolutionary elements drawn from folk song into account, so they became irrelevant, reduced to metaphorical ashes. 131

THE INTERNATIONAL STAKES OF NATIONALIST MUSICAL AESTHETICS

Th e citations just discussed illustrate how musical Hungarianness was not just a national issue but also an international one. Hungarian musical institutions were established, and Hungarian composers nurtured, precisely so that music marked “Hungarian” might be recognized on the international concert stage; Hungary’s drought in internationally successful composers aft er Liszt was a source of deep frustration for many during this period. International success was the trump card for Hungarian composers, even if they did not fi t the gen-erally conservative aesthetic mold favored by most of Hungary’s old-guard critics and audiences.

Th us it was the acceptance of Bartók’s Kossuth for a performance in Manchester that convinced the Hungarian Philharmonic to program it in 1904 despite the travesty of the Austrian national anthem that so off ended members of the orchestra—though in the event, the Hungarian audience applauded the piece far more warmly than the British one. 132 While Bartók used Hungarian-style motifs in

131. A. Molnár, “Neu-ungarische Musik,” 1417.

132. See Tallián, Béla Bartók , 42, and Schneider, “Hungarian Nationalism and the Reception of Bartók’s Music, 1904–1940,” 179.


a typical Germanic fashion, as in Kossuth , he was seen as especially Hungarian, even though some criticized his harmonic “experimentation” that was perceived as a debt to Strauss. In his ongoing eff orts to fi gure out how to combine elements of the folk music he was fascinated with and his urge to go ever forward, he drew in elements of French music, and the press described him as in thrall to foreign powers (especially Debussy). 133 Bartók protested that only “Th ose who have a faulty ear will call it the infl uence of Strauss, Reger, or Debussy” and not of Hun-garian folksong, “for they will not be able to sense the subtle nuances”; 134 yet it was Bartók’s growing international reputation, which we may credit at least in part to his musical sympathy with international trends, that was substantially responsible for his continuing relevance to the local scene, whether many listeners appreciated his style or not. 135

International success also brought a certain currency to the ideas of Bartók and his colleagues on Hungarian music at large, since he and Kodály were the fi rst Hungarians to make serious inroads onto foreign concert stages since Liszt. At least one “offi cial musician” was quite displeased about the views that he and others saw the modernists peddling in foreign journals. Th is incident illustrates the close watch that Hungarian musicians were keeping on their for-eign reputation.

Th e period 1910–1911 was a time of particular excitement among Budapest’s handful of mostly young modernist musicians, led by Bartók. From the formation of the Waldbauer-Kerpely Quartet (with Antal Molnár as violist) in order to per-form Bartók’s and Kodály’s fi rst string quartets through the launch of the New Hungarian Music Society, exciting things were happening. 136 Somehow, a young Austrian composer of Hungarian Jewish descent, Egon Wellesz (1885–1974), him-self a student of Arnold Schoenberg from 1905 to 1906, 137 was drawn into this circle. Wellesz’s fi rst works to appear in print, “Wie ein Bild” (op. 3) for soprano and piano, written on a text by Peter Altenberg, and a set of four piano sketches called Der Abend (op. 4), were published in 1911 in Budapest by the Rózsavölgyi fi rm, reportedly on Bartók’s recommendation; “Wie ein Bild” was premiered in

133. Th is was especially true of Two Pictures , written in 1910 and premiered in 1913.

134. In “On Hungarian Music,” BBE , 302.

135. As Schneider has written, Bartók’s alienation from his Hungarian audience became a source of increasing distress in the interwar period, even as his profi le rose abroad (see Bartók, Hungary, and the Renewal of Tradition , 225–231).

136. Th e newly formed Waldbauer-Kerpely quartet performed the quartets on two composer evenings in March 1910: Kodály’s composer evening on March 17, Bartók’s on March 19. Th e formation of the New Hungarian Music Society was announced in April 1911 (see Hooker, “Modernism on the Periphery,” 274).

137. Benser, Egon Wellesz , 8–9.


Budapest and its publication was dedicated to Béla Balázs, Bartók’s librettist for Duke Bluebeard’s Castle and Th e Wooden Prince . 138

Wellesz’s relationships with both Budapest’s musical modernists and the Sec-ond Viennese School provide the background for his 1912 review in the Viennese journal Der Merker of Bartók’s and Kodály’s newly published fi rst string quartets, op. 7 and op. 2, respectively, proclaiming his Hungarian colleagues’ accomplish-ments in both composition and folksong scholarship:

Bartók and Kodály are the founders of Hungarian national music, in contrast with the Gypsy music that has prevailed up until now. Setting out with a phonograph, they recorded folksongs everywhere and found a rich treasury of old Hungarian songs which originate in Byzantine melodies; these ac-cordingly are not based on our major and minor, but on the old Greek modes. Both artists frequently base their works on these melodies, or imita-tions of these melodies in the manner of a cantus fi rmus, and thus endow them with a primeval power. 139

Notwithstanding his excessive emphasis on the connection between Greek modes and Hungarian folksong—a curiosity deriving from Wellesz’s burgeoning scholarly investigation into Byzantine chant rather than from Bartók and Kodály’s research—Wellesz’s statement is an important early example of the now com-monly received image of Bartók and Kodály as originators, living in a Gypsy-music wasteland, setting off into the wilderness with a phonograph to fi nd something genuine. It spread the kernel of the same legend told for the fi rst time in German by Antal Molnár’s essay in Jung Ungarn , and it told it in a more estab-lished journal to a Viennese arts audience. Th is story was beginning to take hold in the German-speaking music scene.

As one might imagine, this was not a story that would sit well with Budapest’s older composers, and one of their number issued an indignant reply. Composer Gyula J. Major (1858–1925) was an established composer who had studied with Ferenc Erkel; on April 18, 1904, the twenty-fi ft h “jubilee” of his career was

138. Benser, Egon Wellesz , 14. Th ere may be a diff erence of opinion as to when this work was premiered. It was defi nitely performed on an UMZE program in December 1911 by Vien-nese soprano Emmy Heim, accompanied by Imre Balabán, a piano student of Bartók (see Hooker, “Modernism on the Periphery,” 286). Benser, citing Wellesz’s joint autobiography written with his wife Emmy Wellesz and published aft er his death ( Egon Wellesz: Leben und Werk , 72), writes that Heim performed “Wie ein Bild” at a 1910 event sponsored by the avant-garde Hungarian painters’ association the Group of Eight ( A Nyolcak) , at which event Béla Balalán [ sic ] played Der Abend and pieces by Bartók and Kodály were also performed. Béla Balalán is almost certainly Imre Balabán. Research has turned up no additional references to the Group of Eight event.

139. Wellesz, “Ungarische Kammermusik,” 672. Bartók and Kodály did emphasize the non-major-minor modality of Hungarian folksong, but stopped far short of saying it “origi-nated” in Byzantine melodies. Th is reference probably refl ects Wellesz’s interests: Wellesz is today remembered as a scholar of Byzantine music more than he is as a composer.


celebrated with a splashy concert devoted entirely to his works, preceded and fol-lowed by front-page stories in two of Budapest’s leading music journals. 140 Aft er having been fêted as “the pride of Hungarian music writers, pedagogues, pianists, and composers of songs and symphonies,” 141 Major unsurprisingly took off ense when Wellesz dismissed everyone in the Budapest music scene other than two much younger radicals. Major’s response, titled “Egy vastag tévedés” (A gross error), objected strongly to this narrative. His rich response is worth quoting at length:

In the Viennese “Merker” Dr. Egon Wellesz . . . leads off his article with these words: “Bartók and Kodály are the creators of Hungarian music, in contrast with the Gypsy music which has prevailed up until now.” Where does the author of the article derive this statement, and with what can he prove its correctness? Or perhaps it was only a lapse in this sentence of his, and actu-ally he wanted to say that B. and K. are the originators of their own national music, that is, that which they will only create in the future , because they are still only at their opus 2 and 7, respectively!

It is almost unbelievable that there would turn up such a person who would like to make himself and his readers believe that a nation which has already taken part in every cultural battle with the other nations of Europe for more than a thousand years, and which has always proved to be excep-tionally talented with respect to music, has waited all of a thousand years, and that it was compelled to wait until the two above-named gentlemen appeared, presented the world with their op. 2 and 7, and thus “ founded ” Hungarian music . . . .

My lines would grow into a thick music history book if I wanted to list here all of those who around the development of Hungarian national music composed worthy pieces which deserve never to be overlooked. Let me men-tion the names of just a few at random: Ferencz Erkel, Kornél Ábrányi Sr., László Zimay, Imre Székely, Ern ő Lányi, Viktor Langer, the recently deceased Ödön Farkas, etc., are these all nobodies?

Ferencz Liszt himself acknowledged the big mistake he committed in his book “About Gypsy music,” and he made repeated public retractions.

Let me mention four more names; it is my duty as a folklorist not to forget about them: Ödön Mihalovich with his opera “Toldi’s Love,” Jen ő Hubay with his numerous Magyar compositions, László Kún with his outstanding collection containing 1000 Hungarian songs, Géza Molnár with his epochal work “Th e history and analysis of Hungarian music” [ sic ], perhaps have all made it quite clear to some extent that there was already Hungarian music

140. See “Major J. Gyula 25 éves jubileuma” and “Major J. Gyula 25 évi művészi jubileuma, április 18.” A hand-written inscription in the Széchenyi National Library copy attributes both of these articles to István Kereszty (1860–1944). Zeneközlöny 2, no. 16 (April 18, 1904) con-tains the program with notes for the all-Major concert.

141. In “Major J. Gyula 25 éves jubileuma,” 1.


before the above-mentioned op. 2 and 7? Indeed perhaps I could even add without immodesty that Mr. Wellesz would fi nd in musical lexicons and other music-historical sources some clue that the humble writer of these lines has also created works which are worthy of being mentioned as creations of “Hungarian music” before the publication of those opuses mentioned. 142

Music historians have long known of Bartók’s views on the confl ict between gen-erations in this period; Major’s article fl eshes out this picture by providing us with the other side of that confl ict. Th e story cannot be reduced to a divide between sty-listic innovation versus conservatism or Hungarianness versus un-Hungarianness; it also featured an older generation that felt disrespected and a younger one that felt it was denied opportunities to be heard. Th is generational friction emerged both in nasty incidents like Bartók’s fairly public confl icts with the Philharmonic Orchestra as well as simple indiff erence and diffi culty getting performances (all discussed fur-ther in Chapter 5 ). Antal Molnár’s denunciation in 1914 of what he saw as unfair, backward-looking treatment of Bartók and Kodály off ers a nice contrast to Major’s assessment of the situation: where Major saw youngsters who did not know their place, Molnár saw patriots putting up with far less than they deserved: “perfor-mances bury pieces by native composers,” meaning that pieces were performed once and then never again, and perhaps also referring to Bartók’s troubles getting good performances; “the best of our musicians must live from teaching,” and “the public does not accept them.” Still, “they persevere and remain here at home . . . only because of the faith that, with strong desire, it is possible to create the artistic life whose seeds they only guess are there in the depths of this child-city.” 143

Th e reference to the “child-city” of Budapest, which again implies a dismissal of all that lengthy history the establishment was so fond of reciting, was a classic avant-garde move, and stands in stark contrast to Major’s essay. Major celebrated the Hun-garian tradition and listed the great achievements of elder composers and writers; Antal Molnár, like Wellesz and Bartók himself, essentially ignored them all. Accord-ing to him, Hungary’s music scene was in an embryonic stage, still developing out from under the suff ocating shadow of foreign infl uence—and in need of impas-sioned young native composers (like himself and his friends) to rebuild it from the ground up. Th ose young composers contrasted themselves and their peasant sources with the Gypsy, that well-known but problematic symbol of Hungary’s musical tra-dition, as a lever with which to create space for themselves in the public sphere.

142. “Egy vastag tévedés,” 5. All italics in original. In this issue of Zenelap , Major became the associate editor of this journal, more evidence to its overall conservative bent. Another important proof is that this article is almost the only place in many years of Zenelap where Bartók’s name even appears; someone who read only this journal would not know about the 1910 Bartók and Kodály composer evenings or any of the activities of the New Hungarian Music Society.

143. “Nemzeti zene,” 578.


CONCLUSIONS

Bartók is so frequently portrayed, by himself as well as others, as a nationalist composer that one may fail to consider why it was that this national composer and not another Hungarian ended up in the “canon.” Th e answer lies in his inter-national success as a modernist, and the question of modernism is also at the heart of the discourse on the “problem of Hungarian music”: in Bartók’s own rhetoric and that around him, embedded in the constant stream of nationalist discussion of music there is a debate between modernist style and technique and following the rules, between the creation of something new for its own sake and the preservation of tradition for its own sake. What marked Bartók to his Hun-garian contemporaries was not so much his nationalism —nationalist music was, in fact, ubiquitous—but his “hypermodernist” stance. In Hungary, much more so than in the discourse surrounding the musical avant-gardes of “central” coun-tries like Austria and France, the tensions over modernism were masked by the idea of nation.

Th e racial element in Bartók’s writing, and in the discourse on Hungarian music of his time, is as problematic as it was for the anthropologists and ethnologists of the era, focused as they so oft en were on the purity of race and weaknesses that might be introduced by “decadence of blood,” a particular danger in a country that “endangered” its “independent national individuality . . . by the fact that here several diff erent peoples have been squeezed into one state.” 144 Bartók, Sepr ő di, and others defi ned the classifi cation of songs almost completely according to the ethnicity of the (original) singers, so that the “race” of music was defi ned by blood as well as sound; their music was all the more authentic if they lived in isolated, “untainted” villages. Th e motivation for comparing folksongs from diff erent groups was “to demonstrate scientifi cally which ones are the pure Hungarian folk-song types, and which are borrowed melodies or refl ect foreign infl uence. Because contrary to the naïve opinion of many people, so-called “good Hungarian senti-ment” is an insuffi cient basis for the detection of pure types; in fact, it is not a matter of sentiment, but of science.” 145

But the illusion of objectivity that Bartók maintained, as did so many of the pioneers of Central European comparative musicology, not only belies the intense debates over the role of folk music in Hungarian musical life that were going on at this time; it also raises ethical questions. First, it immediately places a scholarly distance between the researcher and reader on the one hand and the largely unnamed folk musicians on the other—creating an exoticized “internal

144. Turda, “Race, Politics, and Nationalist Darwinism,” 158, 159, citing Malonyay, A magyar nép művészete [Th e art of the Hungarian folk], and Arthur de Gobineau, “Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines” (1853, 1855).

145. From “Összehasonlító zenefolklór” [Comparative musical folklore], in BÖÍ , 569. Trans-lation adapted from that in BBE , 157, on basis of original text.


Other.” 146 Second, and more problematic, is the axiom at the core of the compar-ative method: the idea of “pure types” for each ethnic group, “permanent, immu-table, and anchored in biology itself,” an idea that has been called “essentially static and ahistorical . . . parallel [to] the ultranationalist, racialist, and fascist thinking [Bartók] has usually been perceived (and clearly perceive[d] himself) to be opposing.” 147

To the untutored eye, the aesthetic progressives might look more devoted to such discredited racial theories than their old-guard opponents: notably, Géza Molnár defi ned national musical expression as the style recognized by the largest possible number of people of that ethnicity based on what Bartók dismissed as “good Hungarian sentiment.” Th e fact that Molnár took popular conceptions se-riously and allowed people to choose to change their ethnicity, at least hypothet-ically, might appear particularly broad-minded from the vantage point of the multicultural twenty-fi rst century. On closer examination, however, Bartók’s crit-icism of those who classify on the basis of a vaguely conceived “genuine Hungar-ian sentiment” should be deemed valid when we consider the questionable way that Géza Molnár, Dezs ő Járosy, and other more aesthetically conservative writers defi ned musical Hungarianness. Moreover, at the beginning of the twentieth cen-tury, the politics of Molnár’s ideas had their own questionable pedigree, based as they were in a tradition of “liberal ethnology” which cultivated assimilation of non-Magyars and which assumed the superiority of the Magyar majority. 148

Bartók’s extensive research into and compositional appropriation of the musics of non-Hungarian peoples off ered a counter to that assumption, helping to vali-date diff erent groups’ separate musical identities and thereby to resist the relent-less, and sometimes coercive, drive toward assimilation. Still, especially in his earlier work, his statements also refl ect a belief that an ethnic group’s pure essence was expressed in its music, and that any mixture—particularly any mixture with Hungary’s “Gypsy music” or its performers—represented corruption of the pure peasants. 149 Bartók eventually came to view the hybridization of ethnic music in

146. As Julie Brown writes in “Bartók, the Gypsies, and Hybridity,” 127: “Like the Oriental other, [the peasants’] little-known music was something Bartók perceived to require West-ern attention. His obsessive documentation of folk musics in Hungary and wider Eastern Europe mimics the Orientalist’s desire to possess the Orient by ‘knowing’ it in exhaustive documentary detail; it was something to be analyzed and to have its connections and in-fl uences traced by an educated, urban, and West-looking Hungarian.” I acknowledge that Bartók was scrupulous about recording the names and ages of performers as he recorded the music they performed for him—these details are one aspect of the exhaustive documentation Brown mentions. In his analysis of the data aft er the fact, however, Bartók takes little note of the performers’ specifi c biographies, only tallying their ethnicity, so their music represents a characteristic of the collective, not the individual.

147. Trumpener, “Béla Bartók and the Rise of Comparative Ethnomusicology,” 428.

148. See Turda, “Race, Politics, and Nationalist Darwinism,” 144–158.

149. Perhaps Bartók’s clearest assault on the Gypsy role occurs in “Observations on Roma-nian Folk Music,” originally published in Romanian in 1914, where he writes that Gypsies


the rural peasant context, with its supposedly “untouched, natural culture,” as a healthy source of enrichment, in contrast to the corrupted urban setting, for which at times he held what he termed a “pathological hatred.” 150 His views also soft ened on the Gypsy musicians who, as the professional musician caste of the villages as well as the cities and manor halls, surely brought about this hybridization—no later than 1933 he acknowledged them as the likely “dissem-inators” of diff erent songs, whether “authentic” folk music or vulgar magyar nóta, among diff erent groups, instead of their likely contaminators. 151

We may view Bartók’s negative reaction to Hungary’s so-called Gypsy music as coming from multiple sources. It was partly aesthetic, similar to his dislike of the overblown emotionalism of some nineteenth-century concert music; partly pres-ervationist, as he repeatedly worried that the popular Hungarian-Gypsy style would drown the remaining rough gems of old-style village music; partly polit-ical, fed up as he was with the sentimental chauvinism of the Hungarian gentry which so identifi ed itself with this style; and partly intellectual, as he continued to battle ignorance of and prejudice against that ancient rural repertoire that he found most valuable. 152 An element of racial prejudice, shared with the majority of his contemporaries, may have been one more element of this reaction.

“pervert melodies” and “contaminate the style of genuine folk music” (quotation from BBE , 198). In Bartók’s Hungarian draft from which the Romanian publication was prepared, the word translated as “pervert” was originally “Gypsify” ( BBÍ 3, 341).

150. See Brown, “Bartók, the Gypsies, and Hybridity,” 131, and Béla Bartók, letter to Emma Gruber dated November 25, 1906, in BBL , 115.

151. In his “Hungarian Peasant Music,” he wrote, “It is likely that the Gypsies, too, partici-pated in the promulgation of the songs, theirs being the role of disseminator” (286). Bartók did acknowledge that Roma “indeed have their own songs (in the Gypsy language), but these melodies are of an utterly diff erent kind” (“Hungarian Folk Music,” in BBE , 71). Bartók and Kodály collected a relatively modest number of songs from Roma informants mostly in the years 1912–1914, plus one in 1933, representing the variety of music these “disseminators” encountered: songs in Hungarian, Romanian, and Slovak in addition to Romani; not only songs in “their own style” but also new-style Hungarian songs, old-style pentatonic Székely songs, Romanian colinde , Slovak songs, and art songs. See Rudolf Víg’s “Gypsy Folk Songs from the Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály Collections” for transcriptions and analysis of these items. Bartók and Kodály originally planned to conduct a thorough survey and collection of music of all Hungary’s national minorities, but “there was scarcely enough [time] left for the smaller ethnic groups,” including the Roma, particularly when their fi eldwork was curtailed aft er World War I; “they discovered such rich material with the Hungarians, Slovakians and Rumanians [ sic ] that publication of the Hungarian folksongs had to be separated from those of the neighboring peoples” (ibid., 90).

152. Th is fi ght continued both within Hungary and without. László Vikárius’s “Bartók contra Möller, or, A hidden scholarly ars poetica” demonstrates how one of Bartók’s most extended statements on the “Gypsy question” came about in response to the 1929 Hungarian volume of Heinrich Möller’s widely circulated song collection Das Lied der Völker (Schott). Th e in-troduction of this volume attacked Bartók’s conclusions about the distinctions between the urban and rural repertories as fake science, and thus “provoked Bartók to a discussion of the very basis of his ethnomusicological work . . . in an unusually personal tone” (ibid., 53).


Modernism, again, was a fundamental distinction in the ways “establishment” writers and those from Bartók’s circle understood the “Gypsy problem” in music. Th e critics discussed earlier in this chapter, particularly Dezs ő Járosy, believed, on the one hand, that low-class Gypsy performance degraded “classic” Hungarian music, and at the same time, that foreign genres and harmonic “cacophony” would also degrade Hungarian music. What Antal Molnár does explicitly in “Neu-ungarische Musik” and “Nemzeti zene” (National music), and Bartók does to a lesser extent in “A magyar zenér ő l” (On Hungarian Music), is portray these two seemingly opposite forces as two sides of a single coin. Both Germans and Gypsies were alien; Hungarian-style art music was based on Germanic harmonies and performed overwhelmingly by Gypsies, and thus it could not possibly be a suitable vehicle for expressing the true Hungarian racial character. By highlighting these similarities, the modernists strove to undermine the nationalist credibility of a style they found sentimental and clichéd.

Some Western scholars have expressed doubts about whether Bartók was a mod-ernist, oft en based on the misconception that anyone using folk music as a source cannot truly be so. 153 Some have accused him of “compromise” because of his rejec-tion of atonality or expressed regret that he “wasted” so much time with folk music, derailing any truly modernist aspirations for his own compositions. 154 We may question whether all of Bartók’s, or for that matter any composers’, works all rise to one traditional defi nition of modernist composition, constantly expanding tech-nical means of pitch and rhythmic organization; but as Walter Frisch and others have argued, modernism and its relationship to the past come in more than one fl avor. Bartók’s “urgent, elemental, and intense connection” with folk music, and his uses and transformations of it in compositions that were “intended and received as modern,” surely qualify as a form of what Frisch termed “historicist modernism” in his writings on the Austro-German sphere, particularly Max Reger. 155

In this chapter, I have presented an extensive treatment of the rhetorical frame that developed in the aft ermath of the publication of Liszt’s Des bohémiens through which Hungarian music was debated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and of how Bartók and his supporters struggled to break down that frame. An examination of writings by both Bartók and his compatriots clearly dem-onstrates, as a matter of history, how they and their contemporaries perceived their

153. Th eodor W. Adorno’s doubt that the use of folk (or “primitive”) art could be truly mod-ernist, for example, as exhibited in Philosophy of Modern Music , 145–160, fi ltered into much of post–World War II Bartók reception.

154. Fosler-Lussier’s Music Divided , 28–33, addresses René Leibowitz’s harsh accusations of compromise and moral weakness as well as the Cold War political context in which this cri-tique arose. David Schneider cites Stravinsky’s patronizing comment on Bartók’s death in his article “Bartók and Stravinsky,” 172–173: “I never could share his lifelong gusto for his native folklore. Th is devotion was certainly real and touching, but I couldn’t help regretting it in the great musician.”

155. In “Reger’s Historicist Modernism,” 732. See also Burkholder, “Museum Pieces,” and Hyde, “Neoclassic and Anachronistic Impulses in Twentieth-Century Music.”


motives as modernist, since Bartók and his supporters oft en expressed their desire to break through what they saw as arbitrary limits on musical sounds, while many establishment musicians wanted to remain fi rmly grounded in “classical” founda-tions. Th e inspiration for their new musical directions was national as well as mod-ernist: they rejected both the German and the Gypsy aspects of the traditional defi nition of Hungarian style and sought to create a new paradigm of authentically Hungarian music drawn from the “pure spring” of the isolated peasantry. 156 We fi nd the link between folk music, the importance of race, and innovative musical language all in one place in a 1925 essay by Bartók: “Th e purity of folk style does not get lost at all with the use of novel harmonies. Th is purity depends solely on the intensity of sensing the racial specifi city hidden in folk music.” 157

By turning the rigid, sometimes self-contradictory dichotomy of German/Gypsy against itself, they were (eventually) able to unseat the long-held equation of Hungarian style with the nóta and verbunkos. By aligning theoretical opposi-tions between West and East with those between cosmopolitan, decadent cultiva-tion and rustically pure “genuine folksong,” between fake (published, popular) folksong and the real thing, the “Bartók-Kodály program” appeared to erase com-pletely the sticky problem of hybridity that made this age and these individuals so uncomfortable. Years of hard-fought lobbying by no fewer than fi ve diff erent writers, plus the not-insignifi cant international success of two of them, Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály, gradually created a space for modernist composition in Hungary.

Th is “solution,” of course, only raised new problems. As Judit Frigyesi has amply documented, it was immensely diffi cult for many reasons to convince most listeners and commentators that some obscure peasant songs, and not the popular “Gypsy” repertoire that they knew and loved, were the Platonic ideal of Hungar-ian music. 158 Also, this entire debate is so saturated with negative stereotypes of race and ethnicity that no one comes out of it completely clean. Finally—and per-haps most ironically—despite all the ink spilled about how Bartók and Kodály had put the false Hungarian style behind them, their music does not observe the strict boundaries that the rhetoric constructs. Not only did they draw on the Gypsy tradition that they oft en accused of corruption; they may even have drawn on musical traits that had been isolated and iconicized by hated “scientifi c gen-tlemen” like Géza Molnár. In the next chapter, I discuss the connections between such “academic Hungarianisms” and some of their compositions.

156. Th e phrase “pure spring” [ tiszta forrás ] appears in Bartók’s writings, most prominently as the closing line of his Cantata profana . In that work it refers to a literal spring from with the enchanted stags in the scenario drink, but it also refers to the “pure sources” of folk music. Klára Móricz discusses the aesthetic and ideological implications of the emphasis on “purity” in “‘From Pure Sources Only.’”

157. BÖÍ , 578. Translation adapted from that in Móricz, “‘From Pure Sources Only,’” 248. Th e essay, originally published in Polish, appears in BÖÍ as “A népzene forrásainál” [At the sources of folk music].

158. See her Béla Bartók and Turn-of-the-Century Budapest , chapters 2 and 3 .

4

Writing Hungarian Music

Genre, Motive, Spirit

Th ose who concern themselves with “serious” music here, they compose symphonies, string quartets, Wagnerian operas, Lieder, with no more Hungarian fl avor in them than Chaikovsky or Dvo ř ák blends Slavic char-acter into his works. Liszt’s rhapsodies and Brahms’ cycle of “ungarische tänze” represent the national element . . . . Under these conditions can someone hope for an upswing in Hungarian music, for the coming of the Messiah of Hungarian music?

—E., “Hungarian music” (1889) 1

Scholarly works were already published some years ago dealing with the characteristics of Hungarian music; they wanted to defi ne something of which there was still no trace.

—Béla Bartók, “On Hungarian music” (1911) 2

Interested concertgoers today tend to be informed by certain truisms about Bartók: he collected “real” Hungarian folksongs in the countryside; these discov-eries led him to reject the “fake” Hungarian folk music, which was actually recently composed popular music performed by urban Gypsies; and his incorporation of this material into his compositions marks him as an intensely Hungarian artist. Idealizing the “pure source” of Hungarian folk music was far from a straightfor-ward scientifi c exercise, however, nor was it the obvious way for composers of the period to exhibit their patriotism. As discussed in the previous chapter, the Bartók-Kodály folk music project strove deliberately to undermine the nationalist

1. Orig.: “Magyar zene,” 2–3.

2. Orig.: “A Magyar zenéről,” BBÍ 1 , 99. Translation based on that in BBE , 302–303; altered based on original text.

Writing Hungarian Music 155

credibility of the prevailing musical style, by manipulating loaded nationalist and racial rhetoric. Th e older national style, typifi ed by compositions like Liszt’s Hungarian rhapsodies and their imitators and defi ned by critics and pedagogues from Kornél Ábrányi to Géza Molnár, was objectionable to forward-looking composers as much for its sentimental Romantic bombast and stale, hackneyed fi gures as for its lack of authenticity. Hungary’s modernist composers, led by Bartók, seemed to want nothing so much as to eff ect a clean break from that outdated idiom.

Th e new model they proposed was defi ned by Hungarian folk music, especially the older layers of folksong from isolated villages, as contrasted with the more urban genres of verbunkos and magyar nóta composed in folk style. Slow, de-clamatory folksong in what Bartók termed “parlando-rubato” tempo was one of the most important precedents for Bartók’s setting of Hungarian texts and his conception of Hungarian style overall: as he wrote in 1920, “our parlando peasant melodies” were the only way to “solve the question” of getting away from Western European patterns, especially “Wagnerian” declamatory style that was “inconsis-tent with the rhythm of the Hungarian language.” 3 Th e infl uence of the parlando-rubato style is evident throughout Bartók’s works, from arrangements of folksongs to the opera Duke Bluebeard’s Castle to abstract instrumental works such as “Az éjszaka zenéje” (Th e night’s music) in the suite Szabadban (Out-of-doors) and other works in the “night music” style. Some of the other rhythmic elements for which Bartók was best known, like the driving rhythms of Allegro barbaro , the Piano Sonata, and many others, also derived their inspiration from folksongs, though in this case they were dance songs.

And yet, even though polemical writings by Bartók and his friends repeatedly attacked both popular music and “establishment” criticism, Bartók’s music bears the defi nite imprint of the previous generation’s work. Bartók oft en chose to write in genres that were marked in the late nineteenth and early twentieth cen-turies as Hungarian, despite the fact that these genres were generally considered by many musicians to be less prestigious. Th e discourse over what constituted a “Hungarian genre” was charged with Hungarian composers’ ongoing concern about how to be worthy of the European concert stage and yet distinct. Could, or should, a Hungarian write a symphony? If not, what were the alternatives? A selection of the prose writings on the subject combined with an overview of concert programs gives a sense of some of the forces at work at a time when young composers like Bartók were struggling to make a place for themselves in Budapest’s concert scene.

Another discourse of the time that is particularly relevant to Hungarian com-posers of this period concerned the question of “Hungarian rhythm.” Recent writ-ings on Hungarian style treat it as a constellation of related characteristics that are more or less equal; according to Hungarian music theoretical discourse of the nineteenth century, however, rhythm was the most important element of that

3. In “Ungarische Bauernmusik,” 424. Appears in English translation in BBE , 306.


style. Th e evaluation of which rhythms were considered Hungarian in music was intertwined with contemporary theories of Hungarian prosody, which in turn was closely linked to Hungarian folksong, even if these mid-nineteenth-century scholars did not yet use as limited a defi nition for Hungarian folksong as Bartók and Kodály did. Th e theoretical apparatus these earlier scholars created reveals “Hungarian” shadings of some pieces that have not been considered particularly Hungarian, and suggests ways that these concepts may have been applied by com-posers including Liszt, Erkel, Mosonyi, and Mihalovich who aimed to paint a Hungarian sound palette. Meanwhile the restrictiveness and extreme complexity of the “rules” of Hungarian style, particularly in the writings of Géza Molnár at the end of this period, suggest how composers, particularly modernists like Bartók, might have felt themselves trapped by its convolutions and hyper-restric-tiveness, and thus why they may have wanted to move beyond it and to come up with entirely diff erent models of Hungarian style. In fact, Bartók’s 1911 essay “On Hungarian Music” condemns the “artifi cial rhythmic formulas” made up by “the kind of musical scientist who has never composed a single note of music”—an implied reference to the work of Géza Molnár and his predecessors—and con-trasts this approach to Hungarian style with the inspiration of “genuine folk music” to be found in “what has been written in the last few years that is new and Hungarian,” though Bartók chose not to name the composers writing things that were both “new and Hungarian.” 4

Despite Bartók’s and others’ objections to the Romantic excesses and theoret-ical artifi ciality of some writings on Hungarian style, however, we may fi nd cer-tain continuing traces of these ideas from the previous generation in their writings and compositions. In the previous chapter, examination of contemporary criti-cism opened the way to a better understanding of some of the vehement argu-ments in Bartók’s prose writings. In this chapter, an exploration of the debate over style and genre and of turn-of-the-century writings on compositional technique shows enduring connections between Bartók and some of the musical precedents he so heartily disavowed.

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN POPULAR, FOLK, AND ART MUSIC TRADITIONS

Th e backdrop to any discussion of Hungarian style and genre in this period are the verbunkos and magyar nóta, defi ned and contextualized in Chapter 1 . Th ere is some overlap between these two genres, as the tunes of the dance music of the verbunkos generally had texts and were oft en, though not always, sung; nóta, meanwhile, became a commercialized popular song form in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Th e verbunkos and this voluminous song repertoire bridged the categories of popular music and folk music, since the largely urban composers of verbunkos and nóta were inspired by rural oral practice and their compositions

4. In “A magyar zenér ő l,” BBÍ 1 , 100. Translation based on that in BBE , 302–303; altered based on original text.


were then circulated back to rural practitioners through their use in professional and amateur performances of népszínművek (folk plays), by Gypsy bands, and for those who could read it, through sheet music, under such titles as “the newest Budapest folksongs.” 5

Two 1906 publications, János Sepr ő di’s review of Géza Molnár’s A magyar zene elmélete (Th e analysis of Hungarian music, referred to here as Analysis ) and Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály’s joint publication 20 magyar népdal (20 Hungarian folksongs), introduced a new, more restricted defi nition of folksong to the Hun-garian public. Instead of being mass-produced for the “domestic folksong fac-tories” by the kind of amateur dilettantes whom Bartók, Kodály, Antal Molnár, and others had criticized, “genuine” folksongs were something to be gathered in rural areas by “descending into the lowest social strata” and “painstakingly tran-scribed” for study, even while some might be distributed for a broader public, as in 20 magyar népdal , with the goal of elevating Hungarians’ taste. 6 As we know, this defi nition is now widely accepted. Following the distinction between “gen-uine” folksong and “folk-style art song” ( népies műdal ) that Bartók in particular emphasized, 7 scholars have divided songs into categories according to the class of the audience and practitioners, mode of transmission, and performance venue.

On the other hand, in practice, the boundary between the two became quite blurry. Nóta generally conformed more to functional harmony and might have more “diffi cult” intervals in the melody, but new-style folksong and composed song in folk style shared some key characteristics: typically they had four musical lines arranged symmetrically, with the last line oft en being a repetition of the fi rst; the fi rst and last lines were oft en in a lower range, with a high point in the middle. Several composed urban songs migrated to the countryside where they became a part of oral tradition, if oft en in simplifi ed form, and they also infl uenced the new-style folksong to move toward the major-minor system. 8 Even Bartók was

5. Th e series A legujabb budapesti népdalok [Th e newest Budapest folksongs] was published by Kálmán Nádor’s music fi rm for at least eight years around the turn of the twentieth cen-tury. Similar sheet music titles include Legujabb budapesti dalok és népdalok (melyek a nép-színházban a legkedvesebb népszínművekben énekeltetnek) [Th e newest Budapest songs and folksongs (which are sung at the Folk Th eater in the most popular folk plays)] and A legu-jabb 101 magyar népdal [Th e newest 101 Hungarian folksongs] (Budapest: Rózsavölgyi és Társa, n. d.).

6. Th e fi rst and third phrases are from Kodály’s Preface to the 1906 collection 20 magyar népdalok , found in ZKV 1 , 9–10. Th e second one is from Sepr ő di’s “Föladatok a magyar zene körül,” 259, also discussed in Chapter 3 .

7. See, for example, the beginning of the introduction to his A magyar népdal [Th e Hungarian folksong], BBÍ 5 , 9. Bartók repeats this distinction in articles from 1921 and 1933 (see BBE , 68–71, 80–81).

8. See Sárosi and Kertesz-Wilkinson, “Hungary, II. 2. Folk music,” in New Grove 11, 860; Schneider, Bartók, Hungary, and the Renewal of Tradition , 25; and Frigyesi, Béla Bartók and Turn-of-the-Century Budapest , 56. For examples of magyar nóta found in oral tradition, see Sárosi, Gypsy Music , 163–178.


fooled by the similarities between nóta and new-style folksong when he included a nóta from a folk play composed by Elemér Szentirmay (1836–1908) in 20 magyar népdal . Bartók removed this song from a later edition of the collection aft er Kodály showed him where it had appeared in a nineteenth-century publication, though Bartók reportedly retained his “affi nity” for the song. 9 Flux was a natural part of the informal popular tradition: though there were certain structural, rhythmic, and melodic conventions, song composers could incorporate infl u-ences from widely divergent sources, from both the German tradition and the informal performance traditions of both urban and rural Hungary.

As “Hungarian style” became a recognizable topos within the more rigorous, German-infl uenced world of art music, however, its features became more and more fi xed. Th e unwritten lexicon of Hungarian musical markers that had been drawn from the popular tradition between the late eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries off ered a basis for defi nitions of Hungarian character in art music. To many Hungarian authors, though, an informal lexicon was not enough. Th e cru-cial (and racially fraught) role of “Gypsy music” as an icon of Hungarian identity virtually guaranteed that musical magyarság , or Hungarianness, would be hotly debated, especially as nationalist rhetoric escalated around the turn of the century.

Th ere were two major reasons for this: fi rst, as discussed in previous chapters, the 1859 publication of Liszt’s Des bohémiens et leur musique en Hongrie set off a fi restorm in Hungarian music criticism, a substantial part of which concerned itself with a precise defi nition of Hungarian characteristics. Th e rise of Hungarian musical institutions, particularly the founding of the Academy of Music in 1875, was the other factor. Th ere was general agreement that students should not only be taught a general (i.e., German) musical curriculum, but also learn what it was that set Hungarian music apart. Additionally, the passing not only of Liszt but also of Mihály Mosonyi (1815–1870) and Ferenc Erkel (1810–1893) (who though they did not share Liszt’s international stature were leaders in the domestic music scene) may have inspired a sense of pedagogical urgency inside and outside the Academy: critics frequently moaned in print over Hungarian composers’ glaring absence on the national as well as the international concert stage. As critics waited with bated breath for the arrival of a great Hungarian composer, or a great Hungarian work, several occupied themselves by defi ning what exactly would make such a work Hungarian, partly in order that this defi nition could be imparted to students.

From broader concerns like genre to minute details of style, commentators attempted to pinpoint the features that could guarantee that composers would sound Hungarian. In addition to this explicit goal, they also implied a hope that Hungarian composers would gain international acclaim, and that a “Hungarian school” could bask in their refl ected glow. Rhetorically this discourse encountered

9. See Kodály’s essay “Szentirmaytól Bartókig” [From Szentirmay to Bartók], ZKV 2 , 464–465. For more general comments on the blurriness of this boundary, see Major’s 1930 essay “A népies magyar műzene és a népzene kapcsolatai” [Connections between folklike Hungarian art-music and folk music]; Sárosi’s Gypsy Music , 162–179 and 185–187; and Frigyesi’s “Hungary: History of Folk Music,” 737–738.


two major challenges: the positioning of Hungarian genres not only as national culture but also as high culture, despite their roots in folk-popular music; and the reifi cation of a lexicon of “Hungarian features,” particularly rhythms, that could be interpreted either as rigid and simplistic or as impenetrably complex and un-recognizable.

HUNGARIAN GENRE

A composer could defi ne a piece as Hungarian not just through surface musical details but also through labeling. Nothing made the nationalist intent of a com-poser so clear as including an identifying marker in the title, whether that marker was a reference to a historical fi gure like Kossuth or Rákoczi or simply the word “Hungarian” (magyar). Of course, the national signifi cance of genre went beyond planting a fl ag in a piece. Categorization of compositions became an arena for erecting boundaries between high and low, center and periphery. To the chagrin of many, peripheral—Hungarian—oft en meant light, “low” repertoire, as we can gather from this anonymous diatribe from 1889:

What kind of Hungarian music can be heard here today? Th ose respectable pioneering Italian operas with those well-known Hungarian motives, and Gypsy music at a ball or a café, folksongs in the folk plays, on the neighbor young miss’s piano or—Lord preserve us!—on her pedal cimbalom. What those ten composers and fi ve hundred master arrangers do, that is all folk-song, or, I won’t lie, art song (sibling to art-leather [artifi cial leather], so not a living soul will admit to doing it). Th ey don’t try to write Hungarian music either. Th ose who concern themselves with “serious” music here, they com-pose symphonies, string quartets, Wagnerian operas, Lieder, with no more Hungarian fl avor in them than Chaikovsky or Dvorak blend Slavic character into their works. Liszt’s rhapsodies and Brahms’ cycle of “ungarische tänze” represent the national element . . . . Th e singing societies sing few of the beau-tiful and Hungarian-style choruses by the old Ábrányi, Th ern, Huber; 10 more than that they sing the manufactured goods of the German Gesangverein , and in German to boot . . . . Th ey do not teach Hungarian music at the Academy . . . . Under these conditions can someone hope for an upswing in Hungarian music, for the coming of the Messiah of Hungarian music? 11

To the chagrin of many, then, Hungarian music was peripheral not only to “se-rious music” in Europe’s cultural centers but also to that in Hungary. It too oft en meant light, “low” repertoire, whether for entertainment outside the home (at balls, cafés, and popular theater productions featuring magyar nóta) or in the

10. Kornél Ábrányi Sr. (1822–1903), Károly Th ern (1817–1886), and Károly Huber (1828–1885).

11. E., “Magyar zene,” 2–3.


middle- to upper-class drawing room, where the piano might be replaced or sup-plemented by the more “typically Hungarian” pedal cimbalom. 12 According to this commentator, the only truly Hungarian works other than this entertainment rep-ertoire were the “respectable pioneering Italian operas with those well-known Hungarian motives,” a reference to the work of Ferenc Erkel—but though these works were “respectable,” their Hungarian qualities were compromised by the Ital-ianate style that dominated those operas, and by the time this piece was written, they were passé. Meanwhile, the critic complained, “serious” music in Hungary had again become the realm of the German.

Other sources lead us to similar conclusions about the marginal place of Hun-garian compositions and the dominance of German music in Hungary’s musical institutions. A survey of the programs of Budapest’s Philharmonic Society, the most prestigious orchestra in the country at the turn of the century, off ers a sense both of how Hungarian works fi t in their repertoire overall as well as what kind of pieces Hungarian composers were writing. Living Hungarian composers were rep-resented, but “traditional,” “central” repertoire from German-speaking lands dom-inated the orchestra’s concerts. An analysis of its programs by nationality from 1853 to 1920 shows that the Philharmonic played selections by Austro-German com-posers almost three times as oft en as Hungarian ones (see Table 4.1 ). 13 Th is prefer-ence came out of a reliance on a canon of great works from the past, in keeping with trends among symphony orchestras across Europe, particularly among elite orchestras. 14 Th e importance of the canon becomes obvious when we realize that of the 2,370 selections played during the period analyzed, over 66 percent were by just sixteen composers (listed in Table 4.2 ). Beethoven was the undisputed leader of this canon: not only did the Philharmonic perform his works far more than those of any other composer, but upon its founding, the orchestra performed a

12. Th e cimbalom, a trapeziform struck zither, has relatives throughout the world, but its use by Hungary’s Gypsy bands led it to become identifi ed with Hungarian style. Around 1870, Budapest instrument maker József Schunda developed the portable folk version of this in-strument into a concert-sized instrument by reinforcing it with a cast-iron frame, extending its range, and adding a damper pedal and legs; this instrument was used in certain orchestral pieces and by most urban Gypsy bands in the region, and was also, like the piano, adopted for domestic use. (See “Cimbalom,” in New Grove 5, 855, and Kettlewell, “Dulcimer,” in New Grove 7, 688–689.

13. Statistics on Philharmonic concerts are drawn from analysis of Nóra Wellmann’s database “A Budapesti Filharmóniai Társaság hangversenyei 1853–2003” [Concerts of the Budapest Philharmonic Society 1853–2003]; 2,370 selections performed on concerts from the orches-tra’s inaugural concert on November 20, 1853, to the end of December, 1920, were classifi ed by the composer’s nationality. Since Hungarian critics tended to lump Austrians and Ger-mans together, my tabulation does the same.

14. William Weber notes, “While during the early 1830s most of the orchestras honored a fair number of local composers (both living and dead) who had no international reputations, by the 1870s they increasingly played music by the same core of dead master composers . . . . All of which added up to an increasingly narrow and rigid focus upon the musical canon, at the expense of new music” (“Th e Rise of the Classical Repertoire,” 374).


Beethoven work on all but two concerts for its fi rst three seasons (seventeen con-certs). 15 Only two of the most frequently performed composers, Richard Strauss and Carl Goldmark, were alive at the end of the period sampled. Th ree of the top fi ft een, Liszt, Goldmark, and Robert Volkmann, were claimed by the Hungarian music world, but questions could be raised about the Hungarian identity of all three: Liszt and Goldmark spent the bulk of their professional lives outside Hun-gary and did not speak Hungarian well, whereas Volkmann was born in Germany,

Table 4.1. Nationality of composers for selections performed by Budapest Philharmonic, 1853–1920

Nationality Number of Performances German and Austrian 1348 Hungarian 505 French 213 Russian 105 Italian 58 Czech 48 Polish 38 Norwegian 37 English 10 Finnish 8 Spanish 7 Danish 6 Swedish 4 Belgian 4 Dutch 3 Scottish 2 Irish 1 American 1 undetermined 7

total 2370

source : Nóra Wellmann, “A Budapesti Filharmóniai Társaság hangversenyei 1853–2003” [Concerts of the Budapest Philharmonic Society 1853–2003], CD-ROM supplement to Ferenc Bonis’ Budapesti Filharmóniai Társaság százötven esztendeje, 1853–2003 [150 Sea-sons of the Budapest Philharmonic Society, 1853–2003] (Budapest: Balassi Kiadó, 2005).

15. David Schneider has commented on the prominent role of the “classical” Beethoven in Hungarian musical criticism in “Bartók and Stravinsky,” 180–191. Emil Hubert also indicates the central role Beethoven played: he proposed that the complete cycle of Beethoven sym-phonies act as the anchor to a concert series introducing workers to art music (in A művészi zene népszerűsítése [Th e Popularization of Art Music], 11–14).


though he moved to Hungary early in his career. Ferenc Erkel, the sixteenth most performed composer, is the fi rst on this list who both was born in Hungary and spent most of his musical career in Hungary.

When the Philharmonic did perform Hungarian works, they tended to fi ll a particular niche in concerts, best described as “local color.” A typical concert might be anchored by a symphony, feature a soloist in a concerto, and then fi ll in the edges of the program with a character piece; many symphony orchestras con-tinue to follow this model of concert programming. “Hungarian” works such as those listed in Table 4.3 (all of which appeared in the Zeneközlöny ’s (Music

Table 4.2. Most frequently performed composers of works performed by the Budapest Philharmonic, 1853–1920

Name Number of Performances Beethoven 347 R. Wagner 203 Liszt 124 Mozart 121 Mendelssohn 94 Weber 85 Berlioz 81 Goldmark 71 Brahms 68 Chaikovsky 65 Schumann 64 Bach 52 Schubert 52 R. Strauss 52 Volkmann 50 F. Erkel 42

source : Nóra Wellmann, “A Budapesti Filharmóniai Társaság hangversenyei 1853–2003” [Concerts of the Budapest Philharmonic Society 1853–2003], CD-ROM supple-ment to Ferenc Bonis’ CD-ROM supplement to Ferenc Bonis’ Budapesti Filharmóniai Társaság százötven esztendeje, 1853–2003 [150 Seasons of the Budapest Philharmonic Society, 1853–2003] (Budapest: Balassi Kiadó, 2005).

Given the importance of the national in this environment, some writers even went so far as to claim Beethoven as an honorary Hungarian. Th is claim was made largely on two grounds: the Overture to King Stephen (a play telling the story of Hungary’s fi rst Christian king), written for the opening of a (German) theater in Pest in 1811, and whose rhythms had a “strong Hun-garian fl avor” (according to the unknown program annotator in Zeneközlöny 6, no. 13 (March 21, 1908), 143); and occasional use of “Hungarian” themes, such as in the fi nale to Symphony no. 8 (referred to in program notes in Zeneközlöny 8, no. 13 (January 22, 1910), 174–175).


journal) program booklets for the Philharmonic, as indicated in the far right col-umn of this table) could be seen as fi lling this role, marginal to the program just as many viewed Hungary itself as marginal to European culture. Other Hungarian repertoire mentioned in the pages of journals like Zeneközlöny were usually chamber serenades, piano rhapsodies, and pieces that used folksong in one way or another—not “signifi cant” or “universal” genres.

Th ough shunted to the margins, “national” repertoire played an important role as a token of identity, one that necessitated that it wear its national content on its sleeve, whether in genre, style, or both. Th e fact that the titles of so many of the Hungarian pieces performed by the Philharmonic identify them as such may be viewed as

Table 4.3. Sample compositions with “Hungarian” titles performed by the Budapest Philharmonic Society, 1903–1913

Composer Title Notes Source (Issue of Zeneközlöny )

Nándor Rékai (1870–1943)

Kurucz Overture About the 18th-century rebellion against the Habsburgs

2, no. 3 (Nov. 16, 1903), 31–37

Leó Weiner (1885–1960)

Magyar Serenade 5, no. 8 (Jan. 7, 1907), 105–106

Károly Goldmark (1830–1915)

“Zrinyi” About the poet-military man who fought against the 17th- century Turkish occupation

6, no. 2 (Nov. 4, 1907), 23–24

Nándor Rékai Variations on a Magyar Th eme

6, no. 5 (Dec. 16, 1907), 52–54

Dezs ő Antalff y-Zsiros (1885–1945)

Magyar Suite 6, no. 11 (March 2, 1908), 124–125

Árpád Szendy (1863–1922)

Magyar Poems 7, no. 11 (April 1909), 124–28

Aladár Radó (1882–1914)

“At the end of the village is a little pub”

Based on a poem by Sándor Pet ő fi , poet/hero of the 1848 Revolution

8, no. 10 (Dec. 4, 1909), 121–23

Jen ő Hubay (1858–1937)

Magyar Variations 10, no. 9 (Jan. 15, 1912), 291–293

Károly Hentschel i

“Road of the Armies” Overture

About the Huns, the Magyars’ putative ancestors

12, no. 2 (Oct. 18, 1913), 31

i Th ere is no entry on Hentschel in the Zenei Lexikon , ed. Szabolcsi and Tóth (Budapest: Zeneműkiadó Vállalat, 1965), my source for the other composers’ dates.


supporting this tokenism. Additionally, although some genres that were not specif-ically Hungarian could be made Hungarian, many believed that Hungarian style did not really suit the weightiest genres in Western art music. A chapter on genre in Kornél Ábrányi’s 1877 textbook, A magyar dal és zene sajátságai (Characteristics of Hungarian song and music), illustrates this point: although some of what he called “cosmopolitan” genres, “for example the ‘Nocturne,’ the ‘Scherzo,’ the ‘Impromptu,’ and the ‘Fantasy,’” had enough fl exibility “to validate the various fl uctuations of Hungarian music, or rather Hungarian temperament,”

the so-called classical genres in our opinion, such as for example the “So-nata,” “Rondo,” “Symphony,” “chamber music” and the contrapuntal genres, are less suitable for this, by virtue of their stricter adherence to the forms and the demands of unity of spirit, and to the more rigid observance of so-called thematic development. 16

An interesting underlying thread in this chapter, though, and in Ábrányi’s book overall, is the contradictory role of “classicism.” On the one hand, those “classic” genres were the foundation of art music as practiced in the Germanic tradition, led by Beethoven, that then held sway in Budapest, and Ábrányi invoked classic Greek prosody as the most important reference point for the musical treatment of Hungar-ian text (as discussed later). On the other hand, the Hungarian music world, like that in the rest of Central Europe, was then divided between Brahmsian “conservatives” and adherents of Liszt and Wagner’s Zukunft smusik , among them Ábrányi. Although Ábrányi saw problems in using “Hungarian” elements within a rigidly conceived clas-sical form, he also hoped for creative personalities that could bring them together:

we do not by any means want to [suggest that] it would be impossible within the frame of these genres to represent Hungarian rhythm, Hungarian fl avor and Hungarian spiritual expression. Because true genius is not too con-cerned with form, and usually, spirit and creative power make the forms as well. And if those experiments that have taken place thus far in this area have not so far completely borne out this assumption, it still does not follow that in time the inspired prophets will not appear to refute it. 17

Signifi cantly, however, Ábrányi did not believe such “prophets” had yet arrived. Th e question of the appropriate genre for Hungarian music was still active at

the beginning of the twentieth century. Multiple authors came to the same con-clusion as Ábrányi had, though they came to state it even more strongly: that the symphony and sonata form were “the legacy of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven” and thus “refl ect[ed] the German way of thinking.” 18 Where Ábrányi placed these

16. Ábrányi, Characteristics , 130.

17. Ábrányi, Characteristics , 130–131.

18. Farkas, “A magyar művészi zenér ő l,” 220.


in the category of “cosmopolitan” (in this case synonymous with “foreign”), com-poser Ödön Farkas implicitly rejected the idea that classical forms and genres were universal, stating that one could no more imagine a Hungarian sonata than a Hungarian waltz, mazurka, or bolero. 19 Dezs ő Járosy similarly rejected the sym-phony and sonata as German; a classical Hungarian composer should use the forms and genres appropriate to his race, which according to Járosy were the Hungarian fantasia or rhapsody, the Hungarian suite, and that “most Hungarian dance: the csárdás .” 20 Since classicism was a fundamental musical value for Járosy, he proceeded to demonstrate how the csárdás refl ected universal formal prin-ciples that apply to genres from every nation. 21 Th ese principles, though only vaguely defi ned, act as the link between the Hungarian csárdás and that universal German form, sonata form, therefore justifying Járosy’s claim that the csárdás is just as classical as sonata form, and therefore, Hungary’s racial music is just as “high” as Germany’s. 22

Th e beliefs about national style and genre found in writings by pedagogues and critics like Ábrányi, Járosy, and Farkas are also found in more practical, if ephem-eral, guidelines like concert programming and guidelines for composition com-petitions. A survey of Budapest concert programs in journals like Zeneközlöny turns up very few symphonies by Hungarians, and none of the three most prominent symphonists working in Hungary in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were ethnic Hungarians. 23 Composition competitions, not surprisingly, emphasized Hungarianness. One such announcement, for a choral piece, though it did not limit “the direction and character of the piece,” nonetheless

19. Farkas, “A magyar művészi zenér ő l,” 220–221.

20. Faji zene és magyar zene , 48. Járosy also referred to “two free-standing Hungarian genres: the Hungarian fantasy and the rhapsody ” (50). Italics in original.

21. Járosy, Faji zene és magyar zene , 33: “the formal principles which have always shaped the essence of the classical, the genuine art music . . . are international and conventional in gen-eral, they are all in solidarity with the music of every nation. Hungarian art music must also stick to them.” But despite the sharp distinction Járosy makes between art music, including Hungarian art music, and Hungarian song, which, “given its more closed and smaller form, stands farther from classical form,” the Hungarian song “can still be a better foundation for art music than the racial music of any other nation” (33).

22. Járosy, Faji zene és magyar zene , 48: “When the csárdás emerged, it consisted of three parts: slow, a little more lively, and fast. Th is is the kinship between the csárdás and sonata form. Th ere we also fi nd movements in three or four kinds of tempi. And as sonata form does not come suddenly upon the fl uctuation of mood with its gradually accelerating movements, but gradually leads from the adagio to the presto, the Hungarian csárdás also begins with the slow [section] and gradually turns to the fast.” Járosy’s defi nition of three- or four-part “so-nata form” apparently refers to movements rather than the sections of sonata-allegro form, and thus he confl ates the diff erent sorts of development processes usually used in each.

23. Hans (János) Koessler (1853–1926), Bartók and Kodály’s teacher, was born in Germany, as was Robert Volkmann (1815–1883), mentioned earlier; Ödön Mihalovich (1842–1929) was an ethnic Slovene.


“stress[ed] that it should be magyaros [Hungarian-like] in fl avor and tuneful.” 24 Th is kind of prescription was also implicit in the guidelines for a competition that the publishing fi rm Rózsavölgyi announced to celebrate its sixtieth anniversary in 1910 for “a Magyar-style orchestral work (Overture, Serenade, Suite, Rhapsody, Sinfonietta, Symphonic Poem, Symphonic Dances, etc.).” 25 Rózsavölgyi’s list cor-responds well with the types of Hungarian pieces actually programmed by the Philharmonic. Th e absence of the symphony from this list looms large, and this absence is further marked by the fact that the last three items on this list are not quite symphonies. Th e symphonic poem that Liszt had developed allowed room for the fl uctuations Ábrányi attributed to “Hungarian rhythm, Hungarian fl avor, and Hungarian spiritual expression,” 26 but it could not displace the prestige of the symphony, particularly in the shadow of Vienna. Th e historical record does not tell us exactly why Bartók abandoned the symphony he was working on in 1902, but that he did so may be more confi rmation of a climate that may have looked askance at symphony composition by any Hungarian, much less one only twenty-one years of age. 27

But nonsymphonic genres were compromised in other ways. Th e reality of the “classical” csárdás that Járosy held up as the blueprint for Hungarian composers was only the most obvious, since its reception was heavily infl uenced by its prom-inence in the popular culture—or, as Járosy put it, the “overproduction” of “worth-less csárdáses” for dancing. 28 Th e genre of “Hungarian Suite” had a similarly questionable pedigree. Th e dance suite goes back to early modern France, and works in this genre by High Baroque composers like Bach reaffi rmed its value. Critic Géza Csáth (1887–1919) validated the value of Hungarian dance music by tracing its lineage to Bach, stating that the forms of the hallgató, the palotás, and the “toborzós” (verbunkos) were just the same as the gigue, chaconne, and minuet of Bach; the century of composition of Hungarian dance music, from Panna Czinka through Bihari to Mosonyi, was worthy of comparison to its Western European counterparts. 29 Yet despite Csáth’s claims, the Hungarian suite could not claim as lengthy and “elevated” a pedigree as its French counterpart. Th e Hun-garian suite evolved from groupings of slow and fast dances either at recruiting

24. “Pályázati felhivás” [Competition invitation].

25. In “Pályázati hirdetmény” [Competition announcement].

26. Characteristics , 130.

27. Th e comments of a secretary at the Academy, which Bartók reported in an October 16, 1902, letter to his mother, capture the climate nicely: “When I signed up for composition the secretary said to me: and now see to it that you compose. I mentioned my symphony. Th en he said: yes, but compose—he said—something Hungarian” (cited by Tallián, Béla Bartók , 33). Th e original appears in Bartók Béla családi levelei [Béla Bartók’s family letters], 70.

28. Járosy, Faji zene és magyar zene , 50.

29. Csáth, “A magyar zene” [Hungarian music], in A muzsika mesekertje [Music’s enchanted garden], 574.


events or social dances of which we fi nd descriptions and manuscripts in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century sources; increasing numbers of such dances were also published as time passed. 30 Th e “creation of the Hungarian drawing-room and social dance as well as the cyclical, repetitive dance form,” transforming oral practices of grouping dances into more formalized sets of dances that were labeled Hungarian Suites, is associated with violinist/bandleader and “Hungarian Jewish Gypsy” Márk Rózsavölgyi—a historically important fi g-ure with, however, limited credentials as a “serious” composer. 31

It is thus not surprising that Hungarian suites had a diffi cult time shaking the association with the popular performance context from which they had emerged. Tibor Tallián’s description of the “national suite” is indicative of how lightly the genre was considered: it was “a point of contact between national consumer music and the concert forms . . . virtually a musical exhibition of indigenous exoti-cisms.” 32 Th at the music press labeled Bartók’s two orchestral suites “Magyar suites,” even when their composer had not, indicates the strength of the genre’s association with “national music.” 33 Th e rhapsody was likewise oft en labeled Hungarian by the press, and not to its benefi t. A case in point is the response of a German music critic to the performance of Bartók’s Rhapsody for Piano and Orchestra, op. 1, at the May 1910 “Tonkünstlerfest” of the Allgemeiner Deutscher Musikverein in Zürich:

Also this year one allowed the acceptance and performance of hack-work, the inclusion of which is simply baffl ing . . . . Do you consider it possible that

30. For catalogues of manuscript and published sources of Hungarian music in this period, respectively, see Géza Papp’s A verbunkos kéziratos emlékei [Th e manuscript mementoes of the verbunkos] and Ilona Mona’s Magyar zeneműkiadók és tevékenységük 1774–1867 [Hun-garian music publishers and their activity 1774–1867]. Papp’s 1999 catalogue is an updated version of the bibliography he published as “Die Quellen der ‘Verbunkos-Musik’: Ein bibli-ographischer Versuch” in 1979–1990.

31. Th e fi rst quotation here is from Ferenc Bónis’ “Rózsavölgyi, Márk,” New Grove 21, 829; the second is from Lajos Lakatos’ article “Magyar zsidó cigányok” [Hungarian Jewish Gypsies]. Bence Szabolcsi and Miklós Forrai’s liner notes to Musica Hungarica , 122, credit Rózsavölgyi with the composition of the earliest extant Hungarian suite in 1842, though this statement disregards many predecessors discussed here and in previous chapters.

Rózsavölgyi’s son Gyula established the Rózsavölgyi és Társa music publishing and trade house in 1850 (Kálmán Isoz, “A Rózsavölgyi és Társa cég története 1850-tól 1908-ig” [Th e history of the fi rm Rózsavölgyi and Company from 1850 to 1908], 156).

32. Tallián, Béla Bartók , 50.

33. See the concert program on the front page of Zeneközlöny 8, no. 7 (November 20, 1909), 85, and two of the reviews collected in ZT III , 351–352: Imre Déri’s review for Egyetértés and the review for Pesti Napló , both appearing on November 23, 1909. Even Bartók’s close colleague Antal Molnár refers to the Second Suite in a German-language article as an “Un-garische Suite”—indicating that this perception was not limited to the “establishment” but also was shared by Bartók’s circle (“Neu-ungarische Musik,” 1417).


a poll within the music committee of the society for the performance-wor-thiness of a thing like the Hungarian Rhapsody [ sic ] for Piano and Orchestra by Béla Bartók . . . would have gotten a majority?—so I must answer in all fairness, that I deem that entirely out of the question. 34

Th is critic’s addition, whether conscious or unconscious, of the word “Hungarian” to the title of this piece only underlined his view that it was unsuitable for a se-rious music venue. Th ough such associations may have refl ected well on Bartók’s patriotism in Hungary, many felt they would not advance anyone’s reputation as a serious modernist composer either at home or abroad.

It was of course not only instrumental music that posed these challenges. Large-scale Hungarian vocal works aft er Erkel’s operas also risked association with another genre, Austro-Hungarian operetta, which was growing in popularity and was an important locus of Hungarian style in the second half of the nine-teenth century, not so coincidentally the years following the Compromise of 1867. 35 Two examples from (non-Hungarian composer) Johann Strauss Jr. illus-trate the range of uses operetta found for numbers featuring this style: Rosalinde’s Csárdás in Die Fledermaus (1874) is a more or less gratuitous showpiece, while in Der Zigeunerbaron (1885), Gypsiness and Hungarianness are integral to the plot and are contrasted with Viennese culture, represented musically by the waltz and set up as more civilized, if also more stuff y.

Th e next generation of operetta, the genre’s so-called Silver Age, was led by Hun-garian composers Ferenc Lehár (1870–1948) and Imre Kálmán (1882–1953), and Hungarian elements of plot and style were featured in several of their works. 36 But if this Hungarianness, combined with sentimentality and earthy humor, was suc-cessful at the box offi ce, it earned little respect among serious musicians in Hun-gary’s capital, particularly the modernists, as indicated by Bartók’s famous note about the worth of the audiences for operettas: “Let them drown in Th e Merry Widow and János vitéz .” 37 Kálmán defended his operettas as theater for a mass

34. Munich critic Rudolf Louis, quoted in Günther Weiß, “Béla Bartók, Zoltán Kodály und der Allgemeine Deutsche Musikverein” [Béla Bartók, Zoltán Kodály and the Allgemeine Deutsche Musikverein], 8.

35. Th is period contrasts with the fi rst half of the nineteenth century, when examples of Hungar-ian style in the music of Western Europe appeared more oft en in high art genres, whether for solo piano, chamber ensemble, or orchestra (based on a survey of examples in Bellman and Peth ő ). Camille Crittenden discusses the cultural political context of Johann Strauss Jr.’s works, including implied commentary on issues surrounding the Compromise, in Johann Strauss and Vienna .

36. For instance Lehár’s Zigeunerliebe (1910) and Kálmán’s Der Zigeunerprimas (1912), Die Csárdásfürstin (1915), and Gräfi n Maritza (1924). Th e prominence of Gypsy plot elements in these works, evident from titles alone, illustrates the continuation, even amplifi cation, of the mixture and sometimes confusion of Gypsy and Hungarian that, as discussed in previous chapters, had already raised the hackles of some Hungarian musicians and critics in the mid-nineteenth century.

37. BBL , 116; as mentioned in Chapter 3 .


audience, while deferring to the greater value of the work of a more serious composer—Liszt; 38 Lehár strove to transcend the genre by shift ing toward a more serious style, especially in Giuditta (1934). Meanwhile, their use of Hungarian style in popular works made it that much more diffi cult for “serious” composers aiming for a more elevated tone to mark their works as national without being viewed as, in Jonathan Bellman’s words, “tamed” or “denatured.” 39 To put it another way, a national style or genre was viewed as mere dialect, and as Kodály quoted his teacher, Hans Koessler, “ Man kann nicht einen ganzen Abend im Dialekt sprechen .” 40

By most measures, this double bind was not a nurturing climate for new Hun-garian compositions. Many pieces were performed only once and few were pub-lished. Although critics were almost unanimous in their desire for notable Hungarian works, such pieces were few and far between from the period between Liszt’s death and Bartók’s ascendance. Th e frustration that this situation yielded is summed up eloquently in a 1903 article by József Vietorisz, in which he expresses a desire for more weighty pieces:

Hungarian music was not born to be something to fi ll in gaps on the sides, or to provide encores for Hungarian artists, but rather so that it should take its rightful place, at least here at home, where it can be most easily understood and its signifi cance best felt.

And [even] if we gladly allow that listening to a good magyar nóta from an expert Gypsy is a delight, we . . . profess with no less conviction that it is a . . . responsibility for a Hungarian poet and artist to cultivate and develop Hun-garian music with honor! 41

38. In a 1913 interview for a Viennese newspaper, Kálmán stated, “I know that half a page of score by Liszt outweighs all the operettas that I have written and will write in the future. But I also know that this half-page of score demands a collected, concentrated, intellectually high-standing public, and that is always only a comparatively small fraction of each audience that goes to the theater” (quoted (without citation) by Batta, Träume sind Schäume , 8).

39. As Bellman puts it, the plot of one show with a Hungarian setting, Lehár’s Zigeunerliebe , “reduces the complexities of the Gypsy stereotype to pap”; in general, “works such as these, and imitations of them, testify by their popularity to the fi nal ‘taming’ of the style hongrois . . . . Th e once-powerful Gypsy stereotype is sanitized and coupled with the denatured music . . . to produce a wholly prescribed and inoff ensive exoticism” ( Style Hongrois , 216–217).

40. “One cannot speak all evening in dialect.” In Kodály, “Bartók the Folklorist,” Selected Writings , 102.

41. Th is passage appears in part 4 of Vietorisz’s article “A magyar zenér ő l” [On Hungarian Music], 78. An anonymous concert reviewer writing in A zene 6, no. 4 (April 1914), 78, made a similar comment more than ten years later: “We are always glad to hear new pieces, but we have had enough of little suites, scherzos, symphonic movements, that is with small-scale novelties; we would also like to get to know powerful works.”

Tibor Tallián stated to me in a personal communication in December 1999 that “every-body” knew the magyar nóta was not something to be taken seriously as a basis for art music. My fi ndings indicate that this may be a slight exaggeration, but writings like Vietorisz’s also indicate that the musicians of the time were ambivalent at best about this link.


DEFINING HUNGARIAN MUSICAL FEATURES: THE IMPORTANCE OF RHYTHM

Hungarian works were not defi ned only by genre, of course, but also by the style used within any given genre. Th e debate over the defi nition of Hungarian musical style renewed itself in recent decades, particularly in the exchange between Jona-than Bellman and Csilla Peth ő . 42 But whereas now the attempt to defi ne Hungar-ian features is a historical exercise (if a signifi cant one), the stakes of the debate in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were diff erent, arguably much higher. Most writings in 1859 and in the 1860s primarily focus on the problem of Liszt’s insult rather than details of the style, but aft er the 1875 founding of the Academy of Music expanded the availability of Hungarian training for composers, the focus shift ed to the important task of prescribing what Hungarian art music would sound like in the future. 43

An aspect of the period literature on “Hungarian” or “Gypsy style” that may sur-prise present-day readers is the degree to which it focused on rhythm. Rhythm was not, of course, viewed as the only element of that style. Liszt identifi ed three elements

42. Bellman’s 1993 Style Hongrois provided the fi rst attempt at a comprehensive lexicon of the features of the nineteenth-century Hungarian style in English; Peth ő ’s article “ Style Hongrois ” aimed to refi ne this lexicon, since she found Bellman’s labeling and analysis of some pieces to be “arbitrary” and “not always musically convincing” (252–253), and she implicitly faulted him for not basing his stylistic lexicon more directly on the Hungarian verbunkos sources of the fi gures Western composers emulated.

43. As far as I have found, very few contributions to this literature appeared before either Liszt’s Des bohémiens or the 1875 founding of Hungary’s Royal Academy of Music. Gábor Mátray’s 1854 “A magyar zene és a magyar czigányok zenéje” [Hungarian music and the music of the Hungarian Gypsies], 119, makes only a few brief remarks on the style and mode of diff erent genres of Hungarian music, stating that “Hungarian music doubtless comes out of the folksongs of the Hungarians, which, however, are accommodated to the dance in a more ornamented way and played in a manner measured to the dance.” In this same article Mátray singles out three main genres of Hungarian dance music—the pálotás, the toborzó (i.e., verbunkos), and the csárdás—which he then characterizes according to their most commonly found tempo and mode (idem). Liszt’s Des bohémiens treats specifi c musical features scantily, and mostly in the 1883 edition. In a section not found in the 1859 edition, Liszt identifi es briefl y those musical features that “constitute the Bohemian character” ( Th e Gipsy in Music , 300), but he provides little detail. Th e technical description of “Bohemian intervals” in this section states that “Bohemian music with few exceptions adopts, for its minor scale, the augmented fourth, diminished sixth and augmented sev-enth” (300), and that Gypsy musicians’ modulations usually consist of a “habit of passing suddenly to a remote key” (298); on rhythm, beyond the themes of “a multiplicity and a fl exibility nowhere else to be met with in the same degree” (304), Liszt writes that “Th ese rhythms, by their variety, sometimes recall the leaps and infl exions of the of the ascle-piads* [fn: | — — | — — | — — | — | ]” (305). Most of Liszt’s discussion of musical characteristics, however, uses metaphor rather than technical specifi cs. It is possi-ble that his impetus to add this section in the 1881 edition was a response to the discourse on the traits of Hungarian style conducted by Hungarian colleagues like Kornél Ábrányi in his 1877 Characteristics , but documentation on the evolution of the 1881 edition of Des bohémiens is not available.


as peculiar to Gypsy music in the second edition of his book: “Intervals—not used in European harmony,” particularly the “Gypsy scale”; “Rhythm—proper to the race”; and “Ornamentation—luxuriant and eminently Oriental.” 44 Th ough he enthused over all of them, he off ered very little specifi c description. Recent publications on the style have discussed all three of these elements, along with characteristic instrumen-tation and melodic language, together and more or less equally. 45 With the exception of Liszt’s writing, however, Hungarian music criticism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries usually foregrounded rhythm, while other elements re -ceived much less attention. Philologist Emil Ponori Th ewrewk’s A magyar zene rhythmusa (Th e rhythm of Hungarian music) (1873 (1881)) off ered the most straight-forward explanation: rhythm held “fi rst place” among the elements that diff erenti-ated Hungarian music from other national types “because the rhythm is older than the melody: rhythm creates the skeleton of the song; it is therefore the chief guide to racial type.” 46 As for the elements that were put to the side, musicologist Géza Molnár explicitly rejected the national (or racial) importance of harmony: “ Th ere are no spe-cifi c Hungarian harmonies . Neither Hungarian ones, nor for other races. Universal analysis can recognize every chord . . . . Th e harmonies rooted in the Hungarian scale can always be fi tted into some ordinary mode and harmonic phenomenon.” 47

Background in Hungarian Literary Scholarship

Although few other authors are as explicit about those musical elements they see as important (or not) in “racial music,” a consensus is implied by the common emphasis on rhythmic elements. Th is emphasis may be seen as an aft er-eff ect of

44. Th e Gipsy in Music , 300.

45. Bellman’s “lexicon” chapter, drawing on “Western” (non-Hungarian) repertoire in Hun-garian style, focuses in particular on examples of evocations of “Gypsy” instrumental style on the fi ddle, cimbalom, and tárogató ( Style Hongrois , 95–112); he discusses more briefl y certain characteristic rhythmic and ornamental fi gures (ibid., 112–120, 122–123); and the use of the “Gypsy scale” and abrupt shift s in harmony associated with this style (ibid., 119–127). Peth ő , using Hungarian verbunkos publications as her sources, also lists the “Hungarian rhythms” that Bellman cites, but she singles out the bokázó —a fi gure whose melodic shape charac-terizes it as much as its rhythm—as “the most pregnantly Hungarian closure” (Peth ő , “Style Hongrois ,” 202), and she also notes, “Stylistic enrichment was particularly conspicuous in rhythm,” as the stereotyped elements of the early verbunkos were increasingly varied (ibid., 212). Like Bellman, she puts as much emphasis on the “fi gurative richness” and “atmospheric elements fi ltered from live performance,” particularly the fi ery virtuosity of Gypsy performers like Bihari, that inspired the non-Hungarian composers she studies in this article as on the “set of patterns fi xed by the typical instrumental fi gurations” (ibid., 225) that make it possible to identify various works as style hongrois .

46. Th ewrewk, A magyar zene rhythmusa , 13. Th e songs Th ewrewk alluded to were the sam-ple of published Hungarian folksongs he studied in this treatise.

47. Analysis , 264. Emphasis in original. Molnár discussed a number of examples in his book, especially from Erkel, Liszt, and Mosonyi, but also from other Hungarian composers includ-ing Mihalovich.


early nineteenth-century Hungarian language reform, introduced in Chapter 1 . Th e scholarly discourse that bridged the technical aspects of language reform and the writing of Hungarian literature was magyar verstan , the study of Hungarian prosody, a project with two aspects: the “casting off of mythology [or ‘classical shackles’] and elevation of nativeness in its place,” 48 and the “elevation of native poetry into national” 49 —that is, making Hungarian literature both more Hungar-ian and more serious. Th eir ideas represent the Hungarian extension of Herder’s ideal of national poetry as “ Naturpoesie . . . consonant with the spirit of the people ( volksmässig ), with time, and with place . . . . Th e folk poet may . . . be a named individual . . . . Nevertheless, the demand of Volksmässigkeit foregrounds the shared, collective quality of the folk spirit.” 50

Th ree writers were at the center of this discourse: János Erdélyi (1814–1868), who through his collection of folk poetry and folktales (published in three vol-umes from 1846 to 1848) among other writings was one of the most important agents in the new népnemzeti , or folk-national, literary movement of the nine-teenth century; 51 János Fogarasi (1801–1878), best known for his role in creating the fi rst major Hungarian dictionary, who also wrote on word order and—most relevant here—accentuation (prosody) in Hungarian, including in Hungarian verse; and János Arany (1817–1882), who was not only one of the giants of nineteenth-century Hungarian literature (as author of the Toldi epic among other works) but was also an important scholar of Hungarian literature, and in partic-ular a formulator of some of the principles of the népnemzeti movement. His bal-lads drew on devices and themes from traditional Transylvanian and Scottish ballads, and his Toldi was a “people’s epic,” “written in a language employing the vocabulary and imagery of the peasants yet remaining the refi ned product of a poet whose main concern seemed to be stylistic perfection and harmony.” 52 For all of them, Hungarian national poetry was inseparable from music; Erdélyi’s 1855 call for the creation of “the kind of classical Hungarian poetry that can thaw every element of poetic art into one consonant whole” that would be “the child of the future,” specifi ed that this poetry should not only be “developed out of our language” but also “fi tting to our musical taste.” 53

48. János Erdélyi, Kisebb prózái 2, 128; cited by András Kecskés, A magyar verselméleti gon-dolkodás története [Th e history of thought on Hungarian prosody], 207.

49. János Arany, “Valami az asszonáncról” [Something about assonance] (1856), 328; quoted by Kecskés, A magyar verselméleti gondolkodás története , 215.

50. Bauman and Briggs, Voices of Modernity , 177.

51. According to, for example, Czigány, Oxford History of Hungarian Literature , 197, and József Színnyei, Magyar írok: élete és munkái [Hungarian writers: Th eir life and works].

52. Czigány, Oxford History of Hungarian Literature , 200, 204.

53. In “Egy századnegyed a magyar szépirodalomból” [A quarter-century of Hungarian liter-ature], collected in Kisebb prózái 2, 21–22, cited in Keckés, A magyar verselméleti gondolkodás története , 208–209.


One factor that allowed the writings of Fogarasi and Arany to exercise particular infl uence on musicians and music scholars was their work combining Greek met-rical terms and their Hungarian equivalents with musical notation. Th e Hungarian labels for the various metric feet were apparently in circulation by the 1840s, though they were not used consistently. Th ese labels are usually not literal translations of the Greek terms but instead are evocative words that have the same relationship between long and short syllables as the metric foot they represent, for example: bac-chius = toborzó (recruiting): — —, spondee = lép ő (stepping) — — . 54 Table 4.4 shows the terms for metric feet in Hungarian and Greek (or the English equivalent for some better-known terms), compiled from the work of Arany and Fogarasi, with the defi nition of each foot using both metric symbols and musical notation. Fogarasi appears to have been the fi rst Hungarian to write about using metric notation to connote duration, to translate its symbols into musical nota-tion, and to state, based on his analysis of “30 most characteristic Hungarian folk-songs,” that “the dominant verse measures in Hungarian folksong are the lengedez ő [choriambus] (— —) and its opposite: the toborzéki [antispastus] ( — — ).” He then wrote those out in music notation, as . . and . . , respectively. 55 In an article fi rst published in 1856, Arany provided musical ver-sions of the remaining metrical feet that Fogarasi had not highlighted and illus-trated them with examples drawn mostly from folksong, since he felt the power of older Hungarian verse forms came from “the pulsation of a folk-national [népnemzeti] rhythm ” that “is still palpable in our folksongs today.” 56 Th is con-nection between Arany’s search for “stylistic perfection” in Hungarian verse and folksong is at the heart of his népiesség (folksiness), and made his work important for musicians as well as writers in this period of building cultural nationalism.

As he formulated principles for the meter of Hungarian verse, Arany—in keeping with the kinship Erdélyi, Fogarasi, and others had posited between classicism and national art—drew deliberate parallels between classical poetry and Hungarian song, likening the rhythmically fl exible performance style of Hungarian lyrics by a “brown [i. e. Gypsy] musician” to “Pindaric freedom.” 57 Since Pindar’s lyrics were written for musical performance, this was somewhat apt, though in the absence of musical scores from ancient Greece this compar-ison served as much to invoke the authority of the ancients as to refer to concrete elements. Th is purpose was also a likely important motivator behind Arany’s

54. Many thanks to Mónika Mesterházi for pointing out this relationship.

55. In János Fogarasi, Művelt magyar nyelvtan elemi része [Basic proportion in cultivated Hungarian grammar], 368–369. Cited by Kodály in his dissertation, ZKV 2 , 24, and by Kec-skés, A magyar verselméleti gondolkodás története , 210.

56. “A magyar nemzeti vers-idomból” [On the profi le of Hungarian national verse], 274.

57. Arany, “A magyar nemzeti vers-idomról,” 306–307: “[the poet] may proceed with the kind of Pindaric freedom like the brown musician, who on fi rst one, then another sound calms his bow and does not even play the parts of the same measure with an always uniform division of time.”


Table 4.4. Metric feet in metric and musical notation, according to theorists of magyar verstan [Hungarian prosody]

Number of syllables in foot (i.e., measure)

Hungarian name

Greek name (English version used for more familiar feet)

In metric notation

In musical notation

2 lép ő spondee — — 2 men ő or szök ő

[not included in Arany’s system]

iamb — .

2 lejtti or bájos trochee — 3 toborzó bacchius — — . 3 körösdi amphibrachis — according to

Arany: . according to Th ewrewk:

3 ugrató creticus or amphimaker

— — . or .

3 lengedi dactyl — 3 lebeg ő anapest — 3 vánszorgó molossus — — — 4 lengedez ő choriambus — — . .

4 Similar patterns that can stand in for the lengedez ő /choriambus:

— —

. .

4 Opposing patterns that can stand in for the lengedez ő / choriambus:

antispastus/ toborzéki[one of “dominant feet” in Fogarasi, unlabeled by Arany] double iamb

double trochee

— —

— — — — — —

. .

. . . . . .

sources: Compiled from János Fogarasi, A magyar nyelv szelleme , vol. 1: Művelt magyar nyelvtan [Th e spirit of Hungarian language, vol. 1: Cultivated Hungarian grammar] (Pest: Heckenast, 1843), 366–369, and János Arany, Arany János összes munkai [Com-plete works of János Arany], vol. 5: Prose works, 2nd ed. (Budapest: Ráth Mór, 1884), 307–312. Alternate musical notation of körösdi in Emil Ponori Th ewrewk, A magyar zene rhythmusa [Th e rhythm of Hungarian music] (Budapest: Franklin, 1881), 39.


application of Greek metrics to Hungarian texts—a strategy Arany had in common with several music scholars of the nineteenth century, both Hungar-ians and non-Hungarians.

Like Fogarasi before him and many Hungarian musicians of his time, Arany deemed the choriambus, or in Hungarian lengedez ő , to be the most important metric form for Hungarian verse, as it “gives the original character of Hungarian song . . . . Th e folk themselves instinctively fi nd the lengedez ő , of which I might quote plenty of examples, because this way the text best fi ts the melody.” 58 Arany considered the fi t between Hungarian verse and the choriambus ideal, so that “Th e more such measures occupy a place in our four-beat measures, the better.” On the other hand, “a verse that would consist purely of lengedez ő would not, aft er all, be safe from monotony. Th us this foot may be replaced in part with measures of similar accentuation , in part with measures of opposing accentuation or stress.” 59

Th e similar and opposing patterns that Arany considered useful substitutes for the choriambus, shown in the last two sections of Table 4.4 , include two other patterns that were frequently singled out by music writers of the period as charac-teristically Hungarian: the iamb, though doubled and labeled “dijambus” (di-iamb or double iamb), and the antispastus, itself a rotation of the choriambus. Arany’s metric labels did not always match Fogarasi’s: for instance, he omitted the iamb ( men ő or szök ő in Hungarian), and though he included the antispastus, he chose not to label it in Greek or Hungarian, lumping it in with several possible substitu-tions for the choriambus. Fogarasi, by contrast, not only labeled the antispastus but deemed it one of the two most important Hungarian rhythmic patterns, along with the choriambus.

Collectively, Fogarasi’s and Arany’s use of musical notation to defi ne these text rhythms, along with the use of folksong texts to illustrate them, demonstrates vividly how intertwined the development of Hungarian poetry and literary schol-arship was with Hungarian song in this period. Still, as writers and literary scholars, Fogarasi and Arany did not address some of the issues that were impor-tant to musicians, particularly composers.

Hungarian Rhythms in Nineteenth-Century Composition: Mosonyi, Erkel, Liszt, Mihalovich

In the early days of the Hungarian style, any dotted rhythm might be considered Hungarian; with the development of the discourse on Hungarian prosody, fewer rhythmic patterns became more concentrated symbols of Hungarianness. Th e most important of these was the choriambus (or lengedez ő ), a pattern that appeared frequently in popular song and folksong and whose signifi cance literary and mu-sical scholars agreed on. Th ere was also a number of fi gures that began with an accented short-unaccented long pair of notes, notated (.) or (.); some were

58. Arany, “A magyar nemzeti vers-idomból,” 310–311.

59. Arany, “A magyar nemzeti vers-idomból,” 311.


followed by another note that would turn them into an amphibrachis ( körösdi ) or bacchius ( toborzó ), or by a pair of notes that might turn them into an antispastus ( toborzéki ), but the short- long pair, which captured the common characteristic of the Hungarian language whereby the fi rst syllable of each word is accented, called enough attention that one author, Géza Molnár, called it the “Hungarian motive-fragment.” 60 Molnár and others also called it the iamb, or in Hungarian the men ő (Fogarasi) or szök ő (Th ewrewk). Th ese two basic rhythms (see Example 4.1(a)) turn up oft en in popular pieces, such as the magyar nóta excerpt shown in Example 4.1(b), and also became important markers of “Hungarian-style” art music, for instance in the motto to Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody no. 14 (Example 4.1(c)). (Th e signifi cance of the antispastus, to which I return later, was ambiguous.)

Although “Hungarian rhythms” were oft en embedded in a context rich in other Hungarian stylistic referents, such as the use of the so-called Gypsy scale, ex-tremely fl exible tempi (particularly in slow sections), extravagant ornamentation, instruments like the cimbalom and tarogató (a clarinet-like national instrument) or evocations of them, these rhythmic fi gures were recognizable enough that they alone (or almost alone) could serve as markers of Hungarianness. “Hungarian rhythm” acts as a primary marker of Hungarian style in several movements of Mihály Mosonyi’s 1859 Magyar gyermekvilág (Hungarian children’s world), a col-lection apparently inspired in part by Robert Schumann’s piano works for chil-dren. James Parakilas views this collection as a less than successful venture in introducing beginning piano students to Hungarian style, since he argues that the pieces in this collection that dwell on its ornamental extravagance, particularly “Kis cigány” (Little Gypsy) and “Kis furulyás” (Little piper), had “not managed to simplify the gestures of the style hongrois to match the titles,” while the “Gyermek-báli jelenet” (Children’s ball scene) that opens the collection, though it is “suitably childlike in character,” Parakilas deems “only palely hongrois in style” since it has only a few Hungarian-like fl ourishes with augmented seconds and triplet turns. 61 But one of the movements that Parakilas does not discuss, “Búdal elhalt kis játszó-társ felett” (Lament for a dead playmate), illustrates Hungarian character not with virtuosic ornaments like those featured in “Little Gypsy” but with Hungarian rhythms—again, especially the choriambus and the iamb (see Example 4.2)—as well as the augmented second of the “Gypsy scale.” By avoiding most (though not all) ornamental fl ourishes, Mosonyi both allows his dirge-like subject to emerge and minimizes the technical diffi culties that might scare off the beginning players who are the purported audience for this work. Th e solemn use of these Hungarian rhythms, meanwhile, ensures that this hongrois is far from pale.

Composers of vocal works, as noted, faced a challenge in deciding how to mark their works as Hungarian—fi rst in fi guring out how to set Hungarian text, and then in asserting the drama of Hungarian subjects in the shadow of operettas that presented a version of Hungarian style. We can observe the progression of the use of “Hungarian” rhythms in a comparison of the two best-known works of Ferenc

60. Analysis , 14–15.

61. In James Parakilas, “Folk song as Musical Wet Nurse,” 478–479.

Example 4.1(a) “Typically Hungarian rhythms”

Example 4.1(b) “Iambic” and “choriambic” rhythms in József Dóczy’s (1863–1913) song “Virágzik már a gyöngyvirág,” n. d., mm. 7–12

Example 4.1(c) “Iambic” and “choriambic” rhythms in Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody no. 14, mm. 25–28


Erkel, the founder of Hungarian dramatic opera, who wrote most of his operas well before the Viennese operetta seized upon Hungarian and Gypsy themes. Hunyadi László (1844) used a variety of “Hungarian” stylistic features, beginning with the triplet turns and prominent dotted and syncopated rhythms in the overture, but the “Hungarian rhythms” most highlighted by the literature on magyar verstan are not particularly stressed; the choriambus, the most important of these rhythms, is truly central in only one number, Erzsébet Szilágyi’s Act II aria “Nagy ég, remegek” (Great heaven, I tremble), both the 1844 version and the revised, more virtuosic version known as the “La Grange aria,” which Erkel created for a series of 1850 performances featuring French diva Anne de la Grange in the role of Szilágyi. 62

Example 4.2 “Hungarian rhythms” in Mihály Mosonyi’s “Búdal elhalt kis játszótárs felett” [Lament for a dead playmate], Magyar gyermekvilág [Hungarian children’s world] (1859), mm. 1–16

62. Tibor Tallián and Katalin Szacsvai-Kim’s Introduction to Erkel’s Hunyadi László , xliii. Scores of the two versions of no. 12b, “Nagy ég,” appear in Hunyadi László , vol. 2, 421–441, esp. 422–427, for the 1840 version, and in ibid., vol. 3, 793–818, esp. 795–799, for the 1850 “La Grange aria.”


Erkel’s limited use of “Hungarian” features in Hunyadi László contrasts with his fuller use of those features in his landmark opera Bánk bán (1861), probably the most beloved opera in the Hungarian repertoire. Both nineteenth-century critics and the editor of the 2009 critical edition, Miklós Dolinszky, judged that Bánk bán used the Hungarian style for a greater portion of its music and integrated that style more fully into the work as a whole; in Bánk bán , “for the fi rst time Erkel succeeded in creating a homogenous style of vocal music out of what was origi-nally an instrumental idiom. In his work, the verbunkos -style, formerly used only as Gebrauchmusik , becomes a medium for the expression of universal feelings and experiences.” 63

David Schneider’s recent book uses this opera both to demonstrate the Hun-garian style and to illustrate the debts Bartók’s Kossuth owed to that style. In the Erkel examples Schneider uses, the “Hungarian rhythms” I have singled out are present but do not dominate; more signifi cant markers of Hungarianness in these passages are the augmented seconds of the “Gypsy scale,” the elaborate or-namentation, and the use of cimbalom in the orchestra. 64 In two examples from dramatically critical points in the second act, however, Erkel’s music is saturated specifi cally with choriambus and iambic rhythms, not with generic dotted rhythms, while the other musical elements are arguably indistinguishable from those that might be used by Verdi. Th e fi rst of these is Bánk’s Act II aria “Hazám, hazám” (My homeland, my homeland) (Example 4.3(a)), the title character’s med-itation on the “shroud” that covers his homeland ( Hazám bórítja szemfödél ), and how helping the homeland comes before all else ( Rajtad el ő bb segítenem ). Th e grandeur of this aria has something of the character of a national anthem, and it is marked by repeated use of the Hungarian iamb. Th e second example from this opera is the fi nal section of Melinda’s duet with Bánk at the heart of Act II (Example 4.3 (b)), their fateful meeting shortly aft er he has learned that the brother-in-law of the king has forced himself on her—as Schneider puts it, the “literal rape” that mirrors the “metaphoric rape of the country” by Hungary’s thirteenth-century foreign rulers, dramatic stand-ins for the Habsburg dynasty. 65 In this sparsely accompanied passage, the appearance of the choriambus alone identifi es these characters as Hungarian musically as well as dramatically.

63. Miklós Dolinszky’s Introduction to Erkel’s Bánk bán , xxxviii, citing several 1861 reviews, including one by composer Mihály Mosonyi.

64. See Schneider’s discussion of Melinda’s theme (end of Act I and middle of Act II) in Bartók, Hungary, and the Renewal of Tradition , 71–76, and (especially) of the Prelude to Act III (scene by the banks of the Tisza) in ibid., 91–94.

65. Schneider, Bartók, Hungary, and the Renewal of Tradition , 71. At the climactic moment of the duet that Schneider discusses in his analysis, the choriambus is one of several “Hun-garian” features: the passage also features the augmented second, a few triplet turns in the orchestra, and a lush tremolo accompaniment that might invoke the cimbalom. My Example 4.3(b), which follows Schneider’s example from the same duet almost immediately, features no augmented seconds and strips the orchestral accompaniment down to the same choriam-bus rhythms as the vocal parts.


Example 4.3(a) “Hungarian iambs” in Bánk’s aria “Hazám, hazám” from Ferenc Erkel’s Bánk bán

We fi nd even subtler and more sparing use of Hungarian stylistic elements in two more large-scale vocal works from the second half of the nineteenth century, Liszt’s Die Legende von der heiligen Elisabeth (1857—1862) and Ödön Mihalovich’s Toldi szerelme (Toldi’s love) (1888–1894). In each case the composer uses “Hun-garian rhythms,” but few other stereotypically “Hungarian” features. Liszt’s ora-torio about the Hungarian-born St. Elisabeth makes only a fl eeting reference to the stereotypical Hungarian style, during the “Arrival at Wartburg” scene where Elisabeth is introduced to the court at the Wartburg as the bride of the future

Example 4.3(b) Choriambus rhythms in Melinda and Bánk’s duet, Act II, Ferenc Erkel’s Bánk bán


Count Ludwig; near the beginning of this scene, the solo by the Hungarian mag-nate who has escorted her there is fi lled, as were the Mosonyi and Erkel examples discussed earlier, with so-called Hungarian rhythms, especially choriambs and iambs (see Example 4.4). Along with these rhythms, one fi gure combines an iam-bic rhythm with the so-called kuruc fourth, 66 and an augmented second appears

Example 4.4 “Hungarian rhythms” in Liszt’s Die Legende von der heiligen Elisabeth , Scene 1: “Th e Arrival at Wartburg,” entry of the Hungarian magnate

66. Bellman, Style Hongrois , 122–123, defi nes this fi gure.


fairly late in the passage, aft er the soloist’s fi rst quatrain (just aft er the end of Example 4.4). Aft er this opening scene, the work bears little trace of “Hungarian style” beyond the sublimation of the augmented second/minor third into some of the complex chromatic harmonies of the work. 67

Rather than using the “Hungarian style” as it was conventionally understood, Liszt used historic Hungarian materials to mark Elisabeth’s Hungarian heritage musically: one Latin plainchant for the saint’s feast day, one Hungarian folksong, and one seventeenth-century Hungarian-language sacred song, all of which mu-sicologist Gábor Mátray “was obliging enough to write out” and which were sent to Liszt “thanks to [the] friendly solicitude and good offi ces” of Mihály Mosonyi. 68 Th e Hungarian folksong “Nem ettem én ma egyebet” (Today I ate nothing else) (Example 4.5(a)) is featured in grand style during the scene where Elisabeth is introduced to the court at the Wartburg as the bride of Ludwig, the future Count; the tune appears fi rst in the orchestral accompaniment to the solo by the Hungar-ian magnate who accompanies her there and then is echoed by a unison chorus of Th uringian courtiers welcoming “this dear pledge of Hungary” (dies teure Pfand des Ungarlands) (Example 4.5(b)), and it recurs at other places in the score when her Hungarianness is remarked upon, for example in Elisabeth’s confrontation with her mother-in-law, Countess Sophie, aft er Sophie’s son, Elisabeth’s husband, has died on crusade (Scene 4, Example 4.5(c)).

Th is straightforwardly diatonic and foursquare tune bears little resemblance to “Hungarian style” as it was refl ected in Erkel’s Bánk bán , Mosonyi’s Gyermekvilág , or Liszt’s Rhapsodies—a fact recognized by Hungarian critics like Géza Molnár, who stated that it “could not be called racially fl avored.” 69 Th e antiphon “Quasi stella matutina” for the feast of St. Elisabeth (see Example 4.6(a)) that Liszt uses as an-other one of his Elisabeth ’s chief leitmotifs, beginning right at the opening of the orchestral introduction (Example 4.6(b)), likewise “stands far from Hungarian sen-sibility.” 70 Meanwhile, Liszt also featured an “ancient German song from the time of the crusades” in Elisabeth . 71 Th ough Elisabeth ’s title character is a Hungarian-born saint, the story, as Michael Saffl e points out, is set entirely in Germany and the orig-inal libretto is in German, 72 though Liszt sanctioned the Hungarian translation by

67. See Klára Hamburger’s “Program and Hungarian Idiom in the Sacred Music of Liszt” for this argument.

68. Liszt is quoted in Bartók, “Two Unpublished Letters,” 524.



71. Ábrányi mentions Liszt’s use in Elisabeth of this German song, “Schönster Herr Jesu”; the antiphon for the feast of Elisabeth, “Quasi stella matutina”; and two Hungarian melodies, the Hungarian sacred song “Szent Erzsébet asszony” [Holy Lady Elisabeth] and the Hungarian folksong “Nem ettem én ma egyebet” [I didn’t eat anything else today] in his Characteristics , 80–82.

72. In “Liszt and the Birth of the New Europe,” 24.

Example 4.5(a) Hungarian folksong “Nem ettem én ma egyebet” [Today I ate nothing else], source of “Hungarian leitmotif ” in Liszt’s Die Legende von der heiligen Elisabeth [source: Abrányi, Characteristics , 82]

Example 4.5(b) “Nem ettem én ma egyebet” in Scene 1, “Arrival at Wartburg,” Liszt’s Elisabeth , accompanying fi rst the Hungarian Magnate and then the chorus

Example 4.5(b) (continued)


Example 4.5(c) “Nem ettem én ma egyebet” in Scene 4, “Countess Sophia,” Liszt’s Elisabeth

Kornél Ábrányi. Th ough Bartók, in his article about Liszt’s correspondence with Mosonyi, took Liszt’s use of historical Hungarian materials as proof that “Liszt con-sidered the ‘Legende der heiligen Elisabeth’ a contribution to ‘modern Hungarian music’ as much as his previous symphonic poem ‘Hungaria,’” 73 the mixture of types of musical citations could easily be taken as proof of Liszt’s mixed, cosmopolitan approach; the Hungarian sources Liszt used in this work were clearly not “Hungar-ian style” as conventionally understood—they were “from Hungary, but not Hun-garian.” 74 For these aspects of Elisabeth to be heard as Hungarian required a broadening of the defi nition of Hungarian music.

Th e opera Toldi szerelme by Ödön Mihalovich (1842–1929), Liszt’s successor as head of the Academy of Music and for many years the president of Budapest’s Wagner Society, falls midway between Erkel’s Bánk bán and Liszt’s Elisabeth in terms of the degree to which it uses Hungarian style, and the element it uses from that style is, once again, chiefl y rhythm. Far more specifi c to Hungary (and less successful) than Liszt’s work, Toldi may also illustrate some of the challenges such an eff ort faced. Toldi is something of an exception within Mihalovich’s body of work: it was his fi rst opera with a Hungarian libretto instead of German; 75 it drew

73. Bartók, “Two Unpublished Letters,” 521.

74. Th ewrewk outlined this distinction in A magyar zene tudományos tárgyalása [A scholarly discussion of Hungarian music], 21: “If I see that the rhythmic characteristics [of a musical artifact] are in opposition to our folksongs and dance tunes, I recognize that it originated in Hungary or from a Hungarian person; but I cannot bear to count it as part of the [main] body of Hungarian music. It is from Hungary, but not Hungarian music.”

75. Major, “Mihalovich Ödön,” 21. Th ough the primary language was Hungarian, the com-poser included a German singing translation with several alternate rhythms in the published score. He surely expected that if it were performed abroad, it would be in German; he also indicated in his essay “Nemzeti opera- és zeneviszonyainkról” [On the aff airs of our national opera and music], 96, that roles were frequently sung in foreign languages on the Hungarian opera stage, and moreover, that mixed-language performances were “established as an unfor-tunate, accepted, shameful custom.”

Example 4.5(c) (continued)


its plot from a distinguished work of Hungarian literature, the second installment of János Arany’s (1817–1882) epic Toldi trilogy; 76 and it is remembered as “the fi rst opera in which [Mihalovich] used Hungarian melodic and rhythmic patterns.” 77 Notably, Mihalovich became director of Budapest’s Academy of Music in 1887, a year before beginning work on Toldi , and he wrote an important essay on what was needed to “fi ght for the future of our national opera” during his Toldi years. 78 Still, the characterization of Mihalovich’s Toldi as Hungarian should be under-stood within the context of his German-leaning oeuvre: the scenes selected for

Example 4.6(a) “Quasi stella matutina,” antiphon for the feast of St. Elizabeth and source of Elisabeth’s leitmotif in Liszt’s Elisabeth [source: Abrányi, Characteristics , 81]

Example 4.6(b) Appearance of Elisabeth’s leitmotif at beginning of orchestral introduction to Liszt’s Elisabeth

76. Although Arany fi nished Toldi szerelme in 1879, the last of the three installments, within the chronology of the story it came second, aft er Toldi (written 1846), which introduced the hero, and Toldi estéje (written 1847–1848), in which the hero is preparing for his death.

77. According to Legány, “Mihalovich, Ödön,” in New Grove Dictionary of Opera 3, 385.

78. In “Nemzeti opera- és zeneviszonyainkról,” 99. Katalin Szerz ő ’s “Mihalovich Ödön a Zeneakadémia élén 1887–1919” [Ödön Mihalovich at the head of the Academy of Music, 1887–1919] off ers many details about Mihalovich’s years in that position.


the opera from Arany’s work echo Wagner, 79 and Mihalovich’s use of Hungarian motifs in the opera is fairly limited.

Among those motifs, rhythmic patterns, particularly the iamb and choriambus, are prominent, while melodic ones are barely detectable. 80 Fitting for an opera featuring a forbidden love, the prelude to Toldi szerelme opens by evoking that of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde (Example 4.7(a)), but then shift s from 6/8 meter into 4/4 and begins featuring choriambus and iambic rhythms, though with a richly contrapuntal Wagnerian accompaniment (Example 4.7(b-c)). At the end of the opera, aft er the king grants Toldi forgiveness for his transgressions, Toldi swears his allegiance to his king and homeland, and then is joined by the chorus in a grand nationalist fi nale that recalls the end of Die Meistersinger , but instead of the people honoring holy German art, they ask God to bless the Hungarians (Example 4.7(d)). Th ough the text has obvious Hungarian references—in fact, the opening of this chorus is strikingly similar to the text of the Himnusz (Hymn), Hungary’s national anthem 81 —in terms of musical referents, there is little more in this section beyond the Hungarian iambs in the accompaniment to indicate that this is a Hungarian work rather than a German one. In fact, the rhythm of this chorus fi ts the German text better than the Hungarian text: for example, in the second measure of the second system of this example, the strong beats of the measure coincide with a (the) and the second syllable of vi- lág , which should be

79. Th e medieval setting of Arany’s nineteenth-century work may have already suggested a relationship to Wagner’s libretti, but still, the parallelisms are striking. Toldi szerelme ’s fi rst act could be viewed as a combination of Act I of Tristan and Act I of Götterdämmerung : it features a tournament in which the prize is the hand of Piroska Rozgonyi, the daughter of an older vassal of King Lajos I; Toldi fi ghts in and wins the tournament on behalf of and disguised as his friend L ő rinc Tar, but falls in love in Piroska in the process. Th e shape of Act II of Toldi resembles that of Tristan : aft er the departure of Tar, now her husband, Piroska con-fi des in her friend Erzse of her love for Toldi, then on his arrival joins him in a passionate love duet. Tar returns, duels Toldi and is killed by him, but the king believes Toldi to be a murderer and banishes him, as Tristan is exiled aft er his confrontation with Melot and Mark. Piroska, stricken with remorse, enters a convent. (Unlike the character in Arany’s work, Mihalovich’s Piroska does not curse Toldi but instead tries to defend him from the king’s sentence.) Act III, as mentioned in the main text, culminates in a national hymn reminiscent of Meistersinger .

80. Certain triplet fi gures that appear woven into the accompaniment in the Prelude might be considered to evoke the ornamental triplets of Gypsy fi ddling, but in this dense contrapuntal texture they sound much more Germanic than Hungarian-Gypsy. Bellman writes that such triplets “are ubiquitous in works designated as hongrois or zingarese but are also plentiful in other styles,” and thus they “cannot in and of themselves be understood as certain indications of the style’s presence” ( Style Hongrois , 116–117).

81. Ferenc Kölcsey’s Himnusz [Hymn] (1823), Ferenc Erkel’s setting of which acts as Hunga-ry’s national anthem, begins “Isten, áldd meg a magyart, / Jó kedvvel, b ő séggel, / Nyújts feléje véd ő kart, / Ha küzd ellenséggel” [God bless the Hungarian, with good cheer and plenty, Extend to him your protecting arm / If he meets with the enemy]. Th e fi rst and second lines of the text of Mihalovich’s closing chorus are not quite identical to, but still distinctly similar to Kölcsey’s fi rst and third lines: “Nagy Isten! Védd meg a magyart! / Adj néki sujtó h ő si kart” [Great God! Protect the Hungarian! / Give him a heroic striking arm].


long but unaccented, whereas in the German version, the musical stresses fall more appropriately on schir men uns ’re .

Avoiding the ornamentation and the “Gypsy scale” elements of Hungarian style allowed Mihalovich to get away from the less serious associations those elements carried, contrasting with the operettas of the time as well as with the dramatic operas of the previous generation, primarily those of Erkel. Th ere were only three composers of Hungarian dramatic operas whose works were performed more oft en than Toldi in this period: Ferenc Erkel, the founder of Hungarian dramatic opera; violinist-composer Jen ő Hubay, whose A cremonai hegedűs (Th e violinist of Cremona) featured a non-Hungarian subject in French style; and Count Géza Zichy, whose success was bound up in his status not only as an aristocrat but also as the Intendant of the Opera from 1891 to 1894. 82

Example 4.7(a) Beginning of Prelude to Ödön Mihalovich’s Toldi szerelme [Toldi’s love] (1888–1894)

82. Th e prelude and Königshymnus (royal hymn, i.e., the opera’s fi nal chorus) of Toldi were premiered under Gustav Mahler’s baton on October 29, 1890, at a concert celebrating one hundred years of Hungarian theater (Zoltan Roman, Mahler and Hungary , 108); the com-plete opera received twenty performances, in 1893, 1904, and 1911 (see Roman, Mahler and Hungary , 160, 175, and A hetvenötéves Magyar Állami Operaház [Th e seventy-fi ve-year-old Hungarian State Opera House], 166). Th e initial production had to surmount the objections of Zichy, a nationalist who was unsympathetic to Mihalovich. According to a survey of works before the outbreak of World War I in A hetvenötéves Magyar Állami Operaház , 158–172, of Hungarian dramatic operas, Erkel’s works appeared at the Opera by far the most oft en; Hu-bay’s A cremonai hegedűs [Th e violinist of Cremona] (1892) had some signifi cant domestic and international success, but given the Italian subject, the work’s French-style score, and Hubay’s extensive connections in France and Belgium, it is unclear whether it was viewed as

Example 4.7(b-c) From Prelude to Mihalovich’s Toldi : “Hungarian rhythms” with Wagnerian accompaniment Ex. 4.7 (b) mm. 25–32 Ex. 4.7 (c) mm. 53–60


But Toldi ’s combination of “Hungarian rhythms” with Wagnerian style is still problematic. Th e text setting is frequently insensitive to the accentuation of the Hungarian text, both in passages that rely on Hungarian rhythms and elsewhere, and the character of the music is somewhat turgid. Th is work did not enter the permanent repertoire at home, nor did it gain a foothold abroad—Mihalovich

Example 4.7(b-c) (continued)

truly Hungarian. Zichy’s Nemo (1905), one of two dramatic works on a Hungarian subject from this period to receive more performances (27 between 1905 and 1918 compared to Toldi ’s 20), represents the other extreme, being extra-Hungarian in subject and style; its plot centers on an imaginary poet and musician from the kuruc rebellion in the early eighteenth century who supposedly composed the Rákóczi March, and its score “draws on all elements of Hungarian music, including popular tunes of the time and the rhythmic and melodic pat-terns of folk music and the Rákóczi March” (Legány, “Zichy, Count Géza,” 1234). Th e score to Nemo is rather simplistic in its musical language, and it may not have gained a place on the Hungarian opera stage without its composer’s considerable political and social infl uence. It is also quite possible that Mihalovich’s opera would have received more stagings without Zichy’s

Example 4.7(d) From fi nal chorus to Mihalovich’s Toldi : Hungarian iambs in accompaniment with contrapuntal, German-style choral parts


tried to persuade his friend Gustav Mahler to perform Toldi aft er Mahler left Budapest, but to no avail. 83 Toldi ’s problems could be seen as emblematic of the situation for Hungarian composers in the generation between Erkel and Liszt in the mid-nineteenth century and Bartók and Kodály in the early twentieth, whether orchestral or dramatic, struggling to combine national character and a sense of heft that could compete with works from the so-called panromanoger-manic mainstream.

THEORETICAL WRITINGS ON HUNGARIAN RHYTHM

As composers relied on Hungarian style, particularly Hungarian rhythms, to mark their works as Hungarian, defi ning these rhythms and solving problems they presented naturally proved a preoccupation in the Hungarian music criti-cism of this period, drawing some elements from the study of Hungarian literary verse but applying them to specifi cally musical problems. Th is developing tech-nical discourse on Hungarian rhythm forms another aspect of the Hungarian reception of Liszt’s Des bohémiens . Liszt’s book included an analytical section to “explain” Hungarian style, but this discussion took a much lower priority than his discussions of Gypsiness and virtuosity.

Liszt’s scanty and vague technical characterization of “Gypsy style,” in addition to his Romanticized depiction of Gypsy life, were particular targets of Samuel Brassai’s Magyar- vagy czigány-zene? (Hungarian or Gypsy music?) (1860). Bras-sai’s criticism of Liszt’s music-analytic skills focused particularly on the problem of rhythm. Brassai treated lightly the signifi cance of “the matter of intervals” 84 as a distinguishing Hungarian characteristic, dismissing “the minor sixth scale degree paired with the raised seventh scale degree” as “the little piquant fl avoring”

intervention, as Zichy was on very poor terms with Gustav Mahler when the latter was direc-tor of the Hungarian Royal Opera and aft erward, and Mihalovich was one of Mahler’s sup-porters (Roman, Mahler and Hungary , 225). In fact, toward the end of Mahler’s directorship, Toldi was scheduled for production, but Zichy, as intendant, had it shelved without notifying Mahler. Th is was one of the events precipitating Mahler’s departure from Budapest (Roman, Mahler and Hungary , 125). In 1899, aft er Mahler had become the director of the Opera in Vi-enna, Zichy “tried to use his infl uence with the court and the Emperor” to have his opera Mei-ster Roland performed at the Hofoper, but Mahler refused (La Grange, Gustav Mahler , 357).

83. Shortly aft er his departure from Hungary—precipitated by Zichy’s taking over manage-ment of the Opera there—Mahler wrote Mihalovich asking “if it would not be better if you were to bring dear Toldi here [Hamburg], as it appears that you will not get anywhere with it in Pest” (letter (probably July 1891) quoted in Roman, Mahler and Hungary , 153). Mahler continued to follow Mihalovich’s eff orts with Toldi and wrote him a warm congratulatory letter aft er its March 1893 Budapest premier, but he did not perform it or Mihalovich’s Eliane in Hamburg, though he studied both scores and corresponded with Mihalovich repeatedly about their prospects (see letters from 1894 and 1896 cited in Roman, Mahler and Hungary , 160, 161, and 164).



on which “today’s Gypsy oft en lives,” both in order to “show himself off —and . . . in order to satisfy the demands of good taste.” 85 As was illustrated in Chapter 2 of this book, Brassai’s discussion of ornamentation could be summed up as a rejection of Liszt’s rhetorical excesses and of his arguments for the contribution of the virtuoso and (more specifi cally) the Gypsy performers of Hungary’s “Gypsy music.” By contrast, he judged rhythm to be the “truly important and fundamental point” and devoted signifi cantly more attention to it. 86 Prompted to refute Liszt’s assertions that Gypsy rhythm was essentially limitless in its variety, that “the rule [of Gypsy rhythm] is that there are no rules,” 87 Brassai then moved toward a more specifi c defi nition:

What is Hungarian (according to [Liszt], Gypsy) rhythm? [Liszt writes] “many kinds, many kinds, many kinds!” Yes, but there must be something characteristic in it, taken from which we might distinguish it from Romanian, German, Muscovite, etc. rhythm? “I already said, many kinds, many kinds, many kinds!” Th is is something we can never get out of, like a muddy cart stuck in a deep rut. We are compelled to state that, for all the world, there are not that many kinds. Dividing Hungarian music fi rst of all into lassú [slow] and friss [fast], the lassú type of rhythm is the choriambus and substitutes for it, in a very limited circle . For the friss we may not speak of a type, rather we may speak only of its basic rhythm, and this is the spondee (– –), going with one of the following in time: dactyl (— ), anapest ( —), amphi-brachis ( — ), and proceleusmaticus ( ) . . . . Th is is perfectly rep-resentative [of Hungarian rhythm], but it is clear from this that the number of rhythmic combinations is neither uncountable nor endless. 88

Brassai’s eff ort at validating Hungarian style through scholarly rigor and associa-tion with classical poetics linked him to literary scholarship by fi gures like Arany, and it also contrasted deliberately with the enthusiastic lack of specifi city of Liszt’s Des bohémiens .

Emil Ponori Th ewrewk’s A magyar zene rhythmusa (Th e rhythm of Hungarian music) (1870 (1881)) took a more coolly detached approach in tone than either the

85. Brassai, Magyar- vagy czigány-zene? 44: “We however allow that showing himself off [lit. “preen himself ”] with this little piquant fl avoring (which does not merit [the] C[omposer]’s glittering phrases)–with the permission of L. h. [Mr. L[iszt]], to satisfy the demands of good taste–is what today’s Gypsy oft en lives on.”


87. Brassai, Magyar- vagy czigány-zene? 45, quoting Liszt: “It is not possible to mention enough of those rare beauties that originate from the abundance of that rhythm. We do not know other music out of which European art might learn so much concerning the productiv-ity of rhythmic inventiveness and its proper use.”

88. Brassai, Magyar- vagy czigány-zene? 46; emphasis added. Although Brassai, like Arany, did not list the iamb among rhythms typical of Hungarian music, we can view the amphibra-chis as a variant of the iamb.


indignant Brassai or the eff usive Liszt, and he provided more empirical evidence for the classifi cation of certain Hungarian rhythms by earlier literary scholars like Fogarasi and Arany. At the same time, Th ewrewk excused Liszt’s excesses as the earnest outpourings of a creative artist “who, devoted to his art, turns to us with a full heart and aspires to introduce us to the delights of the ideal world,” although like Brassai he felt that Liszt’s “words of enthusiasm . . . sooner or later prove that there is an error in the thing.” 89 In his description of Hungarian rhythm, Th ewrewk began where Brassai left off , from a handful of rhythmic patterns found regularly in Hungarian songs and dances and the Greek metric terms used to describe them. To determine which patterns should be counted as “racially characteristic,” he undertook a straightforward tabulation of rhythmic patterns from three major song collections of the period; in the interest of contrast with the national music of a related group, he also tabulated rhythmic patterns from a Finnish collection (see Table 4.5 ). 90 Four of the patterns Arany and Brassai identifi ed, namely, the spondee (— — or ), the dactyl (— or ), the anapest ( — or ), and what Th ewrewk simply termed the four-eighth-note measure ( or ), also appeared frequently in Th ewrewk’s sample, not only in the Hungar-ian songs he analyzed but also in the Finnish collection.

Musicologist Géza Molnár, meanwhile, viewed the cells Th ewrewk used as evidence for the Finnish connection as basically trivial:

We do not believe . . . that the most frequently appearing patterns are all, from the point of view of racial musics, the most characteristic patterns. Th ose [frequently appearing patterns] are mostly the kind of formations (e. g. or . ) that, as neutral rhythms, are the most universal in the music of every nation. Conversely the kind of characteristic that according to these statistics occurs relatively less frequently, for example ., are just the ones that are peculiar to Hungarian music, because in other music they do not crop up even this much . 91

Th ewrewk’s and Molnár’s diff erent views on these rhythms refl ect a diff erence in disciplinary and scholarly outlook. Th e relationship between the Finnish and

89. Th ewrewk, A magyar zene rhythmusa , 15. Th is slim book is a revised edition of the lecture Th ewrewk gave on accepting his election to the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 1871 (cited in Zsigmond Ritoók, Ponori Th ewrewk Emil , 235). In addition to his study of Hungar-ian rhythm, Th ewrewk also published essays in English and French in order to refute Liszt’s attempt “to prove the Hungarian music to be a mere Gypsy invention” (in “Th e Origin of the Gypsy Music,” 313). His 1890 study of Hungarian musical sources, A magyar zene tudomán-yos tárgyalása [Th e scholarly consideration of Hungarian music], concluded with a medi-tation on the limits of “the main body of Hungarian music” or “autochthonous Hungarian music” (ibid., 21).

90. Description of method found on Thewrewk, A magyar zene rhythmusa , 16; table in ibid., 31.

91. In Analysis , 93. Emphasis in original.


Table 4.5. Emil Ponori Thewrewk’s tabulation of rhythmic patterns found in three major nineteenth-century Hungarian and one

Finnish song collections

Orpheus Bartalus Simonff y Finnish songs 121 216 61 83

. – 111 7 1

32 60 12 73

68 141 49 23

3 61 53 –

. – 7 7 –

. 4 4 – –

. 32 52 21

46 168 28 248

. – 7 7 –

. 25 2 17 –

. 12 78 22 13

. . 27 20 2 –

. . 52 283 132 –

. . 7 6 1 –

. 5 26 27 –

. . 22 47 24 –

– 3 43 –

– 4 – –

– 2 – –

– 35 – –

source: From A magyar zene rhythmusa (Budapest: Franklin, 1881), 31. Th ewrewk’s sources for the fi rst two columns of this table, “Orpheus” and “Bartalus,” are two collec-tions edited by István Bartalus (1821–1899), respectively Magyar Orpheus: Vegyes tar-talmú zenegyűjtemény (Pest: Rózsavölgyi, 1869), referenced on Th ewrewk’s p. 22, and 101 magyar népdal (Pest, 1861), cited on p. 19. Th ewrewk gives no title for the “Simonff y” collection he studies, but it could be either Kálmán Simonff y’s Magyar dalbokréta (1863) or his Dalvirágok, eredeti 40 magyar dal (1866). [See Zenei lexikon .] Th ewrewk cites Vali-tuita Suomalaisia Kansan Lauluja multiple times in his discussion of “A rhythmusfajok” [Th e races of rhythm], 25, but no publication information is given, and it is not clear whether this is the source of data for his table.


Hungarian languages had been established already in the late seventeenth cen-tury, but this relationship became more widely known in the context of more extensive communication and collaboration between Finnish and Hungarian scholars in the mid- to late nineteenth century. Finno-Ugrianism stressed the otherness of both European groups through their connection to their Asian ancestors and their contemporary Uralic relatives, but it also legitimized their unusual languages through thoroughly European scholarly methods. 92 A linguist and philologist, Th ewrewk asserted that the prevalence of certain fi gures in both his Hungarian and Finnish samples proved the relationship “which we could infer from linguistics”: “that Finnish and Hungarian music show a conspicuous kin-ship to each other.” 93 In addition to his disciplinary orientation, Th ewrewk may also have had personal relationships that would have predisposed him to pay particular attention to possible Finnish connections, since as a university pro-fessor and member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, he would likely have been in contact with a number of important visiting Finnish scholars during this period. 94 By contrast, Molnár was less interested in confi rming the Finnish connection; in his view Th ewrewk’s tabulation of rhythms distracted from the more important question of how to mark music as uniquely Hungarian. Th us he, like the Hungarian composers discussed previously, focused on common Hungarian patterns that were not common in Th ewrewk’s Finnish sample—the choriambus and patterns that include the iamb ( —, . or .) or the amphibrachis ( — , or ), which could be read as a variation on the iamb—to mark Hungarianness. 95

Th ough the extremely simple rhythmic patterns Th ewrewk identifi ed as evi-dence of the Finno-Ugric connection may not be completely convincing, his empirical approach to the question of musical Hungarianness, conducted with

92. See Jaakko Numminen et al. (eds.), Friends and Relatives , 29–30 and 52–98.

93. Quotations from Th ewrewk, A magyar zene rhythmusa , 16: “And this, our research only arrives at the recognition of that fact which we could bravely infer from linguistics,” and 52: “Even if what we could say here about Finnish music is only a little, we have proved this much with it: that Finnish and Hungarian music show a conspicuous kinship to each other.” In par-ticular, Th ewrewk claims that , the spondee (line 1 of Table 4.2 ); , the dactyl (line 3); , the anapest (line 4); and (line 9), the proceleusmaticus (which Th ewrewk also sometimes terms simply the four-eighth-note measure) are rhythmic fi gures that Finnish and Hungarian music have in common.

94. Th ewrewk’s many publications included, among other things, studies on Hungarian lin-guistics and translations from Greek and Latin into Hungarian (including of Homer, Ana-creon, Virgil, Cicero, and other major classical authors). For his bibliography, see Zsigmond Ritoók, Ponori Th ewrewk Emil , 231–251.

95. Th ewrewk tabulates occurrences of the Hungarian choriambus (. .) in line 14 of Table 4.2 ; of the iamb in lines 7 ( .), 8 ( . ), 11 ( .), 16 ( . ), and 17 ( . .); and the amphibrachis in lines 5 ( ), 18 ( ), 20 ( ), and 21 ( ).


what he termed “statistical exactness,” 96 can also be viewed as a refreshing advance beyond the prescriptive defi nition of Hungarian “racial features” in music that had become the norm in the works of Ábrányi, Molnár, and others. Th e sam -ples of Hungarian “folksong” Th ewrewk chose to use for this comparison were problematic—they were from published song collections fi lled with magyar nóta and including piano accompaniments, sources that the next generation of scholars, led by Bartók, Kodály, and their circle, did not consider genuine folk music. Still, in its rigor, as well as the use of comparison, Th ewrewk’s work off ers an interesting precedent to Bartók’s and Kodály’s folksong research.

Th ewrewk’s empirical observation of musical text-setting caused him to recon-sider the importance of one rhythmic pattern, the antispastus ( — — , . . or . . ). While János Fogarasi had considered it, along with the choriambus, to be one of two “dominant verse measures of Hungarian folksong,” 97 and Arany considered it to be one of the “opposing patterns” that could substitute for the choriambus (see Table 4.5 ), Th ewrewk concluded based on his statistics that in practice it was simply not used very oft en, noting that “while the Hungarian choriambus occurs in approximately 55 percent of the songs [in the sample], the antispastus is found in scarcely 4 percent.” 98

Th ewrewk’s report of the scarcity of the antispastus failed, however, to stamp out the idea that it was an important “Hungarian rhythm”: two important authors writing about Hungarian style for music students in the fi n-de-siècle, by Kornél Ábrányi Sr. and Géza Molnár, considered it to be so despite its rarity. Again, their respective positions may explain their diff erent emphases and the diff ering degrees of acceptance of their ideas: while Th ewrewk as a philologist was silent on how his work should be applied musically, Ábrányi and Molnár, both faculty members at the Academy of Music, wanted to guide young composers in writing Hungarian music.

Kornél Ábrányi published his A magyar dal és zene sajátságai, nyelvi, zön-gidomi, harmoniai s műformai szempontból (Th e characteristics of Hungarian song and music from the viewpoint of language, tone profi les, harmony, and genre, henceforth Characteristics ) in 1877, presumably to use in his teaching of harmony, aesthetics, and composition at the newly opened Academy. 99 Like other composers and authors discussed here, Ábrányi prioritized rhythm over other musical elements: aft er two chapters off ering general comments, including an

96. Th ewrewk, A magyar zene rhythmusa , 16. Th ewrewk also took a more scholarly approach than some of his contemporaries, particularly Ábrányi (discussed later), in his extensive use of primary Greek sources (for example, Aristotle, Aristoxenus, Plutarch, and Anacreon, among others, 9–11) to discuss the background of his analysis of Hungarian metrics and of secondary Hungarian (particularly Liszt, Gábor Mátray, and István Bartalus) and German sources (Rudolf Westphal).

97. As quoted by Zoltán Kodály in his dissertation, ZKV 2 , 24.

98. Th ewrewk, A magyar zene rhythmusa , 28.

99. Dezs ő Legány lists these as the fi elds that Ábrányi taught in “Ábrányi, Kornél,” New Grove 1, 33.


evaluation of the place of Hungarian music on the border between East and West, he spent his next four chapters on problems of rhythm and meter; harmony, meanwhile, received only one chapter, and form received two.

In keeping with its pedagogical role, Ábrányi’s Characteristics went more deeply into technical musical issues than either Brassai’s or Th ewrewk’s works. At least in this book, however, Ábrányi’s point of view was narrower. 100 Whereas Brassai and Th ewrewk referred specifi cally to Western European composers and Brassai also linked the performance practice of Hungarian Gypsy musicians to that of Western European virtuosi, 101 Ábrányi focused on Hungarian music composition, particularly song composition, as related to Hungarian poesy and folk music; he referred to non-Hungarian composers only very rarely. 102 His primary goal was to prescribe the correct manner for setting Hungarian text, and he used other music traditions and languages chiefl y as a rhetorical device in making this point—for instance, when he claimed that Hungarian was the only language besides Greek that was too sensitive to being mishandled, while “Indo-German” languages were not so restrictive. 103

100. By this I do not imply that Ábrányi was provincial, musically or otherwise. He had traveled across Europe early in his career in search of broad musical experiences; “a dev-otee of Chopin, Berlioz, Wagner, and Liszt, he made ceaseless effort to have their works accepted in Hungary” through the journals he published, Zenészeti lapok (1860–1876) and Zenészeti közlöny (1882), and in the music criticism he contributed to general in-terest periodicals of many kinds (Katalin Szerz ő , “Introduction,” ix–xi). The focus of Characteristics therefore may be understood as reflecting the direction Ábrányi favored for teaching students to write Hungarian music rather than as a summary of Ábrányi’s career.

101. See discussion in Chapter 2 .

102. Here including magyar nóta.

103. Ábrányi, Characteristics , 29–31: “Besides the classical Greek prosody, only the Hun-garian language possessed long and short syllables, the improper use of which, in musical tone profi les or declamation, immediately off ends every Hungarian artistic sensibility; while there is nothing so restrictive in other Indo-German languages, so long as those stand with proportional long or short [syllables], and so long as the [accustomed] stress . . . is usually assigned and held up as valid. [Here are included simple examples setting brief phrases in German, Italian, and French to various rhythms.] Hungarian prosody, either in poetic or musical declamation, may not fall under such arbitrary treatment.”

Brassai’s and Th ewrewk’s writings demonstrate that the link Ábrányi made between Greek metrics and Hungarian musical rhythm was part of a common tradition. Nor was it in only a musical tradition: there is a clear parallel between Ábrányi’s approach to mu-sical accent and the historically documented fact that “Hungarian poets have consciously attempted to adhere to the strictly prescribed basic quantitative rules of Greek-Roman metrics” (Andrew Kerek, Hungarian Metrics , 4, citing László Négyesi’s A mértékes magyar verselés története [Th e history of measured Hungarian versifi cation] and János Horváth’s Rendszeres magyar verstan [Systematic Hungarian prosody]). Linguist Kerek labeled the principle by which stresses in poetry are understood as equivalent to syllables of longer duration the “musical-quantitative view of Hungarian [poetic] meter,” but also argued that this principle was not inherent to the Hungarian language but was adopted from outside ( Hungarian Metrics , 4–5).


Ábrányi’s value-laden claims about the relative sensitivity of the Hungarian language are less useful for their insight into the language than for what they reveal about the author’s priorities and strategies as a nationalist composer, pedagogue, and music journalist. 104 Th e parallelism he drew in this passage served to elevate Hungarian language and, by extension, music into the realm of the “classic.” 105 Ear-lier in his book Ábrányi also emphasized the role of national style in classicizing Hungarian art music, writing, “Only . . . on this basis [the stronger coloring of mood fl uctuations inherent in the national style] can our art music be elevated to a classical level.” 106 Yet while some would approach the classicization of national style by combining it with elements of the panromanogermanic mainstream—for example, Erkel’s use of elements of Italian opera or Mihalovich’s and Liszt’s use of German elements—Ábrányi viewed the combination of Hungarian traits with other national elements skeptically at best, and he saw stylistic purity as necessary to any classical national style. In his view, “Th e mixture of various [national] mu-sical elements only causes the sensation to be confused, and instead of genuine eff ect we feel only prurient titillation.” 107

Th e tradition of ancient Greece, or at least the idea of it, was an important ex-ception to Ábrányi’s avoidance of other national traditions, one that lent the au-thority of the ancients to his work and linked it to the work of international scholars. In his use of classical Greek metric terms and notation, Ábrányi fol-lowed a tradition of Hungarian music theory found in Arany, Brassai, Th ewrewk, and others; also like most of those authors, Ábrányi favored the Hungarian ver-sions of these terms, thus tempering his classicism with Hungarocentrism. Like Fogarasi, Ábrányi defi ned the “basic principles” of Hungarian rhythm around two “dominant feet,” the “lengedez ő (choriambus), thus: | — — |” and the “toborzéki (antispastus), thus: | — — |”—despite the rarity of the antispastus in musical practice, as demonstrated by Th ewrewk’s study. In fact, one of few

104. Ábrányi was one of the founders of Zenészeti lapok , Hungary’s fi rst important music periodical, before he took us his role as a pedagogue, and he published another, shorter-lived journal, Zenészeti közlöny , in 1882. He also wrote on music for several general-interest publications. (See Katalin Szerz ő , “Th e Most Important Hungarian Music Periodical of the 19th Century”; Szerz ő , Introduction, Zenészeti lapok , ix–xi; and János Kárpáti, Introduction, Zenészeti közlöny . . . ix–xi.)

105. Th at this strategy positioned Hungarian above the “Indo-German” (Indo-European) languages and their associated musics is no accident. While German philologists claimed a close relationship between German and the theoretical proto-Indo-European Ursprache (see Alexander Rehding, Hugo Riemann and the Birth of Modern Musical Th ought , 118–121, and Maurice Olender’s Th e Languages of Paradise ), Finno-Ugrians were once again excluded from this mainstream; as was the case in contrasting with German musical universalism, some Hungarian scholars thus felt the need to claim or at least imply the signifi cance and ancient-ness of Hungarian language and culture.


107. Characteristics , 21. Ábrányi’s rhetorical stance here does not indicate that there was no such mixture in practice, of course, as I have discussed elsewhere.


musical examples of the antispastus that I have located is in a piano piece by Ábrányi himself: his Hungarian Rhapsody no. 7 from 1896, an excerpt from which appears in Example 4.8. Th e antispastus functioned in Ábrányi’s system, as in Arany’s treatise, as a substitute for the choriambus, particularly at the beginning of a period. “From the combination and mixture of these feet” with a handful of important auxiliary feet, Ábrányi continued, “it is possible to eff ect countless and varied tone profi le patterns.” 108

Th e range of the “countless and varied” patterns promised turned out to be quite limited, however, as metric feet could be combined only in very specifi c ways, so as not to “off end against the cadence of Hungarian verse and the rhythm of Hungar-ian music.” 109 Th at cadence and rhythm, formed in regular periods, in duple meter, and using a restricted palette of rhythmic fi gures associated with magyar nóta and dances of the mid-nineteenth century, strictly bounded Ábrányi’s concept of Hungarian style. As a devotee of Liszt and Wagner he was intimately acquainted with their ideas of musical prose, and as the editor of the journal Zenészeti lapok he

Example 4.8 Th e antispastus in Kornél Ábrányi’s Hungarian Rhapsody no. 7, op. 108 (1896), mm. 91–102

108. Characteristics , 24. Th e auxiliary feet are the “ lép ő ,” the “ bájos ,” the “ lengedi ,” and the “ lebeg ő ”—a set of fi gures that was consistent with those Arany highlighted (see Table 4.4 ) but with a minor variation in terminology ( bájos instead of lejtti for the Hungarian version of the trochee), illustrating the inconsistent terminology found in this literature.



had written frequently on Hungarian musical idiom and was a booster of serious Hungarian composition; but the way he conceived of Hungarian-style composition could create serious limitations in extended forms. 110

Géza Molnár’s 1904 textbook A magyar zene elmélete (Th e analysis of Hun-garian music, henceforth Analysis ) sought to correct some of these limitations by developing a more fl exible approach to rhythm. Like Kornél Ábrányi’s 1877 book, Géza Molnár’s was presumably written primarily for use by students at the Academy, where Molnár taught from 1900 until 1933, the year of his death; thus he was on the faculty when Bartók, Kodály, and many of their younger colleagues, students, and supporters were students there. His book came out just aft er Bartók completed his studies at the Academy and while Kodály was still enrolled. Evidence indicates that both Bartók and Kodály may have attended Molnár’s classes on Hungarian music history, though some of that evidence is inconclusive; regardless of whether they attended, however, both Bartók and Kodály certainly read Molnár’s book, as each had a copy of Molnár’s Analysis that he marked with marginal notes. 111

Th ough some scholars posed telling questions about elements of Molnár’s theories at the time his book was published (as discussed in Chapter 3 ), Analysis carried the authority of not only the Academy of Music but also European scholarship: more than Ábrányi, Molnár developed his book in the context of

110. For a brief overview of Ábrányi’s role as a booster of the Music of the Future, see Szerz ő , Introduction, Zenészeti lapok , xi. Ábrányi’s rigidity may have been one factor behind the fact that he was never awarded the full professorship that he expected at the Academy of Music (Szerz ő , Introduction, Zenészeti lapok , xiv), but another factor may have been his less formal and mostly domestic musical and musicological training in an era when the Academy was bringing in more and more German-trained faculty.

111. Kodály’s copy of Analysis is held in the library of the Academy of Music (cat. # K 42.184). According to Anna Dalos, composition students at the Academy of Music were required to take a course on the analysis of Hungarian music at a time when Kodály was studying there and Molnár was teaching the course, though Kodály did not take the associated exam (in Forma, harmónia, ellenpont , 67).

Bartók’s copy of Analysis is held in the Budapest Bartók Archívum (cat. #BH 421) and is dedicated to him by the author. Many thanks to Professor Tibor Tallián for directing me to this source. Bartók’s notebooks on courses in music history and Hungarian music were shared with Felicie Fábián, his classmate at the Academy of Music, and are preserved at the Budapest Bartók Archive (catalogue #BA-N 2025/1-4). Bartók’s handwriting records notes on composers’ biographies and style, including Liszt’s use of a “Hungarian cell” (BA-N 2025/2, p. 27) and Brahms’ use of “Hungarian folk music” and its motives (BA-N 2025/3, p. 2), and on the history of Hungarian music from Attila through Panna Czinka, Ferenc Erkel, Károly Huber, and Mihály Mosonyi (BA-N 2025/3, pp. 4–7). In addition to other com-posers’ biographies, Fábian’s fourth notebook includes descriptions of Hungarian genres as well as Hungarian rhythms, including the choriambus, on which “most nóta are based” (BA-N 2025/4, p. 4); the antispastus; and various “2 and 3-beat patterns . . . to be diff er-entiated in Hungarian music: amphibrachis — — . ; — — amphimacer . .” (idem). Th ough neither Fabián nor Bartók records Molnár’s name in these notebooks, he was teaching music history and Hungarian music at the Academy at that time and these notes bear a striking similarity to the ideas in Analysis .


work by leading music theorists like Rudolph Westphal (1826–1892), Mathis Lussy (1828–1910), and especially Hugo Riemann (1849–1919). 112 Even though Molnár’s citation of such secondary sources refl ects a scholarly approach beyond that found in Ábrányi’s book, and though Molnár (unlike Ábrányi) was not a composer, in the end, as Kodály put it in his unpublished notes, Molnár, like Ábrányi, wanted to write “not scholarship, but rather instructions for the com-posers’ attainment of Hungarian-style eff ect.” 113 Molnár’s instructions consisted of a complex palette of features, particularly rhythmic motives, that would mark compositions as Hungarian.

As Molnár laid out the “objective” principles by which a composer could as-sess the Hungarian character, or lack thereof, of any motive or passage, he largely followed the rhythmic and harmonic conventions of the nineteenth-century Hungarian style. Like many commentators on Hungarian style, Molnár devoted particular attention to rhythm, dedicating the better part of nine of his book’s sixteen chapters to the topic. But compared to other Hungarian theorists’ work, the extent of Molnár’s systematization is unparalleled, comprising detailed elab-oration of simple motives into long lists of related patterns in a manner that can be quite convoluted. I present only a brief introduction to his work in order to highlight Molnár’s overall approach.

As in his discussions of “racial science” in the introduction to his book, Molnár claimed authority in part by paying homage to Western thinkers, in this case, the music theorists mentioned. Each of these theorists off ered a comprehensive theory of rhythm: Mathis Lussy’s was mainly practical, drawn from observation of perfor-mance practice; Rudolph Westphal’s (also a source for Th ewrewk) built a theoret-ical understanding of phrase structure through the rigorous application of ancient Greek metric theory; and Hugo Riemann’s speculated both on general principles of phrasing and meter and on performance. 114 By referring to these theorists, Molnár could appear to off er an up-to-date scientifi c basis for his systematic tabulations of rhythmic patterns.

However, the goals of Lussy, Westphal, and Riemann diff ered substantially from Molnár’s: while these “Western” theorists set out to create a general theory

112. Th e link with Riemann is particularly suggestive since Molnár’s studies in Leipzig may have overlapped with Riemann’s time teaching there, though the record is unclear on this matter.

113. Cited in Dalos, Forma, harmónia, ellenpont , 70.

114. Th e treatises that Molnár cites are Lussy’s Traité de l’expression musicale (1874), West-phal’s Allgemeine Th eorie der Musikalische Rhythmik seit J. S. Bach (1880), and Riemann’s Musikalische Dynamik und Agogik (1884). (Smither’s Th eories of Rhythm in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries discusses the contributions of these and other theorists in detail.) Of these three authors, Molnár engages the most with Riemann. Greek terms act as a bridge to contemporary German scholar Westphal, though Molnár’s text did not really engage with Westphal’s and the content of his work is very diff erent; whereas Westphal addressed the general principles through which large-scale units were constructed from smaller building blocks, Molnár focused his analysis on the racial character [ fajiság ] of groups of motives—that is, phrases and themes [szakasz, tétel] (see Analysis , 21).


for the rhythmic organization of all music, using “universal” examples (typically, the vast majority of those examples were German), Molnár strove not for a gen-eral theory, but for a localized one, on “the substance of racial character.” 115 He was especially engaged with how his theory accorded, or rather did not accord, with those of his panromanogermanic counterparts, particularly Auft aktigkeit (upbeat-ness), a principle that Riemann (among others) claimed was universal. 116 Molnár agreed that this principle oft en applied, and in fact called his student-readers’ at-tention to its subtlety, remarking that “the melody may only turn into a character-istic feature aft er a long pattern . . . . Sometimes the melody reaches its peak in the fi ft h, or the fourth measure, other times only in the seventh or eighth measure.” 117 Yet Molnár felt Riemann took his universalizing too far in questioning what he viewed as the “most characteristic motive-fragment” of Hungarian music: 118

Riemann in one of the notes to his book “Musikalische Dynamik und Agogik” fi nds that this rhythm . , . . . is nothing more than an ornament, and more-over a clacking (Vorschlag) [fore-beat]. Only as a sound-repetition (reper-cussio)—so he says—can it be celebrated as something specially preferred in Hungarian music. Riemann is not on the right track. Th is pattern in Hungar-ian music is not an ornament and not a repercussio, but rather a part of the motive rising to substantive melodic and rhythmic signifi cance . . . . [T]here is an essential diff erence between the dynamic evenness of the orna-ment and the bold accentuation of our short beat that Riemann did not con-sider. Th e note aft er a clacking [Vorschlag] may never be of lesser signifi cance, whereas in our pattern it is the second, long member [of the pattern] that is decidedly weaker in stress. 119


116. Mine Doğantan, “Upbeat,” in New Grove 26, 149, citing Riemann’s Musikalische Dy-namik und Agogik , defi nes this concept as the principle that “a well-formed rhythmic unit always proceeds from upbeat to downbeat” and that “the prototypical beginning for rhythmic groups of any size is anacrustic.”

117. In Analysis , 26. Th e example Molnár uses to illustrate this is Beethoven’s funeral march (the second movement of Symphony no. 3): “the high point of [its] introductory theme falls only in the sixth measure” (idem). Using Beethoven as a reference point was typical in the Hungarian musical world, as I discussed in the previous chapter.

118. Th is “Hungarian motive-fragment” ´ — [accented short- unaccented long], or : , is defi ned in Molnár, Analysis , 20–21. Earlier in this book, Molnár equates this pattern, whether in poetic meter or in musical rhythm, with the iamb (8–9).

119. Molnár, Analysis , 29–30. Arany had also noted the absence of the Vorschlag in Hungarian, commenting that “there is no upbeat in Hungarian melody . . . thus [with no upbeat] the folk sing, thus they play in the inn, no matter how the heroes of the concert hall vorschlag -ify” [i.e., distort folk rhythm into upbeats] (“A magyar nemzeti vers-idomból,” 310). Th e reference to the “heroes of the concert hall” may even have included Liszt, the published score of whose Hungarian Rhapsody no. 14, for instance, included iambs read as upbeats (see Example 4.2).


Although Molnár saw the power of Auft aktigkeit in Riemann’s work in conceptu-alizing the shape of longer units, he thought that a focus on such units—the period level or higher—glossed over the patterns that held the greatest signifi cance for racial character. Meanwhile, brief motives and “motive-fragments” were important building blocks, but by itself the motive “still does not seize [racial character] enough.” 120 Since Molnár believed the most important level to build racial character, or to recognize racial patterns, was on the theme and phrase level, he spent the bulk of his book examining how such patterns could be built from foreground motives he identifi ed as characteristically Hungarian.

According to Molnár, three formulas–the “Hungarian motive-fragment” (the iamb), the choriambus, and the antispastus–should be considered “dominant feet in Hungarian poetry and music”: the same formulas identifi ed by Fogarasi and Ábrányi. Th e iamb is of course not only the shortest of the three but is in fact a component of the other two. In the passage duplicated as Example 4.9, Molnár illustrated both in metric notation and in modern musical notation diff erent expressions of the iamb. Th e fi rst two parts of this example, the “accent formula” and the “dynamic formula,” show the iamb as an agogic accent: in the fi rst, the second of two notes is accented, and in the next, the second of two notes is the arrival point for a crescendo. In the last version, the “Hungarian iamb,” a durational accent on the second syllable qualifi es the fi gure as an iamb, while the stress on the fi rst note or syllable refl ects the accentuation of the Hun-garian language. Other motives, like the dactyl and trochee and patterns derived from them, or motives with too much emphasis on the upbeat, were viewed as “not racially fl avored.” 121 Th e centrality of the iamb and the choriambus to Mol-nár’s system was expected, given their prevalence in Hungarian music; the per-sistence of the antispastus, on the other hand, implies a debt to his predecessors, including Ábrányi, Arany, and Fogarasi.

Example 4.9 Using Greek metrics to describe rhythms: Diff erent interpretations of the iamb [G. Molnár, Th e Analysis of Hungarian Music , 8]

120. As he writes “ Racial character hones itself primarily within the phrase and the kolon ; the motive still does not seize it enough, while the period many times scarcely gives it anything” ( Analysis , 21; emphasis in original).

121. Analysis , 84.


Molnár’s text went far beyond the text of any of his predecessors, however, in his rigorous search for creative approaches to Hungarian rhythm. Modeling his notation for accentuation aft er Riemann, he demonstrated how the iamb, the choriambus, and the antispastus could be used as building blocks for the con-struction of longer passages. In a sense, Molnár carried out what Ábrányi only suggested: he displayed hundreds of the “diff erent kinds of accentuation pat-terns” which, Ábrányi said, “can result from the compounding and mixture of these metric feet.” Example 4.10(a) is one of the clearest and simplest examples of Molnár’s elaboration process; he divides the long, unaccented notes in “iam-bic” and “antispastic” motives into slurred eighth-notes, stating that this is a way to create more rhythmic variety while maintaining “Hungarian-like ef-fects.” In Example 4.10(b), we see how Molnár categorized rhythmic patterns by degrees of magyarság , the “racial, non-racial, and neutral” categories he promised in his introduction. Although the label “neutral” makes intuitive sense for some rhythmic patterns, like the sequence of quarter notes that oc-curred so frequently in Th ewrewk’s study (and on which Molnár commented in a passage quoted earlier), the logic behind the classifi cation of more complex patterns is much more diffi cult to follow, despite the rational, matter-of-fact way in which Molnár presented his patterns. Only aft er an immersion in Mol-nár’s book and with close and careful examination can one connect patterns to their source cells, whether “Hungarian-like”, like the patterns in Example 4.10(a) that are derived from the Hungarian iamb and the antispastus; “not racially fl avored”, like the patterns in the fi rst part of Example 4.10(b) that could be derived from the trochee, rather than more “racial” accented iambs; or “un-Hungarian”, like the patterns in Example 4.10(c), which have too much Vorschlag- character, whether because the upbeat is so short in the fi rst pattern or so long in the second one. 122

On the other hand, Molnár’s complex views on meter and rhythm off ered a window to new stylistic approaches that Ábrányi, for instance, could not imagine. Whereas most musicians viewed Hungarian style as limited to simple duple meters, Molnár sought or created “Hungarian” rhythmic patterns beyond those boundaries, using not only triple meters but also fi ve- and seven-beat meters. He emphasized that such meters were not new-fangled inventions—they could be found “quite clearly” in the songs of Ádám Palóczi Horváth (1760–1820) and the works of Bach 123 —and worked out ways in which duple-meter patterns could be transformed into three or fi ve-beat patterns:

Th us [even] if János Arany denotes the toborzó [ — —; i.e., iamb plus long beat] and the lengedez ő [— —; i.e., choriambus] and if he uses this sort of

122. I repeat that the reasoning behind several of Molnár’s examples is simply too murky to be useful, as one of his contemporaries, János Sepr ő di, also complained (see quotation in Chapter 3 ).

123. Analysis , 100, uses an example in 516 from the F-major fugue from Book 2 of Th e Well-Tempered Klavier to illustrate this point.


measure in his recent declaimed poetry . . . those of us who attribute Hungarian character to the pattern with the accent need not set, for example, the toborzó and lengedez ő to music in duple measures, thus:

24 . toborzó [bacchius]

24 . . lengedező [choriambus]

Example 4.10 Samples from Molnár’s tables (a) Hungarian (or racial) rhythms [from pp. 88–89], (b) non-racially fl avored rhythms [from p. 84], and (c) un-Hungarian rhythms [from p. 80]


Because it is possible to set them to music well in Hungarian fashion in odd measures as well, according the racial fl avor with accentuation in this way:

34 > . toborzó

34 >

> > lengedező

If Arany accepted the bacchius (toborzó) with an odd number of pulses, which consists of fi ve time-units, then we may endorse the odd measure type in music as well, and we may subscribe to the toborzó-pattern with Hungar-ian accentuation thus:

54 > or 5

8 124

By adapting “Hungarian patterns” for use in fi ve-beat measure, Molnár opened the door to new kinds of creative expression within the national style where some had lamented the end of originality. As was discussed in Chapter 3 , he was skep-tical at best that “racial music” could be modernist. His ultimate wish appeared to be to derive all “Hungarian elements” from the same basic motivic cells—iamb, choriambus, antispastus—that Ábrányi and others had foregrounded, leavening them with neutral elements but not too many “un-Hungarian” ones, in order that the “racial element” be clear to the audience.

Problems with Ideas of “Hungarian Rhythm”

For other commentators, basing the national style on these “Hungarian rhythms” seemed dubious: not only did they consider such rhythmic patterns too atomistic a foundation, but they were also unsure whether to endorse the use of such pop-ular style markers in elevated concert or operatic repertoire. In his 1904 article “Alkalmasak-e a magyar motivumok műzenében való felhasználásra?” (Are Hun-garian motives appropriate for use in art music?), Otmár Ságody (1881–1945) answered his title question in the negative, because as he saw it, the choriambus—the only Hungarian motive he discussed at length—was defi ned largely by a free-dom of tempo. Ságody went on to argue that it was such freedom that enlivened Hungarian motives like the choriambus, and which made it impossible for them to retain their meaning in an orchestral setting. Hungarian music could only take “its rightful place in general music” by giving up the rhythmic freedom that was “one of the main features of the character of the national soul.” 125 Th at would mean

124. Molnár, Analysis , 52–53.

125. Original title: “Alkalmasak-e a magyar motivumok műzenében való felhasználásra?” 333: “In my opinion, the independence of Hungarian song (or music) from strict meter rises from one of the main features of the character of the national soul—out of that powerful in-dependence and love for freedom, which is perhaps not so strong in any other folk as in the Hungarian folk. For this reason we give it up only with diffi culty, and for this reason Hungar-ian music has not succeeded in taking its rightful place in general music.”


giving up the choriambus motive that identifi ed Hungarian music as Hungarian, because simply returning to this motive over and over again in a strict tempo would be absurd.

Molnár’s elaborations and permutations of this and other basic rhythmic formulas off ered one response to such a narrow concept of what Hungarian style was, but Sándor Kárpáti (1872–1939), in a response to Ságody published a few scant weeks later, took a diff erent approach: he rejected both Ságody’s assumption that the choriambus was the principal Hungarian motive and his conclusion that Hungarian motives could not be used in art music. Kárpáti argued that Hungarian motives should be understood as extending far beyond the choriambus:

Above all, again, I emphasize: the choriambus (— —) is not our only Hungarian motive ; the convulsive attachment to this is the most unfortunate idea of the reform, because with monotonous, uniform rhythm it makes art music really lamentable, indeed it makes our ambitions for art-music expressly simple-minded. 126

Kárpáti then derived more than a dozen “Hungarian rhythms”—none of them choriambus—from the rhythms in folksong and nóta melodies, arguing that any-thing that fi t any of these tunes was Hungarian, because their texts were Hungar-ian. Th is derivation of Hungarian rhythms could be one precursor of the way Bartók and Kodály located Hungarian rhythm in folksong and the rhythms of the Hungarian language. Even if Bartók and Kodály never came across Kárpáti’s ar-ticle, we know from this article that the text-accentuation hypothesis for Hungar-ian rhythm rose up against the restrictions of the motivic-taxonomy approach well before Bartók and Kodály dove into the fray.

We can read in Kárpáti’s other criticism of Ságody yet another confrontation over the orientation, or perhaps “occidentation,” of Hungarian music. Ságody had called metric freedom a basic part of Hungarian performance, an essential part of its Eastern character, with connotations of license and sensuality that cannot be confi ned by a strict tempo. Kárpáti argued that the extreme rubato of popular Hungarian performance was only the sloppiness that came from the backwardness of popular and folk performers, contrasted with those who are trained according to proper Western standards.

Ságody yielded somewhat under Kárpáti’s criticism but was unwilling to com-pletely relinquish the identifying Easternness of rubato. Whereas in his 1904

Ságody attempted to portray that typically Hungarian metric freedom with something much more rigid, arithmetical ratios. To paraphrase his description: the choriambus is no-tated strictly as 3/8 + 1/8 + 1/8 + 3/8 [ . . ], but in performance, it could end up more like 3/8 + 1/8 + 1/10 + 4/10. I should clarify that Ságody acknowledges that the arithmetical descriptions he off ers for rubato-fi lled phrases cannot hope to capture the eff ect; the fact that he tries, however, even in order to prove this negative, is in keeping with the “scientifi c” theoretical methods of some of his contemporaries.

126. In “Stilizált magyar motívum” [Stylized Hungarian motive], 1. Emphasis in original.


article he seemed to say that Hungarians had to shed the metric freedom char-acteristic of the East to fi t into the bounds of international concert music (the West), he modifi ed his position within a few months to respond to Kárpáti’s criticism. He tried to mark a fi ne line between these two poles, distinguishing between the modest tempo variation of Hungarians and extreme distortion, which he attributed to Gypsy performance practice. In part, what Ságody claimed was that the Hungarians are a little bit exotic, but not so uncontrollably as the Gypsies. Th e limited irregularity of Hungarians could be used in art music, adding fl avor but not totally distorting the frame. By contrast, Gypsy practice was too loose to fi t into an art-music setting, partly because of the free-dom of a small chamber ensemble as opposed to an orchestra, but also partly because of the “Bohemian temperament.” 127

Just as commentators searched for the ideal position between East and West in the aesthetics and politics of music, Ságody and Kárpáti struggled over the ideal technical means to establish such a position in music. From their dialogue we can identify a number of thoroughly entangled confl icts over the issue of the Hungar-ian motive. Locating Hungarian character in the stereotypes of the popular Hun-garian style invoked the ongoing problem of high versus low, which continued to be entangled with the dichotomy of West and East. What then could be translated from the popular Hungarian style into art music, and what elements of that style were too low, or too oriental, to be translated into a concert work? If some motives might be used to embody Hungarian character, how could they be extracted for use in art music without compromising that character? Should certain motives, such as the choriambus, be understood to be independently Hungarian, or should we rate any motives as Hungarian that come out of Hungarian song melodies? What tools would demonstrate music’s magyarság with enough precision to meet the scientifi c standards of Western Europe without eliminating the intangible, vaguely Eastern quality of “genuine Hungarian feeling”? 128

127. In “A czigányos magyar zenér ő l” [About Gypsy-style Hungarian music], 77: “We can diff erentiate between two kinds of rhythmically irregular variations which dominate in Hun-garian music: One is when the tempo variation, happening in the bounds of one or at most two beats (happening once or recurrent), is such that their sum total does not change the value, the time, of the entire beat or two. In the other on the contrary, the tempo variations happening within the bounds of the beat are such that their total does change the value of the entire beat. / In my persuasion this latter is attributable principally to the Gypsy infl uence. Because the Gypsy musician has, besides his Bohemian temperament, still another reason for cultivating such tempo variations. Most Gypsy bands actually are nothing but a violin soloist with string accompaniment, where the accompaniment in every view is completely under the direction of the soloist, the ‘primás.’”

128. As Ságody wrote in “A magyar zene metrikai sajátosságáról” [About the metrical char-acteristics of Hungarian music], 369–370: “Th e composer who recognizes intellectually the identifying characteristics of Hungarian music, but has no Hungarian feeling in him, will never create Hungarian art-music; conversely, that composer who perhaps is not intellectually acquainted with [its] identifying characteristics as explained by me, but has in him genuine Hungarian feeling, nevertheless can emancipate himself from the slavish use of Hungarian motives will involuntarily produce Hungarian art music.”


Th ese were some of the questions raised by the debate over “Hungarian mo-tives.” A more critical problem than the diffi culty of Molnár’s system is what Kárpáti pointed out in his critique of Ságody, and what Sepr ő di highlighted in his review of Molnár: how could anyone, whether scientist or composer, defi nitively locate the musical expression of a nation’s character in expansions of just a few basic rhythmic patterns? Th e hyper-concentration on these motives would appear to limit the free exercise of that highly unscientifi c article of faith, the “genuine Hungarian feeling” so many writers invoked. Before Molnár’s book was even pub-lished, Ödön Farkas, who was a generation older than Molnár, wrote derisively of how the widespread obsession with metrical analysis and “typically Hungarian” rhythms had turned Hungarian music into “a row cobbled together from the ‘lengedez ő ’ [choriambus] and ‘toborzéki’ [antispastus] . . . and still other kinds of metric feet.” 129 In an environment where the Romantic cult of the genius was es-sential to the ideal of the composer, any hint of a priori limitation on the compos-er’s palette was aesthetically and ideologically problematic. Vague enthusiasm for a composer’s Hungarian spirit was more compatible with that cult, however many “rules” the composer’s spirit might inspire him to break. As music scholars worked to fi x and measure those elements of Hungarian music that people had vaguely agreed upon for years—that even geniuses like Liszt and Brahms had agreed upon—their writings appealed to the positivism of the age, but their tendency toward analyses based on simplistic interpretations of Hungarian elements still did not satisfy those looking for a foundation for great Hungarian art music co-mposition. Géza Molnár’s elaborate system allowed for more complexity, but was so convoluted that only the most determined could follow it; moreover, its almost comically overreaching claim to classify features as “racial, race-destroying, and neutral” made it a target for skeptical readers. 130

A New Model of Hungarian Rhythm: Kodály’s Dissertation

Th e document that reshaped the question of Hungarian rhythm was Zoltán Kodály’s 1906 dissertation, “A magyar népdal strófa-szerkezete” (Th e strophic structure of the Hungarian folksong). 131 In a sense this work revisited the approach Emil Ponori Th ewrewk used in his A magyar zene rhythmusa from some three

129. Farkas’ “A magyar művészi zenér ő l,” 228. Th is passage continues by ridiculing those Hungarians with naïve nationalistic notions of Hungarian music based on the nóta, though they share blame for the sorry state of Hungarian music with Gypsy musicians: “Th is music has been spread by the Gypsy, the theater, and every Hungarian today who cannot think with his own head believes as a matter of faith and is convinced that Árpád our father sang such songs and the future lies only in this kind of music.”

130. Notably János Sepr ő di and Béla Bartók (see Chapter 3 ).

131. Originally published in Nyelvtudományi közlemények 36 (1906), 95–136; appears in ZKV 2 , 14–46. Citations here are from the ZKV edition.

Erdely’s Methods and Principles of Hungarian Ethnomusicology , 1–42, off ers a detailed summary of Kodály’s dissertation in English, with several extended quotations.


decades earlier—understandable since Th ewrewk was one of the examiners for Kodály’s doctorate. 132 Like Th ewrewk before him, Kodály drew conclusions on rhythmic and strophic structure based on his examination of a body of folksongs. But although Kodály, like Th ewrewk, included some published collections (nota-bly István Bartalus’) that included many recently composed songs, Kodály was much more critical toward these sources than his predecessor, remarking that fewer than half of the items appearing in these collections were “real folksongs.” 133 Embedded in Kodály’s work was also an implicit response to the previous genera-tions of writers on Hungarian style, folksong, and rhythm, in particular, Molnár, whose ideas Kodály had critiqued in his unpublished notes as not merely unscien-tifi c but a “stupid” attempt to “fi ll out the entire Western European formal scheme with Hungarian fl esh and blood.” 134

Kodály, by contrast, turned to Hungarian folk material as his sources, and in particular to the work of a more scholarly, and mostly more recent, generation of folk music collectors than Th ewrewk had used: János Sepr ő di, Áron Kiss, Béla Vikár, and naturally Kodály himself, since he had made his fi rst collecting tour in 1905. 135 Signifi cantly, Kodály took the radical step of using not only notated mate-rials but also recordings in evaluating both his own collection and those of Béla Vikár. Th is technological and epistemological innovation privileged the perfor-mances of “the folk” over the transcriptions and arrangements of urban scholars and musicians, since

many questions on the precepts of beats and lines may only be decided on the basis of lengthy observation of folk singing; namely we [should] situate our-selves in the standpoint of modern rhythm and, instead of paper analysis, take live performance as our foundation . . . . [M]oreover, we must pay attention to [the performance] of the folk, because even with the greatest knowledge of folksong and practice in its chief performance modes we cannot be sure in the performance of every single song. 136

Kodály’s examination of evidence from these recordings led to a new typology of Hungarian folksong form and rhythm based on structures with broader scope than the atomistic rhythmic motives that had so preoccupied writers on Hungarian

132. Olga Szalay, Kodály, a népzenekutató [Kodály the folk music researcher], 33.

133. Kodály, “A magyar népdal strófa-szerkezete,” Vissztekintés 2, 15.

134. Cited by Dalos, Forma, harmónia, ellenpont , 71.

135. In the area around his childhood home in Galánta (see Szalay, Kodály, a népzenekutató , 32); he published a small sample of that collection as “Mátyusföldi gyűjtés” [Collection from Mátyusföld]. Although Bartók had collected a handful of melodies while vacationing with his sister’s family in 1904 and 1905, Kodály’s Mátyusföld tour predates Bartók’s fi rst “properly organized expedition to collect folksongs,” which occurred in 1906 (Sándor Kovács, “Th e Ethnomusicologist,” 54).

136. ZKV 2 , 14.


rhythm for decades. Kodály in fact specifi cally rejected the Greek labels that had been applied to the “so-called dominant verse meters of the Hungarian folk-song,” because “Hungarian metric forms have nothing to do with the ancient names that have been forced onto them.” 137 He shift ed focus away from those rhythmic motives to a typology of song and verse forms, some of which used “Hungarian rhythms” like the choriambus and some of which, like children’s songs and what he called runic melodies (runo-melodiák), with their sequences of tones of equal value ending in longer or stressed notes, did not. Instead of pointing out connections with Western European composers like Bach and Handel as Géza Molnár did, Kodály highlighted these runic melodies and their similarity to Finnish Kalevala melodies, following up on Th ewrewk’s discussion of the Finno-Ugric connection.

Th is turn eastward in search of “a part of our ancient heritage” 138 is one of the earliest documents among Hungarian musicians of their search for an alternate, modern kind of Hungarianness with Eastern origins, a search that echoed through modernist discourse on folk music in subsequent decades, as already discussed in the previous chapter. Kodály laid the foundation for a rejection of both composers and theorists of the previous generation, who had failed to develop a satisfactory forward-looking model of Hungarian composition out of elements of “Hungarian style”—either rhythmic or otherwise—and had also failed to include what he saw as the most important dataset of all, folksong as performed by rural Hungarians. Th is work made Kodály a central intellectual fi gure in that discourse, though he was still developing as a composer and he published little prose in the decade following his dissertation.

By arguing the scholarly irrelevance of previous models of Hungarian rhythm, Kodály, Bartók, and their circle created an opening for a new icon of Hungarian music, the folksong. Folk music provided the intellectual justifi cation to discard the endless stream of choriambus that some had served up as Hungarian music, it evoked the misty primitive past in a way that appealed to the modernists’ fondness for the ancient, and it suggested a palette of sounds that were verifi ably Hungarian because of their source locations but also sources of unfamiliar novelties. (By all accounts, it was the search for greater variety that initially motivated Bartók’s own folk music collecting.) And while Kodály’s conclusions were presaged by the work of Th ewrewk in the previous generation, unlike Th ewrewk, Kodály, because of his role as a musician in a circle of modernist musicians and from 1907 as a teacher of harmony, counterpoint, and composition at Budapest’s Academy of Music, was in a position to shape the next generation of Hungarian composers directly; thus his ideas about folksong and Hungarian rhythm became a part of Hungarian music

137. ZKV 2, 24.

138. ZKV 2, 43. Th is phrase appears in the following context: “A characteristic line type ap-pears in this [four-line strophe type], another of which we do not fi nd in western music: it appears its home is the east; perhaps it is part of our ancient heritage. Th is line [type] is the typical line [type] of the Finnish Kalevala melody .” Italics in original.


theory and composition pedagogy, eventually replacing the ideas of teachers like Géza Molnár. 139 With the rise of Bartók and Kodály over the subsequent decades, approaches like Molnár’s to Hungarian music analysis have been dismissed as an “anachronism.” 140

Yet even the scholar who retrospectively gave Molnár this label acknowledged that “in this time—before the development of practiced folk music research—he did not stand alone with his views.” 141 Bartók, Kodály, and their circle promoted the folk music of the isolated rural peasantry as an alternative icon and a time when the popular Hungarian-Gypsy style was all the Hungarian public knew as Hungarian music, and they met much resistance in this project, as has been well documented. Moreover, the decades-long presence of this style, and teaching based on it, left its imprint on these modernists in spite of their best eff orts to discard it. It is this tension that I address in the fi nal section of this chapter.

BARTÓK, KODÁLY, AND THE “HUNGARIAN STYLE”

In their early prose writings, Bartók and his close colleagues repeatedly rejected Hungarian-Gypsy style, because of both its aesthetic excesses and what they saw as its false claim to authentic national character. Th e folksong-based project Bartók, Kodály, and their supporters promoted to replace the earlier stylistic con-cept was tremendously successful from the point of view of rhetoric. It bridged past and future and East and West through the symbol of the old-style, not-quite-tonal folksong, evoking Eastern ancestors with ancient sounds—for example, “runic melodies.” Eventually, this rhetorical achievement came to dominate the way people understood not only Hungarian folksong but also the historiography of Hungarian music as a whole.

A part of their rhetorical strategy was the demonizing of a superfi cial, overly cosmopolitan establishment that stood between the people and the truth. Hun-gary’s musical modernists dismissed claims of Hungarian character attributed to nóta, verbunkos, and art-music genres drawing on these idioms: in their view, these genres were so heavily infl uenced by foreigners of all stripes that it was ludi-crous to claim them as the core of the Hungarian musical tradition. At the same time, they dismissed the work of “so-called musicologists” as superfi cial armchair science. Th e rhythmic theories put forward by some of “these scientifi c gentlemen” were particular targets.

As successful as the turn-of-the-century modernists eventually were in redefi n-ing Hungarianness in music, however, there were more connections between the rear guard and the avant-garde, particularly Bartók, than are usually acknowl-edged. I have already mentioned the repetition of traditional rhetorical tropes of

139. Kodály joined the faculty of the Academy of Music the same year that Bartók did, in 1907, but Bartók avoided teaching composition there; his position was in piano.

140. According to Berlász, “Zenetörténet tanítás,” 259.

141. Berlász, “Zenetörténet tanítás,” 259.


race and nation in the modernists’ writings. Th e Westward-leaning scientism of a Géza Molnár also fi nds a mate in the positivistic approach to the collection and study of folksong shared by Bartók, Kodály, Sepr ő di, and Antal Molnár. But the most surprising continuity, given the militancy (discussed in Chapter 3 ) of the modernists’ rhetoric of purity versus corruption, is the retention of musical gestures from the discarded Hungarian(-Gypsy) style of the nineteenth century.

We must be careful not to take at face value Bartók’s claims about his reliance on “pure sources” to the exclusion of the artifi cial “Hungarian style” that fi lled his environment. Rather than completely discarding this style, Bartók reinterpreted it from a diametrically opposed point of view. In his 1933 essay “Hungarian Peasant Music,” he singled out the very same rhythmic patterns Kornél Ábrányi and Géza Molnár had held up as typical of Hungarian music, but following Kodály, he did not include the Greek labels that had come into use in the nineteenth century:

Th e combinations occurring most frequently are 44 . . [choriambus], . . [iambs], and . . [antispastus]. Th ese rhythms have been imitated by our composers of folksong-like art songs, and in this manner they have come to the notice of foreign musicians (for example, in the fi rst theme of Liszt’s Fourteenth Rhapsody). 142

Th e comparison between Bartók’s and Molnár’s accounts of the interchange between musicians from the cultivated and folk traditions could hardly be more diff erent. Molnár’s work, like that of Brassai and Ábrányi before him, assumed a gesunkene Kulturgut model of the distribution of knowledge from the metropoles of Western Europe to Hungary’s cultural center, Budapest, and thence to the pe-riphery: educated Hungarians took over something formed in the learned centers of European culture, by fi gures like Bach and Handel, and it eventually fi ltered down to the rude Gypsies and peasants. 143 Bartók assumed exactly the opposite: folk music had seeped up from below, its true strength diluted along the way, until it fi nally reached the foreigners—notably including Liszt.

In fact, as discussed earlier, there was much interchange between what Bartók and Kodály called the new-style folksong and “folk-like art songs” (nóta), 144 and strong creative personalities like Liszt and Brahms contributed to the perception of what Hungarian music was inside as well as outside of Hungary. Given the fl uidity of the situation, I question whether Bartók and Kodály decided which

142. “Hungarian Peasant Music,” 276. Bartók discussed these same rhythms at least as early as 1918, in “Die Melodien der madjarischen Soldatenlieder” (see BBE , 54, for English trans-lation of this passage).

143. Th e connection to Bach and Handel was discussed in Chapter 3 . Th e theory of gesunk-enes Kulturgut posited by German folklorist Hans Naumann and built on by John Meier and others in the early twentieth century similarly placed the origins of folk culture in the culture of the upper classes. (See Porter, “Europe, traditional music of,” New Grove 8, 431.)

144. See Major, “A népies magyar műzene,” 158–180.


rhythms were Hungarian based exclusively on their “pure peasant” music sources. Why did they single out these particular rhythms? Th e fi rst and second, the cho-riambus and iamb, are common enough, but the last one, the antispastus, does not appear oft en in “folksong taken in the narrow sense” as Bartók conceived it any more than in the nóta examples that Th ewrewk used in his study decades earlier. Bartók cited these three rhythmic patterns as most typical of Hungarian music in at least two diff erent essays, one from 1918 and one from 1933, plus his 1921 book Th e Hungarian Folksong . In the musical examples he provides for the two essays, we fi nd many iambs and choriambus, but no antispastus. 145 His 1921 book Th e Hungarian Folksong lists the iamb, the antispastus, and the choriambus as the “most frequent” rhythms, yet in the musical examples only twelve songs use anti-spastus rhythms, compared to over sixty songs that use choriambus and over 150 that use iambs. 146

Since it was not actually common, Bartók could have just as easily lumped the antispastus in with the variety of fl exible dotted rhythms that changed with the changing texts of successive strophes. Aft er all, like Kárpáti, Sepr ő di, and Kodály, Bartók linked Hungarian rhythm directly to text, and he sometimes deliberately distanced his work from the obsession with “antique metrical feet” that charac-terized Géza Molnár’s 1904 text. 147 Yet the uncommon antispastus remained in Bartók’s list of typical Hungarian rhythms, as it had in Kodály’s dissertation, though both eschewed the Greek label. We might tentatively ascribe their inclu-sion of the antispastus motive at least partly to its place in the tradition of Hun-garian metric analysis, particularly through Géza Molnár’s class at the Academy of Music. Th is faint echo of the work of “so-called musicologists” from the pre-vious generation lingered on in writings by Bartók and Kodály, even though this motive’s new context—where peasant music was the true source of the power of Hungarian art music, and where fancy Greek terms had little or no place—was radically altered. 148

“Establishment” references and infl uences in the works of Bartók and Kodály are not limited to their prose writings. Both also used “Hungarian genres,” partic-ularly the rhapsody and the Hungarian dance suite, throughout their careers. Ob-vious examples of the rhapsody include Bartók’s Rhapsody for piano, op. 1 (1904)

145. Th ere are no antispastus in the song examples for either “Die Melodien der madjarischen Soldatenlieder” (1918) (see BBE , 50–57 or BÖÍ , 77–82) or “Hungarian Peasant Music” (1933).

146. Bartók lists the “most frequent” rhythms in Th e Hungarian Folksong , 29. Th e musical examples appear in ibid., 219–305.

147. For example, in this passage from “Hungarian Folk Music” (1933), Bartók obliquely criticizes the use of Greek metrics to analyze Hungarian music: “It should be added here that Hungarian metrics are not based on the length or shortness of the syllable but on their accent or lack of accent; the sequences of syllables with or without accent do not result in antique metrical feet, but in those of another kind” ( BBE , 76).

148. Later on, however, Kodály departed further from the tradition of Hungarian metric analysis: in his A magyar népzene [Folk music of Hungary], fi rst published in 1937, he made no claim about what rhythms are the most typically Hungarian.


and the two violin rhapsodies (1928); the rhapsody’s slow-fast structure also lies behind two-movement works like Bartók’s Two Portraits , op. 5 (1907–1911) and Two Pictures , op. 10 (1910). Kodály’s Márosszéki táncok (Dances from Márosszék) and Galántai táncok (Dances from Galánta) are overt homages to the nineteenth-century Magyar Suite, and Bartók’s suites for orchestra and for piano, the Four Orchestral Pieces , op. 12 (1912–1921), the Divertimento (1939), and Szabadban (Out of doors) (1926) refer to that precedent as well, in addition to referring to Western European genres like the Baroque suite.

Both composers also redeployed “Hungarian rhythms” in many of their com-positions, and the connections between the late nineteenth-century discourse on “Hungarian rhythm” and the ways that Bartók and Kodály used them run deeper than has been previously recognized. Bartókian conventional wisdom holds that early pieces like Kossuth (1903), the Rhapsody for piano (1904), and the two Suites for Orchestra draw on the popular tradition of “Hungarian style,” while Bartók largely sheds that infl uence in later works. Certain movements of Kodály’s Háry János and Czinka Panna and especially his Galántai táncok referenced historical Hungarian style as well as genre.

Th is study is not the fi rst to recognize continuities between Bartók and Kodály and the past. Judit Frigyesi and David Schneider have written about Bartók’s con-tinuing use of diff erent aspects of “Hungarian style” in later works. In her 1998 book, Frigyesi illustrated some of the connections between heavily ornamented Gypsy performance style and a handful of Bartók’s works; in one particularly signifi cant example drawn from Duke Bluebeard’s Castle , Frigyesi showed how the fi guration in one passage can be interpreted as a “chain of verbunkos -derived rhythmic variations” spun out of an antispastus motive (though she does not use the Greek label). 149 Schneider’s 2006 book demonstrated several other rich con-nections not just between Bartók’s music and the performance styles of Gypsy musicians both in rural and urban contexts, but also between Bartók and the Hungarian composers creating “Hungarian-style” art music in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. 150 I suggest here that both Bartók and Kodály may have drawn not only from folk and popular traditions and from the composers of preceding generations that they had dismissed as not actually Hungarian, but also from a source they despised even more than either of those: academic analyses of popular style elements, particularly rhythms—including the antispastus.

Galántai táncok

Kodály’s Galántai táncok (1933) pays homage to a Gypsy band from the Esterházy lands in western Hungary who were well known in Haydn’s time; “two booklets of ‘selected Hungarian national dances’ were published in Vienna in 1803, based on

149. In Béla Bartók and Turn-of-the-Century Budapest , Chapter 8, especially 244–253. Example 26, on page 252, shows the use of the antispastus as a generative motive.

150. In Bartók, Hungary, and the Renewal of Tradition .


the performance of ‘various Galánta Gypsies,’” and when a copy was discovered in a Budapest library in 1927, they came to Kodály’s attention. 151 In his composition, Kodály, following a procedure familiar to many in that age of neoclassicism, com-bined historical material with original work. Th e historical material on which Kodály drew predates the full development of the idea of “Hungarian rhythm”; there are many dotted rhythms, but only a handful of iambs, one passage fea-turing choriambus (in dance #20), and no antispastus. As previously noted, the antispastus takes no prominent role in his book Hungarian Folk Music . Yet in the slow opening section, one of the original sections of Galántai táncok , Kodály bases his melody on overt uses of “Hungarian rhythms,” especially choriambus and antispastus (see Example 4.11). Th e reference to “Hungarian rhythms” in this context reinforces Kodály’s homage to the historic “Hungarian style,” and his use of the antispastus here indicates the degree of infl uence still wielded by the academic discourse on the style from his student days and before, despite the negative comments on that discourse from the time of his dissertation onward.

Suite no. 2 for Orchestra

Bartók’s Suite no. 2 occupies a transitional place in that composer’s output. Its harmonic language, like that of Kossuth , is heavily infl uenced by Strauss—though this time without a battle program to explain the dissonance; the

151. Ferenc Bónis, Preface to Hungarian Dances of Galánta 1803 , x.

Example 4.11 Kodály’s Galántai táncok (1933), mm. 74–85, violin I


thematic development draws on Brahms, another German, and the piece is marked throughout by stereotypical “Hungarian” rhythms. At the same time, the orchestration already sounds remarkably Bartókian, with many passages that evoke later pieces (especially Th e Wooden Prince ), and this piece bears one of the fi rst fruits of Bartók’s burgeoning involvement with folk music: his fi rst composed pentatonic melody, at the opening of the fi nal movement. 152 Bartók’s incremental manipulation of certain rhythms, particularly the choriambus, also off ers an early instance of the composer’s longtime interest in musical symmetry.

Th e third movement of the suite begins with an expansive solo by the bass clar-inet, itself invoking the tarogató in its instrumentation and a rhapsodic hallgató in its style. 153 Th e most obvious “Hungarian rhythms” in this passage are the many iambs, particularly the ones in mm. 15, 34, and 36 which are followed by long notes, forming a phrase-ending gesture common in Hungarian popular and folk music. (For example, such gestures appear in measures 9 and 12 of József Dóczy’s “Virágzik már a gyöngyvirág” (Th e lily-of-the-valley has already bloomed), shown in Example 4.1(b).) Th e iamb continues to be a Hungarian marker throughout the movement. When the opening hallgató theme returns in a chorus of winds at rehearsal number 4, a simple choriambus pops up in that phrase which connects the opening motto, and several versions of this motto that appear throughout the movement, directly to the choriambus rhythm. 154 Th e symmetrical structure of that choriambus aft er rehearsal 4, shown in Example 4.12(a), is expanded by add-ing two more eighth notes on either side of the axis of symmetry, as shown in Example 4.12(b). Th is expanded choriambus can then be rotated or refl ected around this axis, as Bartók does in mm. 92–93 (Example 4.12(c)), creating an expanded antispastus. Alternatively, the expanded choriambus could be varied, which connects this motive back to the opening motto of the movement (Example 4.12(d)). Similar procedures are applied to motives based on “Hungarian rhythms” in other works of Bartók, especially the 1938 Violin Concerto and Contrasts , and of Kodály, in particular the 1923 Psalmus hungaricus .

The Eleventh Bagatelle

In the middle section of the eleventh of Bartók’s Fourteen Bagatelles , op. 6 (1908), shown in Example 4.13, we fi nd the same rhythmic cells that occurred in the opening of Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody no. 14, even though the context diff ers

152. According to Tallián, Béla Bartók , 61.

153. Schneider explicates the tradition of using the clarinet or English horn to evoke the tárogató and Bartók’s response to that tradition in this passage ( Bartók, Hungary, and the Renewal of Tradition , 94–108).

154. Measure and rehearsal numbers refer to the 1943 revised edition of the suite (London: Boosey & Hawkes, 1948). Th e Universal Edition publication of the original version is not generally available. According to Halsey Stevens’ Th e Life and Music of Béla Bartók , 262, the revision consisted largely of “structural tightening,” with sections of the third and fourth movements being excised. Th is revision does not aff ect the motivic connections used here.


greatly in tonality, texture, and mood. In Liszt’s Rhapsody, these rhythms fi rst appear in a solemn dirge, before turning into the heroic march seen in Example 4.1(c). (Th e stereotypically Hungarian mood-swing from crying to rejoicing sounds even more resplendently in the orchestral transcription of this piece.) By contrast, Bartók’s bagatelle frames the march-like “Hungarian” rhythms of mm. 40–60 with extreme, almost drunken tempo fl uctuations in the outer sections; the mini-verbunkos in this middle section contrasts sharply with the preceding measures by virtue of shift s to soft er dynamics and more regular tempo and pre-dictable homophonic texture. Supporting the choriambus and iamb rhythms in the melody is an accompaniment that recalls the oom-pah esztám accompani-ment frequently used by traditional Hungarian folk ensembles. 155 Yet both the “Hungarian rhythms” in the melody and the evocation of traditional elements in

Example 4.12 Versions of choriambus in Bartók’s Suite no. 2, mvmt. III (a) simple choriambus: woodwinds, m. 84 (b) expanded choriambus: woodwinds, mm. 98–99 (c) rotation/refl ection of expanded choriambus (= expanded antispastus): woodwinds, mm. 92–93 (d) opening motto: bass clarinet, mm. 1–3

155. For a defi nition of esztám and illustration of its traditional use, see Schneider, Bartók, Hungary, and the Renewal of Tradition , 24–25.


the accompaniment are spare and reserved in a way almost unheard of for nineteenth-century Hungarian style. Rather than blossoming or bursting forth as we expect “Hungarian rhythms” to do, the rhythms in the melody become more muted, though the dynamics do rise and the tempo quickly begins to fl uctuate again. As for the accompaniment, this bagatelle is slower than the usual esztám , and there are rests in the accompaniment on the strong beats where the bass in-strument would ordinarily be; the accompaniment is a more minimalist, taciturn version of traditional esztám . Even the appearance of such “Hungarian rhythms” in the middle of something as insignifi cant as a “bagatelle” is unexpected; it seems to comment ironically on the persistence of the “Hungarian style,” perhaps even on the absurdity of chauvinist nationalism in general.

String Quartet no. 5

An element of the oft -noted increased accessibility of Bartók’s late style is his re-consideration of Hungarian stylistic elements. He went so far as to put versions of the label “Verbunkos” on the fi rst movements of two major works from late in

Example 4.13 Bartók’s Fourteen Bagatelles , op. 6 (1908), no. 11, mm. 34–60


his career, Contrasts and the Violin Concerto, both from 1938; in the case of the Violin Concerto, although he chose to omit his initial marking (“Tempo di ver-bunkos”) in the fi nal published version, “it is nevertheless the verbunkos topic that resonates most strongly at the outset of the work,” through the prominent use of choriambus and iambic rhythms among other features. 156 But some echoes of these Hungarian rhythms fi nd their way into the 1934 String Quartet no. 5, a less audience-friendly piece, though in a more subtle way than in either the Violin Concerto or Contrasts . Indeed, interpreting rhythms as Hungarian in a move-ment marked “Alla bulgarese” is counterintuitive.

Classical musicians have most oft en classifi ed additive meters like the 4+2+3/8 in the third movement Scherzo and 3+2+2+3/8 in the corresponding Trio as Bul-garian, since Westerners, in this context including Bartók, fi rst took notice of them through descriptions and transcriptions of Bulgarian folk music, and since Bartók not infrequently labeled pieces or movements with such meters, including this Scherzo, as Bulgarian or “Alla bulgarese.” Such meters are not limited to Bul-garia, however, but are found throughout the Balkans, Turkey, North Africa, and Central Asia. 157 Even given the knowledge that Bartók discovered music with mixed meters through Bulgarian and other East European folk music, it is clear that Bartók’s pieces in mixed meter had other aspects beyond their refl ection of his immersion in East European musical folklore. One good example is Mikrokos-mos no. 151, the fourth of Bartók’s Six Dances in Bulgarian Rhythm, where the composer “employs the 88 (3+3+2) meter to capture the syncopated rhythms of American popular music and jazz . . . . Bartók’s comment on the piece confi rms this view: ‘Very much in the style of Gershwin. American folksong feeling.’” 158

Th e third movement of the Fift h Quartet illustrates the variety of textures and moods that Bartók was capable of creating within the context of an irregular “Bulgarian” meter. A “walking bass” in the cello accompanying smooth eighth-note melodies in the other parts sets a cool atmosphere at the beginning of the move-ment (Example 4.14(a)); János Kárpáti associates the rising and falling contour of these opening lines with “the dome structure of the ‘new type’ of Hungarian folk-song.” 159 A sprightly melody in the fi rst violin interrupts the cool mood briefl y at m. 24, although the nonchalantly intertwining of the beginning still persists. Aft er a transitional crescendo, this contrapuntal texture gives way to the most “Bulgarian”-sounding material in the movement (Example 4.14(b)): to borrow from Rice’s descriptions of Mikrokosmos no. 113 and no. 150, the “constant motoric rhythm of the bass part is typical of Bulgarian instrumental dance melodies,” and “the movable-drone accompaniment completes the Bulgarian impression,” even

156. Schneider, Bartók, Hungary, and the Renewal of Tradition , 237.

157. Brăiloiu, “Le rythme Aksak.”

158. Rice, “Béla Bartók and Bulgarian Rhythm,” 198; Rice’s Bartók citation taken from Benja-min Suchoff , Guide to Bartók’s Mikrokosmos , 138.

159. In “Béla Bartók: Th e Possibility of Musical Integration in the Danube Basin,” 162.

Example 4.14 Bartók’s String Quartet no. 5 (1934), 3rd movement. (a) Scherzo, mm 1–7: nonchalant, with walking bass (b) Scherzo, mm. 36–40: rough, rhythmic, Bulgarian “folksy” (c) Trio, mm. 9–23: “Hungarian rhythms” fl oating over Bulgarian meter

Example 4.14 (continued)


though “a melodic phrase that begins aft er the fi rst beat and crosses bar lines [has] no analogues in Bulgarian music.” 160

Th e Trio section off ers a stark contrast: aft er the cool atmosphere of the opening is reestablished in a transitional section, a new mood emerges with a shimmery, utterly un-folksy accompaniment over which a mixed-meter melody fl oats. For this passage, looking beyond the Bulgarian label to a partly Hungarian one points to a more provocative interpretation (see Example 4.14(c)). Even though Bartók completed this piece more than three decades aft er he graduated from the Academy of Music, aft er several published jabs at the sentimentality of the “Hun-garian style” topos and a handful of whacks at the rigid way it was conceived of and taught by scholars and critics of the previous generation, one prominent com-ponent of that topos stands out in this Trio: Hungarian rhythm, the element most strongly emphasized in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature on “Hungarian style.” Aft er his decades of immersion in a wide variety of East Euro-pean folk musics, Bartók integrated this element with elements from diff erent national styles of “genuine folk music”: “the subject of the trio section is . . . rem-iniscent of a characteristic type of Hungarian [bagpipe] song,” “the structure of thirds [in the trio melody] is an almost fundamental characteristic of Slovak folk music,” and “this kind of dotting in a ratio of 3:2 occurs frequently in Romanian colindas .” 161 According to Kárpáti, these rhythms appear in a pattern made up of “choriambic and antispastic version[s], similar to the adaptable rhythm of the Hungarian folksong.” 162 But as has been shown here, the antispastic version was a rarely used aspect of that adaptation; it did not emerge from Bartók’s fi eld collec-tions, but instead persisted from an earlier discourse, the “Hungarian rhythm” taught by Molnár and Ábrányi and used by Liszt, Mosonyi, Erkel, Mihalovich, and others. We might even view the fi ve-beat, “Bulgarian”/“Romanian” versions of these rhythms as Bartók’s take on Molnár’s expanded idea of these “typically Hun-garian rhythms” discussed earlier. Th e residue of Hungary’s “national style,” as theorized over decades by academics from the middle of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth, is refracted through a folklore-based multicul-tural lens of Bartók’s own making.

It would obviously be foolish to attempt to trace the appearance of any of these “Hungarian rhythms” or their manipulations purely to the infl uence of Géza Mol-nár, whether through his class at the Academy of Music or his textbook. Th e kind of symmetrical construction of musical materials found in Suite no. 2 or the “Bul-garian” version of the choriambus and antispastus is also akin to the classical mo-tivic manipulation found in a study of Beethoven, whose music, as has already been discussed, continued to occupy a central role in the musical life of Budapest into the twentieth century, or Brahms, who was idealized by Hans Koessler, the composition teacher shared by Bartók, Kodály, and many other members of their

160. Rice, “Béla Bartók and Bulgarian Rhythm,” 198–199.

161. Kárpáti, “Bartók: Th e Possibility of Musical Integration,” 162–163.

162. In Bartók’s Chamber Music , 379.


circle. However, looking at the work of Molnár and his predecessors off ers impor-tant context to the fact that Bartók, Kodály, and others of their generation chose these particular motives to highlight and manipulate, and that scholars studying Bartók and Kodály in later generations have noticed these particular “Hungarian rhythms.” Th ough the Hungarian modernist composers may have disliked Mol-nár’s method both as pedagogy and as description of Hungarian music, they may still have absorbed something useful from it. Th ey also appear to have associated those rhythms with “Hungarianness” even when their “scientifi c” data did not support such a label—not surprising given that those rhythms had already been labeled as Hungarian for almost a century, and that they had been the subject of intensive promotion and scrutiny.

It is easy to overlook the scholarly contributions of fi gures like Kornél Ábrányi Sr. and Géza Molnár as manifestations of chauvinist conservatism that had no real impact on “geniuses” like Bartók. Th ese examples alert us to what we might miss if we do so. Hungary’s musical modernists scoff ed at dilettantes and foreign-trained academics who held up atomized motifs from Gypsy-style performance as Hungarian, and they pushed for a new, more rigorous scholarly model for un-derstanding Hungarian music; even so, none of these musicians could remain completely untouched by this environment. Th ese examples from Bartók’s work suggest a few of the ways that Hungary’s most prominent musical modernist remained engaged with the old-fashioned, academic Hungarian tradition he was so eager to dismiss.

CONCLUSIONS

Aft er Liszt’s bombshell of 1859, writers and musicians argued not only over the racial and national underpinnings of their music and how it should be sold to audiences at home and abroad. Many also tried to pinpoint its musical essence, what specifi c elements were necessary and suffi cient to make a composition Hun-garian, or to make listeners recognize it as such. At the same time that musicians were working under the banner of Beethoven and other canonical Austro-German composers to build a broader audience for cultivated music in Hungary, they were plagued by the anxieties of a “peripheral” culture: the fear that either their music would not be elevated enough to compete with the great German traditions, or that it would not be distinct enough from them, or both. Th is fear inspired an outpouring of writings treating the nation’s musical problems. A va-riety of writers from every corner of Hungary’s musical life argued over the polit-ical and aesthetic aspects of these problems, as shown in previous chapters. Th e evidence presented in this chapter suggests that they also took on the problem from a more practical standpoint, attempting to pinpoint the musical elements that would brand a piece or a passage as Hungarian—from broad strokes like genres and names to brief rhythmic patterns that could serve as atomistic icons of magyarság .

From the vantage point of the most progressive writers of the time, and from today’s point of view, the features and procedures some writers recommended to


Hungarian composers do not seem terribly compositionally useful: Ábrányi’s system was far too limiting, while Géza Molnár’s seemed both too convoluted to use and not particularly grounded in Hungary’s musical traditions. In the back-ground of this discourse, too, Hungarian composers faced the problem of nation-alist composition, to be created by insiders, with solutions that at their core came from “the workshop of exoticism,” representing Hungary as an Other. 163 Th e most successful composers of the Hungarian-Gypsy style, including Liszt, took on the subjective persona of the rhapsodizing Gypsy musician, even as they bounded that rhapsodizing with positivistic prescriptions.

By shift ing the basis of national composition to “genuine” folksong, especially the most isolated, unfamiliar kinds of examples, Bartók, Kodály and their col-leagues also shift ed the Hungarian composer’s power position with respect to their material. Th ey saw knowledge of the folk tradition, the “musical mother tongue,” as an essential touchstone for Hungarian culture; but the folk and the folksong were something for these modern(ist)s to study, not to be. In the place of the rules promulgated by the discourse on Hungarian rhythm, rules created in part to expand the distance between the Gypsy performers who had made Hun-garian rhythm famous, “genuine folk music” was an organic thing completely sep-arate from the everyday lives of composers; its innate mystical force could only be understood through expeditions out of the cosmopolitan capital into the country-side that only further emphasized the barrier between “us,” the unfortunately ur-banized, and “them,” the idealized rural community. In addition to locating musical sources, these journeys served as a reminder that, as Debussy wrote in 1913 about the Javanese musicians who inspired some of his memorable composi-tions, “there were, and still are, despite the evils of civilization, some delightful native peoples for whom music is as natural as breathing.” 164

Th e shift in positioning fi nessed the practical diffi culty of translating musical traits from one side to the other. No one was going to teach musicians from the cultivated tradition to become folk musicians or to write folksong; they studied composition as its own discipline, and the aim of teaching composition was, in Kodály’s words, “to help everyone develop their personalities” 165 —individual composers still had to fi nd their own voice. An outlook nebulously based on re-learning one’s “musical mother tongue” kept the national essence at the center of the discourse, while restoring to composers the freedom to pursue genius-inspired innovation as modern European subjects.

By comparison, many musicians, emphatically including Bartók, saw the wide-spread tendency to reduce “Hungarian character” to rhythmic patterns as simplistic,

163. As James Parakilas argues Falla did with “‘national’ Spanish style” in “How Spain Got a Soul,” 192-193.

164. Cited in Taylor, Beyond Exoticism , 87.

165. In Magyar zene, magyar nyelv, magyar vers. Kodály Zoltán hátrahagyott írásai [Hungar-ian music, Hungarian language, Hungarian verse: Writings left behind by Zoltán Kodály], 88–89; cited by Anna Dalos, “‘It is not a Kodály School, but it is Hungarian’: A Concept and Its History,” 157.


anti-creative, and not really Hungarian. Th e fact that the “theories of Hungarian music” that preceded Bartók did not inspire the great hoped-for school of composi-tion, though, does not make them irrelevant. For one thing, knowing what some of these theories said provides needed context to some of the otherwise bewildering rants of Bartók and his circle. For another, we cannot accept the word of Bartók and his followers on this topic as fi nal: despite their distaste for it, the legacy of nineteenth-century Hungarian musical nationalism, emphatically including Géza Molnár et al., left a subtle mark on Bartók, both his prose and his compositions. When we break down what the Hungarian musical modernists tended to lump to-gether as “establishment” into its component parts, we uncover a rich dialogue between factions, and we gain insight into the problems they confronted.

In this and the previous chapters, I have brought together a variety of materials from a wide array of sources to create a textured portrait of the complex musical world of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Hungary, a context shaped profoundly by Liszt and the reaction to his work, the “rules” of which then changed drastically in response to the challenge Bartók and his supporters leveled at them. In that eff ort, I have allowed myself to roam fairly freely through time collecting clues to the way Hungarians thought about music and their nation. Chapter 5 takes a diff erent approach. During a brief period before World War I, mainly 1910–1914, we see various members of Bartók’s circle acting as cosmopol-itan modernists as well as nationalists. Th e story of this period distills many of the themes of this study, addressing what it meant to present either Hungarian music or new music to a Hungarian audience.

5

Cosmopolitan Nationalist Modernism

Promoting and Composing Modern Hungarian Music

Forgive me if I interfere in questions that are perhaps none of my concern . . . it’s just that I’m utterly devoted to music—not just French music!—so I’m always sad to see its riches being wasted; or people misinterpreting its true feeling, I could say: its national feeling !

We have too much German infl uence in France, we’re still being suff ocated by it. Don’t you go the same way.

—Claude Debussy, letter to Gusztáv Bárczy (December 19, 1910) 1

[Bartók and Kodály] went to fi nd Debussyism and Ravelism at the heart of villages in Hungary. At the same time that they reached the roots of folklore, they discovered modernists in excess. Th at is their originality; from that came the novelty of their work, so bold, so untraditional . . . . To us, it takes on another value. We see the seeds of a national art that has been expected and hoped for there for a long time . . . . Its tones evoke the harsh monotony of the Hungarian landscape, the plains where the sun grows red and the crickets sing . . . . And we love it as we love our native ground, our mother!

—Sándor Kovács, “La jeune école hongroise” (1911) 2

Th e discourses of “Hungarian style” discussed in the previous three chapters were framed primarily in a domestic context, defi ning that style in the context of local history for a predominantly local audience, though with many international refer-ents. Although, as I have illustrated, Bartók and his circle spoke directly to the

1. Debussy Letters , 232–233. Adapted on basis of original text, in Debussy, Lettres 1884–1918 , 202.

2. Kovács, “La jeune école hongroise,” 57, 59.

Cosmopolitan Nationalist Modernism 231

concerns of that preexisting national discourse, in other ways they contrasted with the status quo: they juxtaposed their vision of Hungarian modernist compo-sition with modernism in the artistic centers of Europe, implicitly arguing simul-taneously for the international relevance of modern Hungarian music and for the national relevance of musical modernism in Hungary. Here I show how, more than their predecessors, they used this shift to position themselves on the same concert platform as stars like Debussy and Busoni, and to argue the equivalence of Hungarian modernism with that growing up elsewhere in Europe.

We may term this stance “cosmopolitan nationalist modernism.” Cosmopoli-tanism was featured early in this study, as was Hungarians’ ambivalence sur-rounding it. Liszt was seen as less Hungarian because of his international career, but the planners of his centennial commemoration in Budapest were also deter-mined to show their own cosmopolitanism by featuring international guests and playing down the most famous of Liszt’s Hungarian-style works. Defi ning fi gures in Hungarian music criticism like Kornél Ábrányi and Géza Molnár owed their legitimacy in part to their foreign training, but they worked to defi ne Hungarian style in opposition to foreign infl uences and modern trends.

Th e polemics Bartók and his colleagues published in the prewar period likewise emphasized the national and eschewed foreign connections that their authors had clearly worked hard to develop. While Bartók’s 1911 essay “A magyar zenér ő l” (On Hungarian music) acknowledged the relationship many heard between his and other modernist Hungarians’ compositions and the mainstream of modern Euro-pean composition, it also stressed the foundation of their novelty, not in their cos-mopolitan infl uences but in their authentic Hungarianness:

Some composers may appear here . . . who endow their compositions with common features which do not exist in music born on foreign soil . . . . Th ese might be common features that originate out of the interconnection of the composers leading a common life, or it might happen under the infl uence of genuine Hungarian folk music. Naturally this style will also bear the stamp of twentieth-century music. Th ose with faulty ears will call such infl uence Strauss-like, or Reger-like, or Debussy-like, for they will not be able to sense the subtle nuances.

. . . I even dare to say that an oddity built on the customary major-minor scales and chromatic motion of the West Europeans is closer to the Hungar-ian “critic” than the Asiatic “frightfulness” of a simple ancient Székely melody. 3

While Bartók rejected foreign infl uence in front of his Hungarian audience, however, he and his colleagues were advocates for Hungarian music abroad and

3. BBÍ 1 , 99. Translation in BBE , 302, adapted on basis of original text. Th e Székely (Szeklers) are an ethnic group from the eastern part of Transylvania, part of Hungary under the Austro-Hungarian Empire, now part of Romania; although their precise origins are murky, they speak Hungarian. Many of the songs at the core of what Bartók called the “old style” (and thus the most Hungarian) of Hungarian folk music were collected in the Székely region.


for foreign modernist composition in Hungary, and they sought to develop con-nections with modernist composers across Europe. Documents like Debussy’s 1910 letter cited earlier demonstrate the intertwining of the international music scene with musical nationalism: in it a Frenchman encourages Hungarian musi-cians in their eff ort to promote “national feeling” and purge excess German infl uence in their work. Of course, Hungarian modernists were interested in this eff ort long before Debussy off ered his advice, and given the fi ndings of their folk music research, they were not inclined to accept Debussy’s exhortation (in the same letter) to “have more respect for your Gypsies” as a proper representation of that “national feeling.” 4 Th is irony notwithstanding, Debussy’s letter—in which the celebrated French composer, writing shortly aft er a concert appearance in Buda-pest, comments on a young Hungarian disciple, Géza Vilmos Zágon (1890–1918)—represents a little-known connection between Hungarian musical modernism and a major contemporary fi gure from the “panromanogermanic mainstream.”

The second epigraph, from Sándor Kovács’ (1886–1918) “La jeune école hongroise,” published less than a year later, illustrates how another of Hungary’s musical modernists made the connection between the experimental “boldness” of their eff orts and their connections to the “native ground.” Writings by members of this circle in Hungarian and German, as well as this one in French, all argued for the international recognition of their brand of Hungarian national modernism, both in its originality and its national character. Th is chapter illustrates the inter-twining of national and international facets of Hungarian musical modernism through the activities not only of Bartók and Kodály but also their lesser-known colleagues, especially Kovács and Zágon.

AUSTRO-GERMAN VERSUS FRENCH CONNECTIONS

Given Hungary’s proximity to Austria and the long-standing interdependency between Hungarian and Austro-German culture, the many linkages between Hungarian musical modernists at the beginning of the twentieth century are expected. Both Bartók and Kodály spent substantial time in Austria and Germany in the fi rst decade of the twentieth century. A culmination of that time, of sorts, is the programming of works by both men at the May 1910 Zürich Tonkünstlerfest of the Allgemeine Deutsche Musikverein: Bartók’s Rhapsody for Piano and Orches-tra op. 1, with Bartók himself as soloist, as well as Kodály’s String Quartet no. 1, programmed at Bartók’s suggestion. 5

Two leaders of Austro-German musical modernism, Ferruccio Busoni and Arnold Schoenberg, as well as Schoenberg pupil Egon Wellesz, also had long-standing connections with Hungary’s musical modernists. Bartók had been acquainted with Ferruccio Busoni since 1903; aft er that initial contact, Busoni had

4. Debussy Letters , 232.

5. On the Zürich festival, see Weiß, “Béla Bartók, Zoltán Kodály und der Allgemeine Deut-sche Musikverein,” 7–11. See reference to criticism of Bartók’s Rhapsody in Chapter 4 .


programmed one of Bartók’s works on his concert series, with Bartók as conductor, and also facilitated Breitkopf & Härtel’s contract with Bartók to edit various Hungar-ian-style works of Liszt for the Gesamtausgabe . 6 One of Bartók’s piano students, Imre Balabán (1889–1947), keeping him informed of musical activities in Budapest, par-ticularly planned performances of Schoenberg’s works by his Hungarian sup-porters—that is, Bartók’s circle, and sharing some of Bartók’s scores; additionally, Balabán ventured twice to ask Schoenberg to become a member of the New Hungar-ian Music Society (Új Magyar Zene-Egyesület, abbreviated UMZE), the short-lived group Bartók and his colleagues had founded in 1911. 7 Wellesz, who was himself of Hungarian Jewish descent, was more directly engaged with the Budapest modernist circle: he wrote a ballet on a scenario by Kodály’s university roommate and Bartók’s librettist Béla Balázs, published his fi rst scores in Budapest with Bartók’s publisher, and praised Bartók and Kodály in the Viennese music journal Der Merker . 8

Th ese personal connections might be viewed as a result of Hungary’s “Central Europeanness,” that is, its geographic and cultural-historical proximity to the German-speaking world. In general, direct connections between Hungarian modernists and the French music scene were more transient than those in the German-speaking world, but in many ways they were more decisive. It was pos-sible at the time “fairly cheaply to be a perpetual student, traveling all over Europe in search of the new”; 9 more specifi cally, for Hungary’s so-called generation of 1900, 10 it “veritably became [their] passion always to discover . . . in every way, newer and newer regions of the cult of France.” 11 Hungarian modernists in a va-riety of media saw “ ‘French spirit’ . . . as a counterweight to the German spirit that had reigned since the foundation of the country.” 12

In Hungary’s music scene, French infl uence was sought as a combined nation-alist and modernist tool, as “Th e domestic popularity of Debussy’s, Ravel’s, and César Franck’s works aft er 1900 presented itself as the reaction against over-whelming Wagnerism.” 13 As he was preparing to travel to Paris in 1907, Kodály

6. Dille, “Les relations Busoni-Bartók.”

7. See Breuer’s “Schoenberg and His Hungarian Advocates” on the details of Balabán’s letters to Schoenberg. A review in Pesti Hírlap of UMZE’s fi rst concert, reproduced in Demény, “Bartók Béla művészi kibontakozásának évei,” 404, refers to Bartók as the group’s “founder and, properly speaking, soul.”

8. Benser, Egon Wellesz , 8–9, 14; see also Chapter 4 of this book.

9. Franklin, “Introduction,” 9.

10. Lukacs, Budapest 1900 , 137–181.

11. Aladár Kuncz (1885–1931), in his novel Fekete kolostor [Black monastery] (1931), cited by Illyés, “Frankofília 1.

12. Illyés, “Frankofília,” 4.

13. Illyés, “Frankofília,” 4.


implied a national-modernist understanding of French music when he wrote in a letter to Bartók of the “original point of view” he expected to fi nd in “a people who are so diff erent from the Germans.” 14 In addition to Kodály’s and Bartók’s implicit and explicit references to Debussy in their compositions, Bartók’s writings and interviews from this time emphasized the importance Debussy over German composers like Strauss and Reger. 15

While in their Francophilia, as in other aspects, Bartók’s and Kodály’s activities are best known, the French connections and activities of two other young (and tragically short-lived) composers of their circle were instrumental in furthering the reputations of Hungarian muscians in prewar Paris. Th e fi rst such link between French and Hungarian modernists was Géza Vilmos Zágon, who developed a rep-utation in Hungary as a performer of Debussy’s music around 1910. He also culti-vated a scholarly and personal connection with Debussy, writing a brief “life and works” of Debussy preceding the latter’s concert appearance in Budapest in Decem-ber 1910 and forwarding his own scores to the French composer through concert organizer Gusztáv Bárczy aft er they met on that occasion. 16 Shortly aft er UMZE’s activities ceased in spring 1912, Zágon moved to Paris, where he spent much of 1912–1913; in April and May 1913 he wrote a handful of letters to Bartók reporting on his associations with various musicians, including Debussy, Vuillermoz, Calvocor-essi, Écorcheville, Laloy, and Harold Bauer, and requesting certain scores in order to share them with his French colleagues or to try to have them played in Paris. 17

Th e second link was Sándor Kovács, whom Bartók may have met on his 1909 trip to Paris. 18 It was Kovács who organized the March 12, 1910, chamber concert there, featuring works by the star graduate of Budapest’s Academy of Music, pianist-conductor-composer Ern ő Dohnányi, then teaching in Berlin, and fi ve members of the Academy faculty: director Ödön Mihalovich, piano department head Árpád Szendy, and the three who a year later became the best-known members of

14. From a March 23, 1907, letter to Bartók, cited in Gergely Fazekas, “Debussy fogadtatása Magyarországon (1900–1918),” 142.

15. In his Modell és inspiráció Bartók zenei gondolkodásában [Model and inspiration in Bartók’s musical thought], 9–14.

16. Zágon’s relevant articles are “Claude Debussy” and “Debussy műveir ő l” [On Debussy’s works]. Antal Molnár noted that “at that time, with the exception of Viñes, Zágon performed Debussy’s piano works the most stylistically” ( Magamról, másokról [About myself, about others], 191). In a December 19, 1910, letter to Bárczy, Debussy promised to review the scores and noted that Zágon was “full of promise” [plein d’avenir] ( Lettres 1884–1918 , 202). De-bussy’s letter is also reproduced in Hungarian translation in Viktor Lányi’s article “Debussy és a magyar népzene” [Debussy and Hungarian folk music], 38.

17. Zágon’s letters to Bartók are published in German translation in his “Briefe an Bartók.” While little else is known about Zágon’s musical activities in France, his integration into the French musical scene of the time is demonstrated by these letters and by his ability to arrange a premiere of his song cycle Pierrot lunaire on a concert of the Société Musicale Indépen-dante, co-founded by Ravel, on December 13, 1913, in the Salle Pleyel.

18. See Stevens, Life and Music , 45.


UMZE—Weiner, Kodály, and Bartók. Bartók traveled to Paris to perform his, Kodály’s, and Szendy’s works on the program; this so-called Festival hongrois was the event that “called attention abroad to the new Hungarian musical movement for the fi rst time.” 19 Just over one month later, on April 20, 1910, Zoltán Kodály’s piano works were performed on the inaugural concert of Ravel’s Société Musicale Indépendante. 20 It seems likely that this performance came about because of connections made through the earlier concert, since Kodály was still little known as a composer at that time and several major Parisian musical fi gures attended the Festival hongrois , in-cluding Émile Vuillermoz, supporter of Société Musicale Indépendante and “ardent defender of Ravel.” 21 In late 1911, as a member of UMZE—then still preparing for its fi rst concerts and full of hopeful energy—Kovács introduced the same composers whose works had appeared on the March 1910 concert in “La jeune école hongroise,” the article quoted in the chapter’s epigraph. In this piece he narrated the progress from Koessler and Mihalovich, the teachers who “founded the new school through their didactic evangelism,” to Bartók and Kodály, those who “have accomplished the revolution.” 22 His claim that Bartók and Kodály “went to fi nd Debussyism and Rav-elism at the heart of villages in Hungary” captures both the Hungarian modernists’ idealization of the French modernists and the direct link they made between cosmo-politan modernism and the traditional music of rural Hungary.

HISTORICIST MODERNISM IN HUNGARY

Kovács’ article also illustrates the connections between the value the Hungarian modernists placed on originality and their desire to use materials and techniques from the more distant past: what Richard Taruskin called the “neo-classicizing impulse” 23 and Walter Frisch called “historicist modernism.” Th e seriousness of the Hungarian modernists, like the examples from Max Reger and Ferruccio Busoni that Frisch cites, contrasts with “the wit and detachment that we associ-ated with the neoclassicism that emerged in the years just aft er World War I.” 24 Also as in Reger and Busoni, in Hungary’s modernist works of this period,

19. BBL , 880. Bartók’s letters to Kovács about arrangements for the concert appear in BBL , 159–161; in one of them, dated March 5, 1910, Bartók wrote of his hope that “Many musicians should come to the concert, this is the main thing” ( BBL , 160). A review appears in A zene 2, no. 4 (April 1910), 67–68. Th e Paris concert was one of the fi rst performances of Kodály’s compositions.

20. Duschesneau, “Maurice Ravel et la Société Musicale Indépendante,” 261.

21. Duschesneau, “Maurice Ravel et la Société Musicale Indépendante,” 259. Kovács sent Bartók a clipping of Vuillermoz’s and others’ reviews of the concert to which Bartók referred in a letter of March 19, 1910.

22. Kovács, “La jeune école hongroise,” 48, 56.

23. Taruskin, “Back to Whom?” 287.

24. Frisch, German Modernism , 139. Works by both Reger and Busoni appeared on UMZE’s concert programs.


musical techniques from the remote past are used prominently and vigor-ously as a way of achieving a distance from late Romantic styles. Historicist modernism is not nostalgic or conservative in any traditional sense. It repre-sents an attempt to bridge a historical gap without denying it, collapsing it, or retreating over it to return to the past. 25

Frisch’s formulation of historicist modernism, like most discussions of neo-classicism, looks to historical art-music repertoire as that resource from the remote past. Writings and programming decisions by members of Bartók’s circle make clear that the “authentic folk music” so heavily stressed in Hungarian dis-course acted as the rural fl ip side to the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century music performed by early music advocates elsewhere: both are old enough to have become strange, and therefore new again. UMZE’s pairing of Bartók’s and Kodály’s folksong settings in all their “perfectly plain, objective simplicity” 26 with Rameau, Couperin, Scarlatti, and Bach in the Society’s fi rst concert, and with new music by Debussy, Ravel, Mussorgsky, Wellesz, Reger, and Weiner in its second, off ers a textbook illustration of how the progressive and the ancient were consid-ered to be “two aspects of the same tradition, complementary sides of the histor-icist mainstream.” 27 Sympathetic critics highlighted the link between the very old and the very new and invoked the power of early music to break away from the immediate past, as in this anonymous review of UMZE’s fi rst concert, held on November 27, 1911:

It is not diffi cult to uncover the interdependence between these old musics, already fallen into oblivion, and the most recent activities: among UMZE’s goals is the bridging of the void dug by the centuries, in which the music of the nineteenth century is positioned like a fearful bastion. We do not want to tear down this bastion, only make a breach in it, so that the view will open and fresh air will fl ow up to us. 28

Another anonymous writer, reviewing the same concert, both saw the mod-ernism of the historicist mainstream and argued that UMZE showed Hungary participating in it, through his discussion of this parallel between the French Baroque and Bartók’s and Kodály’s folksong settings on the concert:

Béla Bartók certainly did not play Couperin and Rameau because they are French and old. Rather, he searched in them for the limits of the expressive power of music; he demonstrated that the accompaniments he wrote to the

25. Frisch, German Modernism , 139.

26. Bartók, “Liszt Problems,” BBE , 506–507.

27. Burkholder, “Museum Pieces,” 123–24.

28. Quoted in ZT III , 404.


interpolated Hungarian songs are not “musical absurdities,” because, you see, it is as if Rameau were speaking in Hungarian, truly in Hungarian. 29

Th e link between national sources and international historicist modernism also featured in the criticism of psychiatrist-author and longtime Bartók sup-porter Géza Csáth. In his review of UMZE’s fi rst concert, he praised the “modern,” “wistful” folksong performances, based on “genuine, valuable elements of folk music suitable for development into art music”—by contrast with “Gypsy nótas”—and also stressed the link between this goal and the group’s eff ort to “revive those great creations of ancient music which today’s classical [period]-adoring music culture has pushed into the background . . . . Th eir goal is the kind of reappraisal that [English art critic John] Ruskin accomplished in visual-art aesthetics at the end of the last century.” 30

Géza Vilmos Zágon’s March 1911 review of a Sándor Kovács publication, of Kovács’ own piano works along with those by “Old Masters,” brought together many of these historicist-modernist threads. First Zágon wrote of the importance of early music to contemporary musicians and contrasted the rarity and expres-sive power of Monteverdi, the “pure source,” with the period’s glut of “Wagner-lust” (the latter also a theme in Debussy’s writings). 31 Th en Zágon moved from a discussion of the early Italian and English keyboard works in Kovács’ collection to “the ancient aroma that lies hidden in the use of the church modes,” from the church modes to the “racial music of the most widely diff erentiated peoples” that use these modes and the contrast between the “poor, yellowed, faded leading-tone music” of recent art music and “the fresh, deep tinted green of the church modes” found in folk music and newer compositions based on it. Th is claim served to introduce Bartók and the uniqueness of his folk-derived compositions, particu-larly Gyermekeknek (For children),

which he created with the use of original Hungarian folksongs that he had collected . . . . [Th ese volumes] relate the story of Hungarian pleasure and grief, Hungarian pride and pain, but not distorted by the Gypsies’ fl ourishes or the great virtuosi’s arrangements; but rather truly, deeply, with almost shocking directness, oft en with a metaphysical thrill throughout. 32

29. Anonymous review in Magyarország , November 29, 1911, as reproduced in ZT III , 405. See Hooker, “Modernism on the Periphery,” for a detailed history of UMZE.

30. In A muzsika mesekertje , 498, reproducing a review originally published in November 1911.

31. “Gondolatok régi és új muzsikáról” [Th oughts on old and new music], 270: “Th ese days (especially in Germany) fashionable [and] endless Wagner-lust and Wagner-commentary has already led many talents to ruin who perhaps were worth more. In opposition to this, there is Monteverdi . . . . Th e water at the source is pure and transparent . . . woe to the one who embarks on the great voyage without the pure water of the source: the ocean can only off er the tortures of thirst to his lips.”

32. Zágon, “Gondolatok régi és új muzsikáról,” 272–73.


Th e linkage of Hungarian folk music to the church modes in Zágon’s review shows both the Hungarian modernists’ neoclassicizing strategy in action and their idealization of folksong, collected scientifi cally using modern technology (the phonograph). Instead of continuing to rely on the proven vehicle for “naïf ” international appeal, the Hungarian-Gypsy style, these musician-critics con-cerned themselves with a broad spectrum of repertoire, with Hungarians on equal footing with the panromanogermanic mainstream—thus setting up Hungary as part of that mainstream. Th is move implicitly argued against the previous limita-tions placed on “peripheral” composers to create a space in which members of the group could aspire to be accepted as theoretical equals of Busoni and Schoenberg, Debussy and Ravel, Bach and Rameau.

A possible argument against applying Frisch’s defi nition of historicist mod-ernism to Bartók’s circle might be that the use of folksong is not as clearly a “tech-nique” as polyphony, that defi ning element of so much early music, and an element with associations not only of ancientness but also of seriousness. Polyphony was a “universal” technique that required learning and that was used in “signifi cant” works of the panromanogermanic mainstream. By contrast, the use of folksong and national style was generally perceived as a superfi cial fl avoring, even a mask; in Liszt’s oeuvre, for instance, most outside of Hungary perceived his Hungarian-Gypsy style works as peripheral and his Hungarian activities as incidental to his biography—excursions, or even “exile,” in the provinces. Th is circle of musicians, led by Bartók, refused to be bound by this conception of Hungarian music as a marginal stylistic fl avor, and one of his supporters, Antal Molnár, appeared to respond to that elevation of polyphonic technique over folksong substance with this reversal in his 1913 “A népdalról” (On folksong): “Polyphony has presented us with a billion moods, but the basic feeling, the fundamental motive, the prevailing mood that resides in the true artist as his consciousness . . . is the air of the simple, monophonic folksong.” 33 Th at is, polyphony was a mere mood-setter, while folk-song was a far more basic element. Folksong and early music were important to the Hungarian modernists for the same reason: because they stripped away the frippery and sentimentality associated with the late Romantic period in general and with Hungarian music of that period in particular.

While both early music and folksong avoided the sentimentality of Romanti-cism, however, folksong also escaped those sins associated with the urban centers of the West: where the West was tainted with cosmopolitanism and alienating decadence, the “true folk music” of the East that this group celebrated was distin-guished by its “absolute” primitive purity. 34 Engagement with folksong through modern “scientifi c” means allowed these artist-scholars to assume the authority of Western positivism, while at the same time leading their audience on what

33. Molnár, “A népdalról,” 56. More on the racial elements of this passage in Chapter 3 .

34. See Bartók’s “Hungarian Folk Music,” included in BBE , 4: “true folk music is always dis-tinguished by absolute purity of style.”


Taruskin has called “a journey back to where [they] had never been.” 35 Th e imag-inary landscape of the idealized rural past promised both to provide novel mu-sical elements and to recoup what had been lost through the alienation of modern urban life, leading to a “primal” and “full-blooded” art music for the future. 36

MODERNISM IN COMPOSITION: MOLNÁR AND ZÁGON

Th e comparisons made by Antal Molnár and Géza Vilmos Zágon among Hungar-ian folk music, early music, and Western European modernist compositions in their writings both drew the Hungarians and their works into the cosmopolitan mainstream and highlighted their separateness from that mainstream. Some ex-amples from Molnár’s and Zágon’s own compositions provide additional context for this discussion as they show combinations of national and international—that is, Hungarian and French—stylistic elements in their music as well as their prose.

Molnár’s Sonatine pour violon et piano (1909–1911) distinguishes itself with a lucid texture and tonal ambiguity reminiscent of Ravel (see Example 5.1). Th ough its violin melody clearly places the piece in A minor, G does not appear until m. 6 and only in mm. 12–13 is it used as the leading tone to A. Even then Molnár carefully avoids conventional dominant-tonic progressions, instead using a G diminished-7th chord. Th ough Bartók cautions us in “On Hungarian Music” against mistaking the infl uence of Hungarian folk music for something “Strauss-like, or Reger-like, or Debussy-like,” neither the shape of the melody nor the rhythm nor the kind of tonal ambiguity found here are at all suggestive of the pentatonic Hungarian folksong; rather, everything about this piece points to early twentieth-century France as the most likely source of inspiration, from the cool white-note opening and nonchalantly wandering harmony to the use of the French language on the outside cover. Even the composer’s given name, “Antoine,” the composer’s dedication “A mon cher ami IMRE WALDBAUER,” and the pub-lisher’s copyright mark are rendered in French in this Hungarian publication. Th e choice to publish titles in a more widely distributed language was not uncommon among Hungarian composers, though German was more oft en used. Molnár’s Sérénade pour Violon, Clarinette et Harpe , published by Rózsavölgyi in 1911, was similar in its use of French musical and linguistic features.

None of Zágon’s works appear to have been published; however, he too left ev-idence of his interest in a wide-ranging internationalist kind of modernism. In addition to his connections with Debussy and the modern French music scene, discussed earlier, he dived into the literary works of the most cutting edge writers of the period. Among his manuscripts are song settings of Symbolist poems in

35. Taruskin, “Back to Whom?” 287.

36. As Molnár writes in his “Neu-ungarische Musik,” 1417–1418: “Brought up with clas-sical music, [Bartók and Kodály] aspire to create forms appropriate to the new colors; as full-blooded men of the future, they draw the newest ideas into their art . . . . Th us there can be no talk of folk-like character [ Volkstümlichkeit ] in the usual sense . . . . Bartók’s Second Hungarian Suite is like nature events, primal, strong, fresh, sublime.”


three languages: Endre Ady’s “Fehér lyány virág-kezei” (White girl’s fl ower-hands), Stefan George’s “Die Gärten schliessen” (Th e gardens are locked), and selections from Albert Giraud’s Pierrot lunaire (Moonstruck Pierrot). 37 An addi-tional piano piece, Mystères , uses an Ady poem as an epigraph. 38 Like Molnár’s Sonatine , Zágon’s musical language is heavily infl uenced by the contemporary sounds of France, but his thicker textures, particularly the frequent use of series of parallel chords, and his occasional use of three staves to notate them on the piano evoke Debussy more than Ravel (see Example 5.2(a) and (b)). Th ere is a sugges-tion of the “Hungarian style” in Mystères , for example in the choriambus rhythms used in mm. 4–5 and the iambs in mm. 21–27. But given the moody feel imparted

Example 5.1 Antal Molnár, Sonatine pour violon et piano (1909–1911), mm. 1–17. (Publ. Rózsavölgyi és Tsa, 1912)

37. Országos Széchenyi Könyvtár (OSZK) Ms. Mus. 2009, Ms. Mus. 2011, and Ms. Mus. 2022/a–f, respectively. Th e manuscripts of Zágon’s Pierrot songs are dated 1908–1909, well before the 1912 premiere of Schoenberg’s settings of German translations from the same source, but Zágon’s songs were fi rst performed aft erward (see earlier discussion).

38. OSZK Ms. Mus. 2007.

Example 5.2 Géza Vilmos Zágon, Mystères pour piano (1911) (Országos Széchenyi Könyvtár [OSZK] Ms. Mus. 2007). (a) mm. 1–12 (b) mm. 21–27


by the Debussyan harmony, any conscious “Hungarianness” lurks in the deep background.

A diff erent sort of musical Hungarianness appears in the middle of Zágon’s “Fehér lyány” as the wandering chromaticism of the A section (mm. 1–28; see Example 5.3(a)) gives way in the contrasting B section, the beginning of the third stanza of the poem, to a pentatonic melody beginning in m. 29 whose accompa-niment begins with a rippling but clear E-fl at minor (see Example 5.3(b)). From m. 29 through the fi rst beat of m. 36, Zágon restricts himself to pitches in the E-fl at-centered pentatonic collection <E G A B D >. In the second two beats of m. 36, he shift s to F <F A B C E >, then, over a crescendo in the piano, grad-ually introduces other pitches–G in m. 37, D in m. 38, D in m. 39, G in m. 40, and C , F , and A in m. 41, thus completing the aggregate in mm. 37–41. Th e two pitches not appearing in m. 41, D (or E ) and A , are featured in mm. 42–43 as the tritone backbone of an altered pentatonic: <E G A C D>. Th e repeated (though respelled) progression in mm. 42–43 leads to what initially seems to be a transposition of the opening of the B section for the fourth stanza of text. Th e melody in mm. 44–46 is in fact equivalent to that in mm. 29–31, only a minor third higher. Th ough the accompaniment in m. 44 is restricted to the correspond-ing pentatonic scale <F A B C E>, the pentatonic character disintegrates as Zágon prepares the return of the A section.

In the context of the song, the sonic shift from chromatic to pentatonic and then gradually back to chromatic creates contrast to complement shift s in the

Example 5.3 Géza Vilmos Zágon, “Fehér lyány virág-kezei” (OSZK Ms. Mus 2009) (a) mm. 1–8 (b) mm. 25–46

Example 5.3 (continued)


subject of the text, from the fi rst two stanzas describing the beloved’s sublime “fl ower hands”:

Kezei, fehér, kis virágok, Her hands, white, little fl owers, Borzas, barna fejemre hulltak, dropped onto my disheveled brown

head, Ott elaléltak, szétsimultak Th ere they fainted, tousled [my hair]

soft ly Halkul s azután megremegtek. And aft erward trembled.

Mikor virág-szirmok peregnek, When fl ower-petals spin round, Heves halál-párfümök szállnak, Th ey carry passionate death-perfume, E két kis kezet, ezt éreztem, Th ese two small hands, I felt them, Omló szirmát egy fehér lyánynak. Falling petals of a white girl.

to a lament on the passing of time in the third and fourth stanzas:

Oh nyomos évek és árnyak, Oh oppressive years and shadows, Most hulltak e kezek fejemre, Now these hands have dropped onto

my head, Kicsi fehér, hónapos rózsák, Little white months-long roses, Forróhidegen dideregve. Shivering in boiling cold.

Hol van fürtjeim régi kedve, Where is my locks’ old mood, Mikor virágot várt, s nem lombot? When it awaited fl owers, and not

foliage? Kicsi kezek én már lerázlak, Little hands, already I brush you away, Kicsi alélt szirmok, bolondok. Little fainted petals, fools.

Zágon’s expansive descending pentatonic melody calls to mind what Bartók called old-style folksong, a style oft en associated with lamenting texts. Given the piano accompaniment, Zágon’s song cannot be performed in the parlando-rubato rhythm found in those songs; nevertheless, it is suggestive that Zágon used this type of melody as the high point of his song, to express the anguish of the protag-onist at that moment in the text.

Both Zágon’s and Molnár’s compositions are now almost completely forgotten; Zágon died of wounds suff ered in World War I before he really established him-self, while Molnár turned his energies toward criticism, scholarship, and teaching, and is remembered as one of the fi rst “to assign Bartók and Kodály to their proper place in music history.” 39 But this expression reveals nothing about that history beyond the slant toward “great men” in music historiography. In a musical world dominated by Austro-German music, infl ected in its lighter moments by the Gypsy style, Zágon’s and Molnár’s writings, in prose and in music, are important documents of the aesthetics of Hungarian musical modernism: they defi ned the

39. Várnai, “Molnár, Antal,” New Grove 16, 907. Várnai also highlighted Molnár’s “compre-hensive knowledge of all periods of music and his thorough insight into musical aesthetics.”


discursive distance between their vision of the Hungarian music of the future, on the one hand, and on the other, both the “distorted” past of Hungarian music and the bombast of Austro-German late Romanticism. Even as Zágon and Molnár proclaimed Hungarian peasant song as their model, they argued for its signifi -cance by linking both Bartók and folk music to international examples of recog-nized importance, and they used international sources in their musical language.

A COMMUNITY OF COSMOPOLITAN MODERNIST NATIONALISTS

Th e musical nationalism of Bartók’s circle had at its core not the use of autochtho-nous material in composition, the traditional litmus test for a musical nationalist, but the building of an active, varied, and cosmopolitan modern music scene in Hungary. Th ough folksong had a central role in their rhetoric, it was not neces-sarily only Hungarian folksong; the UMZE concert series pointedly included set-tings of folksongs from many countries—emphasizing an internationalist agenda that celebrated diff erent peoples and styles of composition, from countries both central and peripheral.

As Bartók wrote in a famous 1931 letter to his Romanian colleague Octavian Beu, “I don’t reject any infl uence, be it Slovakian, Romanian, Arabic or from any other source. Th e source must only be clean, fresh and healthy!” Bartók acknowl-edged that it was “the Hungarian source that was nearest” and therefore exerted the strongest infl uence; 40 nonetheless, the Hungarian modernists’ catholic ap-proach to sources, from folk music or early music, contrasted with the traditional chauvinistic kind of nationalism in ascendance in Hungary in the period, which may never have countenanced, for instance, the inclusion of a work by Romanian composer Enesco in a “Hungarian” concert series sponsored by UMZE. 41 Th e Hungarian musical modernists’ celebration of, and UMZE’s programming of, his-toricist modernist repertoire and historic repertoire alongside “integral mod-ernist” compositions like Schoenberg’s and Debussy’s 42 gave this group its unique

40. Th is January 10, 1931, letter is published in an English-language version of the German original in Béla Bartók Letters , 201; Hungarian version published in BBL , 396–399. Cited in Vikárius, “Bartók and Folklore,” 5. Klára Móricz discusses Bartók’s idea of “health” in her article “‘From Pure Sources Only,’” 243–266.

41. See Frigyesi, Béla Bartók and Turn-of-the-Century Budapest , 77–80, for a discussion of the political associations of “Gypsy music” versus Bartók and Kodály’s “genuine folk music.” Enesco’s Sonata for Piano and Violin was programmed for UMZE’s planned fi ft h concert, though that concert did not take place as planned (Hooker, “Modernism on the Periphery,” 287).

42. In his article “Reger’s Historicist Modernism,” Frisch outlines several diff erent modes through which modernist composers engage with the past. In integral modernism, “a tech-nique from the past is used in a way that is completely consistent with the prevailing style of the work” (733), exemplifi ed by a fugato section from the fi rst movement of Schoenberg’s First String Quartet, op. 7. In this passage, “Th e past is not worn ostentatiously; the historical principles become part of the modernist fabric of the work” (736).


stamp, and their radically inclusive approach to modernism in general also made an implicit argument for including Hungarians in the European modernist mainstream.

Th is study has examined the ways that the members of this group struggled both to deconstruct prevailing domestic discourses and to make themselves rele-vant to the international modern music scene. In the process they challenged both the prevailing aesthetics of their time and the way the musical categories of national and modern are usually perceived. Th e primary aesthetic category of the modernist center, the autonomous artwork, can always grow, indeed it must; but nationalist representations of various peripheries have oft en been presumed or even required to remain static lest they become inauthentic. Th ese assumptions, of course, do not adequately depict the use of native materials, the range of styles in which so-called peripheral composers write, nor the complex cultural and po-litical forces to which they respond. Nonetheless, they have guided the problem-atic reception of many peripheral composers, Bartók being a prime example. 43

Such limits on peripheral artists come from the inside as well as the outside. Hungarian music critics and scholars of the early twentieth century themselves oft en tried to limit their composers’ perceived excesses and urged them to main-tain their recognizably Hungarian (but also old-fashioned) qualities. In a few gen-eral examples of how critics and scholars enforced the stylistic status quo, both discussed in Chapter 3 , Dezs ő Járosy promoted a “classical” ideal of Hungarian racial music, and Géza Molnár warned student composers not to stray too far from “the healthy traditions of Hungarian music” lest “the universe of Hungarians not recognize him as a representative of itself.” 44 Th e restrictive formulae for Hun-garian rhythm promulgated by Kornél Ábrányi, Géza Molnár, and others, expli-cated in Chapter 4 , continued to have an eff ect long aft er their authors were forgotten. Th ose who criticized what one reviewer of the fi rst UMZE concert called the modernists’ “enthusias[m] for extremes” 45 oft en expressed doubts about the composers’ national authenticity at least as much as a simple dislike of mod-ern style. Even a favorable review of UMZE’s fi rst concert underlined the barriers between Hungarian composers and the international concert stage when it stated

43. A quick survey of music textbooks in English (admittedly a necessarily simplifi ed kind of source) fi nds Bartók categorized variously under “Ethnic Contexts” (Grout and Palisca, A History of Western Music , 680); “National Styles” (Salzman, Twentieth-Century Music , 69); and “Emerging National Aspirations” (Watkins, Soundings , 393–394). Stanley Sadie empha-sizes that Bartók’s career path “loosely matched the history of his country” ( Music Guide , 448), an idea rarely applied to “central” composers, while Joseph Kerman diminishes Bartók’s music as folksy or as “an alternative to modernism” ( Listen , 325–328)—that is, not modern at all.

44. Analysis , 194: “ Even the most independent individual who may be born in our age cannot overthrow the healthy traditions of Hungarian music . . . . If there is not this continuity between him and our entire musical-aff ective past, then the universe of Hungarians will not recognize him as a representative of itself.” Italics in original. Cf. Chapter 3 .

45. Review in Egyetértés (December 13, 1911), credited to na , as reproduced in ZT III , 411–412.


that Bartók’s and Kodály’s “modern-spirited, brilliant accompaniments gain the right of citizenship for Hungarian peasant folksong in European concert halls and put the true pearls of Hungarian musical genius before the eyes of the cultured West.” 46

Th is quotation, like others throughout this book, stresses the international aspects of creating a national music scene or national music. Th e international aspects of Bartók’s music and outlook were part of what made him and his circle so controversial in early twentieth-century Hungary, as illustrated by Gyula Major’s response to Egon Wellesz (discussed in Chapter 3 ). At the same time the important international connections of Hungary’s musical modernists are a crit-ical part of their story: Bartók’s with Busoni and Wellesz, Balabán’s with Schoen-berg, Zágon’s and Kovács’ with Debussy and other members of France’s musical avant-garde. Whereas histories of this period oft en depict Bartók as almost alone, with Zoltán Kodály his only friend in the musical world, the story told here shows the cosmopolitan Bartók in action, and it places his activities fi rmly in the under-studied context of other cosmopolitan modernist musicians responding to a rich if confl icted discourse of the status quo. Since documents unrelated to Bartók or Kodály are less likely to have been preserved, it is more diffi cult to know much about the motivations of other members of the group; nevertheless, the handful of surviving letters, published writings, and musical works brings to life a varied cast of characters who not only took aesthetic and intellectual inspiration from Bartók’s compositional and research agendas but also worked passionately on his behalf. Th is account of early twentieth-century Hungarian musical modernisms thus highlights the collaborative nature of eff orts to transform traditional notions of what Hungarian music meant.

Finally, the diffi culties the group faced along the way, including UMZE’s fail-ure, 47 reminds us that the emergence of Bartók and Kodály as national and inter-national stars was far from a foregone conclusion, but something that they and their advocates battled for at every step. Bartók and his colleagues probably were not completely surprised at their rejection by home audiences. Aft er all, they had become accustomed to shabby treatment by the “offi cial musicians” of Budapest, and this persecution, both real and imagined, could only add to the legend they were building for Bartók, the tortured genius. As Bartók’s international reputation grew, the lack of respect at home became an element of the narrative about his origins and the origins of his music.

Music history, like political history, is written by the winners. Bartók, as one of the most internationally successful composers of his generation, eventually changed the way Hungarians conceived of Hungarian music by the weight of his reputation and by sheer repetition. Coming as they did from a “peripheral” music culture like Hungary, Bartók and his supporters could literally write the story of a place many of his readers and listeners knew little else about. Th e story they wrote

46. Review in Népszava (November 28, 1911), credited to ni , as reproduced in ZT III , 406.

47. See Hooker, “Modernism on the Periphery,” 287–290.


eliminated all predecessors except the problematic Liszt, and all contemporaries except Kodály. Undervaluing the environment from which Bartók came served their narrative of the composer as misunderstood genius; but this approach also “grayed out” the connections between Bartók and his Hungarian forebears and between Bartók’s music and that of his urban, as well as rural, surroundings.

Ironically, some of the authors who wrote important early versions of Bartók’s history, such as Antal Molnár, all but erased not only the previous generation of “establishment” composers but also themselves from that history. A scholar is not expected to include himself in his subject—in fact, he is usually expected not to; but the interactions of biographers with their living subjects can be an important if usually untold element of history. For historians and anthropologists, it has long been recognized that “Literary processes . . . aff ect the ways cultural phenomena are registered,” that writers “cannot avoid expressive tropes, fi gures, and allegories that select and impose meaning.” 48 Th ese writers chose tropes that underlined their claim about the roots of “Hungarian national music” in a previously unknown but “pure” folklore, tropes that appealed to the widespread belief both in Hungary and abroad that peripheral composers should derive the substance of their works from autochthonous sources. Th ey also created a narrative that en-couraged contemporary critics and later historians to overlook the transnational urban concert scene in which those works were brought to life.

It may initially seem extreme to insist that Bartók’s folk music program must be understood as part of a battle over the heart of Hungarian music that began by 1859 with the publication of Liszt’s Des bohémiens . Th e oddity of this claim is one indicator of Bartók’s success, as he, Kodály, and generations of Hungarian music scholars and teachers cast doubt on the legitimacy of all but “peasant music taken in the narrower sense.” 49 By constructing his agenda as a correction of past errors about what folklore was “valid,” he and his supporters obscured the radical way that the modernists’ defi nition of Hungarian music revisited some of the same questions about Hungary’s place in the world that earlier critics had answered so diff erently.

48. Cliff ord, “Introduction: Partial Truths,” 4, 7. Scholars have only recently begun to subject musical biography as a genre to the examination demanded by the late-twentieth-century critical turn in the humanities; Jolanta T. Pekacz’s work is exemplary in this regard (see “Mem-ory, History and Meaning: Musical Biography and Its Discontents” and Musical Biography: Towards New Paradigms ).

49. See Bartók’s “What Is Folk Music?” BBE , 6. See original and notes on context in BÖÍ , 672-674.

Epilogue

“Liszt Is Ours!” versus “Liszt Problems”

[T]he Hungarian public draws Ferenc Liszt to its heart more than any-thing else; furthermore it is proper to propagate the Liszt cult . . . . From a national viewpoint this is doubly important, because every great man not only bears his nation before him, but he also directs the world’s eyes to-ward his homeland and enlarges its prestige.

—Jen ő Hubay, Foreword to Liszt Is Ours! (1936) 1

[T]he question is still before us today: why do people always prefer Liszt’s least important works, the ones that merely tickle the ears, and why do people still shrink from the more valuable but less fl ashy ones?

—Béla Bartók, “Liszt Problems” (1936) 2

In 1936, the 125th anniversary of Liszt’s birth and the fi ft ieth anniversary of his death, Europe’s musical world once again erupted in celebration. In Budapest the Liszt year opened on October 21, 1935, on the eve of Liszt’s 124th birthday, with a solemn mass at the overfl owing Coronation Church (now known as the Matthias Church) with a thousand invited guests, with the Minister of Religion and Public Education representing the government; the service was accompanied by a perfor-mance of “one of Liszt’s most grandiose masses,” the Mass for Esztergom. 3 Later that day, a festival meeting of the National Ferenc Liszt Society featured keynote speeches by Reichsmusikkammer president and Liszt biographer Peter Raabe and

1. Jen ő Hubay, “El ő szó” [Foreword], 7.

2. Originally: “Liszt-problémák,” his lecture upon being elected to the Hungarian Academy of Sciences; also appeared in Liszt a miénk! Translation adapted from that in BBE , 501, based on original text.

3. Gyula Novágh, “A Liszt emlékév eseményei” [Th e events of the Liszt commeoration year], 132.


Jen ő Hubay (1858–1937), longtime violin professor at the Academy of Music, the Academy director from 1920 to 1934, and one of the chief organizers of the events of this Liszt year. 4 Selections from these events were broadcast on Hungarian radio. 5

One indication of how far Hungarian musical institutions had come was the degree to which Hungarian personalities took part in celebrations abroad. In Bayreuth, the site of Liszt’s grave, where Winifred Wagner, Liszt’s granddaughter-in-law and Hitler’s faithful friend, acted as the “honorary patroness” ( Ehrenprotek-torat ) of the “Franz Liszt Gedenkwoche” (October 19–24, 1936), members of the Royal Hungarian Opera performed Die Legende von der heiligen Elisabeth on the fi rst evening of the festival and ballets choreographed to selected Hungarian Rhap-sodies on the second. On Liszt’s birthday, October 22, Peter Raabe gave a com-memorative lecture jointly with Kálmán d’Isoz (1878–1956), Franco-Hungarian musicologist and director of the music collection of the Hungarian National Mu-seum. 6 In Paris, the site of Liszt’s early triumphs, a commemorative performance in Liszt’s memory at the Sorbonne on June 9 featured (among other items) a Hungar-ian conductor, Tibor Harsányi, leading the orchestra of the Paris Philharmonic Society in Liszt’s Hungaria and the Piano Concerto in E-fl at, the latter with a Hun-garian piano soloist, Lajos Kentner. 7

As it had in 1911, Liszt’s legacy oft en acted as a proxy for the Hungarian nation. Gyula Novágh, the reporter summarizing Raabe’s remarks on Liszt, stressed that

[t]he outstanding scholar proved in an incontrovertible way that Ferenc Liszt was born of the Hungarian people, the Hungarian nation, was a depository of Hungarian genius, who in his whole life, in the course of the exceptional career that swept him up to Parnassus, always and repeatedly professed his faith in Hungarianness . Research determining whether Ferenc Liszt’s ancestors were Hungarian or German cannot unravel the matter entirely—but that is not important. What settles the question of Liszt’s Hungarianness once and for all is that Liszt always felt and professed to be Hungarian, and proved it in his deeds . 8

4. Hubay was also Bartók’s boss at the Academy of Music aft er World War I and his some-times nemesis: see Hubay’s and others’ criticism of Bartók for his 1920 publication on Ro-manian folk music and Bartók’s response in BÖÍ , 861–864 and 617–618, respectively. David Schneider comments on this matter in his book, and I write about it in “Transylvania and the Politics of the Musical Imagination.” In 1934 Bartók still considered his relationship with Hubay to be “utterly bad” (Schneider, Bartók, Hungary, and the Renewal of Tradition , 226).

5. A tizéves Magyar Rádió, 1925–1935 , 50.

6. See program booklet held in the Liszt Ferenc Emlékmúzeum és Kutatóközpont [Ferenc Liszt Memorial Museum and Research Center], Budapest, cat. # LGY 473 (K): 2, pp. 1–2. Of course this combination of events and personalities may also refl ect the growing cooperation between Nazi Germany and Horthyist Hungary.

7. See program booklet held in the Liszt Museum, cat. # 99621.

8. Novágh, “A Liszt emlékév eseményei,” 135.

“Liszt Is Ours!” versus “Liszt Problems” 251

Th e sentiment of this passage is not so remarkable, but its passion is—all of the italics are in the original. Th e reader surmises that this passion likely came more from Novágh than from Raabe. Other writings similarly took hold of this oppor-tunity for nationalist rhetoric. In the foreword to Liszt a miénk! (Liszt Is Ours!), the essay collection he edited for this occasion, Hubay emphasized the special place Liszt had (or should have) in the heart of the Hungarian public, as cited in the opening epigraph; he also called for erecting a “suitable statue” of Liszt in Budapest, transforming Liszt’s apartment and the old Academy of Music building into a museum, and returning Liszt’s ashes to Hungary, as “he should rest here, in the land he loved so well.” 9 Other items maintained a greater scholarly distance, like Ervin Major’s “Liszt Ferenc magyarsága” (Ferenc Liszt’s Hungarianness), an important study of Liszt’s role in the establishment of the National Conservatory in the mid-nineteenth century; but Major’s goal too was to off er the “truest evi-dence, aside from his many Hungarian compositions, of Liszt’s unbreakable Hun-garianness.” 10 Th e National Ferenc Liszt Society sponsored a variety of concerts throughout the year, from free outdoor events to galas in the largest halls and churches in the country, ending the commemorative year with the oratorio Chris-tus (of symbolic if unsubtle importance for Christian-national Hungary) on October 21, 1936. 11 Most glossed over the awkward memory of Liszt’s Des bohé-miens in a few lines before returning to the celebration of the “genius who arose from Hungarian sod.” 12

Th e glaring exception to this hagiographic rule, once again, was Bartók. At this point he was well respected abroad, but this reputation did not translate into pop-ularity at home; the situation was so disheartening that between 1930 and 1937 he did not perform any of his compositions in Budapest. 13 Hungarian offi cialdom began to warm to Bartók, however, as the nationalist policies of the Hungarian government looked to folk-related research for “justifi cation of Hungary as the purest, most ancient culture in central Europe”: the state increased its support for his folk music transcription and classifi cation work through a position at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences beginning in 1934; his Wooden Prince and Duke

9. Hubay, “El ő szó” [Foreword], 8.

10. In Major, Fejezetek a magyar zene történetéb ő l [Essays from the history of Hungarian music], 198.

11. See schedule of events in Novágh, “A Liszt emlékév eseményei,” 151.

12. Hubay, “El ő szó,” 8: “Th e genius that arose from Hungarian sod belongs to us here forever, and the rest of the world may only be irradiated by it through his masterworks.”

13. Th e French government celebrated Bartók’s fi ft ieth birthday in 1931 by awarding him the Legion of Honor, but the Hungarian government “let the occasion pass in stony silence” (Schneider, Bartók, Hungary, and the Renewal of Tradition , 225). He was invited to perform in Germany at least ten times aft er Hitler came to power but never accepted. David Schneider documents his failed negotiations to do so on terms that his conscience could allow—he re-fused to provide proof of his non-Jewish origin to those in authority ( Bartók, Hungary, and the Renewal of Tradition , 220–225).


Bluebeard’s Castle were revived at the Opera for the fi rst time in sixteen years in 1935 and 1936; and the Hungarian Academy of Sciences recognized the achieve-ments of his research in the fall of 1936 by electing him as the fi rst musician to be a full member. 14 As this point coincided with the Liszt celebrations in Hungary and abroad, Bartók once again took up the question of Liszt’s legacy in the lecture he delivered upon taking his seat in the Academy. Given his improved vantage point, Bartók was more generous to Liszt in 1936 than he had been in 1911; in fact, his argument that Liszt’s less signifi cant, “ear-tickling” works got more atten-tion than his more important compositions was a pointed parallel to his own situation. 15

Yet Bartók still cast a somewhat skeptical eye on Liszt: his lecture—published soon aft er in the collection Liszt Is Ours! , edited by Hubay, his former boss at the Academy of Music—once again sticks out among the more reverent contributions of his colleagues, starting with its title, “Liszt problémák” (Liszt problems). By this time Bartók and others, including old friend Antal Molnár in the same collection, had demonstrated repeatedly in print their argument that Liszt had been mis-guided both in his attribution to the Gypsies of the creative impulse behind Hungarian-Gypsy style and in his acceptance, along with the rest of his generation and the one following (with the notable exception of János Sepr ő di), of that style as authentically Hungarian expression. Bartók assumed his audience was familiar with this argument, and, to quote him, “it would be a pity to waste another word on proving it.” 16 Here, Bartók focused again on the aesthetic dichotomy between the fl ashy but frivolous kind of Hungarian music that inspired Liszt and the “truly” Hungarian peasant music he, Kodály, and their disciples had written about so extensively in the intervening years. In addition to the explosive rhetoric of “authenticity” that rightly raises the suspicions of today’s reader, this article cap-tures the revolutionary aspect of Bartók’s push for a new paradigm of musical “Hungarianness”:

One sees that the classical simplicity of the peasant melodies did not interest [Liszt] . . . and for this again we must blame his period, the nineteenth cen-tury. Liszt, like so many of his contemporaries, was fascinated rather by frills and decoration, show and glittering ornamentation, than by perfectly

14. Schneider, Bartók, Hungary, and the Renewal of Tradition , 226–227.

15. Schneider makes this observation in Bartók, Hungary, and the Renewal of Tradition , 228. Bartók’s argument about the reception of Liszt’s works would have implied a parallel to the recent awarding by the Kisfaludy Society of the Greguss Prize for music composition in 1935 to Bartók for his 1905 First Suite for Large Orchestra—pointedly not acknowledging his more recent and more strikingly modernist works. Bartók publicly refused this award. (See Sch-neider, Bartók, Hungary, and the Renewal of Tradition , 266.)

16. “Liszt Problems,” BBE , 506. Original in Liszt a miénk! , 61. (See also BÖÍ , 702.) Antal Mol-nár’s essay, “Liszt, a magyar zeneszerz ő ” [Liszt the Hungarian composer], appears in Liszt a miénk! , 43–52.


plain, objective simplicity. Th is explains why he placed the extravagant, over-loaded and rhapsodic Gypsy music-making higher than the peasant performances. 17

At the core of the distinction between the old and new defi nitions of Hungarian music is not the troubling race-based dismissal of the contribution of Romani musicians, nor nationalism—we can fi nd those elements in both old and new defi nitions. Th e critical aspect of Bartók’s essay is the aesthetic shift from Roman-ticism to modernism as he perceived it. Bartók embraces Liszt in this essay as a modernist himself, who, despite his Romantic weakness for ostentatious virtu-osity and his mistakes on the “Gypsy question,” should be held up as a model of musical innovation as well as patriotism; but as a matter of musical science, Bartók maintained, Hungarian music must be defi ned around “authentic folk music.” Th e distinction Bartók drew between the Hungarian Gypsy style and the Transylva-nian peasant song, and therefore by implication between Liszt’s “Hungarian-style” works and his own, was most importantly a distinction between what he saw as the sentimental excesses of Romanticism and the clean lines of an international modernist sensibility. 18 With some substitutions, this quotation from Bartók could apply to a comparison between the music of Wagner and that of Erik Satie, or one between the styles of Biedermeier and Bauhaus.

We might take Bartók’s embrace of Liszt the modernist as an invitation to search out direct musical connections between Bartók’s works and Liszt’s late works, such as Nuages gris (1881), Unstern! (1881), or Bagatelle ohne Tonart (1885), pieces whose intense chromaticism, tonal ambiguity, and startling originality overall has earned a “devoted following” since the mid-twentieth century. As many of these pieces remained unpublished or out of print in Bartók’s lifetime, however, connecting these works directly is not possible.

One case is particularly tantalizing but in the end acts as the exception that proves the rule. Bartók received copies of manuscripts of the unpublished Csárdás macabre (1881–1882) and two other pieces of “Hungarian character” in February 1912, among the works to appear in a later volume of Hungarian-themed works for the Breitkopf & Härtel complete Liszt edition; he returned this copy with several instructions for the engraving of the edition of Csárdás macabre , which itself was not published until aft er Bartók’s death. 19 Aft er Zoltán Gárdonyi wrote (also in 1936) that “the matter of the elemental nature of rhythmic invention and of certain characteristics of its harmonic connections in this bold work” could not be found in the works of any other Hungarian composer besides Bartók, some leaped to the conclusion that Bartók had been infl uenced by the Csárdás —particularly in his

17. “Liszt Problems,” BBE , 506–507.

18. Bartók’s idealization of lack of sentimentality is addressed in László Vikárius’s “Bartók and the ideal of a ‘Sentimentalitäts-Mangel.’”

19. Sulyok, “Béla Bartóks Handschrift im Liszt, Material in Weimar,” 353–354.


Allegro barbaro . 20 But Bartók had completed Allegro barbaro a year before receiving Csárdás macabre . Moreover, Bartók did not mention Csárdás macabre once in his writings, either published or private correspondence, with the exception of the correspondence with Breitkopf & Härtel about the manuscript itself. Th e absence of any mention of the piece in “Liszt Problems” is particularly glaring. László Somfai argues that the work did not leave any lasting impression on Bartók and even speculates that Bartók may not have considered it a fi nished work. 21 At most, any reference to it was unconscious. 22

Despite the fact that we may fi nd much of interest in the intersection between Liszt-as-modernist and Liszt-as-Hungarian-composer, then, as scholars from Gárdonyi and Szabolcsi to Shay Loya explicate in detail, Bartók’s writings on Liszt consistently divide the older composer’s oeuvre in two. In those pieces where Liszt used Hungarian style in the nineteenth-century sense, Bartók found fault not only with their “nationalistic whitewash”—the banal exoticism based on trivial, dilettantish popular sources, lacking any of the depth of “genuine peasant music”—but also with “frills and decorations,” “extravagan[ce],” “bombast,” and “breaking up of the unity of style,” those elements that violated Bartók’s ideal of organicist modernism. 23 Th e most worthy aspects of Liszt’s works, the charac-teristics that Bartók cited as most “prophetic” and opening up “so many new possibilities,” were those “bold harmonic turns, the innumerable modulatory di-gressions . . . the absolutely new and imaginative [formal] conception that mani-fests itself in the chief works.” 24 Maintaining this strict opposition between the “bad” Liszt and the “good” Liszt—or, to be fairer to Bartók, between Liszt as audi-ence-indulging virtuoso with dubious taste in source material, and Liszt as visionary and important modernist precedent—allowed Bartók to imply that his own work represented the fulfi llment of Liszt’s incomplete promise, a promise that Liszt could not carry out due to the limitations of his time.

Another aspect of Bartók’s “Liszt Problems” that supported this implication was his argument that Liszt was more French than German. Liszt’s biography, Bartók acknowledged, was quite mixed, as “apart from the early years spent in Paris, he had no great cultural connection or affi nity with France,” and “His mature years were spent mostly in Germany, in Weimar.” But Bartók pointed out

20. Somfai, “Bartók és a Liszt-hatás,” 342. Quotation from Gárdonyi, Liszt Ferenc magyar stilusa/Le style hongrois de François Liszt , 47.

21. Somfai, “Bartók és a Liszt-hatás,” 342.

22. We might also see it as an example of Bartók suppressing memories of infl uences he found problematic, à la Vikárius, Modell és inspiráció , 149 (see also Móricz, “Th e Anxiety of Infl u-ence and the Comfort of Style,” 465–466).

23. First two quotations drawn from “Th e relation of folk music to the development of the art music of our time” (1921), BBE , 323. Last four quotations drawn from “Liszt Problems,” BBE , 503–504, 506–507. For more on organicist ideas in Bartók, see Frigyesi, Béla Bartók in Turn-of-the-Century Budapest , 104–109, among others.

24. “Liszt Problems,” BBE , 503, 505.


that Liszt wrote primarily in French, and more importantly, he argued that Liszt’s musical style was “the antithesis of the excessive density and laboriousness of [nineteenth-century German works]; it is rather the clarity and transparence of French music that manifests itself in every measure of Liszt’s works.” 25 Th rough his French qualities, Liszt became the predecessor fi rst of “the two greatest fi gures in modern French music, Debussy and Ravel,” and then of the “new school of Hungarian music”—Bartók, Kodály, and their contemporaries. 26 As Shay Loya puts it, Bartók thus “retrospectively recast” Liszt as

belonging to the proto new Hungarian school. Th e Liszt whom Bartók wished to celebrate stood at the beginning of an honorable genealogical line that was free of both Gypsy and German infl uences and that led, therefore, directly to Hungary’s musical future by way of a musical tradition that was coming to be recognized as a worthy alternative to that of Germany and Central Europe: Parisian modernism. Th e dichotomous perspective he pre-sents throughout [“Liszt Problems”] does not allow any other direct link with Liszt.

. . . [Bartók’s] omission [of discussion of Liszt’s most radical “Hungarian-style” works like “Sunt lacrymae rerum”] reads easily like a Freudian forget-fulness or an anxiety of infl uence. It seems to me that this is a case where, despite his intellectual integrity, Bartók may have been brushing aside or omitting evidence that got in the way of his arguments[,] whether he did this consciously or not. 27

Taking a cue from Harold Bloom, Joseph Straus, and László Vikárius, I would emphasize that the dichotomy Bartók created, and his selective embrace of Liszt, act less as a Freudian slip and more as a creative misreading: Bartók envisioned Liszt as an earlier, less informed version of himself. Such a treatment of Liszt is somewhat similar to the way Bartók used Kodály in his writings, but with caveats emerging from Bartók’s diff erences from Liszt with respect to aesthetics (Roman-tic versus Modern) and sources (“Hungarian-style” versus “authentic peasant music”), and on Bartók’s need to “clear imaginative space,” as well as space in the public discourse, for himself. 28 At the same time, Bartók’s reading of Hungarians’ reception of Liszt, of their preference for his more trivial works and their “neglect [of his] most interesting works,” implicitly refer to the way Bartók saw himself being treated. 29

25. “Liszt Problems,” BBE , 509.


27. In Liszt’s Transcultural Modernism and the Hungarian-Gypsy Tradition , 127.

28. Harold Bloom, Th e Anxiety of Infl uence , 1.



Th e way that Bartók’s Liszt serves as a voice for Bartók himself is particularly evident in a passage from “Liszt Problems” referring to Liszt’s use of a variety of sources, an approach Bartók, of course, shared:

[W]hatever Liszt touched, whether it was Hungarian art song, folksong, Italian aria or anything else, he so transformed and so stamped it with his own individuality that it became, as it were, his own property. What he cre-ated from these foreign elements became unmistakably Liszt’s music. What is even more important, however, is the fact that he mixed with these foreign elements so many more that were genuinely drawn from himself that there is no work in which we can doubt the greatness of his creative power. We can say that he was eclectic in the best sense of the word; one who took from all foreign sources, but gave still more from himself. 30

Just as certain elements of Liszt’s Des bohémiens read as a defense of the creative contribution of himself as virtuoso composer-arranger, Bartók’s essay is a defense of his own contribution as a composer: both of the possibility for a composer to integrate sources from diff erent nationalities into one unifi ed voice and of the genius required to take up interesting sources (folk music) and stamp them with the “greatness of his creative power,” in keeping with the “long-standing tradition in German aesthetics which valued the absorption and abstraction of folkloristic material over straightforward representation . . . the same thinking [that] shaped Bartók’s three-tier model for the adaptation of ‘peasant music’ [which placed] at the highest level . . . abstraction and total synthesis with personal style.” 31

Bartók’s essay is also a banner for the idea of an inclusive nationalism, one that allowed the artist himself to choose his label even if he was eclectic in his approach to sources: “Liszt called himself Hungarian; everyone, Hungarian or not, should know of this and let the matter rest at that.” 32 At the end of the essay, the degree to which the topic of Liszt acts as a thin veil for Bartók to decry his own poor treat-ment, comes to the fore as he lambastes certain “important and publicly respected gentlemen in our musical life who are stubbornly opposed to everything new,” who claim Liszt’s legacy even as they “prevent, as far as they can, the following of Liszt’s traditions” of innovation, inclusive nationalism, and integrity. 33

Just a few years aft er “Liszt Problems,” Bartók found himself revisiting the “inauthentic” “Hungarian-Gypsy style” that he had so fi rmly rejected in the past, and the use of which had been a cornerstone of his and his colleagues’ rejection of

30. “Liszt Problems,” BBE , 502. Translation adjusted on basis of original text.

31. Loya, Liszt’s Transcultural Modernism , 133, citing Bartók, “Th e Infl uence of Peasant Music on Modern Music,” BBE , 341–344.


33. “Liszt Problems,” BBE , 510. Loya also discusses this passage in Liszt’s Transcultural Mod-ernism , 127–128.


Liszt’s “Hungarian” works. Th e “Hungarian-Gypsy style” is most apparent in his Violin Concerto and Contrasts , both from 1938. Th e magyaros aspect of these works is part of Bartók’s turn to a less acerbic, more accessible style during this period, as part of his rapprochement with the Hungarian public. At this time he also had the comfort of knowing that his folk music research had fi nally earned a signifi cant level of acceptance at home: the Academy of Sciences created a research position for him in 1934, which allowed him to withdraw from piano teaching and focus more energy on his folk music work; and the Academy of Sciences acknowl-edged him publicly by making him a full member in 1936—the fi rst musician to receive this honor. 34 Such acceptance may have given him the emotional and in-tellectual breathing room to attempt a creative re- or mis-reading of “Gypsy style” and “Hungarian rhythm.”

Hungarian-Gypsy elements also continued to play a signifi cant role in postwar Hungarian music, particularly in the works of Kodály: his singspiel Czinka Panna , premiered at the Budapest State Opera House in 1948, drew heavily on traditional “Hungarian-Gypsy style” to celebrate the title character, a Hungarian-Gypsy woman violinist who had supposedly composed the Rákóczi March in the early eighteenth century; a few years later, he elaborated a prewar song, Kállai kett ő s , into a substantial work for mixed chorus and orchestra, to be performed by the newly formed Hungarian State Folk Ensemble in 1951. 35 Th e orchestra for Kállai kett ő s included strings, clarinets, and cimbaloms, for the inaugural Hungarian State Folk Ensemble was a Gypsy orchestra, with its players coming from various restaurants and cafés around the country, especially Budapest. 36 Th us despite the delegitimation of the “authenticity” of those elements and the thorough redefi ni-tion of Hungarian music that Bartók and his compatriots had accomplished in prose, the musical pull of the Gypsy continued to cast its spell over Hungarian composers and audiences for years to come. 37

In scholarly discourse, two contrasting works from 1936, by Antal Molnár and Zoltán Gárdonyi, illustrate both the continuing tension over Liszt’s role and the rising hegemony of the Bartók-Kodály view on authentic folk sources. In his “Liszt, a magyar zeneszerz ő ” (Liszt, the Hungarian composer), Molnár, as a leader in Hungarian musicology who had been a disciple of Bartók since before World War I, celebrated Liszt’s Hungarianness—but in a somewhat left -handed way. Molnár applauded Liszt for “never, for one moment, forget[ting] what he

34. See Schneider, Bartók, Hungary, and the Renewal of Tradition , 226–228.

35. E ő sze, et al., “Kodály, Zoltán,” New Grove .

36. Gulyás, “Th e Orchestra,” 20. Th e question of the use of “Hungarian-Gypsy style” (and of the role of the Romani musicians who played it) during Hungary’s State Socialist era remains an important fi eld for future research.

37. Th e role of “Gypsy music” in Hungarian culture receded only with the advent of the folk revival movement of the 1970s (see Frigyesi, “Th e Aesthetic of the Hungarian Revival Move-ment,” and Halmos, “Th e Táncház Movement”).


owed to the Hungarian people,” for “propagandiz[ing] for the value of Hungarian-ness in the West,” for “nurtur[ing] Hungarian culture,” for “creating national co-mposition for the Hungarian people”; at the same time Molnár emphasized that Liszt was “one of those very few artistic worthies who are purely international , indeed Europeans , [who are] above the national.” 38 While Molnár sometimes viewed this quality in a positive light, he also saw it as problematic, since it clearly meant Liszt was an outsider in his home country. Th us his “use of exotic scales, which chiefl y springs from the ‘ Gypsy-scale ’ interspersed with augmented sec-onds,” among other Hungarian stylistic features, might be considered exploitation of the exotic. 39

As Bartók and others in their circle had done, Molnár excused Liszt’s ignorance or lack of appreciation of authentic folk music, and praised his elevation of “our gentlemanly nóta music from the level of dilettantism” and creation of “the fi rst European-level and uniformly Hungarian-style musical language and form” in the Hungarian rhapsodies, the Hungarian Historical Portraits , and other works. 40 Unlike Bartók, Molnár mentioned “the impetus taken from Liszt’s late, most dis-tilled, most valuable Hungarian-style compositions,” especially Rhapsodies no. 16 and 17 and “the Master’s last testament to Hungarian music, Sunt lacrymae rerum ” from the Années de pelerinage , a piece about which Bence Szabolcsi later wrote that “the old revolutionary Liszt holds out his hand to the young revolutionary Bartók .” 41 Like Szabolcsi aft er him, though, Molnár in the end teleologically al-lotted Liszt the role of noble predecessor, going as far as possible on the fl awed foundation of nineteenth-century Hungarian-Gypsy style and preparing the way for the next generation, as the fi nal sentence of Molnár’s essay proclaims: “And thus the great gardener did not toil in vain, because if the most fruitful shoot—Hungarian folk music—was mostly unknown to him, he still plowed the fallow fi eld into fertile earth, and he showed that there was primal power in this land!” 42

Zoltán Gárdonyi took an opposing view: his 1931 German-language disserta-tion, Die ungarischen Stileigentümlichkeiten in den musikalischen Werken Franz Liszts (Hungarian stylistic characteristics in the musical works of Franz Liszt), republished in the Liszt year of 1936 in a Hungarian/French dual-language edi-tion, served as an important attempt to rehabilitate Liszt’s Hungarian works and with it the nineteenth-century “Hungarian style.” Th is work included one of the fi rst extensive treatments of the still-unpublished radical late pieces like Csárdás macabre along with earlier, better-known pieces; as did Molnár, Gárdonyi also

38. Molnár, “Liszt, a magyar zeneszerz ő ,” 47, 46.

39. Molnár, “Liszt, a magyar zeneszerz ő ,” 50–51.

40. Molnár, “Liszt, a magyar zeneszerz ő ,” 50.

41. First quotations from Molnár, “Liszt, a magyar zeneszerz ő ,” 51–52. Last quotation from Szabolcsi, A Concise History of Hungarian Music , 74. Italics in original. Loya also discusses Szabolcsi’s treatment of Liszt in Liszt’s Transcultural Modernism , 130–132.

42. Molnár, “Liszt, a magyar zeneszerz ő ,” 52.


made the connection between the sound of Liszt’s late pieces and Bartók’s style, though neither argued that Bartók drew on those works directly. Th ough Gárdo-nyi still deferred to the writings of Bartók, Kodály, and their circle, and to their distinction between magyar and magyaros (a distinction Molnár still used), he pushed back against the increasingly accepted Bartókian defi nition of Hungarian music in defense of Liszt:

What Liszt used as elements of Hungarian style: the “cadence magyare,” the choriambus, the Gypsy scale, etc.: all of this in the Hungarian Romantic music of the nineteenth century was not merely exterior, but rather sub-stance. Only now, since the exploration of Hungarian folk music, have we arrived at a deeper recognition of the substance of [a] Hungarian music compared to which the musical Hungarianness [ magyarság ] of the last cen-tury appears to be “Hungarian-style-ness” [ magyarosság ]. Th e assertion that the form of music which nourished Liszt’s Hungarian style led Hungarian music on a false trail, to a dead end, and contributed nothing to its develop-ment, is totally false . . . . As justifi able and important as this artistic concep-tion, arbitrary to a fanatical degree, is to a contemporary composer, it is just as inappropriate and harmful when it aff ects music scholarship. Th ose judg-ments . . . are dubious from a scientifi c point of view. Th e more objective examination leads to the conclusion that the root of Liszt’s Hungarian style, that is, the Hungarian music of the nineteenth century, contains values that, [though they appear] to be exhausted and empty for the majority of today’s Hungarian musicians who stand on a foundation of folk music, have not been destroyed, but rather are transformed. 43

Gárdonyi thus “comes close to saying that composers . . . perhaps need to misread the past for their own creative ends . . . but for that reason their opinions should not be taken at face value.” 44 In so doing he reclaims both Liszt and his sources, rejecting as presentist the idea that only one kind of source should be considered “correct.”

In the end, Bartók’s and Molnár’s rhetorical strategies, rather than Gárdonyi’s challenge to them, gained the upper hand; Bartók and his camp had won the long war. Th eir discursive reconstruction of Hungarian music around peasant music has held up over time and has pervaded the art music world and the folk music world in Hungary and abroad, and memories of the battle that shaped the Hun-garian music world for more than fi ft y years have been largely erased. Bartók was unusual even among his generation of European modernists in rejecting every predecessor from his national school except Liszt, whose acceptance came with

43. Gárdonyi, Liszt Ferenc magyar stilusa , 53–54. Loya also discusses this passage in Liszt’s Transcultural Modernism , 133–134; my translation is based on Gárdonyi’s Hungarian text rather than his French one, and thus diff ers slightly from Loya’s.

44. Loya, Liszt’s Transcultural Modernism , 134.


many qualifi cations; in their narrative, Bartók, along with Kodály, were “not sim-ply the fi rst modern Hungarian composer(s), but the fi rst composer(s) to write what could legitimately be considered Hungarian national music, because [they were] the fi rst to base [their] works on a legitimate national source.” 45

Recapturing the debates that raged around Hungarian music from the aft er-math of the publication of Liszt’s book to Bartók’s ascendance as international star suggests that the vicissitudes of fame and talent impacted these arguments at least as much as logical coherence. But the predominance of the arguments put for-ward by Bartók and his circle since then testify to the rhetorical power of the trope of the “pure source”—no matter that the cosmopolitan members of that circle wrote music that drew on many sources, Hungarian and non-Hungarian, pure and not so pure. Hungarian music criticism in this period simultaneously engaged the politics and poetics of national and racial identity in a cultural scene that was both local and international, reminding us that the creative process is one of pre-sentation as well as composition. Restoring the memories of this battle off ers a rich understanding of the ideascape against which current assumptions came about, as well as the fi erce determination it took to get there.


Appendix

Biographical Notes

Following are short biographies of some of the lesser-known fi gures discussed frequently in the text.

Kornél Ábrányi Sr . (1822–1903) was a composer, critic, and pianist who studied in Vienna and Paris (in the latter city as a student of Chopin) in the 1840s. Later, he was the founding editor of the fi rst major Hungarian music periodical, Zenészeti lapok (Music pages) (published from 1860 to 1876), and one of the leaders of the movement to establish the Academy of Music in Budapest. Aft er it opened, he was its fi rst registrar and one of its teachers. He was also a founder of the Országos Magyar Daláregyesület (National Hungarian Singing Society) in 1867. His Hungarian translation of the original German libretto of Liszt’s Die Leg-ende von der heiligen Elisabeth was used in the première performance of that work in Budapest in 1865, and his books A magyar dal és zene sajátságai (Characteris-tics of Hungarian song and music) (1877) and A magyar zene a 19-ik században (Hungarian music in the 19th century) (1900) off er important insights into the theory and history of Hungarian music during this period.

János Arany (1817–1882) was one of the giants of nineteenth-century Hungarian literature. Best known for his epics, particularly Toldi and its sequels, and his ballads, he was also signifi cant as a translator of works by Shakespeare, Molière, Pushkin, and Aristophanes. In addition, he was one of the most important theorists of the principles of the népnemzeti (folk-national) movement, sometimes termed “national classicism.” Folksong played an important role in his ideas about Hungarian verse.

Sámuel Brassai (1800?–1897) was a Transylvanian linguist and pedagogue, a founding member of the Transylvanian Museum Society from 1859 and a mem-ber of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences from 1865, as well as an avid musician and music critic. His 1860 Magyar-vagy czigány-zene? (Hungarian or Gypsy music?) is one of the most important early critiques of Liszt’s Des bohémiens et de leur musique en Hongrie (1859).

Géza Csáth (1887–1919), pen name of József Brenner, was a Hungarian short-story writer and music critic. His Symbolist fi ction was imbued with psychoana-lytic explorations of character (he was a psychiatrist by profession). He is also

Appendix262

remembered as one of the earlier critics to appreciate the compositions of Bartók, Kodály, and Stravinsky.

János Erdélyi (1814–1868) was one of the most important agents in the new nép-nemzeti (folk-national) literary movement of the nineteenth century, through his collection of folk poetry and folktales (published in three volumes from 1846 to 1848) among other writings.

Ferenc Erkel (1810–1893), composer and conductor, was the founder of Hungar-ian dramatic opera; his most famous works are Hunyadi László (1844) and Bánk bán (1861). He was also the founding conductor of Pest’s Philharmonic Society and the founding director of the Academy of Music in Budapest.

Mihály Mosonyi (1815–1870), born Michael Brand, was probably the third most prominent Hungarian composer in the nineteenth century, aft er Liszt and Erkel. He composed in a variety of genres, from opera and symphony to piano miniature; he was one of the fi rst to use Hungarian style elements, including the cimbalom, in symphonic works. He was also an important music critic, writing extensively in support of Liszt and on issues around “national music” in Zenészeti lapok .

Ödön Mihalovich (1842–1929), Hungarian composer and pedagogue of Slove-nian extraction, was trained in Pest, Leipzig, and Munich; he was known for his orchestral works, his operas infl uenced by Wagner, and his role as director of the Academy of Music in Budapest from 1887 until 1919, a time when the institution began to produce world-renowned graduates as both performers and composers. He also was a friend of Liszt, and was instrumental in the appointment of Gustav Mahler, then twenty-eight years old, to direct the Royal Opera House in Budapest.

János Fogarasi (1801–1878) is best known for his role in creating the fi rst major Hungarian dictionary. He also wrote on word order and accentuation in Hungar-ian, including in Hungarian verse. He expressed his thoughts on accentuation of the language using musical notation, and included several popular Hungarian songs in his 1843 book Művelt magyar nyelvtan elemi része (Basic proportion in cultivated Hungarian grammar).

Dezs ő Járosy (1882–1819) was a priest, church musician, and music critic. He wrote primarily on historical and contemporary church music, but also contrib-uted short studies on several major nineteenth-century composers. His book Faji zene és magyar zene (Racial music and Hungarian music) (1908) foregrounds the issue of race and nation in talking about genre and “spirit.”

Pongrácz Kacsóh (1873–1924) was a composer of operettas, most famously János vitéz (1904), and a secondary school teacher and administrator. He was also a music critic, contributing especially to the journal Zenevilág (Music world), of which he was the managing editor in the fi rst years of the twentieth century, but also to other journals. As a critic, he was one of Bartók’s earliest public advocates.

Aurél Kern (1871–1928) trained as a composer under Hans Koessler (1853–1926), also Bartók’s and Kodály’s teacher, but his impact was as a music critic, both in

Appendix 263

music periodicals and in the general-interest press. He was also an administrator at the Nemzeti Zenede (National Conservatory), the Budapest Opera House, and the Hungarian Radio.

Sándor Kovács (1886–1918), composer, pianist, and critic, formed an important link between Hungarian and French modernist musicians in the years leading up to World War I: in late 1911 his article on “La jeune école hongroise” was published in the journal of Ravel’s Société Internationale de Musique, and he organized a chamber concert in Paris on March 12, 1910, featuring works by Bartók, Kodály, Dohnányi, and three other members of the faculty of Budapest’s Academy of Music, with works by Bartók, Kodály, and Szendy played by Bartók. Kovács was also an advocate of early music who published a collection of piano pieces by “the old masters” in early 1911, as well as the founding secretary of the New Hungarian Music Society (UMZE) of 1911–1912.

Antal Molnár (1890–1983), now best remembered as a musicologist, published at least fi ve articles between 1911 and 1914 on various aspects of the “problem of Hun-garian music” in Hungarian and German. At that time he was the founding violist of the Waldbauer-Kerpely string quartet, the ensemble that premiered Bartók’s and Kodály’s fi rst quartets. He was also a composer, folksong collector, and prominent fi gure in the New Hungarian Music Society of 1911–1912.

Géza Molnár (1870–1933) was a musicologist trained in Leipzig, where he may have studied with Hugo Riemann. He taught at the Academy of Music in Buda-pest beginning in 1900, when Bartók was a student there; he was the fi rst member of its faculty who was dedicated solely to teaching music history. His textbook A magyar zene elmélete (Analysis of Hungarian music) (1904) was briefl y infl uential.

János Sepr ő di (1874–1923), musicologist and folklorist, was an important writer on Hungarian early music history, collector and scholar of folk music, and critic of other scholarship of the time. He taught at the Calvinist College in Kolozsvár (Cluj, Romania) from 1898 until his death; he was also secretary of the philosoph-ical section of the Transylvanian Museum Society from 1909 and a member of the Kolozsvár Music Society from 1907.

Emil Ponori Th ewrewk (1838–1917) was a linguist, a translator of Greek and Latin poetry, and a founder of the Budapest Philological Society; he also wrote impor-tant works on Hungarian music, mainly folksong, in the late nineteenth century. He was a member of Zoltán Kodály’s thesis committee, and his infl uence on Kodály’s ideas about Hungarian rhythm can be detected in that thesis.

Egon Wellesz (1885–1974) was a Viennese composer and scholar of Hungarian-Jewish extraction. In Vienna, he studied harmony and counterpoint with Schoen-berg and musicology with Guido Adler, specializing fi rst in baroque opera and then in Byzantine chant. He became acquainted with Bartók, Béla Balázs, and other Hungarian musical modernists around 1911; one of his works was performed on the second concert of the New Hungarian Music Society of 1911–1912 in Budapest, and he wrote articles praising Bartók and Kodály in the Viennese journals Der Merker and Musikblätter des Anbruch .

Appendix264

Géza Vilmos Zágon (1890–1918) was a pianist and composer who was known during his life as an interpreter of Debussy, whom he met in 1910. He was one of the younger composers whose works were featured in the concerts of the New Hungarian Music Society of 1911–1912. Shortly aft er the Society’s activities ceased, Zágon moved to Paris, where he spent much of 1912–1913 associating with mod-ernist musicians there; he reported on his activities in letters to Bartók, and shared some of Bartók’s scores with French colleagues.

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INDEX

Ábrányi, Kornél Sr and Bártok , 216 , 227 compared to G. Molnár , 203–204 ,

206 , 207 , 216 as composer , 39 , 147 , 159 , 201 as founder of institutions , 61 , 109 Hungarian Rhapsody no . 7 , 201 , 202 on Hungarianness , 3 , 4 , 110 , 114 ,

155 , 164–165 , 231 and Liszt , 60 , 110 , 170 n 43 , 186 and rhythm , 166 , 199–203 , 226 , 228 ,

246 A magyar dal és zene sajátságai

(Characteristics of Hungarian Music) , 3 , 164 , 199

A magyar zene a 19-ik században (Hungarian music in the 19th century) , 114

Academy of Music, Hungarian as an institution, 5 , 26 , 28 , 42 , 65 and German infl uence, 61 , 130 , 158 ,

159 and G. Molnár, 128 , 203 , 217 and Liszt, 10 , 89 , 90 , 251 and debates on Hungarian identity,

109 , 140 , 170 Academy of Sciences, Hungarian , 23 ,

25 n 24 , 198 and Bartók, 251–252 , 257

Adorno, Th eodor , 137 Ady, Endre , 11 , 240 Allgemeine Deutscher Musikverein

and Bartók , 232 and Liszt , 50 , 59 , 62 , 63

amphibrachis (körösdi) , 176 , 195 anapest , 195 , 196 Anderson, Benedict , 96 , 123 Andrássy, Count Gyula , 25 , 26 antispastus (toborzéki)

for Ábrányi , 201–202 , 209 for Bartók , 216 , 217 , 218 , 220 , 226 for Farkas , 212 as a Hungarian rhythm , 173–175 ,

176 , 201–202 , 206 , 207 , 209 , 216

as not a Hungarian rhythm , 199 , 212 , 219

for Kodály , 217 , 219 for Molnár, G. , 206 , 207 , 209 for Th ewrewk , 199

Arany, János as poet , 5 , 97 , 188 and rhythm , 172–175 , 195 , 196 , 199 ,

201 , 206 , 207–209 A nagyidai cigányok (Th e Gypsies of

Nagyida) , 97 Toldi , 188

art, national , 29–35 , 173 bacchius (toborzó) , 176 , 207–209 Bach, Johann Sebastian

as German, universal, or Western musician , 19 n 3 , 61 , 117 , 118 , 216 , 238

and issues of old and new , 166 , 207 , 236

and Molnár, G. , 141 , 214 Balabán, Imre , 233 , 247

Bold indicates musical example. Italic indicates illustration or table.

Index290

Balázs, Béla , 146 , 233 Bárczy, Gusztáv , 230 , 234 Bartalus, István , 109 , 113 , 119 , 131 n 88 ,

213 Bartók, Béla

and contexts, various , 9–12 , 17 , 96–99 , 166 , 229

continuities with predecessors he disavows , 154–156

and Gypsies or Gypsy style , 16 , 92 , 99 n 13 , 133 , 134 , 138

as a Hungarian national composer , 4 , 6–8 , 13 , 16 , 94 , 149

and Hungarianness , 7 , 19 , 133 , 167–168

and Hungarian rhythm , 16 , 199 , 214–215 , 226

and Hungarian style , 44 , 215–229 international aspects of , 145 , 153 ,

230–232 , 234 , 235 and issues of old v new , 50 , 137 ,

236 and the problem of Hungarian

music , 16 , 111 his reception, aspects of , 7 , 99 , 126 ,

136 , 142 , 244 , 246 , 247 and rhythm , 156 , 203 , 210 , 228 and virtuosity , 77–78 and modernism , 110 , 139 , 144 , 168 ,

231 , 232 , 234 , 245 Bartók, Béla, folksong and folk music

collecting , 131 , 132 , 149–150 , 228 defi nition of , 157 folk music as marginal , 238 and Hungarian music, the debate

over , 149 , 156 , 248 , 259 and innovation , 93 , 136 , 137 , 139 ,

153 , 231 , 239 , 247 legend of , 96 , 154–155

Bartók, Béla, and Liszt , 13 , 254 , 256 Bartók’s comments during Liszt

celebrations , 47–48 , 91–93 , 251–256

Liszt’s role as Bartók’s predecessor or infl uence , 12–14 , 93 , 254 , 255 , 259 , 260

Bartók and Liszt’s nationality , 15 , 69–70 , 186 , 252 , 254–255

Bartók, Béla, works 20 magyar népdal (20 Hungarian folk

songs) with Kodály , 157–158 Allegro barbaro , 155 , 254 Contrasts , 220 , 223 , 257 Divertimento , 218 Duke Bluebeard’s Castle , 11 n 22 , 146 ,

155 , 218 , 251–252 Four Orchestral Pieces op . 12 , 218 Fourteen Bagatelles op . 6 , 220–222 ,

222 Gyermekeknek (For children) , 237 Kossuth , 12 , 141 , 144 , 179 , 218 , 219 Mikrokosmos no . 151 , 223 Piano Sonata , 155 Rhapsody for Piano and Orchestra ,

167 , 217 , 218 , 232 Six Dances in Bulgarian Rhythm , 223 String Quartet no. 1 op . 7 , 145 , 146 String Quartet no . 5 , 16 , 222–227 ,

224–225 Suite no. 1 for Orchestra , 167–168 , 218 Suite no. 2 for Orchestra (Orchestral

Suite no . 2 ), 16 , 143 , 167–168 , 218 , 219–220 , 221 , 226

Szabadban (Out-of-doors) , 155 , 218 “Az éjszaka zenéje” (Th e night’s

music) in Szabadbad (Out- of-doors) , 155

Th e Wooden Prince , 146 , 220 , 251 “Th ree Folk-songs from County

Csík,” 140 Two Pictures , op . 10 , 218 Two Portraits , op . 5 , 218 violin rhapsodies , 218 Violin Concerto (1938) , 220 , 223 , 257

Bartók, Béla, writings autobiographies , 12–13 Th e Hungarian Folk Song , 217 “Hungarian Peasant Music,” 216 “Liszt-próblemák” (Liszt problems) ,

12 , 17 , 249 , 252 , 254–255 , 256 “Liszt zenéje és a mai közönség”

(Liszt’s music and today’s public) , 47–48 , 69 , 78 , 91

“A magyar zenéről” (On Hungarian music) , 91–92 , 133 , 134 , 137 , 152 , 154 , 156 , 231 , 239

Index 291

Batthyány, Count Lajos , 24 Beckerman, Michael , 8 , 35 Beethoven, Ludwig van

and Bartók , 226 and Bihari , 119 as a canonical composer , 61 , 93 ,

160–161 , 164 , 227 as German, not international , 58 , 59 ,

116 and Liszt , 48–49 , 58 , 59 , 61 , 63 , 71 and verbunkos , 43 n 73

Bellman, Jonathan , 8 n 15 , 169 , 170 Berlin , 126 , 142 Berlioz, Hector , 77 Bihari, János , 41 , 113

as composer , 39 , 166 as folk , 38 as Gypsy (Roma) , 39 , 92 , 117–118 ,

119 and Liszt , 80

Bloom, Harold , 255 Bohemian . See Gypsies (Roma) Botstein, Leon , 29 Brahms, Johannes

and Bartók , 220 , 226 as foreign , 135 , 136 and Hungarian(-Gypsy) style , 42 , 44 ,

62 , 115 , 212 and Hungarian music , 154 , 159 , 216 Ungarische Tänze , 154 , 159

Brassai, Samuel and Bartók , 216 on Gypsies, the role of , 88 , 113 and Liszt , 87–88 , 194–195 Magyar- vagy czigány-zene?

(Hungarian or Gypsy music?) , 87 , 113 , 194

and rhythm , 196 , 199–201 Breitkopf & Härtel , 13 , 62 , 233 ,

253–254 Brendel, Franz , 58–59 Budapest

and Bartók , 247 , 251 as a cultural center , 26–27 , 32 ,

35 , 109 , 136 , 145 , 148 , 216 , 234 , 257

German culture in , 164 , 165 , 226 , 233

and Liszt , 61 , 80 , 249 and the Liszt centennial , 47 , 50 ,

65–67 , 77 , 231 See also Pest-Buda, Pest

Budapest Philharmonic Society , 42 , 130 , 141 , 148 , 160–164

Busoni, Ferruccio as a German or European , 232–233 ,

238 as a modernist , 231 , 235–236 , 247

Buttykay, Ákos , 93 , 140 census, Gypsy , 37 census, Hungarian , 19–20 , 24 culture, Hungarian , 22 , 24–29 , 42 center v periphery, issues of , 7 ,

115–116 , 159–160 , 216 dichotomy challenged , 65–69 , 144 , 245 eff ects of being peripheral , 7 , 116 ,

246 , 247 and legitimation , 120 , 132 , 158 , 198 ,

201 , 204–205 and modernism , 142 , 149 , 231 , 238 ,

245–246 national identity in the periphery , 6 ,

10 , 125 , 128 , 133 , 149 , 238 , 248 reform of language and art in

periphery , 3–4 and Russian music , 97

center v periphery, Europe as center , 16 , 42 , 159 , 160 , 162 , 231

concert programming , 16 specifi cally German-speaking center ,

42 , 166 maintaining the distinction , 119 ,

130 , 162–163 , 227 and modernism , 231 , 245–246 center v periphery, Hungary as

periphery , 9 , 35 , 42 , 49–50 , 96–97 , 159–164 , 216 , 228 , 238

competes only with other peripheries , 116

and modernism , 231 , 245–246 and music criticism , 50 , 111 and national identity , 6 , 133

Chaikovsky, Peter Ilyich , 97 , 154 , 159

Chopin, Frédéric , 74 , 75 , 77 , 82

Index292

choriambus (lengedező) and Ábrány , 201 , 209 antispastus, as substitute for , 202 and Arany , 207–209 and Bartók , 214 , 216–217 , 220–223 ,

226 and Erkel , 178 , 179 as Hungarian , 176 , 179 , 182 , 189 ,

195 , 198–199 , 201 , 212 , 240 as not uniquely Hungarian , 210 , 211 ,

214 as inappropriate for art music ,

209–210 and Kodály , 214 , 217 , 219 as lengedező , 173–175 , 207–209 , 212 and Liszt , 182 , 259 and Molnár, G. , 206–207 , 209 and verse , 173–175

church modes , 237–238 cimbalom , 159–160 , 176 , 179 , 257 classicism , 125 , 139 , 164 , 173

and Járosy , 117 , 165 , 246 and modernism , 111 , 117 , 133 , 143 Hungarian , 115–119

colindas , 226 Compromise of 1867 (Ausgleich) , 20 ,

25–32 , 60 , 168 cosmopolitan national modernism

(or modernist nationalist) , 230–232 , 245–248

cosmopolitanism , 9 , 65–67 , 230–232 , 238

Couperin, François , 236 csárdás , 37 , 39 , 165 , 166 , 168 , 170 n 43 ,

253–254 Csáth, Géza , 166 , 237 Csermák, Antal , 39 , 44 , 92 , 117 , 136 Csók, István , 30 , 31 Czerny, Carl , 54 Czinka, Panna , 166 d’Agoult, Countess Marie , 58 , 73 , 74 d’Isoz, Kálmán , 46–47 , 63 , 90–91 ,

250 dactyl , 195 , 196 , 206 Dahlhaus, Carl , 8 , 30 Dankó, Pista , 40 Deaville, James , 93

Debussy, Claude and Bartók , 142 , 145 , 234 as a European standard , 141 ,

230–232 , 238 on Javanese musicians , 228 and Kodály , 233–234 and Liszt , 255 as a modernist , 231 , 236 , 245 , 247 on national infl uences , 230 anti-Wagnerism , 233 , 237 and Zágon , 232 , 234

Demény, Desző , 108 n 15 , 110 dijambus (double iamb) , 175 Doborján (Raiding) , 54 , 64–65 Dóczy, József , 177 , 220 Dohnányi, Ernő , 11 , 234–235 Dolinszky, Miklós , 179 Dvořák, Antonín , 154 , 159 East v West, issues of , 119 , 132 , 153 ,

210–211 , 238 , 246–247 anthropology to maintain the

distinction , 120–121 artistic genius as Western idea , 129 as Asia v Europe , 6 , 45 , 97 , 197 , 231 folksong bridges the distinction , 132 ,

137 , 215 geographically , 199 and Gypsies (Roma) , 6 , 35 , 138 Hungary as East , 65–66 , 132 Kodály’s focus on the East , 214 and modernism , 94 , 127 , 245–246 in music , 18 , 155 , 158 , 168 and the problem of Hungarian

music , 108 , 111 in the visual arts , 29–35 and Western science and scholarship ,

123–125 , 131 , 203–204 , 211 as Westernization, aft er the

Compromise , 27–28 Eckhardt, Mária , 75–76 Egressy, Béni , 63–65 Erdélyi, János , 112 , 172 , 173 Erkel, Ferenc , 146

as too German , 136 as not German enough , 110 as Hungarian , 11 , 62 , 114 , 147 ,

158–159 , 160

Index 293

and Hungarian-Gypsy style , 39 , 44 , 62 , 114 , 183

and Hungarian rhythm , 156 , 176–179 , 182 , 226

and Liszt , 63–65 , 182 and Mihalovich’s Toldi , 189–190 operetta , 168 , 190 Bánk bán , 179 , 180–181 , 183 , 186 Himnusz , 63–65 , 189 Hunyadi László , 178

esztám rhythm , 221–222 Fabó, Bertalan , 56 , 77 , 89 , 90 Fantasy (fantasia) , 164–165 Farkas, Ödön , 128

as a Hungarian , 147 and Hungarian identity in music ,

115 , 141 , 212 Western domination, rejected by ,

127 , 165 “A magyar művészi zenéről” (About

Hungarian art music) , 115 Festetics, Count Leó , 55 , 64 , 73 Fogarasi, János , 172–175 , 176 , 196 , 199 ,

201 , 206 folk art motifs , 29–35 folksong (and folk music) , 132 , 215 ,

245 and Bartók , 145 , 223–226 defi nitions of , 157 , 253 and Gypsies (Roma) , 151 , 237 Hungarian , 93 , 115 , 154 , 156 , 183 ,

213–214 , 231 and Hungarian-Gypsy style , 136 ,

138 and the Hungarian language , 16 , 173 ,

200 , 210 and modernism (modernists) ,

137–139 , 153 , 214 , 236 and national music, as a source for ,

96 , 109 , 138–139 , 142–143 , 228 science and the collection of , 131 ,

157 , 213 Franz Joseph, Emperor , 25 , 59 Frigyesi, Judit , 10–11 , 29 , 99 n 13 , 114 ,

153 , 218 Frisch, Walter , 152 , 235–236 , 238 Fulcher, Jane , 8

Gárdonyi, Zoltán on Bartók , 253–254 on Hungarian style , 259 on Liszt , 93 , 253–254 , 258–259

generation of 1900, the , 29 , 233 genre , 116–117 , 154–159 , 164 , 170 , 227

Hungarian , 159–170 , 217–218 George, Stefan , 240 Giraud, Albert , 240 Glinka, Mikhail , 97 Goldmark, Carl , 115 , 161 Gooley, Dana , 10 , 56 , 74 , 93 Gyarmathy, Etelka Hóry , 33 Gypsies (Roma) , 97 , 121 , 136 , 154 ,

216 and Debussy , 232 and Liszt , 84 , 87–88 , 112–115 , 252 and Molnar, A. , 135–136 peasants contrasted with , 133 , 138

Gypsiness , 50 , 168 , 194 Gypsy band (orchestra) , 35 , 42 , 157 ,

218 , 257 Gypsy music , 97 , 158

and Bartók , 91 , 92 , 150 and classicism , 117–119 and Hungarian music , 15 , 35–45 ,

109 , 117–119 , 146 and Liszt , 14 , 83 , 195

Gypsy orchestra . See Gypsy band (orchestra)

Gypsy Question (Problem), the , 37 , 136 , 152

Kacsóh on , 92–93 and national music , 35–45 and Liszt , 78–84 , 253

Gypsy scale , 176 , 179 , 190 , 258 Gypsy style , 244

and Bartók , 227 , 257 and classicism , 152 , 173 as corruption or distortion , 152 , 211 ,

228 , 237 and Liszt , 194–195 , 259 See also Hungarian-Gypsy style

Gypsy, image of , 16 , 42 , 84–88 , 148 and Liszt , 82–88

hallgató , 166 , 220 Hamburger, Klára , 10 , 76 , 89

Index294

Handel, George Frideric , 117 , 118 , 141 , 214 , 216

Hanslick, Eduard , 127 Haraszti, Emil , 75 Haydn, Joseph , 42 , 43 n 73 , 116 , 117 , 164 Herder, Johann Gottfried , 3 , 21 , 83 , 172 Hermann, Antal , 122 Hess, Carol , 8 high v low, issues of , 94 , 98 , 211

Germany as “high,” 6 , 165 Hungary as “low,” 4 , 43 , 209

Hofer, Tamás , 123 Hohenlohe, Princess Marie , 75 Hollósy, Simon , 5 Horváth, Ádám Palóczi , 207 Hubay, Jenő , 136 , 147 , 190 , 249

and Liszt’s 125th anniversary celebration , 249 , 251

A cremonai hegedűs , (Th e Violinist of Cremona) , 190

Liszt is Ours! , 249 , 251 , 252 Huber, Károly , 136 , 159 Hungary, history of , 19–29 Hungarian motive-fragment , 176 , 206 ,

211–212 Hungarian music , 7–8 , 124–126 , 140

and Bartók , 96–99 , 247 and the centennial , 49 , 94 defi nitions of , 17 , 94 , 247 and folk song , 131–132 , 139 and genre , 154–156 and Gypsy style , 35–36 , 139 see also Hungarian music, problem of

Hungarian music, problem of , 99–112 , 100–108

and Bartók , 16 , 149 and classicism , 115–119 and race , 112–115 , 119 , 134–135

Hungarian style , 62 , 109 , 179 , 211 , 240 and Bartók , 15 , 96–99 , 153 , 215–219 ,

226 , 254 defi nitions of , 19 , 170 , 230–231 and genre , 156–159 , 164 and Gypsy music , 15 , 35 as Hungarian-Gypsy style, 35–45 and Kodály , 96–99 , 214 , 215–219 as limited or limiting , 94 , 129 , 139 ,

156 , 158 , 175 , 202–204

and Liszt , 7 , 15 , 180 , 183 , 186 , 254 as low, in low v high , 129 , 211 and Molnár, G. , 176 , 204 , 207 , 210 and operetta , 168–169 , 176 and peasant music , 139 , 255 and rhythm , 176 , 194 , 207 , 210 and Toldi , 186 , 190 see also Hungarian-Gypsy style

Hungarian-Gypsy music , 39 , 62 , 112 , 136

defi ned , 37 and Liszt , 79–82

Hungarian-Gypsy style , 6 , 17 , 38 , 78–81 , 97 , 137 , 238

and Bartók , 16 , 133 , 151 , 215–216 , 253 , 256–257

and German style , 98 , 130 and Hungarianness , 14 , 63 as Hungarian style , 44–45 and Kodály , 216 , 257 and Liszt , 228 , 238 , 252 , 258 and peasant music , 138 , 253 political implications of , 99 n 13 ,

113–114 Hungarianness (magyarság) , 62 , 136 ,

148 , 150 , 165–166 , 168 , 242 , 259 and Bartók , 14 , 16 , 91 , 227 , 231 ,

252–253 and defi nitions , 17 , 115 , 215 ,

227–228 discourse on , 7–8 , 14–19 , 99 ,

100–108 , 158–159 , 227–228 and Gypsies and Gypsy music , 134 ,

135 , 138 , 158–159 , 179 international aspects of , 93 , 144 and Kodály , 214–215 , 227 and Liszt , 54–56 , 64 , 66 , 68–69 , 84 ,

183 , 250–251 , 257–258 and Molnar, A. , 135 , 257–258 and Molnar, G. , 130–131 , 207 and rhythm , 175–176 , 198 ,

207 , 227 and science , 130–131 , 211 and the visual arts , 29–35 See also identity, Hungarian

Hunter, Mary , 76 hypermodernism , 110–111 , 127 , 133 ,

143 , 149

Index 295

iamb (menő) and Bartók , 216 , 217 , 220–223 and Hungarianness , 175 , 176 , 179 ,

182 , 189 , 198 , 206 , 240 and Kodály , 217 , 219 and Molnár, G. , 206–207 , 209

identity, Hungarian , 17 , 64–65 , 96–99 , 112 , 158

see also Hungarianness impromptu , 164 Járosy, Desző , 129 , 136

and anti-modernism , 127–128 , 141 and classicism , 139 , 143 , 152 , 166 and national music , 116–119 , 138 ,

165 , 246 “A zeneesztétikai szép a

zenetörténelemben” (Th e music-aesthetically beautiful in music history) , 127

Faji zene és magyar zene (Racial music and Hungarian music) , 117

Jókai, Mór , 86 Kacsóh, Pongrácz

and Bartók , 110 , 140 , 141–142 on international modernism ,

141–142 on Liszt and “the Gypsy Question,”

92–93 János vitéz (János the hero) , 141 “Új utak a zenében” (New roads in

music) , 141–142 Kálmán, Imre , 168–169 Kárpáti, János , 223 Kárpáti, Sándor , 210–211 , 212 , 217 , 226 Kern, Aurél , 78 , 108 n 15 , 142 , 144

and Bartók , 140–141 and Liszt , 68–69 , 90 Modern magyar zene: 12 zongoradarab

(Modern Hungarian music: 12 piano pieces) , 140

Kodály, Zoltán and Bartók , 11 , 17 , 96 , 158 , 248 , 255 and folk (peasant) song (performance) ,

7 , 93 , 131–132 , 136–137 , 156–157 , 213 , 228

and Gypsy musicians , 134

and Hungarian rhythm , 16 , 199 , 210 , 212–215 , 217

and Hungarian style , 215–229 and Hungarian-Gypsy style , 99 n 13 ,

257 and Hungarianness , 13–14 , 39 ,

96–99 and internationalism , 145 , 153 , 232 ,

235 , 247 and Liszt , 13–14 , 255 and modernism , 139 , 232 , 236 and Molnár, G. , 203 , 204 and nationality in music , 169 ,

232–235 reception of , 99 , 142

Kodály, Zoltán, works 20 magyar népdal (20 Hungarian folk

songs) with Bartók , 157–158 Czinka Panna , 218 , 257 Galántai táncok (Dances from

Galánta) , 16 , 218–219 , 219 Háry János , 218 Kállai kettős , 257 Magyar népdalok (Hungarian folk

songs) , 136 Márosszéki táncok (Dances from

Márosszék) , 218 Psalmus hungaricus , 220 String Quartet op . 2 , 145 , 146 , 232

Kodály, Zoltán, writings “A magyar népdal strófa-szerkezete”

(Th e strophic structure of Hungarian folk song) , 212–214

Hungarian Folk Music , 219 “Magyarság a zenében”

(Hungarianness in music) , 18–19 Koessler, Hans (János) , 140 , 169 , 226 ,

235 Kolózsvár (Cluj-Napoca) , 26 Körösfői-Kriesch, Aladár , 5 , 32 , 33 Kos, Károly , 34 Kovács, Sándor

and modernism , 230 , 237 , 247 and French connections , 230 ,

234–235 “La jeune école hongroise,” 230 , 232 ,

235 Krohn, Ilmari , 132

Index296

Kún, László , 147 Kurtág, György , 137 language, Hungarian , 22 , 200–201 , 210

and Finnish , 196–198 and Liszt , 56 , 96 as marker of identity , 21–23 , 122 reform of , 16 , 21 , 57 , 96 , 172 and rhythm , 16 , 79 , 172 , 176 , 206

Lavotta, János , 39 , 44 , 92 , 117 , 136 Lechner, Ödön , 34 Legány, Dezső , 10 , 93 Lehár, Ferenc , 168–169 lengedező . See choriambus lepő . See spondee (lepő) Ligeti, György , 137 light v serious music , 15 , 27 n 31 , 50 , 69 ,

159 , 167–169 , 190 Liszt centennial

and Bartók , 47–48 , 94 and cosmopolitanism , 50–70 , 231 and Des bohémiens , controversy over ,

78 , 90–94 and Liszt’s identity , 14 , 47–50 ,

61–65 and virtuosity , 77

Liszt, Ferenc (Franz) and the 125th anniversary

celebrations , 17 , 249–251 and the Academy of Music , 10 , 28 , 61 and Beethoven , 48–49 and cosmopolitanism , 9 , 136 and critical editions , 88 , 233 , 253 and cult or religious overtones ,

64–65 , 249 and Germany , 14 , 58 , 61–62 , 164 , 201 and Gypsy music and musicians ,

80–81 , 83 , 84 , 92 , 119 , 194–195 , 228 and the Gypsy Question , 78–93 and Hungarian music, problem of ,

111 , 170 , 227 Hungary as his context , 7 , 12–14 ,

47–50 and improvisation , 81 on the individual as composer of

national music , 83 as an international composer , 8 , 15 ,

144 , 145 , 257–258

and modernism , 253 as a national composer , 4 , 6–8 , 13 ,

89 , 155 , 158 and race , 112–115 and rhythm , 156 , 166 , 180–186 , 196 ,

202 , 226 and Romanticism , 254 and the saber incident , 55–57 and virtuosity , 14 , 50 , 70–78 , 81–82 ,

84 , 195 Liszt, Ferenc (Franz), and Bartók

Liszt replaced as national composer by Bartók , 16

Liszt’s identity addressed by Bartók , 69–70 , 96 , 216 , 254–256

Liszt’s infl uence on Bartók , 12–14 , 229 , 248 , 259–260

Liszt’s works edited by Bartók , 253 Liszt, Ferenc (Franz), and Hungarian

(-Gypsy) style criticized for using the style , 135 ,

154 , 159 and Hungarianness , 19 , 212 successful with the style , 62 , 115 , 228 his use endorses the style , 212 , 216

Liszt, Ferenc (Franz), and national identity

and the centennial , 62–65 and cosmopolitanism , 231 contradictory aspects of his , 49 cultivates Hungarian identity , 59–61 as French , 254–255 as German , 14 , 58 and Gypsiness , 50 and individuality , 68–69 meaning of his , 56 , 94 problems of , 49 , 50–57 , 161 questioned , 60–70 , 96 , 216 , 257–259

Liszt, Ferenc (Franz), Des bohémiens et de leur musique en Hongrie

and 125th anniversary celebrations , 251

and anti-Semitism , 75–76 , 88–89 authorship of , 74–76 and Bartók , 92 , 248 and the centennial , 90–93 discussion of specifi c musical

features , 170 n 43 , 194

Index 297

and Gypsies (Roma) , 14 , 38 , 78–89 , 98 , 118 , 158

Hungarian music, sparks debate on , 45 , 78 , 83 , 111 , 113 , 152 , 158 , 170 n 43

and Hungarian rhythm , 194–195 and Hungarian reception of Liszt , 15 ,

84–93 , 147 and virtuosity , 74–78 , 256

Liszt, Ferenc (Franz), works Années de pèlerinage , 7 , 13 , 258 Bagatelle ohne Tonart (1881) , 253 La Campanella , 67 Christus , 251 Csárdás macabre , 253–254 , 258 “Das deutsche Vaterland,” 58 Faust Symphony , 13 , 66 , 67 Festkantate zur Enthüllung des

Beethoven-Denkmals in Bonn (1845) , 48

Festklänge , 67 Heroischer marsch in ungarischen

Styl , 63 Himnusz , setting of Erkel’s , 63 , 67 Hungaria , 13 , 66 , 78 , 186 Hungarian Fantasia , 78 Hungarian Rhapsodies , 13 , 63 , 65 ,

74 , 81 , 91 , 154 , 155 , 159 , 183 , 250

Hungarian Rhapsody no . 14 , 176 , 177 , 216 , 220–221

Die Legende von der heiligen Elisabeth , 60 , 66 , 180–186 , 180–181 , 182 , 184–185 , 186–188 , 250

Magyar dallok , 74 Mephisto Waltz , 67 Missa solennis zur Erweihung der

Basilika in Gran (Esztergrom) , 59 , 66 , 249

Nuages gris , 250 , 253 Piano Concerto in E-fl at , 66 Piano Sonata in B minor , 12 n 25 Psalm XIII , 66 Rákóczi March , 67 Requiem for male voices , 67 Rhapsodie espagnole , 7 Rheinweinlied , 85

“Sunt lacrymae rerum,” 255 , 258 Szózat , setting of Egressy’s , 63 , 67 Tasso , 67 Totentanz , 13 Ungarische Krönungsmesse

(Coronation Mass) , 60 , 65 , 66 , 67 Ungarischer Marsch zur

Krönungsfeier in Ofen-Pest am 8 Juni 1867 , 13

Ungarischer Sturmmarsch , 13 Unstern! , 253 Zur Säcularfeier Beethovens

(II. Beethoven-Kantate) (Beethoven centennial cantata), 61

literature, Hungarian , 16 , 156 , 172–175 , 200–202

verse, versifi cation, or poesy , 173–175 , 200 , 202

Loya, Shay , 254 , 255 Lukács, György , 11 Lussy, Mathis , 204 (magyar) nóta

as corrupt , 137 , 139 and folk music , 155 as folk-style art song , 157 , 216 and Gypsies (Roma) , 41 , 151 , 237 and new-style folksong , 216 as not Hungarian , 139 , 153 , 215 and Hungarian(-Gypsy) style , 37 ,

39–40 , 156–157 , 258 as low, not serious , 159 and race , 125 and rhythm , 176 , 199 , 202 , 210 , 217 and text , 79 and verbunkos , 38 , 43

magyaros (Hungarian-style) , 44 , 257 magyarság . See Hungarianness

(magyarság) Mahler, Gustav , 110 , 190 n 82 , 194 Major, Ervin , 93 , 251 Major, Gyula J. , 146–148 , 247 Mátray, Gábor , 55 , 59 , 60 , 183

and the nature of Hungarian music , 79 , 170 n 43

melodies, runic , 214 , 215 menő . See iamb (menő)

Index298

metrical terminology, Greek , 173 , 196 , 201 , 214

Mihalovich, Ödön and German infl uence , 93 , 190–193 ,

192 , 201 and Hungarian rhythm , 156 ,

186–194 , 226 as a Hungarian composer , 147 Toldi szerelme (Toldi’s love) , 44 , 147 ,

180 , 186–194 Millennium Exhibition of 1896 , 26 , 30 ,

32 , 34 n 46 Minor, Ryan , 48 , 67 modern v traditional, issues of

and Bartók , 50 , 91 , 141 and the centennial , 50 , 92–93 and other dichotomies , 87–88 , 139 and folksong , 93 , 133–144 and Liszt , 66 , 91 the past as a source for the new , 137

modernism , 16–17 , 127 , 152 , 239–245 , 254

historicist , 152 , 235–239 , 245–246 Hungarian , 15 , 230–239 , 244–245 and Hungarian identity , 137 , 149 and nationalism , 98 , 110–111 ,

133–144 , 149–153 , 237 and romanticism , 253

Molnár, Antal and Bartók , 142–144 , 146 , 148 , 244 ,

248 , 258–259 and folksong , 138–139 , 157 , 216 , 238 and Hungarian(-Gypsy) music , 16 ,

134–135 , 252 and Liszt , 44–45 , 252 , 257–258 and modernism , 139 , 144 , 145 , 239 and national character , 4 , 138 , 152

Molnár, Antal, works Sérénade pour Violon, Clarinette et

Harpe , 239 Sonatine pour violon et piano , 239 , 240

Molnár, Antal, writings “Liszt, a magyar zeneszerző” (Liszt

the Hungarian composer) , 3 , 257 “Nemzeti zene”(National music) , 44 ,

135 , 143 , 152 “Neu-ungarische Musik” (New

Hungarian music) , 95 , 134–135 , 142 , 152

“A népdalról” (About folk song) , 138 , 238

Molnár, Géza on Arany , 207–209 and Bartók , 215–217 , 227 , 229 and classicism , 143–144 on cosmopolitanism , 231 on Gypsies , 118–119 and Hungarian identity , 156 , 212 and Hungarian rhythm , 176 , 199 ,

203–209 , 226 , 227 , 246 and Hungarianness , 147 , 150 , 153 ,

176 , 246 and internationalism , 141 and Kodály , 213–215 and national character , 128 , 138 , 155 ,

171 , 183 , 229 and race , 121–127 , 129 , 138 , 155 ,

171 , 183 and rhythm , 205–206 , 210 , 212 ,

216–217 , 228 Seprődi, on Analysis , 130–133 and Th ewrewk , 196 , 198 , 199 A magyar zene elmélete (Th e analysis

of Hungarian music) , 118 , 128 , 157 , 203

Mosonyi, Mihály as a Hungarian composer , 62 , 109 ,

166 , 183 and Hungarian rhythm , 156 , 176 and Liszt , 60 , 63 , 84 , 86–87 , 110 , 182 ,

183 , 186 and nationality , 22 , 39 , 136 , 158 and rhythm , 182 , 226 Magyar gyermekvilág (Hungarian

children’s world) , 176 , 178 , 183 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus , 58 , 116 ,

164 Munkácsy, Mihály (Michael Lieb) , 22 ,

30 , 31 music criticism and pedagogy , 9 ,

116–117 , 119–130 , 130–133 , 144–148 , 149–153

and Bartók , 8 , 15–16 , 215–218 and genre , 162–170 , 227–229 and Hungarian(-Gypsy) style ,

87–89 and Hungarianness , 14 , 99–112 and Kodály , 215–218

Index 299

and Liszt , 15 , 47–48 and modernism , 17 , 133–144 and rhythm , 16 , 155–156 , 158–159 ,

170–175 , 194–215 , 227 , 229 music criticism, selected journals

Aurora , 140 Der Merker , 233 Magyar dal , 92 Magyar zene , 154 Népművelés , 47 Neue Zeitschrift für Musik , 47 , 62 Nyugat , 128 A zene , 67 , 110 Vasárnapi újság , 84–85 Zeneközlöny , 108 n 15 , 110 , 143 ,

162–163 , 165 Zenelap , 110 , 148 n 142 Zenészeti lapok , 109–110 , 111 , 202 Zenevilág , 108 n 15 , 110

music, national , 9 , 19 , 96–99 , 109 , 130–133 , 160–164

and Bartók , 96 , 146 , 167 , 260 Finnish , 196 and folksong (music) , 99 , 133–134 German , 116–119 and Gypsies (Roma) , 8 , 35–45 Hungarian , 8 , 19 , 96 , 99 , 146 , 248 , 260 and identity , 163–164 and Kodály , 96 , 146 , 260 and the visual arts , 35–45

musicians, Gypsy (Romani) , 6 , 17 , 97 , 98 , 111–115

and Bartók , 77–78 , 134 , 151 , 218 and Brassai , 87–88 , 200 and Liszt , 77–78 , 195 as primary performers of Hungarian

popular music , 35–40 , 79 and purity , 8 , 132 and race , 117 and virtuosity , 16 , 81 , 87–88 , 200

musicians, Hungarian , 49–50 , 111 musicians, Romani . See musicians,

Gypsy (Romani) Nagy, Sándor , 32 , 34 National Conservatory (Nemzeti

Zenede) , 59–61 , 89 , 109 , 140 National Museum , 63–64 , 91 National Ferenc Liszt Society , 249 , 251

national style , 14 , 19 , 133 , 155 , 201 , 226 as “light,” 169 , 194 , 238 and Molnár, G. , 126–127 , 209

National Th eater , 42 , 56 , 110 national v cosomopolitan, issues of , 9 ,

50–70 , 235 national v international, issues of ,

4–5 , 144–148 , 232 , 237 , 239–245 , 245–248

and Bartók , 144 and Hungary , 5 , 45 and Liszt , 257–258

nationalism and aesthetics , 125 , 128 and Bartók , 245 , 256 and Hungarianness , 158–159 and Liszt , 67 , 111 and modernism , 67 , 133 , 245–248 and the Revolution , 23–24

nationality , 68 , 72–73 , 93 , 122 “Nem ettem én ma egyebet” (Today

I ate nothing else) , 183 , 184–187 New German School , 58–59 , 62 ,

110 New Hungarian Music Society

(Új Magyar Zene-Egyesület, abbrev. UMZE) , 17 , 134 , 145 , 233–237 , 245–247

Nocturne , 164 Novágh, Gyula , 250–251 Ohm’s Law , 125–126 , 131 , 132 Opera, Royal Hungarian , 65 , 66 , 110 ,

130 , 140 , 250 operetta , 168 , 176 , 190 Osváth, János , 129 overture , 166 Paganini, Niccolò , 82 Palestrina, Giovanni Pierluigi da ,

19 n 3 palotás , 37 , 41 , 166 , 170 n 43 panromanogermanic mainstream , 201 ,

205 , 238 defi ned , 4 n 5 and modernism , 232 , 238 and national character , 69 , 194

Parakilas, James , 176 Pardoe, Julia , 55

Index300

Paris , 54 , 58 , 72 , 120 , 142 , 250 parlando-rubato , 155 , 244 peasant music (song)

and authenticity , 139 , 255 and Bartók , 136 , 247 , 253 , 259 contrasted with Gypsy music , 133 ,

138 , 148 , 253 and Hungarian identity , 98 , 217 See also folksong (and folk music)

periphery . See center v periphery, issues of

Pest and the 1838 fl oods , 55–56 , 68 , 73 and Liszt , 55–56 , 58–60 , 73 , 80 , 81 and the Revolution , 23–25 and theater , 22 , 24 See also Pest-Buda, Budapest

Pest-Buda , 54 , 56–57 , 60 as a hub of commerce and culture ,

20 , 42 as site of debates , 86 , 109

Pethő, Csilla , 170 Petőfi , Sándor (Alexander Petrovics) ,

22 , 23 , 63 Philharmonic . See Budapest

Philharmonic Society Podmaniczky, Baron Frigyes , 41–42 ,

56–57 Ponori Th ewrewk, Emil . See

Th ewrewk, Emil Ponori Pozsony , 26 , 67 Prahács, Margit , 93 purity (pure source) , 132–134 ,

136–137 , 154 , 260 “Quasi stella matutina,” 183 , 188 Raabe, Peter , 249–250 race (racial character)

and classicism , 116–117 and folksong (folk music) , 132–144 ,

149 , 153 and Gypsies (Roma) , 112–115 , 253 and Hungarian music, debates about ,

4 , 15 , 112–115 and Molnár, G. , 121–123 , 125–126 ,

206 and science , 119–130

Raiding . See Doborján (Raiding) Rákoczy–March , 56 , 63 , 65 , 81 , 257 Ramann, Lina , 62 , 88 Rameau, Jean-Phillippe , 236 , 238 Ravel, Maurice , 233 , 236 , 239–240 , 255 Reform Era , 22 , 39 , 57 Reger, Max , 145 , 234

as a modernist , 127 , 152 , 235–236 Rehding, Alexander , 49 rhapsody , 165–168 , 217 rhythm, Hungarian , 89 , 159 , 175–194 ,

246 , 257 in discourse on Hungarian music ,

115–116 Kodály’s dissertation , 212–215 problems with the idea of , 209–213 theoretical writings on , 194–215

Riemann, Hugo , 204–207 Roma . See Gypsies (Roma) Rome , 59 , 61 Rózsavölgyi, Gyula , 109 , 145 , 166 , 239 Rózsavölgyi, Márk (Mark Rosenthal) ,

22 , 39 , 44 , 92 , 136 , 167 Ruskin, John , 237 saber incident (saber of honor) , 55–56 ,

58 , 64 Ságody, Otmár , 115–116 , 209–211 , 212 Sárosi, Bálint , 8 n 15 , 34 n 46 , 38 , 42 n 68 ,

42 n 70 Sayn-Wittgenstein, Princess Carolyne

von , 74–75 , 88 , 90–91 Scarlatti, Domenico , 236 Scherzo , 164 Schneider, David , 10–11 , 179 , 218 Schober, Franz von , 57 Schoenberg, Arnold , 145 , 232–233 , 238 ,

245 , 247 Schubert, Franz , 42 , 43 n 73 , 44 , 62 , 78 ,

115 Schumann, Robert , 72 , 176 Seprődi, János

and folksong (folk music) , 137 , 157 , 213 , 216

and Hungarian identity in music , 98 , 149 , 212 , 252

and Molnár, G. , 130–133 and rhythm , 212 , 217

Index 301

serenade , 166 Simonff y, Kálmán , 85–86 , 113 Sinfonietta , 166 Somfai, László , 254 sonata , 116 , 164 , 165 Sopron , 55 , 64 , 66 spondee (lépő) , 173 , 196 Strauss, Johann Jr , 168 Strauss, Joseph , 255 Strauss, Richard , 127 , 161 , 234

and Bartók , 12 , 142–145 , 219 Stravinsky, Igor , 11 , 137 style hongrois . See Hungarian-Gypsy

style style, Hungarian-Gyspy . See

Hungarian-Gypsy style suite, baroque , 218 suite, French , 166

chaconne , 166 gigue , 166 minuet , 166

suite, Hungarian , 165–167 symphonic dances , 166 symphonic poem , 166 symphony , 116 , 164 , 165 Szabolcsi, Bence , 254 , 258 Széchenyi, Count István , 21 n 10 , 23 ,

25 n 24 , 41 Szekfű, Gyula , 18 Szendy, Árpád , 11 , 234–235 Szerző, Katalin , 109 szökő . See iamb (menő) Tallián, Tibor , 167 tarogató , 176 , 220 Taruskin, Richard , 4 , 6 , 8 , 97 , 235 , 239 Th alberg, Sigmund , 72 , 74 Th ewrewk, Emil Ponori

and Abranyi , 199–200 and the Finno-Ugric connection ,

196–198 , 214 and Hungarian rhythm , 195–199 and rhythm , 171 , 176 , 201 , 207 ,

212–213 , 217 Th ewrewk, Emil Ponori, writings

A magyar zene rhythmusa (Th e rhythm of Hungarian Music) , 171 , 195 , 212

“Th e Origin of the Hungarian Music,” 89

Th oroczkai Wigande, Ede , 32 See antispastus (toborzéki) See bacchius (toborzó) Topinard, Paul , 120 , 123–124 Török, Aurél , 120–121 trochee , 206–207 Turda, Marius , 121 Turino, Th omas , 9 UMZE. See New Hungarian Music

Society (Új Magyar Zene-Egyesület) (UMZE)

universal v local, issues of , 6 , 14 , 204–205

urban v rural, issues of , 151 , 155 and Bartók , 139 , 216 , 218 , 248 blurring the distinction , 156–158 ,

235 , 248 and other dichotomies , 139 , 153 ,

216 , 228 and folksong (folk music) , 158 ,

238 and Gypsies (Roma) , 37 , 154 , 218 and Kodály , 136 , 213 and visual arts , 14

Vahót, H. and Imre , 55–56 , 73 verbunkos (toborzós)

and Bartók , 139 , 153 , 218 , 221–223

as composed or performed by non-ethnic Hungarians , 38 , 39 , 41

defi ned , 43–45 disagreement over , 170 n 42 and Hungarian identity in

music , 37–39 , 41 , 79 , 80 , 109 , 155 , 156–157 , 170 n 43 , 215

and Molnár, A. , 136 , 139 Vienna , 54 , 55 , 80 , 166 Vietorisz, József , 169 Vikárius, László , 11 , 12 , 255 virtuosity

in Des bohémiens , 76 , 194 and Liszt , 50 , 70–78 , 87–88 as superfi cial , 70–73

Index302

virtuoso , 67–68 , 70–71 and Des bohémiens , 76–77 , 256 and Gypsies (Roma) , 80 , 81 , 200 and Liszt , 76–77 , 81 , 195 , 254

Volkmann, Robert , 93 , 161 Vörösmarty, Mihály , 25 n 24

Ode to Ferenc Liszt , 46 A vén cigány (Th e old Gypsy) , 95 , 97 Zrinyi , 18

Vuillermoz, Émile , 234 , 235 Wagner, Richard , 12 , 117 , 164 , 189 ,

202 “Der Virtuos und der Künstler,”

70–71 , 76 Walker, Alan , 10 , 75 Weber, Carl Maria von , 71 , 117

and Hungarian-Gypsy style , 42 , 43 n 73 , 78 , 115

Die Freischütz , 117

Weimar and Liszt centennial , 50 , 77 as a European center , 58 , 93 as Liszt’s residence , 58 , 61 , 62 , 88 ,

254 Weiner, Leó , 140 , 235 , 236 Wellesz, Egon , 145–148 , 232–233 , 236 ,

247 Der Abend , op . 4 , 145 “Wie ein Bild,” op . 3 , 145

Zágon, Géza Vilmos , 232 , 234 ,

237–245 , 247 “Die Gärten schliessen,” 240 “Fehér lyány virág-kezei” (White

girl’s fl ower-hands) , 240 , 242–244 , 242–243

Mystères pour piano , 240 , 241 Pierrot lunaire , 240

Zichy, Count Géza , 190