Redefining Hungarian Music from Liszt to Bartók

Abstract

This book explores the transformation of the idea of national music in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Hungary, envisioning Hungary’s two best-known composers, Liszt and Bartók, as endpoints in a tumultuous debate over what made music Hungarian. The context that shaped these two very different figures reveals not only new perspectives on these renowned figures but also a rich cultural and ideological landscape with profound implications for the ways that Hungary’s musicians and critics viewed their identity. A crucial part of what many called the “problem of Hungarian music” was the controversy over the role of Hungary’s most problematic musical representatives, the Gypsies. Hungarian Romani and non-Romani musicians carried the “Hungarian-Gypsy style” around the world, in cafés, theaters, and concert halls. The potent image of the “Oriental” Gypsy contrasted starkly with the more elevated mainstream European classical musician; the Hungarian-Gypsy style was a natural first choice as a musical signifier of Hungarianness, yet it was a popular style, associated not with ethnic Hungarians but with reviled racial aliens. Hungarian musicians spent decades trying to come to terms with the significance of this style and trying to determine how it might be used in the concert hall. The folk music writings of Bartók, Kodály, and their colleagues thus emerge as a modernist response to what they saw not only as inauthentic but also as a Romantic throwback. In this context, it is clearer than ever how their use of ancient folk music fits among the modernist musicians of their time.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 97 citations exist upstream.