| VI The “Verbunkos”. The National Musical Style of the Nineteenth Century | CONTENTS | VIII The Instrumental Music of the Romantic Period. Liszt and Mosonyi: the Programme of Romanticism |
VII
Popular Song-writers.
Erkel and the Romantic
National Opera
The conspicuous Magyarization of Hungarian towns in the twenties and thirties of the nineteenth century and the fact that the culture of Hungarian music, that is of the “verbunkos”, was becoming more and more prevalent, was one of the most far-reaching phenomena of the time. This cause, and in general the organizing of musical education on a more systematic basis, was significantly promoted by musical schools, and by the musical courses at “Hungarian national schools”, established one after the other in different parts of the country (Kassa, Keszthely, Kolozsvár 1819) and working for the most part in the spirit of the new national musical culture. The Musicians’ Society (National) School of Music in Pest was headed since 1840 by Gábor Mátray (1797–1875), one of the leading personalities of Hungarian musical life. András Bartay published in 1835, after János Gály’s initiative (1831), the first systematic Hungarian school of harmonics [Magyar Apollo (Hungarian Apollo)], and the publication in 1833–34 his Eredeti Népdalok (Original Folk Songs) ranks him among the pioneers of Hungarian folk-music research. The rapid growth of the new musical culture was, indeed, encouraged not only by the schools but by the collecting of folk songs. The Hungarian public of the period realized with great admiration the opulence of folk poetry lying around, not only in the domain of literature but in the sphere of music, and although it did not completely understand the depth ant the extent of this poetry, it began with enthusiasm to unearth the accessible folkloristic and popular melodic treasure. “I wish I could write something like that”, Ádám Pálóczi Horváth {65.} said in 1789 speaking about a folk song, and was bold enough to declare in the preface of his Ötödfélszáz Énekek, that the disappearance of some old song was a much bigger loss than that of some enormous cannon of the “conquering army”. Mihály Csokonai Vitéz (1803), the outstanding poet of the period, urged, “Cast your poor song-books away… and listen attentively to the singing village girl and the simple water carrier.” Mátray, who published popular melodies in 1826, 1827 and 1829 already, in his collections Pannonia, Flora and Hunnia, recognized in these folk songs “the veritable preserves of national character”. In the spring of 1838 the young Franz (Ferenc) Liszt intended to walk with a pack on his back all over the unexplored regions of Hungary (“les parties les plus désertes de la Hongrie”), as if he divined the age-old musical treasures hidden there, and desired to refresh his spirit by wandering through “the virgin steppes of Hungary”, of his “wild and distant native country”, partaking “in the singpilicity of peasant morals”. For a long time there was no difference between genuine folk-music compositions in the vein of folk music and popular song. Pálóczi Horváth did not think it necessary to make a careful distinction between them. Nor did his successors, the compilers of late song collections, István Tóth (Arias and Songs, 1832–1843) and the publishers of the printed compendia of the century, beginning with Bartay and János Fogarasi (through the publications of Travnyik, Egressy–Szerdahelyi, Füredi and Bognár) up to Gábor Mátrai, Károly Szini and István Bartalus. In one word, from 1833 to 1896 the collection of folk song bringing forth such characteristic and significant compendia as the one in manuscript of János Arany, the great Hungarian poet, from 1874,* was done according to old principles; but the year 1896 – in which the Hungarian people celebrated the thousand anniversary of their country – marks the beginning of a new period (with Béla Vikár). The blending and intermingling of principles and of styles did not always show the want of scientific critical acumen on the part of the publishers. On the contrary, a definite tendency to create from folk music, or by stages, but at all events without sharp delimitations, the artistic Hungarian musical culture could {66.} be ascertained. “The development of our art music… should take place gradually, almost unnoticed, so that it remain consistent with its origin,” wrote Gusztáv Szénfy (1819–75) in 1860. “It would be desirable to be in possession of as many songs as possible that rise above the standard of folk song without being taken entirely for composed music.” This spirit also inspired the work of Hungarian song composers of the nineteenth century.
Béni Egressy (1814–51) used the form of expression of the “verbunkos” directly, and with a good instinct transplanted in his most successful compositions the new Hungarian song style, coming from the secular song literature of the eighteenth century, into forms taken over from instrumental music. Kálmán Simonffy (1832–81), the most original and most inventive song writer of the second half of the nineteenth century, most nearly approached the ideal of “popular melodic culture” in his songs written around 1860. Some of his contemporaries, Gusztáv Nyizsnyai, Ignác Bognár and Gusztáv Szénfy (who were well known already between 1840–50) for instance, could not as yet completely free themselves from the weight of instrumental figurations they were accustomed to in the music of the “verbunkos” and “czardas”. On the other hand Elemér Szentirmay (alias János Németh, 1836–1908), the very successful composer of popular plays in the seventies and eighties, hit upon the form of expression and scale of popular character with such a happy instinct that his works surpassed in popularity everything written by his contemporaries, and some of them – in spite of their sentimental flavour – are subsequently intermingled with the real folk melodic treasure. The music of popular plays of this period, the authors of which are unknown, beyond doubt influenced certain melodic turns of new folk melodies between 1840 and 1900.
This was a peculiar, ambiguous sort of music. It was intended as the music of the people, but no matter how much it was popularized by the Gipsy bands of town and country, it remained basically the music of dilettanti, and in a more and more conscious way even the music of the “Hungarian gentry”. This is why it was defended in the beginning of the twentieth century by the Hungarian middle class against the resurging genuine folk music. The cultivators of this music, however, were self-taught composers, {67.} or people playing only by instinct. They relied, for want of a more fundamental musical education, on their instinct only (their songs were written down and furnished with accompaniment by their more educated friends). It was probably due to this circumstance that as soon as their spontaneous inspiration wore thin and could not find a direct way to the public’s fancy, to the demands of the day, these composers lost their footing irreparably and disappeared from musical life as slighted, embittered people. [It should be mentioned here that the Hungarian operetta (musical comedy) also was essentially a late descendant of the popular play and of popular song literature. It was started first in the sixties in the French style by Bognár, Allaga and Huber, then continued in the eighties by Elek Erkel and Baron György Bánffy, and at the beginning {68.} of the twentieth century by Huszka, Kacsóh, Buttykay, Jacobi, Kálmán, Lehár and others, predominantly in the Viennese style.]
However, there were spheres, besides the nineteenth-century song literature, besides this “amateur”, popular branch of the Hungarian artistic music, where the national tendency of the “verbunkos” period could not gain ground so easily. The cultivators {69.} of the latter were educated musicians, whose culture was nurtured by foreign roots. Later on they joined increasingly the general national tendency. Catholic church music for instance, that was still in the centre of Hungarian musical endeavours at the end of the seventeenth century, was apparently firmly influenced in the middle of the eighteenth century by South German music. The song-books of Mihály Bozóky (1797, 1806) reflect this Western musical taste that gives a German character to Hungarian melodies even, in a characteristic parallel to the reformed songbooks of the era (Kolozsvár 1777, Debrecen 1806), that have displaced the majority of old Hungarian lauds from the song-books. As far as the Catholics were concerned, it was in the middle of the nineteenth century that they slowly found the way back to a Hungarian musical language. However, the most important steps in this connection were taken later on in the works of Liszt and Mosonyi.
Stage music was the domain where the great results and the even greater problems of Hungarian music of the nineteenth century unfolded themselves in their true perspective. This was the genre that could reach, in addition to popular song literature, wide strata of the Hungarian public in a most direct way, and that would first promise the solution of the problems of contents and form of Hungarian music. We have seen how after 1820 increasing experiments were made to create Hungarian opera. With the appearance of the regular Hungarian theatre, and of an extraordinary artistic personality as well, these endeavours seemed to reach their goal. Added to this great impetus was given to Hungarian opera through the close and organic connection with the ideas of national freedom, powerfully unfolding in the “reform era”, and of bourgeois progress. On the stage of the National Theatre, opened in 1837, the music of Ferenc Erkel,* the greatest {70.} Hungarian opera composer of the period, was heard already in 1840. His work, spanning over in a single arch five decades of the century, between 1837 and 1887, is of great importance, and he possessed extraordinary abilities. He was the first to consciously create a Hungarian opera language, writing eight operas (or nine, if we include Elizabeth, written in collaboration with the two Dopplers for a special occasion). Hungarian stage singing – in spite of the experiments of Ruzitska, Bartay and others – could not yet call on a ripe tradition. There were, however, ready forms presented by the Italian and French opera literature (Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti, Verdi, Auber and Meyerbeer) and then again the music of the “verbunkos” and the popular Hungarian song literature as well. Erkel built up the world of his operatic forms from this double material. First he transplanted the idiom of the Western opera into Hungarian milieu without completely getting away from the Italian pattern as far as melody, the treatment of the libretto and the style of singing goes. But he also used the biggest forms of “verbunkos” music both in instrumental and vocal pieces. (Báthori Mária to the libretto of Béni Egressy, 1840; Hunyadi László to the libretto of the same author, 1844; the Hunyadi Overture, written in 1845, are among the most significant instrumental works of Hungarian Romanticism.) Later Erkel worked along two lines. On the one hand he was trying to find the solution in the development of closed, arioso forms, on the other his object was the creation of Hungarian dramatic recitativo. In the former he depended on the technique of the Italian opera and the possibilities of the Hungarian popular song. [Bánk bán – (bán = warden of the southern marches of Hungary) libretto by Egressy, first performed in 1861; Sarolta, libretto by J. Czanyuga, 1862; Névtelen hősök (Nameless heroes), libretto by Ede Tóth, 1880.] In the second half of his life Erkel was probably inspired by Wagner (Dózsa György, libretto by Jókai and Szigligeti, 1867; Brankovics György, libretto by Ódry and Ormai, 1874; King Stephen, libretto by Antal Várady, 1885). There are certain indications that Erkel considered this dramatic recitativo to be Hungarian in character, but in its creation he did not take the recitativo of the Hungarian folk song as his starting point, as did Bartók a quarter of a century later, but rather – following his {71.} classically trained imagination – the recitativo of international opera. For Erkel the relation to the people was not the central problem, the invigorating power; for him the people represented an idyll, a reconciliation, not an obligation but a comforting background. His operatic music had the romantic progressive conception of history and people’s lives that crowned the fame of the “young” developing nation with romantic historical glory. Still his work was the best that was produced in the sphere of Hungarian musical drama in the nineteenth century. His themes described the great conflicts of the “Hungarian reform era”, of the War of Liberation and of Absolutism, and the historical background, revived in his works, spoke to the great masses of the nation just as did his exceptionally expressive melodies, forceful dramatic imagination and the dramatic recitativo itself that he first introduced into the Hungarian opera. Erkel may be thus justly ranked with the contemporary composers of the “Spring of the Nations”, of the great European awakening around 1848, with the great musician-heralds of the ideals of national and social progress, with Glinka, Moniuszko, Smetana, and to a certain extent with Verdi.
The dramatic force of Bánk bán, Dózsa György or Brankovics György, and the lyrical richness of Nameless Heroes, could not be reached by any of Erkel’s Hungarian contemporaries, although Mihály Mosonyi’s Szép Ilonka (Beautiful Nelly), created under the influence of popular national purism (1861), was quite a noteworthy experiment in the domain of the Hungarian fairytale opera, while his Álmos (1862) was a monumental Hungarian choral drama of the period. Other opera composers of Erkel’s time, however, were inferior to his example. Károly Thern’s (Gizul 1841, The Siege of Tihany 1845, The Would-be Invalid 1855), Ferenc Doppler’s (Benyovszky 1847, Ilka 1849, Vanda 1850, Two Hussars 1853) and Károly Doppler’s (The Camp of the Grenadiers 1853), György Császár’s (Cumanians 1847, Erzsébet from Morsina 1850), Ignác Bognár’s (Mária Tudor 1856, The Adopted Daughter 1862), Károly Huber’s (The Szekler Maiden 1858, Gay Fellows 1863), Leo Kern’s, Gusztáv Böhm’s and Gusztáv Fáy’s theatrical works introduced new elements for the most part only inasmuch as they gave – beside Italian and Hungarian elements – a bigger {72.} play to German and possibly to French influences. Indeed, all through the Hungarian opera literature of the nineteenth century – in spite of its great promises and important results – one can feel the atmosphere of experimentation. Erkel and the contemporary opera literature are at any rate evidences of the real possibilities of Hungarian stage music even if not a final solution. Undoubtedly it is no accident that this remarkable effort was realized in the name of romantic national ideas.
| VI The “Verbunkos”. The National Musical Style of the Nineteenth Century | CONTENTS | VIII The Instrumental Music of the Romantic Period. Liszt and Mosonyi: the Programme of Romanticism |