Abstract In a poetic vein, Donald Maurice's “remarkable story” of Béla Bartók's unfinished Viola Concerto rightly calls the work a “swansong.” It was the composer's last work that remained, however, unfortunately “unsung.” The question as to how incomplete the single autograph manuscript of the sketchy compositional draft is, has already received significant attention in the literature, in reconstructions, and in its facsimile edition. From various perspectives, my colleagues from the Budapest Bartók Archives further discussed this question at the Bartók's Viola Concerto Revisited conference, organized by the Budapest Bartók Archives on July 22, 2024, relying on fresh experience with compositional sources, in connection with editorial work on the Béla Bartók Complete Critical Edition series. What I have tried to consider in my paper is why this work remained, as it appears, necessarily fragmentary. In what way were Bartók's final years burdened with personal and professional hardships that, added to his frail and failing health, could not but have exhausted his energies. Although his final years now seem more productive than perhaps he himself would have acknowledged, his last works, unquestionable masterpieces, the Sonata for Solo Violin (1944), the Third Piano Concerto (1945), and the Viola Concerto (1945) were all published unavoidably posthumously with varying degrees of editorial assistance. In comparison, though, the composer left the Viola Concerto behind without its finally worked-out written form, despite its rich (perhaps even complete) collection of necessary material. While revisiting the difficulties of those final years spent in voluntary exile in the United States, I am also trying to consider their meaning and significance more generally.

Abstract Bartók's protests against the violent actions of ultra-nationalist sentiment interfering with matters of art, tolerated and even fueled by the governments of the early 1930s are known from the composer's biographies, even if some of these important documents have not yet been included in the composer's list of writings. Less known are Bartók's views about the rampant antisemitism and inhuman laws introduced by governments of the 1930s against their Jewish citizens. His statements and actions for the sake of the persecuted mostly come from his private correspondence. The present article gives an overview of these documents complementing it with a previously unknown letter of Bartók, written on behalf of the German ethnomusicologist, Robert Lachmann, who lost his livelihood in Berlin after the restrictive laws introduced in Germany in 1933. The road to Bartók's decision to his ultimate protest against the Nazi-allied Hungarian government, to leave the country, is also traced in his correspondence.

Abstract A theatrical privilege of May 13, 1749, which was granted to the Pressburg citizen and confectioner, Charles Turbilio, provided the basis for operations of permanent theatrical performances and balls. The privilege also included the duty to construct a new theater building for the purpose. However, during the decade of its validity, Turbilio did not fulfil this element, and so he did not receive the second privilege of September 11, 1760. This second document did not apply to a specific individual but to the area of Pressburg. The city authorities transferred these rights to Count Eudemio Castiglioni, who, together with Count Kristóf Erdődy, eventually paid for the conversion of the so-called Green House into a theater. This study does not deal with theatrical repertory but mainly the background of issuing the second privilege from the perspective of the official proceedings of the Hungarian Royal Governor's Council.

Abstract Richard Wagner's theoretical writings were intended to institute a tradition of interpretation that has had a major impact on the musical world from 1870 to the present day, in Europe and in the United States. In this essay, I concentrate on excerpts concerning conducting and singing practices, highlighting their interrelation in Wagner's view. I then turn to Cosima Wagner's reinterpretation of her late husband's theories and her attempt to codify this Wagnerian tradition of interpretation, contributing to provide a reassessment of the much-debated “Bayreuth style” of performance.

Abstract The peasant music Béla Bartók first discovered in 1904 and which he collected systematically between 1906 and 1918 belongs to what he generally described as “Eastern Europe.” His career as pianist and composer was naturally oriented towards Western Europe. His contract with one of the most important publishing houses of the period interested in contemporary music, Universal Edition in Vienna, seems to have conserved a Central European network during the interwar period – a network originating in the by then dissolved Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. Apart from pointing out the conspicuous contrast between Bartók's concept of Eastern Europe and his Central European position as an intellectual, this article revisits a particular historic event, the new music festival organized in April, 1938 in Baden-Baden, to examine Bartók's concept through his art and careful politics during a period of heightened tensions. Since the premiere of his Second Piano Concerto in Frankfurt in January, 1933, Bartók had avoided giving concerts in Nazi Germany. When invited to offer a piece for the 1938 festival he proposed Five Hungarian Folk Songs for voice and orchestra (1933). Despite his initial consent, however, he later tried to withdraw the work and forbid its performance shortly before the start of the festival; in the end his work did remain in the program despite his protest. His peculiar strategy on this occasion seems to have been prompted by his dispute with the German copyright office (STAGMA), which categorized his works in which he used folk melodies as mere arrangements, declaring them unoriginal. It appears that Bartók might have consciously offered such a “questionable” work to demonstrate its originality. At the same time, however, it seems that this particular set might have had a special topical message, too. Starting with a deeply-felt composition based on a song considered to belong to the most ancient layers of indigenous Hungarian folk music, it ends with a grotesque arrangement of a folk song which Bartók described as of Western, probably German, origin. One might wonder whether it was intentional to offer a narrative that contrasts the values of indigenous East European folklore with the shallowness of Western, specifically German, influence. The Appendix of the article presents an English translation of Bartók's notes about his composition sent to the organizers of the Baden-Baden festival.

Abstract In Bruno Monsaingeon's 2009 film portrait of Piotr Anderszewski cinematic technique, voice-over commentaries and musical performances combine to create an “affective” geography in which the pianist moves between significant Central Eastern European places. Anderszewski is filmed traveling in a special train carriage (including a grand piano) which, the director said, “as a place of meditation and reflection … would facilitate the use of flashbacks.” Memory, identity, and origins become central to the film's symbolism. After Freud, railway journeys can be interpreted as a privileged “analogy” for unconscious and repressed thought processes. Train metaphors may thus facilitate an imaging of the mental apparatus and its “lines of conduction.” The essay focuses on three symbolic locations in Anderszewski's journey – Warsaw, Budapest and Zakopane – and on performances of music by Chopin, Schumann and Szymanowski (the first heard in the railway carriage, the second in the Liszt Academy, Budapest, and the third in Szymanowski's house in Zakopane). Each of these sites and musical examples are interpreted primarily through Freud's notion of “displacement” to reveal counterpoints and conjunctions of displaced musical “voices” and identities. These hearings reveal the complexities and dissonances between Monsaingeon's French vision of “Eastern” Europe and Anderszewski's Polish-Hungarian self-identity as “Central” European cosmopolitan.

Abstract After the Second World War, the Soviet Union did not simply squeeze the countries of the Central and Eastern European region into its sphere of interest and under its economic, political and cultural control, but also isolated them from each other in order to secure its dominance. The Kremlin's control was also reflected in weakening the established diplomatic relations. Politicians of the so-called people's democracies communicated with one another through Moscow, and the importance of the embassies was reduced by appointing mostly incompetent persons to diplomatic posts. In this light, the revival of Hungarian-Polish cultural relations at the end of the 1940s, including the exchange of artists between the two countries, deserves special attention. In addition to their diplomatic importance, the guest performances also provided an opportunity to discuss Soviet musical aesthetics. Based on archival press sources, my paper focuses on the two-week guest appearance of the Vocal and Dance Ensemble of the Hungarian People's Army in Poland. I wish to explore the ways in which leading representatives of the musical life of the two countries interpreted Soviet artistic decisions in 1952, and also their differing strategies of living up to the conceptually ambiguous ideal of Socialist Realist art.

Abstract There is hardly another Frankfurt School treatise on art theory today which is as much discussed and quoted as Walter Benjamin's notable “artwork”-study. This text has become a mandatory reading; however, it has been largely overlooked by musicologists. Benjamin developed his theory in connection with the visual arts: it is only the image that carries the aura, traveling through time and space and is saturated with historical substance. Benjamin remained seemingly uncertain about the place and role of the sound (and the music) in the historical process of losing the aura. Among the three surviving versions of his study, the first one posited a direct cause-and-effect relationship between the reproduction of sound and the paradigm shift that affects art as a whole, while in the third version, this connection is vanishing. It is generally known how challenging Benjamin's study was to Adorno's ideas on art theory. Adorno tried to deny the positive value of the change that Benjamin described. He raised doubts about the constitutive role of “reception in the distraction” in his famous “Fetish-Character” study. The “distracted perception,” the “atomistic hearing” dissociates the unity of the work. Adorno wanted later to preserve the validity of the “auratic work” and its derivatives that he called “critical works” (for example, in the famous footnote 40 of the “Philosophy of New Music,” or in the 1950s, when he faced efforts aimed at the radical erasure of the musical context, and for example, he classified Křenek's works written in the 1920s as productive forms of loss of aura). According to these, it is difficult to place the technical work of art on Adorno's aesthetic value horizon. This makes his writings on gramophone recordings or the relationship between music and mediality so interesting. Focusing on the discussion of Benjamin and Adorno, this presentation tries to find an answer to the following questions: how can the paradigm shift in art history (and art ontology) described by Benjamin be interpreted in relation to music? And what does this imply about the relationship between the “artwork of music” and the sound recording?

Abstract This paper presents some aspects concerning a group of works written by Ede Terényi in the 1980s, a time in which composers were preoccupied with regaining a certain expression through the revival of the musical past. Romania was not an exception to this orientation, and composers applied the same technical devices as their Western colleagues, such as quotation, collage, allusion, pastiche, etc. This stylistic approach provided Terényi with the opportunity to find ways for the reconciliation of the European canon with the musical tradition of his native Transylvania, a reconciliation that was meant to make music accessible and beautiful again. He composed a series of twelve concertos for various instrumental combinations, in which the Baroque formal and expressive strategies meet the folkloric idioms of the central Romanian multiethnic region.