Liszt's Transcultural Modernism and the Hungarian-Gypsy Tradition (review)

Abstract

Liszt's Transcultural Modernism and Hungarian-Gypsy Tradition. By Shay Loya. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2011. [xx, 341 p. ISBN 9781580463232. $85.] Music examples, illustrations, bibliography, index, accompanying Web site. Was Franz Liszt Hungarian? This is arguably one of most divisive questions to pose because it remains one of most vexing to answer. After all, he was awarded sabre of honor by a group of Hungarian nationalists in 1840, but he refrained from wielding it against their oppressors when revolution broke out eight years later. While he ostensibly disseminated Hungarian culture abroad via symphonic poem Hungaria and ubiquitous Hungarian Rhapsodies, he exposed his ignorance of authentic Hungarian music by privileging Gypsy tradition in his Des Bohemiens et de leur musique en Hongrie of 1859-a decision which enraged more Hungarians than non-Hungarians. He could not even pass Herder's simple national litmus test, it seems, for although born on (Austro-)Hungarian soil, he never spoke language. Answering question in a form of pastiche, scholars have increasingly become comfortable with label cosmopolitan, citing Liszt's various, and at times contradictory, allegiances to France, Germany, Hungary, and Italy, among other national entities. (In this sense, Liszt's cosmopolitan modernism provides an interesting foil to Johannes Brahms's historicist modernism.) But such scholarly efforts to characterize Liszt's career and style as best represented by an aesthetic of unity in diversity often miss real priority that Liszt gave to certain cultural projects at various points in his life: French and Italian opera in 1830s and 1840s, German symphonic and literary tradition during 1850s, and church music from 1860s. One of most misunderstood of these projects, as Shay Loya persuasively argues, is Liszt's complex relationship with Hungarian-Gypsy musical tradition of verbunkos, to which Liszt was attached both as a patriot and for more complex musical, aesthetic, and political reasons, which is why he tried out so many compositional possibilities and generic combinations that were well beyond call of duty and nationalist narrative (p. 90). Over course of an introduction and seven wideranging chapters, Loya shapes a provocative image of Liszt that is not so much cosmopolitan-that is, ambivalently yet still hierarchically assimilative-as it is transcultural, a concept which resists the dichotomies (and implicitly Eurocentric) terms 'acculturation' (culture acquisition on dominant culture's terms) and 'deculturation' (loss of culture) (p. 5). Transcultural perspectives illuminate how material haphazardly flows back and forth between center and periphery; Loya, in charting this dual directionality (p. 26), seeks to flatten many of stark dichotomies that persist in characterizing- and inevitably denigrating as inartistic, inauthentic, or anti-modern-Liszt's so-called Hungarian music. Taking aim squarely at musicological and music-theoretical practices that have shaped such entrenched attitudes, he argues that [i]n this way, it is possible to balance a formal perspective on compositional craftwith a more nuanced understanding of cultural context and then to force a confrontation between these modes of knowledge and perchance arrive at a synthesis of them (p. 154). Chapters 1 and 2 introduce and develop fundamental concepts of modernism and verbunkos, respectively. Verbunkos is an important element in chapter 1, however. A useful table on pages 22- 23 pithily demonstrates how a historical bias toward modernism has debased style as conservative, generic, exotic, familiar, and naive. The surprising appearance of critiques by Arnold Schoenberg and Steve Reich midway through chapter 1 convincingly demonstrates that verbunkos- when presented as unoriginal material, as cliched style-has failed to gain much traction among composers and critics into present day. …