Abstract
In my study, I show how three different figures of the interwar Hungary saw Beethoven. The first of them, Dénes Bartha (1908–1993), was a musicologist and became an international specialist of Viennese Classicism. In the context of contemporary Hungarian literature, his first Beethoven monograph (1939) represents an emphatically anti-Romantic attitude. In the second part, I examine the popular image of the composer, on the basis of the planned operetta Beethoven (1929–1931) by Zsolt Harsányi, an author of popular biographical novels, and Mihály Nádor (1882–1944), a successful operetta composer. This piece follows the example of Das Dreimäderlhaus, and its music was compiled from Beethoven’s melodies by Nádor. In the third part I examine an essay about Beethoven by an important musician of the period, Ernst von Dohnányi (1877–1960), who was, according to Bartók, a leading Beethoven performer of his age. Although the text of his “Romanticism in Beethoven’s Piano Sonatas” was written during his émigré years (draft: 1948, revision: 1955), it summarizes well what the leading figure of the interwar Budapest musical life might have thought about Beethoven’s music.
Highlights
I would like to demonstrate how three very different personalities living in Hungary in the interwar period, Dénes Bartha, Mihály Nádor, and Ernst von Dohnányi, saw Beet hoven
‒ can be read in the preface of Bartha’s Hungarian Beethoven book (p. 7). This statement was meant to characterize the totality of the international literature concerning the subject, the same is even more true for Hungarian Beethoven studies published during the interwar period: before Bartha’s volume in question, his compatriots were only able to consult mostly Romantic biographies and studies in particular subjects
Writings belonging to the latter category discussed mostly the episodic Hungarian aspects of the composer’s biography, like the brief articles by Kálmán Isoz and Ervin Major published in the 1927 centenary year,[4] or the short volume written by Viktor Papp, whose pathetic style and tone seem to be ridiculous today.[5]
Summary
The market of books ... is overwhelmed by studies of particular subjects and Romantic biographies, so much so that for the musicians and scholars who are seriously interested in Beethoven, it often needs hard labour and leg-work to look for the scattered material concerning his musical works and style. As an opera conductor, in co-operation with László Somfai and Dorrit Révész;[34] not to mention his critical editions of some Italian operas.[35] It should be noted that in 1956 (in the year of the anti-Soviet revolution in Hungary, when Beethoven’s overture to Egmont became a symbol of the struggle for freedom), he published a second Hungarian Beethoven book, dedicated to the symphonies, which was reprinted several times and published in a revised edition.[36] This volume proved to be of fundamental importance concerning the Hungarian reception of the composer For my generation, it was the standard Beethoven reading even in the 1980s and 1990s, despite the fact that a Hungarian translation of the Beethoven entry published in the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians by Joseph Kerman and Alan Tyson became available in 1986.37 Bartha’s significance in his homeland is characterized by the fact that in 2008, on the centenary of his birth, the Magyar Zenetudományi és Zenekritikai Társaság (Hungarian Musicological Society) dedicated its annual conference to his memory
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