Search

The poetry of Paul Verlaine inspired several songs by Debussy. Il pleure dans mon coeur is no. 2 in the cycle Ariettes oubliées. The same poem is used as a motto for a short piano piece by Zoltán Kodály: no. 3 in the Seven Pieces for Piano, Op. 11 (Esik a városban). The paper describes the madrigalesque word painting of Kodály’s composition on the one hand, and analyzes the modes of its melodic material on the other. In a broader context, the influence of French art (the music of Debussy in particular) on the artistic development of the young Kodály is discussed, as well as the two composers’ mutual estimation of each other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present article traces two writings missing from the canon of Bartók's voluminous short texts first published and catalogued by András Szôllôsy in Hungarian and compiled and edited by Benjamin Suchoff in English. Bartók was invited to join the Committee of Arts and Letters of the League of Nations in 1931 and, as we know from his letter about the meeting, he had to deliver a proposal, which so far has appeared to be lost. This motion urging the establishment of a gramophone recording collection and initiating new recordings can be found both as published in the minutes of the session and also among Bartók's still unpublished papers. The Appendix of the article contains the newly found French and German text versions of his proposal, as well as Bartók's other proposal, which attempts to find support for the defence of the freedom of art and science, a text he had originally wished to present at the meeting but was discouraged from doing so because of its politically delicate nature. The surviving text, previously published in facsimile but not included in the list of Bartók's writings, clearly testifies to the composer's sense of responsibility and foresight. Finally, the identification of most of the twenty-seven members of the committee shown in a repeatedly reprinted photograph is also attempted for the first time. The article was published in a slightly different and earlier English version (together with a Romanian translation) entitled 'Béla Bartók as Public Figure: Tracing Two Missing Writings Linked to a League of Nations Committee Session in Geneva, 1931' in Lucr±ri de Musicologie / Musicology Papers in 2022. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The central term of discussion and controversy about music in the decades of neoabsolutism (1849-1867) was originality, which was inseparable from its national context. Music critics and experts thought that the most genuine source of national Hungarian music could be found in the classical era of verbunkos music (ca. 1780-1820), especially in the compositions of the so-called 'three virtuosi', János Lavotta, Antal Csermák and János Bihari. The debate over the composer Ignác Frank, taking place in the most relevant weekly paper of the second half of the 19th century, showed the typical narratives of pro-verbunkos and anticsárdás thinking. While the old verbunkos music was considered genuine and national, the new csárdás was stigmatized as fake and antinational. Behind this artificially created opposition of the two genres one can detect the conflict of two distinct generations that interpreted the term 'national' differently. Beside the demanding and continuous search for originality in music of both the present and the past, a powerful cult of the 'three virtuosi' started forming via the narratives of the biographies and memoirs about the composers published in the 1850's and 1860's. The article explores the similarities and differences of these recollected stories and outlines the significant patterns that lead us to the realization of how the collective memory of the Hungarian nation established the site of memory (lieu de mémoire) of verbunkos music. Politically stuck in the neoabsolutist Habsburg régime, music was the only legitimate way to remember an era when hopes had still been high and the nightmare of the lost War of Independence had not yet threatened. Finally, readers can briefly witness how Ferenc Liszt's book Les Bohémiens established a counter-memory of verbunkos music, interpreting the significance of the 'three virtuosi' differently. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ernst von Dohnányi's Hungarian years, including the musicological examination of his work with the philharmonic, can be considered to be the current task of Dohnányi research. So far we know very little about the Dohnányi era of the Budapest Philharmonic Orchestra, the long-standing Philharmonic Society, about Dohnányi as a conductor who gained an international reputation, primarily as a pianist and composer, and the concert tours outside Hungary of the orchestra that represented Horthy-Hungary. This paper examines the background of these concerts held outside the country, especially the significance of their cultural policy and the content of their programmes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are important studies in the Bartók literature that deal with the form and content of the finale of Bartók's First Violin Sonata. Our picture of the work has been enriched by many important points following from analyses based on rondo form and sonata- rondo form (Kárpáti, Kroó, Laki, Seiber, Tallián, Griffiths, Stevens, Wilson) as well as from those exploring the complex structures that arise from a comparison with other works of the composer - above all the Third String Quartet (Somfai, Kárpáti), together with analyses that focus on the folk music roots of the thematic material (Somfai, Ujfalussy). Following in these footsteps this paper examines the finale in relation to other violin works composed by Bartók up until the middle of the 1930s, and offers a few observations in contribution towards a deeper understanding of the piece. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As already pointed out by László Somfai in the late 1980s, Béla Bartók's first fully developed five-movement realization of the so-called 'bridge' or 'palindrome' form was only an afterthought, a further development of a composition originally intended as a cycle of four movements only. As also discussed briefly by Somfai, the evolution of the Allegretto, pizzicato movement itself had distinct stages. A recently surfaced source further clarifies these compositional phases, among other things it confirms the existence of a 140 bars long version without a proper conclusion, which, at one point, the composer considered as a definitive version (for which only the ending needed to be composed) and tried out with the Waldbauer-Kerpely Quartet. The present article re-examines the compositional process of Bartók's String Quartet No. 4 with an emphasis on its additional fourth movement and discusses the different compositional phases of the Allegretto, pizzicato. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]