Ligeti, Kurtág, and Hungarian Music during the Cold War

Drawing on key elements from musical thought in inter-war Hungary, this book provides a new perspective on the nation’s musical heritage both inside and outside Hungary’s borders during the Cold War. Although Ligeti became part of the Western avant-garde after he left Hungary in 1956, archival sources illuminate his ongoing contact with Hungarian musicians, and their shifting perspective on his work. Kurtág’s music was more obviously involved with Hungarian traditions, was entangled with the Soviet occupation, and was a contributing part of the city’s diverse musical culture. However, from the mid-1960s onwards, critics identified his music as an artistic and moral ‘truth’ distinct from the broader musical life of Budapest: it was an idealised symbol of life beyond the everyday in Hungary. Grounding her interpretations of works in these complex political circumstances, Beckles Willson is nonetheless sympathetic to arguments by Ligeti, Kurtág, and Budapest music critics that their music might have a life beyond nationalist and Cold War ideology.

RACHEL BECKLES WILLSON is Reader in the Music Department at Royal Holloway, University of London. She is the author of Gyorgy Kurtág’s ‘The Sayings of Péter Bornemisza’ op. 7 (2004) and she has many articles published in journals including Contemporary Music Review, Slavonica, Music and Letters, and Central Europe.

Music in the 20th Century

GENERAL EDITOR Arnold Whittall

This series offers a wide perspective on music and musical life in the twentieth century. Books included range from historical and biographical studies concentrating particularly on the context and circumstances in which composers were writing, to analytical and critical studies concerned with the nature of musical language and questions of compositional process. The importance given to context will also be reflected in studies dealing with, for example, the patronage, publishing, and promotion of new music, and in accounts of the musical life of particular countries.

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Ligeti, Kurtág, and Hungarian Music during the Cold War
Rachel Beckles Willson

Ligeti, Kurtág, and Hungarian
Music during the Cold War

Rachel Beckles Willson

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
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© Rachel Beckles Willson 2007

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First published 2007

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For Tony, Robina, Mark and Rob.
And with warm memories of Naomi, who even
learned some Hungarian.

I am even jealous of their language, which contains nothing human, whose sound calls forth another world – forceful and harsh as a prayer, comparable to a roar, to a plea, its enunciation perpetuating the very accents of hell. Even if I know only its swear words, it gives me endless pleasure; I cannot listen to enough of it – it enchants me and petrifies me – I am astounded by all the beauty and the horror its words contain, words as sweet as nectar and as bitter as cyanide, so perfectly appropriate for the expression of death throes. It is in Hungarian one must expire, or refuse death altogether.

Contents

Music examples

Acknowledgements

I began gathering materials for this book in 1999, and the long intervening period has placed me in debt to a large number of people. At the Paul Sacher Foundation I received much help from Felix Meyer and Ulrich Mosch, as well as unstinting technical support from Evelyn Diendorf, Christina Dreier, Carlos Chanfón and Matthias Kassel. At the Hungarian Music Council Ágnes Páldy welcomed and aided my research process, I was also well supported by staff at the Hungarian National Archive, at Artpool, the National Philharmonia concert agency, as well as many libraries in Budapest, including the Hungarian Music Information Centre (special thanks to Eszter Vida). Márta Papp, at Hungarian Radio, was exceptionally generous with her time. The staff at Boosey and Hawkes in London have kindly opened their cabinet of archived concert reviews to me on more than one occasion.

Sabbatical leave funded by the University of Bristol, along with Parallel Leave funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Board, underwrote my major archival searches in Budapest in 2002 and 2003. A British Academy Small Research Grant enabled me to research at the Paul Sacher Foundation in 2003 and 2004, as well as pay for research assistance from Vera Kusz, István G. Németh and Lóránt Péteri, who filled some gaps in my archival searches. An award from Music & Letters contributed to final reproduction costs and musical typesetting (for which thanks to Christopher Brown).

I should like to express gratitude to a number of individuals in Budapest whose conversations have been of special guidance. Mária Feuer, Eszter Lázár, Tibor Tallián and Bálint András Varga each had a story to tell about the media in the 1970s and 1980s. László Vidovszky, Zoltán Jeney, László Sáry and András Wilheim offered valuable insights into the New Music Studio and its controversies; László Tihanyi provided recollections of concert life in the 1980s. János Breuer, Adrienne Csengery, János Demény, László Dobszay, Péter Eötvös, István Láng, András Székely and András Szollosy each offered personal perspectives. I was immensely privileged to work with Kurtág during my studies at the Liszt Academy between 1992 and 1995, and I am grateful for both the contact I have had with him subsequently and the generosity with which he has responded to my queries.

Invitations to interdisciplinary conferences organised in 2001, 2003 and 2004 by György Péteri (as part of the Program on East European Cultures & Societies at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology) were of considerable value and inspiration as I mapped out the broader intellectual background for the research. Conferences on which I collaborated with Adrian Thomas at Cardiff University and the University of Bristol in 2001 (Socialist Realism in Central European Music: 1945–1955) and 2002 (The Modernisms of the 1960s in Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland) also contributed substantially as the project evolved.

In bringing the book to its final form, I’ve had great support from colleagues and friends who have read all or part of the manuscript in earlier versions. Here I should mention Andrea Bohlman, Anna Dalos, Péter Halász, Barry Millington, Ferenc Rados, Jim Samson, Florian Scheding and Richard Steinitz in particular, as well as my ever-supportive editor Arnold Whittall. Peter Sherwood’s checking my Hungarian translations was also of tremendous assistance, but was really only the final touch to eight years of regular input to and encouragement of my work on Hungary, for which I am extremely grateful. I also thank other Hungarianist friends Lynn Hooker, Michael Kunkel, David Schneider, Claudio Veress, Alan E. Williams and Tim Wilkinson for their interest and frequent help. And without the involvement of Béla Simon, of course, the book would have been scarcely imaginable.

I presented material from Chapters ² and 3 in a paper entitled ‘Dr Faustus and the demonisation of dodecaphony in Hungary 1947–1963’ at the American Musicological Society Annual Conference 2004. My paper ‘Reconstructing Ligeti’, presented at the conference of the Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale (‘Music’s Intellectual History: Founders, Followers & Fads’, New York, 2005) included material appearing here in Chapter 3. The Epilogue is published in a somewhat different form in ‘Sehnsucht als Mythos? Zur musikalischen Dramaturgie in den Drei Schwestern’, trans. Elke Hockings, in Hans-Klaus Jungheinrich (ed.) Identitäten: Der Komponist und Dirigent Peter Eötvös. Mainz: Schott 2005, pp. 17–26.

I acknowledge the permission given by publishers for the reproductions of musical extracts as follows:

Works by Kurtag

Eight Piano Pieces op. 3 © Copyright 1965 by Zenemukiado Vallalat, Budapest, with rights with Universal Edition A. G., Vienna for all countries other than Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, Albania, and the former Soviet Union.

   Four Songs op. 11 Copyright 1979 by Editio Musica, Budapest, for Hungary, Albania, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, China, the former Yugoslavia, Poland, Romania and the former Soviet Union. Copyright 1979 for all other countries by Universal Edition A. G., Vienna.

The Sayings of Peter Bornemisza op. 7 1973 by Editio Musica, Budapest for Hungary, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, Romania and the former Soviet Union. 1973 by Universal Edition A. G., Vienna for all other countries. German text 1973 by Universal Edition A. G., Vienna. English text 1973 by Editio Musica, Budapest. String Quartet op. 1, Wind Quintet op. 2, Eight Duos op. 5, Splinters op. 6c, Games S. K. Remembrance Noise op. 12, Hommage à Mihàly Andràs 12 Microludes for String Quartet op. 13, Omaggio à Luigi Nono op. 16, Attila Jozsef Fragments op. 20, Kafka Fragments op. 24, . . . quasi una fantasia . . . op. 27 no. 1 Copyright Editio Musica, Budapest. Reproduced by kind permission.

Works by Kodàly

Evening Song Editio Musica, Budapest. Reproduced by kind permission.

Works by Ligeti

String Quartet no. 2 1971

Ejszaka 1973

Magyar Etuo 1983

Piano Concerto 1986.

‘Fem’ [Metal] No. 8 from Etudes, Book II 1998

Hàrom Weores Dal 2004

All copyright Schott Musik International GmbH & Co. KG, Mainz. Reproduced by permission. All rights reserved.

I also thank the Paul Sacher Foundation for permission to quote from letters housed in the collections of György Kurtág, Ligeti, and Sándor Veress. Copyright remains with the authors of these letters, and I have gained permission to make citations wherever possible.

Finally, I thank Mr János Vasilescu for permission to reproduce Lili Ország’s ‘Sárga holdportré, Holdak, Holdfej, Hold és föld’ [Yellow Moon Portrait: moons, moon head, moon and earth] (1957) on the dust jacket.

Note on the text

The text refers to a large number of critics and composers whose names will be unfamiliar to most readers. On their first appearance I have attempted to make their significance clear, but I have also provided a ‘Personalia’ at the back of the book that fills out additional biographical data, including professional genealogies and affiliations.

Archives are abbreviated in footnotes as follows:

Documents housed at the MOL and MZT are listed individually and numbered in the ‘Archives’ section of the Bibliography, and are referenced in the footnotes as ‘MOL document 1’, ‘MOL document 2’, and so forth.

Collections within the Paul Sacher Foundation:

I have presented the titles of Hungarian musical works initially in Hungarian (with an English translation), and thereafter in English only. I have provided translations of journal titles appearing only once in the text itself; but more significant and/or regularly appearing journals and newspapers remain in Hungarian. These are the following: