György (Đuro Arnold (1781-1848), the Musician with Two Homelands

Abstract

György (Đuro) Arnold (1781-1848) the composer, teacher, conductor, lexicographer and founder of the first music school in Subotica, was the regens chori of the Subotica's Sv. Terezija church (1800-48). He was a prolific composer, writing in a variety of genres, from compositions for the church of Sv. Terezija, choral and chamber works to operas, melodramas, songs, overtures, and verbunkos (the complete list of his works is included in the appendix). Arnold's style was influenced by Viennese Classical church music and the emerging Hungarian national style. In his early sacred pieces, he used quotations from popular operas, but in later compositions he was closer to Haydn, and the Te Deum Solenne dedicated to the Zagreb Bishop Aleksandar Alagović shows possible influence of early Beethoven. In many aspects, Arnold was a composer on the periphery. He liked large ensembles which could impress audiences with the brightness of the orchestral sound altough, as far as we know, he never attempted to build a large symphonic form which would match the richness of such a sound. He ususally set the text in short sentences, quickly exhausting its possibilities, undermining the expectations raised by the large-scale gradations which open his compositions. In 1819, Arnold published Pismenik, a collections of texts (without tunes) of Croatian Roman Catholic hymns collected in Bačka (western Vojvodina); the preface to Pismenik and its complete table of contents are reprinted in an appendix. In 1839-40, he completed the hymnal Valóságos egyházi kántori fontos énekeskönyv with 186 church compositions intended for Hungarian and Transylvanian chuch musicians, which remained unpublished. In 1826, Arnold began working on the Historisch-musikalisch bibliographisches Tonkünstler Lexikon, which expanded to four manuscript volumes in length, but remained unpublished and seems to be lost today.