Music Divided: Bartók’s Legacy in Cold War Culture 9780520933392

Table of contents :
Contents
Illustrations
Preface
Note on Hungarian Pronunciation
1 Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra and the Demise of Hungary’s “Third Road”
2 A Compromised Composer
3 “Bartók Is Ours”
4 Bartók and His Publics
5 Beyond the Folk Song
6 The “Bartók Question” and the Politics of Dissent
Epilogue East
Epilogue West
Appendix 1: Compositions by Bartók Broadcast on Hungarian Radio
Appendix 2: Biographical Notes
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous contribution to this book provided by the Ahmanson Foundation Humanities Endowment Fund of the University of California Press Foundation.

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Music Divided

california studies in 20th-century music Richard Taruskin, General Editor

1. Revealing Masks: Exotic Influences and Ritualized Performance in Modernist Music Theater, by W. Anthony Sheppard 2. Russian Opera and the Symbolist Movement, by Simon Morrison 3. German Modernism: Music and the Arts, by Walter Frisch 4. New Music, New Allies: American Experimental Music in West Germany from the Zero Hour to Reunification, by Amy Beal 5. Bartók, Hungary, and the Renewal of Tradition: Case Studies in the Intersection of Modernity and Nationality, by David E. Schneider 6. Classic Chic: Music, Fashion, and Modernism, by Mary E. Davis 7. Music Divided: Bartók’s Legacy in Cold War Culture, by Danielle FoslerLussier 8. Jewish Identities: Nationalism, Racism, and Utopianism in TwentiethCentury Art Music, by Klára Móricz

Music Divided Bartók’s Legacy in Cold War Culture

danielle fosler-lussier

University of California Press berkeley

los angeles

london

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.

University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 2007 by The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Fosler-Lussier, Danielle, 1969– Music divided : Bartók’s legacy in cold war culture / Danielle Fosler-Lussier. p. cm. — (California studies in 20th-century music ; 7) Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. isbn: 978-0-520-24965-3 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Bartók, Béla, 1881–1945—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Music—Political aspects—Hungary—20th century. 3. Music— Political aspects—20th century. 4. Music—20th century—History and criticism. I. Title. ml410.b26f67 2007 780.92—dc22 2006029087 Manufactured in the United States of America 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 This book is printed on New Leaf EcoBook 50, a 100% recycled fiber of which 50% is de-inked post-consumer waste, processed chlorine-free. EcoBook 50 is acid-free and meets the minimum requirements of ansi/astm d5634–01 (Permanence of Paper).

For Eric, and for my parents

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Contents

List of Illustrations

ix

Preface

xi

Note on Hungarian Pronunciation 1. 2.

Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra and the Demise of Hungary’s “Third Road”

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1

A Compromised Composer: Bartók’s Music and Western Europe’s Fresh Start

28

“Bartók Is Ours”: The Voice of America and Hungarian Control over Bartók’s Legacy

51

4.

Bartók and His Publics: Defining the “Modern Classic”

72

5.

Beyond the Folk Song; or, What Was Hungarian Socialist Realist Music?

94

3.

6.

The “Bartók Question” and the Politics of Dissent: The Case of András Mihály

117

Epilogue East: Bartók’s Difficult Truths and the Hungarian Revolution of 1956

149

Epilogue West: Bartók’s Legacy and George Rochberg’s Postmodernity

157

Appendix 1: Compositions by Bartók Broadcast on Hungarian Radio, 18 September to 1 October 1950

167

Appendix 2: Biographical Notes

170

Notes

173

Selected Bibliography

207

Index

221

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Illustrations

figures Ferenc Szabó

9

András Mihály

17

Hermann Scherchen with his students at Darmstadt

35

Endre Szervánszky

100

József Révai with Zoltán Kodály

114

Endre Székely

121

András Mihály in the Alkotók Haza (Creative Artists’ House), 1955

139

music examples 1. Bartók, Concerto for Orchestra, I, mm. 1–8; Szabó, Homecoming concerto, mm. 1–7

11

2. Bartók, Concerto for Orchestra, I, mm. 39–42; Szabó, Homecoming concerto, mm. 28–31

12

3. Bartók, Concerto for Orchestra, I, mm. 51–54; Szabó, Homecoming concerto, mm. 42–45

13

4. Szabó, Homecoming concerto, after rehearsal 18 (mm. 274–282)

14

5. Maderna, Concerto for Two Pianos and Instruments, mm. 118–121; Bartók, Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion, I, m. 195; Bartók, Cantata profana, mm. 5–9; Maderna, Concerto for Two Pianos and Instruments, mm. 210–211

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Illustrations

6. Szervánszky, interlude tune from Home Guard Cantata, IV; folk melody used in Szervánszky, Home Guard Cantata, III; folk melody used in Szabó, Song Singing, VI

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7. Szabó, Song Singing, V, mm. 11–26

108

8. Mihály, Cello Concerto, I, mm. 4–20; Mihály, Cello Concerto, I, mm. 219–226

140

9. Mihály, Cello Concerto, II, mm. 1–4; Bartók, Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta, I, mm. 1–2; Mihály, Cello Concerto, II, mm. 4–12

141

10. Mihály, Cello Concerto, II, mm. 39–40; Bartók, Duke Bluebeard’s Castle, m. 16; Bartók, Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta, III, m. 46; Mihály, Cello Concerto, II, m. 73

143

11. Mihály, Cello Concerto, II, mm. 106–107; Bartók, Fifth Quartet, IV, mm. 91–94; Bartók, Concerto for Orchestra, I, mm. 76–78; Mihály, Cello Concerto, II, mm. 115–117

144

12. Rochberg, Third String Quartet, II, mm. 12–15; Bartók, Fourth Quartet, V, mm. 151–155; Bartók, Fourth Quartet, I, mm. 94–95

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Preface

“If I play you notes, just notes on the piano like that, those notes don’t tell you any ideas. Those notes aren’t about burning your finger, or Sputniks, or lampshades, or rockets, or anything.” Leonard Bernstein offered this explanation to an audience of parents and children at a Young People’s Concert of the New York Philharmonic in 1958. “Music is never about anything,” he proclaimed, “music just is.”1 Yet the list of things he claimed music is not about reveals a particular kind of anxiety that was characteristic of the cold war era. Bernstein’s statement does more than simply demonstrate that Sputnik and rockets were on his mind. The very fact that the conductor found it necessary to disentangle music from these possible referents before a crowd of schoolchildren implies that musical ideas and the icons of cold war culture were already intertwined. Despite Bernstein’s vehement denials, music did convey meaning, in the 1950s as today, and many of its meanings were inescapably political. The postwar division of Europe, imagined as the Iron Curtain, had a profound effect on all spheres of culture, and the emergence of the United States and the Soviet Union as rival superpowers spurred efforts to distinguish them musically, as in every other way. On both sides governments channeled financial support to institutions that fostered musical traditions that suited their political purposes and neglected or tried to eliminate organizations whose aesthetic aims too closely resembled those of their foes. European and American musicians were called upon to act as advocates for one of the two competing visions of modernity: aestheticist modernism in the West and socialist realism in the East. Each of these traditions encompassed ideas about how composers should relate to the rest of society, how their music should sound, and what the music should mean to its audiences. Under these circumstances, to compose a musical work in a particular style meant to take xi

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a position in the political and aesthetic debates of the day. To listen meant to evaluate not only the work, but also the composer: Was he progressive or reactionary? Participating in a dominant trend or rebelling against it? Aside from the topical images or associations that any work may evoke or evade, these ubiquitous metamusical meanings played a crucial role in listeners’ experiences on both sides of the cold war conflict. Precisely because the effects of the ideological divide penetrated every aspect of musical culture in the latter half of the twentieth century, they are difficult to measure: no Archimedean point outside the system exists from which we can achieve an unbiased perspective. Still, the pervasiveness of these political influences on music makes them all the more important for post-cold-war listeners to understand. Western scholars have had difficulty approaching music from the East Bloc because the aesthetic principles upon which much of this music is founded differ so strikingly from our own, and they imply a scale of values many Westerners have learned to regard as undesirable.This prejudice is also part of the historical picture, for it was formed largely through reaction against the norms cultivated by governments in the East. By coming to terms with the aesthetic principles that reigned in Eastern Europe, we may also gain insight into the potent political forces that shaped our own musical values during the cold war. The chapters that follow describe a variety of responses to the music of Hungary’s most renowned twentieth-century composer, Béla Bartók (1881– 1945), during the early cold war years. Bartók’s unusual relationship to European musical traditions makes him a particularly good subject for this kind of study. As a Hungarian with relatively little in the way of a national artmusic tradition to draw upon, he became an eclectic. Not only did he absorb many different trends of European art music, but he also studied and recorded the folk and peasant musics of many different peoples, incorporating some elements of these musics into his compositions. At the same time, he sought recognition at home and abroad as a specifically Hungarian composer. In this way Bartók’s music could be both universally relevant in the European sphere—for it had something of everything in it, from Germanic forms and French-inspired harmonies to a Russian-style reliance on folk melody and adaptations of folk melodies from all over Central Europe and beyond—and universally foreign, for it represented no single tradition. In the postwar era this problem of identity became even more complex. The Communist regime in Hungary had to balance its desire for a specifically Hungarian art music (in which Bartók’s legacy would certainly play a role) against its desire to root out modernism (a stance apparent in much of Bartók’s art music). Chapter 1 shows how, as a result of these conflicting

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aims, Bartók became central to the debates about musical style that accompanied Hungary’s transition to Soviet-style socialism between 1945 and 1950. Meanwhile, in Western Europe the most influential modernist musicians soon began to see Bartók’s music as an artistic dead end; they favored instead Webern’s twelve-tone works and the serial techniques derived from them. This explicit rejection of Bartók as a model for new compositions in the West is discussed in chapter 2. Some of the arguments about Bartók’s music took place across the East-West divide, by radio or in published essays. As we will see in chapter 3, Bartók even became the subject of a propaganda battle between the governments of the United States and Hungary. The issues raised, the points fought, and the local repercussions of these arguments can tell us much about the development of musical values during these years. Bartók is better suited to this study than any of his contemporaries because of an accident of biography. Similar musicopolitical arguments could be made about the reception of Igor Stravinsky, another exiled composer whose work reflected eclectic interests. Stravinsky’s music, like Bartók’s, was criticized under Stalin’s regime for its formalism: some of the same tensions are evident in Soviet reception of Stravinsky’s music as can be found in Hungarian reception of Bartók’s.2 Stravinsky’s music of the 1930s and 1940s, like Bartók’s, fell out of favor with Western European avant-garde musicians after the Second World War as the modernism of the 1950s eclipsed the neoclassical impulses of the interwar era. Nonetheless, a crucial difference distinguishes the two composers’ roles in postwar musical life. Stravinsky lived until 1971; he managed to remain an active player in the American and European musical scenes by changing his compositional style to keep up with Western trends and by speaking out against Soviet musical policies. By contrast, Bartók’s death in 1945 meant that he could no longer influence directly either the reception of his own music or any of the other events that determined the course of music history after the war’s end. Indeed, his very absence would mark the postwar history of music in tangible ways. As a figure of the recent past whose music encompassed a variety of twentieth-century tendencies from modernist complexity to accessible arrangements of folk song, Bartók proved to have a significant impact on how musical styles were defined after World War II. Because he was no longer present to speak for himself, others could and did represent him in whatever manner seemed expedient. In both Eastern and Western Europe, Bartók became particularly susceptible to revisionist portrayals that highlighted certain aspects of his work at the expense of others in order to further the agenda of a particular author or group. Bartók’s output included

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enormous variety, from difficult chamber and stage works admired by modernists to choral folk song arrangements and orchestral works that seemed to speak directly to audiences. This variety allowed many interpretations of Bartók’s importance. It is noteworthy that much of his influence in this period was negative. After the 1948 Soviet resolution on music condemned aestheticist modernism and formalism, and as avant-garde composers in the West turned to more rigorous systems of composition, Bartók’s music was often cited on both sides as an example of outmoded music that had to be superseded by a newer and better style; yet even its critics were reluctant to abandon it entirely. Perhaps because of his status as a figure of the past, or perhaps because of his music’s stylistic heterogeneity, Bartók was granted a special place in both socialist realist and Western critiques of musical style. Whereas after 1948 critics tended to evaluate most bodies of work by a single composer either positively or negatively, they tended instead to split Bartók’s oeuvre into two, castigating some works while praising others. The changing placement of the division between the two categories and the changing ways in which the division was justified reveal the growing polarization of cultural values that characterized the early cold war years. The need to specify and defend these values was merely a by-product of cold war competitiveness, but it drove both Eastern and Western theories of art in peculiar directions. In chapter 4 I examine the ways in which standards of value were applied to Bartók’s music in the United States and Western Europe. While some musical leaders tried to make modernist music accessible to the public through education, others tried for ideological reasons to keep the public at bay. These contradictory impulses affected not only the marketing of Bartók’s music and other modernist masterworks, but also the criteria by which the music’s value came to be judged. The Eastern European effort to define folk song as essential to musical value seemed monolithic and unilateral from the Western perspective. As we see in chapter 5, however, Eastern discussions about folk song’s role in the creation of art music reveal that there, too, it was difficult to articulate a coherent artistic standard that would perfectly match the political ideal. In both of these cases, Bartók’s music serves as a lens through which local judgments about music can be seen in sharper focus. Thus, in a sense, this book is not about Bartók. It is about some of the adventures that befell his music after his death, and about the ways in which his scores and his image were exploited by those who thought them powerful. I read through Bartók to see his impact on postwar thinking about music: as a model for new composition; as a figure too important to be ig-

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nored but too problematic to be embraced; as a tool for international propaganda; as an influential theorist of the art of folk music arranging; and as a composer whose music was at once too modern and not modern enough. The responses to Bartók’s music recounted here enact and exemplify the ways in which cold war politics were played out in European and American musical life. Yet Bartók is never just a lens. In studying his music’s reception, we discover what it meant to certain of its audiences, and these meanings have a curious way of lingering with the works to which they pertain. The rejection of Bartók’s late works by modernists in the West, for instance, persists as an undercurrent of ambivalence about these sounds among music students and scholars. The most telling example, though, is the enduring association between dissonance and dissent that was forged by arguments over Bartók’s legacy in Hungary. In chapter 6 I examine this association by focusing on the personal circumstances of one composer, András Mihály, whose career was shaped by the political battles around Bartók’s music. Both in chapter 6 and in “Epilogue East” we see that as the 1950s wore on, Hungarian listeners came to associate Bartók’s most difficult music with the idea of political freedom. This was a striking rehabilitation of modernism that challenged the musical values asserted by Eastern European governments; it is equally striking that these meanings still surface when the music is heard. In 1996 a “Festival of Mandarins” was held in Budapest; within a few short weeks, the festival presented sixteen different productions of Bartók’s ballet The Miraculous Mandarin from all over the world. The impetus behind this unusual event was not only musical: conceived in the 1980s, the festival provided a way of compensating for the history of the work’s suppression by Hungary’s own government and a means of celebrating new social freedoms through the return of the suppressed ballet.3 The persistence of these political associations with the work testifies to their historical reality and to their lasting power. “Epilogue West” skips forward in time to the early 1970s, when the musical divisions perpetuated by cold war politics were beginning to loosen. Just as composers in the East reclaimed modernism to begin dismantling the cold war musical order, so in the West some composers rehabilitated tools for musical expression that had languished in the 1950s while composers took refuge in “impersonal” styles. In part through imitation of Bartók’s music and other music of the past, the American composer George Rochberg self-consciously sought to free his music from the stylistic distinctions and historical teleologies of the cold war, embracing a stylistic pluralism that would express wholeness rather than division.

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In post-cold-war descriptions of the West’s victory over the East, history is often presented as if the two sides existed in isolation from one another. Friedemann Sallis has argued along these lines that the East-West debate about Bartók “soon disintegrated into two solitudes talking past one another.”4 The metaphor of the Iron Curtain reinforces this manner of thinking, implying an unbreachable division. In many cases, however, the evidence suggests a different model, something more like a “nylon curtain”:5 the division was real, but each side listened to what the other was saying, and the interaction between the two sides was crucial to the development of new meanings and associations for this repertory. As I argue in the two epilogues, the interplay between the opposing cultures was crucial in shaping both: the much-discussed stylistic pluralism of concert life after 1960 may owe a great deal both to the political associations music acquired during the postwar years and to the efforts of composers such as Rochberg to undermine those associations in meaningful ways. Although my approach is comparative, I do not want to minimize the important asymmetries between the Eastern and Western situations studied here. The political and social coercion enacted in Eastern Europe had no parallel in the West; I have tried to take into account the differences among official, semiofficial, and unofficial pressures that shaped musical taste, while remaining aware that these cultural forces sometimes interacted in important ways. Likewise, Bartók’s music was always more central to the musical life of his native Hungary than it would ever become in Western Europe: this repertory was pivotal to discussions about new music in Hungary, whereas in the West it was one of many repertories to consider. The prolonged and relatively well-documented Hungarian discussions allow a more narrative treatment, whereas the more fragmented reactions to Bartók’s music in Western Europe require a more synoptical approach. In a project of this kind, any attempt to be truly comprehensive would be foolhardy. I have instead chosen to limit my discussion to the situations in which Bartók’s music was most hotly contested in the cold war context— predominantly Germany, France, and the United States in the West, and predominantly Communist musical circles in Hungary—during the years of most acute conflict, roughly 1948 to 1956. Not only were these debates the most heated, but they also had the most dramatic impact in generating lasting new associations for Bartók’s music. In the Hungarian case, my decision to focus on the public and propaganda uses of Bartók’s music was driven in part by the chronological limitations of the study: during these early years some prominent musical figures who disagreed with the government’s positions grew silent or voiced their opposition privately, in ways that had less

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immediate political impact on a regional and international scale. The history of “unofficial” musical culture in Hungary remains to be written. Likewise, my selection among Western trends in Bartók reception focused on those that most directly reflected the demands of cold war politics. In making these choices, I sought not to reduce the musical experiences of two continents to one limited paradigm, but to specify the ramifications of a certain trend in politics for particular facets of musical life. By bringing these debates forward for discussion, my intent is not to lambaste historical figures— Eastern or Western—for their treatment of Bartók’s music, though one might argue that some of their judgments have negatively affected perceptions of this repertory. Rather, I am interested in gaining as deep an understanding as possible of the reasoning behind these critiques, for the values embodied in them reveal a great deal about the cold war entanglement of musical judgment and political circumstance. Many colleagues and friends helped this book come into being. Richard Taruskin’s steadfast support and voracious curiosity have been invaluable: his critical engagement with this project, first as an adviser, then again as a colleague and editor, has improved it in countless ways. For assistance in my Hungarian research I am indebted to Tibor Tallián, László Somfai, György Kövér, László Vikárius, Ágnes Papp, and Zsuzsanna Szepesi. I am grateful to Peter Schmelz for sleuthing in Russian archives on my behalf, to Lynn Hooker for research assistance in the University of Chicago’s Regenstein Library, and to Lóránt Péteri for his help in locating photographs in Hungary. Wilhelm Schlüter of the Internationales Musikinstitut Darmstadt, Christiane Schafferhans at the German Radio Archives, and Ulrich Mosch of the Paul Sacher Stiftung were particularly helpful as I undertook my Western European research, and Karlheinz Stockhausen kindly allowed me access to his personal archives. Klára Móricz, Iván Waldbauer, Katherine Bergeron, and John Connelly offered valuable criticism of the Hungarian material at the dissertation stage, and careful reading by László Somfai, Pamela Potter, Judit Frigyesi, Beth Levy, and Scott Paulin substantially improved later versions. For comments on portions of the manuscript at early stages, and in some cases for checking translations, I am indebted to Greg Castillo, Leslie Sprout, Nathaniel Lew, Connie Anderson, Steven Pond, George Starr, Joy Haslam Calico, Alyson Knop, Brigetta Abel, and Katherine Kuenzli. Conversations with David Schneider, Steve Swayne, Sabine Meine, Amy Beal, and the participants in the Project on the Cold War as Global Conflict at New York University’s International Center for Advanced Studies provided both practical informa-

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tion and inspiration. My colleagues at Princeton’s Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts, especially Alexander Nehamas, Lisa Hilbink, Jonathan Gilmore, Heather O’Donnell, and Branden Joseph, asked questions that usefully refined the scope of the project as it developed and provided a collegial atmosphere in which to think and write. No less crucial was the gracious support of my colleagues at Ohio State University and that of Marianne Lipson. Sheena Phillips cheerfully and painstakingly prepared the music examples. I also owe heartfelt thanks to my family—Eric and Elliott Fosler-Lussier, Joanne and Roger Lussier—without whose enthusiasm and patience this book would not exist. For shepherding the book through the publication process, I am grateful to Mary Francis and Jacqueline Volin of the University of California Press. For the financial and logistical support that made this work possible, I am indebted to the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts at Princeton University, particularly to Alexander Nehamas, Leonard Barkan, Mary Harper, Carol Rigolot, and Cass Garner; the Princeton University Department of Music; the Princeton University Committee on Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences; the Ohio State University; the AMS 50 Dissertation Fellowship and the Gustave Reese Publication Endowment Fund of the American Musicological Society; the American Council of Learned Societies; the Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities and the Department of Music at the University of California, Berkeley; and the International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX) for grant monies provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the U.S. Department of State under the Title VIII program. Three sections of this book present revised versions of material published elsewhere. An earlier version of chapter 1, presented at the Bartók 2000 conference at the University of Texas, Austin, appeared in the conference proceedings as “Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra in Postwar Hungary: A Road Not Taken,” International Journal of Musicology 9 (2006): 363–383. Part of chapter 6 appeared previously as “András Mihály and the Legacy of Béla Bartók:The Persistence of Tradition,” in The Past in the Present: Papers Read at the IMS Intercongressional Symposium and the Tenth Meeting of the Cantus Planus, vol. 1, ed. László Dobszay (Budapest: Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music, 2003): 515–530. Portions of the epilogues appeared previously in “‘Multiplication by Minus One’: Musical Values in East-West Engagement,” Slavonica 10, no. 2 (2004): 125–139; copyright © 2003 Maney Publishing. The score that appears on the cover is used by permission of European American Music Distributors, LLC, and Boosey & Hawkes, Inc.

Note on Hungarian Pronunciation

All Hungarian names and words are pronounced with a strong accent on the first syllable. The Hungarian sz is equivalent in sound to the English s in soft; this is distinct from the zs, which sounds like the s in measure. The Hungarian s sounds like the English sh (as in shout). The letter j and the clusters ly and lj all approximate the English y (as in you); the cs sounds like the English ch in much. The cluster gy resembles the d in the British pronunciation of duke; the ty, analogously, sounds like the t in the British tube. As for vowel sounds, the Hungarian a is somewhat darker than the English, as in father rather than yam; the á, by contrast, is bright and forward, as in cat. When written with an acute accent, the unmarked o as in moth becomes the long o as in soap. Otherwise, the acute accent primarily affects the length of the syllable rather than the sound. The Hungarian i sounds like the English long ee ( fee), the Hungarian e like the English ay (pay), and the Hungarian u like the English oo (or the u in rule); all are clipped when spelled without the accent mark and elongated with it. The vowels W and d are elongated equivalents of the shorter ö and ü, which are pronounced as they are in German. Thus, in approximate transliteration: Bartók Kadosa Losonczy Lukács Mihály

BAR-toak (with the oa long, as in soap) KAH-doe-sha LO-shon-see (with both o’s dark and short, as in moth) LOO-kach (with the a bright and elongated) MEE-high (the forward a blends with the cluster ly)

Nagy

NODGE xix

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Note on Hungarian Pronunciation

Rákosi Révai Szabó

RA-ko-shee (with the a forward, as in cat, and elongated) RAY-vaw-yee SOB-oh

Székely

SAY-kay

Széll

SAIL

Szervánszky

SER-van-skee (with bright, forward, somewhat elongated a)

1

Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra and the Demise of Hungary’s “Third Road”

The years immediately after the conclusion of the Second World War were turbulent ones in Hungary. Occupation by the Soviet army and food shortages made people’s everyday lives difficult, but the end of hostilities also brought the hope of establishing a democracy and renewing concert life.This was a moment of great openness, when all political and musical possibilities could be discussed frankly and their validity debated. The events of this period present a rare opportunity to glimpse Hungarian musicians’ ideas about their musical future just before their choices were restricted by the increasingly severe policies of the Communist regime that came to power in 1948.1 That Hungary would follow the Soviet road, politically or musically, was by no means a foregone conclusion: only the passage of time and the gradual accumulation and exercise of political power made it seem that way in retrospect. This early and chaotic postwar period is worth our attention, for here, through music and words about music, the historical voices of Hungarian composers point the way to a musical “road not taken,” a road that existed in the minds of Hungarian intellectuals but would not be realized. After the “liberation” of Hungary by the Red Army in 1945, most Hungarians had no idea that new assaults on their freedom were soon to follow. Even as late as 1946 and 1947, Hungarians, and especially leftist Hungarians, had good reason to feel optimistic about the future of their new “People’s Democracy,” as the East Bloc states were then known. During these early years the Soviet Union allowed the People’s Democracies considerable independence as national entities separate from the Soviet Union.2 It seemed likely that Hungary would pursue socialism in its own way: Mátyás Rákosi, the secretary general of the Hungarian Communist Party, stated in 1946 that the party would embrace a “Socialism born on Hungarian soil and adapted to Hungarian conditions.”3 The idea that Hungary’s path 1

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should be neither wholly Eastern European nor wholly Western European had circulated among Hungarian intellectuals for years; since this position advocated a third, unique alternative, it was often referred to as Hungary’s “third road.” In a 1945 article, the Hungarian writer István Bibó defined the third road as follows: “Anyone who wants to turn Hungary into a Soviet member state is a traitor; anyone who wants to restore the Habsburg [monarchy] in Hungary is a traitor; but anyone who wants to present Hungary with the false dichotomy that it may choose only one of these two is a traitor twice over, because between the two there lies a third road, the only correct road: the possibility of a democratic, independent, free Hungary that practices a balanced but radical program of reform.”4 The idea that Hungarians could negotiate a path between the great powers of the Soviet and Western European empires guided those who sought to reestablish Hungarian cultural life after the upheavals of war. To the leftists who wanted to gain control over the state and its resources, the third road meant a gradual rather than a revolutionary approach to socialism, and this strategy helped the party win support among intellectuals, including many of Hungary’s composers. Although the Communists’ consolidation of power was already beginning to affect government and industry by 1947, it had relatively little effect on cultural life at first, leaving musicians free to compose as they wished and to argue about what new music should sound like in a new society. Particularly heated debate surrounded the arrival of Béla Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra, first performed in Hungary on 22 April 1947. Bartók had died in New York City in 1945, after five years of exile; during the war and the turmoil that followed, his countrymen had no opportunity to hear the music he had composed in the United States. When the late works were finally performed in Budapest, Hungarian musicians were taken aback: the style of this music differed dramatically from what they had anticipated. In a review of the concerto, Sándor Jemnitz uneasily commented, “This work leaves no one indifferent: it seizes and shakes its listeners, but they cannot make heads or tails of it, despite the greatness of the impression they received.”5 Some musicians who revered Bartók’s modernist music saw the concerto as a surprising simplification of his style. As the composer and critic Endre Szervánszky described it, “Quite a few appraised the work’s easy accessibility as chasing after success, as giving in to the dollar, and there were some who explained the multiplicity of styles in the concerto as the exhaustion of Bartók’s creative energy.”6 Several critics questioned whether Bartók had compromised his artistic integrity; one even called the concerto “the sell-

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ing out of the spirit of modern music.”7 Even some musicians who praised the concerto out of loyalty to Bartók still acknowledged that the piece represented a certain softening of the composer’s style, one that might be forgivable on the part of a dying composer but almost certainly revealed an unfortunate turn away from the progressive musical values of the 1920s and 1930s.8 Others, however, spoke favorably of the concerto’s easy accessibility and its communicative power. Endre Szervánszky, for instance, wrote: “In our opinion, Bartók, who is one of the most powerful musical innovators of the recent history of music, showed the path ahead in this work too. The slogan of the work could be this: ‘Out from the coldly lit world of the laboratory— out among the people!’ . . . In easily intelligible, melodious language, sometimes perhaps in conventional harmonic and formal expression, but always in a sincere, pure tone, he communicates his deeply human message.”9 Coming from Szervánszky, himself a composer who sympathized profoundly with the aesthetic goals of modern music articulated by Bartók and others, the description of the Concerto for Orchestra as music’s emergence out of a cold, impersonal laboratory might have seemed surprising. Nonetheless, like several other composers of his generation, Szervánszky believed that socialism might enhance musical life by providing greater access to music for a wider variety of people. Thus, in his article, written for a Communist newspaper, he celebrated the concerto as an important step toward art music that might communicate intelligibly to the broadest possible audience. (Neither Szervánszky nor any other socialist critic mentioned the apparent parodistic reference in the concerto’s fourth movement to Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony, although Szervánszky did mention that the concerto contained humorous moments that evoked laughter. Perhaps the critics sidestepped this issue to avoid suggesting that the concerto itself could be a critique of socialist music.) These positive and negative responses to the concerto did not correspond precisely to their authors’ political affiliations; they reflected a complicated mix of aesthetic, personal, and political loyalties. Even though one might be tempted to presume that most Communists would share the agenda of making music more accessible, there was in fact no agreement among Communists about how to judge the concerto. Although some praised the piece, others, like the composer Pál Kadosa, continued to express dissatisfaction with it because it seemed to refute the premises of the modern music they held dear. Each of these positions was perceived by its proponents as springing from a deep loyalty to Bartók: the pro-concerto position from a personal loyalty to Bartók that transcended any particular style or technique, and the anti-

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concerto position from a more specific loyalty to Bartók’s modernist music of the 1920s. Kadosa in particular remained faithful to Bartók’s modernism even as he espoused Communist politics; the involuted melodies and rhythmic complexity characteristic of the middle of Bartók’s career also resonate in several of Kadosa’s postwar works, such as his 1948 Capriccio Symphony. Over the next few years, the more favorable interpretation of Bartók’s concerto continued to be a viable position in public music criticism; indeed, glowing praise of the late works seemed a more or less officially sanctioned opinion. The modernist grumblings about Bartók’s late works, on the other hand, gradually disappeared from view. This change reflected not a sudden shift in aesthetic principles, but the altered political atmosphere in which critical writings were produced and published. Between 1948 and 1950 those who cherished modernist styles would be compelled either to reevaluate and defend their opinions or to withdraw into silence.

the zhdanovshchina comes to hungary The most immediate impetus behind these changes was the Soviet Communist Party’s notorious resolution on music. On 10 February 1948, following a series of hearings convened by the leading cultural ideologist, Andrei Zhdanov, the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party issued a statement intended to serve as a blueprint for the development of music both in the Soviet Union and throughout the East Bloc. The resolution’s stated purpose was to denounce the opera The Great Friendship by Vano Muradeli, but it reached much further than that, chastising several Soviet composers and presenting criteria for the creation of music that was appropriate to the development of socialist societies. This was the fourth and last in a series of cultural reforms, collectively known as the Zhdanovshchina, led by Zhdanov in various branches of the arts after the war.10 The decree declared that Muradeli’s opera was discordant and unmelodious, that it failed to incorporate folk and popular idioms, and that it neglected to follow the forms of classic opera. Muradeli’s opera, according to the Central Committee, was thus characteristic of a more general trend toward formalism in the works of leading Soviet composers, including Dmitri Shostakovich, Sergei Prokofiev, and Aram Khachaturian: The characteristic marks of this music are the negation of the basic principles of classical music: the cult of atonality, the dissonance and discord supposedly expressive of “progress” and “novelty” in the development of musical form, the rejection of such a vital principle

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of musical composition as melody, and enthusiasm for confused, neuropathological combinations which transform music into cacophony, into a chaotic medley of sounds. This music reeks strongly of the odor of the contemporary, modernistic, bourgeois music of Europe and America which reflects the decay of bourgeois culture, the total negation, the impasse of musical art.11

Formalism, according to the resolution, was also marked by a lack of attention to the composition of music in vocal genres, which it imputed to composers’ scorn for the art of melody. Referring to the 1936 condemnation of Shostakovich that had appeared in the Soviet newspaper Pravda,12 the resolution made it clear that insufficient progress had been made in music since that time and demanded that composers abandon the use of formalist techniques. The committee’s closing statement indicated that organizational measures would soon be taken for the improvement of this unacceptable musical situation. The Central Committee’s stated aim of ensuring that music develop “in the direction of realism” made more explicit the philosophical outlook that stood behind all the accusations against the Soviet composers.13 The Soviet regime articulated the fundamental principles of socialist realism as narodnost’ (“peopleness”), klassovost’ (“classness”), and partiinost’ (“partyness”)— in other words, art should be of the people, support the cause of the oppressed and revolutionary social class, and identify with the Communist Party.These three principles would continue to form the foundations of art criticism in the East Bloc even after the death of Stalin in 1953.14 The charge of formalism in music, for example, was primarily an extension of the idea that music must exhibit narodnost’, a vague equivalent of Volkstümlichkeit or “folksiness.” Because music with no clear topical or referential content could appeal only to the narrow class trained to enjoy it, the party’s official position favored opera, simpler songs, and other genres that might be more easily understood by more people. Thus, Zhdanov and his colleagues dismissed music in which the primary interest was the abstract play of sound and form in favor of music with an explicit plot or easy-to-follow tunes, as well as a text that could easily be censored. As we will see, even Hungarians who embraced socialism were not quick to align themselves with the musical values espoused by the Central Committee, but these values did eventually come to be enforced in Hungary. The full text of the Central Committee’s resolution on music was published in the Hungarian press a week after it was issued in the Soviet Union.15 Composers and critics alike wondered to what extent the resolution would

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apply to people living outside the Soviet Union but within the Soviet sphere of influence. Szervánszky remarked that the resolution brought wholly unfamiliar problems to the attention of Hungarian artists: The Soviet Communist Party’s harsh criticism of Soviet music has stirred up Hungarian musical public opinion to an extraordinary extent. . . . The primary thing that is entirely unusual for the Hungarian public is that in the Soviet Union artistic problems are on the agenda of the Communist Party. We must clarify for our readers that in the socialist state cultural problems, and thus music, are matters of public interest. Cultural factors possess just as important a social function as the problems of politics or economics. Thus, the current intervention into musical life is understandable.16

That Szervánszky felt the need to explain this aspect of the resolution to his readers indicates that, as he stated, the kind of intervention practiced by the Soviet Communist Party was upsetting to many Hungarians. Though censorship had been practiced in prewar Hungary, this kind of wide-ranging official rebuke was shocking to many Hungarian composers; they expressed concerns about artistic freedom and wondered fearfully whether the Soviet resolution would apply to them. Some also worried specifically about what the resolution implied for their national tradition, particularly for Bartók. Communist music critics in Hungary tried to allay these fears, insisting that as long as art remained connected with the folk, it would not run afoul of Communist principles. Several interpreted the resolution as favorable to Bartók—for Bartók’s music featured folk melodies and classical forms and could therefore serve as a model for the kind of populism the Soviet Communist Party sought to achieve. Szervánszky, for instance, came to Bartók’s defense, saying that “in Bartók’s music . . . we constantly perceive the formal principles of Bach and Beethoven.”17 The Hungarian composer András Mihály, too, spoke in Bartók’s favor: he explained that Bartók was different from other modernists because he had “turn[ed] back from the cold emptiness of the unbounded freedom of fantasy toward the warm, human, voluntary boundaries of communal language.”18 Lajos Vargyas, a former student of Zoltán Kodály, maintained that Bartók and Kodály firmly espoused the very same aesthetic principles as those advocated by the Central Committee, and that their music was therefore already compatible with the resolution’s demands, far superior to any decadent Western European music.Vargyas’s article was something of a preemptive strike: his claim that Hungarian composers were musically and ideologically superior to those of Western Europe supported an argument that Hungarian musical life did not need to be

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rebuilt on the model of Soviet music.19 The implication of these essays and others like them was that the humanity, folksiness, and classicism of Bartók’s music would surely shelter it from criticism under the Soviet guidelines. Nationalism played a key role in these interpretations of the Soviet resolution. Although Hungarian Communists regarded the Soviet Union as more experienced in political socialism, most had no reason to believe in its cultural superiority. On the contrary, they continued to prize their own musical traditions above all others. Mihály went so far as to speculate that since the best Soviet composers had been criticized as formalists, and since Bartók seemed to fulfill the party’s criteria for populist music, perhaps the vanguard of socialist music would arise not in the Soviet Union but in Hungary. He explained that the creation of music appropriate to a socialist society was not a question of mere goodwill or talent, such as that of Shostakovich or Prokofiev, but a matter of real genius. He then went on to ask, “Is it certain that this creative musical genius will appear on Soviet soil? According to the lessons of history, absolutely not.”20 For Mihály, there was no reason to believe that the Soviet tradition would prove any more fertile than the Hungarian tradition of Bartók and Kodály. The young music critic József Ujfalussy also saw Bartók’s legacy as a musical force that would have more than just local importance. Ujfalussy explained that “thanks to the work of the two great artists [Bartók and Kodály], new Hungarian musical production has found in Hungarian and Eastern European folk music a firm foundation for the cultivation of art music of the highest quality that slowly will conquer the entire world. . . . “21 Ujfalussy’s triumphal imagery expressed a dream that was cherished by many Hungarian musicians during this otherwise demoralizing period: that Hungarian music—the tradition of Bartók and Kodály—would emerge as a model for, or even the basis of, a new international socialist music tradition. This hope for the future of Bartók’s music was intimately bound up with the hope that Hungary would be able to follow a third road, a path between Eastern and Western European cultural powers. Mihály’s and Ujfalussy’s arguments suggest that just as Hungarians planned to follow their own unique path to political socialism, they also intended to follow their own path to socialist music, the path indicated by Bartók in his late works.

ferenc szabó’s homecoming This hope was expressed not only in words, but also in music. In Ferenc Szabó’s 1948 orchestral work entitled Homecoming, later referred to simply as his Concerto for Orchestra, one can hear how central Bartók’s music

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was to Communist imaginings of the future. Szabó, who studied with Kodály in the 1920s, had been a member of the illegal interwar Communist Party in Hungary and had spent several years in exile in the Soviet Union. The “homecoming” of the title refers most directly to his return to Hungary in 1945 as an officer in the Soviet army. The composer wrote about the autobiographical inspiration for the piece in a preface to the score: “The composer is one of those who had the elevating task of taking part personally in the great fight for freedom. He returned home and found his true home, as did millions of Hungarian working people. His music speaks of this. He dedicates his work to the immortal memory of the many who could not return home because they sacrificed their lives for the great cause of the workers’ liberation, of the freedom of their homeland and of their Hungarian people.”22 In accordance with its autobiographical theme, the music is replete with reminiscences; the most obvious and the most evocative are those of Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra. The composer’s dedication therefore seems to include Bartók himself as one of those who “could not return home.” The points of contact between Szabó’s concerto and Bartók’s link the two exiled composers in an act of remembrance and homage.23 The homage begins even before the first measure of music. Szabó’s preface to the score explains that his designation of the work as a concerto “is not an end in itself; rather, it refers only to the freer nature of its performance. If the playful sparkling and the evident play of instruments occasionally predominate, the designation ‘concerto’ primarily calls attention to the intensified independence and responsibility of the orchestral instruments.”24 Szabó’s description echoed Bartók’s own words: Bartók had explained about his own concerto in 1944 that “the title of this symphony-like orchestral work is explained by its tendency to treat the single instruments or instrument groups in a ‘concertant’ or soloistic manner.”25 Like Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra, Szabó’s Homecoming concerto relies not on the use of a solo instrument, but on the presentation of contrasting groups of instruments. Szabó’s act of homage suggests that he, like Mihály, considered Bartók an excellent model for new socialist music. Szabó’s debt to Bartók is most apparent in the slow introduction that opens his concerto. Both composers open their works with low strings playing a melody based on leaps of a fourth, expanding gradually in successive phrases. (Compare example 1a, the first eight measures of Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra, to example 1b, the opening of Szabó’s Homecoming concerto.)26 Despite this resemblance, the two passages differ in affect because

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Ferenc Szabó. Photo: Magyar Nemzeti Múzeum (Hungarian National Museum). Used by permission.

of the different character of the music that accompanies the two melodies. Bartók’s trembling, muted strings play symmetrical chromatic figures that expand and contract, creating dense clusters of seconds. By contrast, Szabó’s low string phrases are interrupted by resonant chiming in the woodwinds, enhanced by pizzicato attacks in the strings. Szabó’s slow introduction remains close to its model throughout, imitating each prominent element of Bartók’s in turn. Thus, we hear in Szabó’s concerto echoes of Bartók’s dissonant, halting trumpet figures (examples 2a and 2b) and of Bartók’s climactic string and woodwind outcries (examples 3a and 3b). A motive bor-

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rowed from Bartók’s introduction also appears prominently as a thematic element of the vivace that follows Szabó’s slow introduction, though the subsequent music bears a more individual stamp than the obvious homage of the opening measures. In a brief episode midway through Szabó’s concerto, Bartók’s music leaves its mark again. Here Szabó evokes the elegiac third movement of Bartók’s concerto, in which Bartók alternates reminiscences of the slow introduction with the eerie, tremulous utterances of his trademark “night-music” style. Szabó’s procedure is similar—he brings back the melody from the slow introduction phrase by phrase, accompanied by twittering arpeggios in the harp and woodwinds (example 4). Here again, though, Szabó’s passage has a very different effect. The sonorous landscape of Bartók’s night music remains ominously static—even the oboe’s melodic line wanders without clear direction (mm. 10–12). By contrast, the corresponding passage in Szabó’s concerto is divided into neat two-bar phrases, led by the piano’s short-winded presentation of a circular melody (mm. 283–292, 302–308). Moreover, Bartók’s more exotic woodwind and harp figures are composed of alternating minor thirds and minor seconds, whereas Szabó’s consist of tame arpeggiated triads with an added neighbor note. Bartók’s night music is apprehensive, but Szabó’s is luminous, untroubled. In spite of the transparency of his homage to Bartók, Szabó was no mere epigone. Rather, he seems to have gone out of his way to adapt the expressive strategies of Bartók’s concerto to a simpler orchestral style that would communicate to the widest possible audience. The brighter sound of Szabó’s score reflected the socialist demand that art represent optimistic sentiments befitting the glorious new world that Stalin and Rákosi were building. This political vision had no place for a night music as dark or as mysterious as Bartók’s. Indeed, it is striking that Szabó, a loyal Communist, took Bartók as a model at all; given the occasionally elegiac tone of the Concerto for Orchestra, one might wonder why Szabó did not simply choose another example to follow. In portraying his own return to Hungary, though, Szabó seems to have been motivated by a longing for continuity with the Hungarian traditions of the immediate past—a desire to create music that would be not only socialist, but also specifically Hungarian. Even Szabó, of all Hungarian composers the most amenable to Soviet leadership, seems to have harbored the hope that Hungarian traditions could play a leading role in the development of new socialist music. By adapting elements of Bartók’s late style, then, Szabó was pursuing one likely strategy for creating truly Hungarian music that would also reflect socialist ideals.

Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra Example 1. a. Bartók, Concerto for Orchestra, I, mm. 1–8. b. Szabó, Homecoming concerto, mm. 1–7.

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Example 2. a. Bartók, Concerto for Orchestra, I, mm. 39–42. b. Szabó, Homecoming concerto, mm. 28–31 (all parts shown at sounding pitch).

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Example 3. a. Bartók, Concerto for Orchestra, I, mm. 51–54 (woodwinds double the emphasized notes). b. Szabó, Homecoming concerto, mm. 42–45 (trumpets omitted).

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Example 4. Szabó, Homecoming concerto, after rehearsal 18 (mm. 274–282).

Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra Example 4 (continued)

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the third road denied Even Szabó’s careful moderation of Bartók’s idiom would prove insufficient when, at the behest of Stalin himself, the Hungarian government put a stop to Hungarian intellectuals’ pursuit of a third road. A policy change that Stalin communicated to East Bloc leaders near the end of 1948 demanded that the leaders of the People’s Democracies follow the Soviet line much more closely than they had previously done.27 In January and March 1949 Secretary General Rákosi and the eminent party ideologist József Révai issued self-critical statements indicating that they had misunderstood the nature of the People’s Democracy. Rákosi explained that too much emphasis had been placed on the differences between Soviet and Hungarian socialism, and Révai stated unequivocally that “the way of the People’s Democracies differs only in certain external forms, and not in essence, from the way of the Soviet Union.”28 This fundamental change in outlook would significantly alter the prospects for a uniquely Hungarian socialist music. Over the next few years, Soviet authorities would invest in the project of bringing satellite cultures into conformity, sponsoring educational exchange trips, promoting the translation of Soviet texted musical works into Hungarian, and— most significantly—enforcing artistic standards that more closely resembled those promoted by Soviet authorities. Concurrent with the political shift away from the third-road policy came increased attention to artistic matters. On 27 November 1948 Rákosi called on the party’s Culture-Political Division to combat bourgeois and Western influences in the arts.29 The division immediately responded by announcing an ambitious plan that would target both “aristocratic, avant-garde formalism” and “kitsch that is in the immediate service of monopolistic capitalism.”30 In what would become an important decision for the history of Bartók’s legacy, the Culture-Political Division recommended the founding of the “Culture-Political Academy,” a lecture series that would help Hungarians to understand how the arts should reflect socialist ideology.31 One of the proposed lectures explicitly concerned the very question that had preoccupied Hungarian musicians since Bartók’s death: how his music would influence the next generation of musicians. The Culture-Political Division determined that Mihály would give a lecture entitled “Béla Bartók and the Generation Coming after Him,” and that its content would consist of “the adaptation of the Bolshevik Party’s musical critique to the Hungarian situation.” Mihály presented the lecture on 3 February 1949. As he was instructed to do, Mihály took as his starting point the speech given by Zhdanov at the end of the 1948 musicians’ congress at which the

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András Mihály. Photo: MTI Fotó, Magyar Távirati Iroda Rt. (Hungarian News Agency). Used by permission.

Soviet Central Committee announced its resolution on music.32 Zhdanov’s speech, which was distributed widely both inside and outside the Soviet Union, had amplified many of the precepts laid out in the resolution. Mihály mimicked Zhdanov’s particular turns of phrase—referring, for example, to “sharp” debates taking place “under the surface” of society—as well as his rhetorical treatment of certain issues. Both Mihály’s and Zhdanov’s lectures progressed from a discussion of the general musical situations in their respective countries, focusing especially on the activities of established institutions, to the problems of formalism that challenged their vision of an appropriately socialist musical life. Zhdanov’s speech had critiqued both the social structure that allowed composers to believe they were independent of society and the stylistic features of the music created by such composers:

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There is in fact, then, a sharp though hidden struggle between two trends taking place in Soviet music. One trend represents the healthy, progressive principles in Soviet music, based on the acceptance of the immense role to be played by the classical heritage, and in particular, by the Russian school, in the creation of a music which is realist and of truthful content and is closely and organically linked with the people and their folk music and folk song—all this combined with a high degree of professional mastery. The other trend represents a formalism alien to Soviet art, a rejection of the classical heritage under the banner of innovation, a rejection of the idea of the popular origin of music, and of service to the people, in order to gratify the individualistic emotions of a small group of select aesthetes.33

For Zhdanov, then, the struggle took place between two trends, the “classical heritage” and “formalism.” He included within the “classical” tradition the (deceased Russian) composers Glinka, Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Dargomyzhsky, and Musorgsky, whose art was marked by “truthfulness and realism, its ability to blend brilliant artistic form with profound content, and to combine the highest technical achievement with simplicity and intelligibility.”34 The opposing “formalist” trend, distinct from the “classical” both in musical style and in the educational qualifications of its composers, was represented by Shostakovich, Prokofiev, and their colleagues, all living Soviet composers of concert music. Zhdanov had at his disposal a national tradition: his pantheon of composers included some who claimed autodidacticism and repudiated academic musical styles, and several who drew on the Russian folk heritage. He used this tradition to point out a new direction for socialist composers: a return to the “classic” would, ironically enough, promise a bright Communist future. Mihály’s decision to adapt Zhdanov’s positions in his own lecture—as requested by party officials—posed a dilemma. Zhdanov’s emphasis on tradition could not be ignored; at the same time, the music of Hungarian composers of the nineteenth century, including Liszt and Erkel, bore obvious hallmarks of bourgeois nationalism.35 Bartók and Kodály were the first artmusic composers consciously to develop a sophisticated Hungarian style that went beyond the application of local color in selected works. Given that Kodály was still alive and present in Hungary, though, he could hardly be treated as a historical personage in 1949. Thus, whereas Zhdanov had an array of historical figures who could be used to support his argument, Mihály really had only one figure to call upon—Bartók—and one who moreover did not fall cleanly on one side or another of the divide. While Zhdanov’s “sharp struggle” took place between two trends and their representatives

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on either side, Mihály’s “sharp debate” consisted of attempts to come to terms with a single figure’s work. Mihály framed the conflict thus: The first fundamental question consists in how we regard Bartók’s work, what we consider closed in it and tied to its time, and what is suitable for continuation or capable of development. This question is timely because under the surface a serious debate is in progress about whether Bartók is indebted to the progressive or to the decadent trend in music; or, examining the course of his musical progress in the spirit of the resolution of the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party of the Soviet Union: was he a formalist or not? The sharpness of this debate is not diminished by the fact that, as I say, it runs under the surface.36

Since party officials had explicitly assigned the title of the lecture, Mihály had little choice about whether to bring Bartók into the discussion of formalism; rather, he had discretion only about how to treat him within the terms set out by Zhdanov. Furthermore, since Bartók had obviously been influenced by modernist Western European music, Mihály could not truthfully portray him as an entirely “realist” composer. Here began a complex series of negotiations around the evaluation of Bartók’s legacy. From this point forward, those who wanted to keep his music in the repertory had to find ways—no matter how distorting—to justify this music politically. For some dedicated Communists, a battle between their musical and political allegiances was inevitable. Some aspects of Mihály’s lecture reflected the optimism certain socialist composers had felt about Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra as a path ahead for an independent Hungarian music. Mihály portrayed Bartók as a great artist who imbued the forms of Western art music with the true content of folk music.37 In Mihály’s reading the dialectical combination of these elements—the synthesis—became the salvation of Bartók’s music.The transcendence of both the Western and the folk elements was a crucial element of this argument because the folk music used most prominently by Bartók was specifically not the gypsy music of the urban folk, but rural peasant music.38 Allowing peasant music to stand for the Hungarian folk in general would not have been at all appropriate, since the peasant class, in its traditionalism, was always by and large resistant to Communism and a problem for Marxist theory. Mihály’s lecture therefore stressed that the concerto transcended all its models, Eastern and Western, to become an example of the new socialist music. Mihály’s selection of the Concerto for Orchestra as the pinnacle of Bartókian synthesis was a logical continuation of the positive commentary

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with which Communists greeted Bartók’s late works. Contrasting his interpretation of the concerto’s accessible style with a memorably caustic remark heard after its Hungarian premiere, he explained: “It is not coincidental that at the first Budapest performance of Bartók’s concerto some composers were at a loss in the presence of the work. Bartók betrayed the revolution— they said—but it turned out that it was just the opposite; this was the crowning of the true revolution of Hungarian music.”39 Defining socialist values in contradistinction to the values traditionally central to the Western European art-music tradition, Mihály claimed that rather than representing the moral weakening of the composer, the Concerto for Orchestra showed Bartók’s true conscience coming to the fore. Here Mihály made explicit again what had already been affirmed by other Communist composers: that Bartók’s concerto, despite its formalist elements, was both Bartók’s vindication and a potential path for the future of Hungarian music.40 Other aspects of Mihály’s lecture, however, undercut this optimism, and in some respects the lecture can be regarded as the turning point at which the party officially began to set Bartók’s music aside in favor of less problematical styles.41 Mihály allowed Bartók to remain at the center of the tradition by asserting that Bartók’s career traced one long progression away from formalism and toward a closer connection with the people. He provided a brief history of Bartók’s style to support this claim, explaining that Bartók’s early serious engagement with the music of Richard Strauss and his attraction to some of the same techniques that Arnold Schoenberg used were moderated over the course of time by his desire to compose music in a more accessible style. Since Bartók did not live long enough to complete this project, Mihály declared, it was the duty of modern Hungarian composers to pick up where he left off and rejoin music with the people. This rhetorical move echoes one of Zhdanov’s: for both Zhdanov and Mihály, the classics represented a standard that must be respected but also surpassed.42 This strategy allowed Mihály to marginalize Bartók for the moment and yet keep him as an important part of the Hungarian tradition, in effect saving him by damning him. In this sense, Mihály’s reading of Zhdanov’s lecture might be regarded as ambivalent. Although he did choose a route that might preserve Bartók’s works as a historical foundation for the new repertory, Mihály also implied that new works could not actually be modeled on Bartók’s, even the late ones; in so doing, he acknowledged that Bartók’s music might have to be left behind in the interest of socialism. The negative undertone of many of Mihály’s comments was noteworthy, especially coming from a composer who declared himself an admirer of Bartók’s music. It is Mihály’s implied dismissal of most of Bartók’s music, not the redemp-

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tive tone of his remarks about the Concerto for Orchestra, that has left the more enduring impression on Hungarian discussions of the musical events of 1949. Another lecture a few weeks later conveyed the party’s message more directly. The Hungarian Workers’ Party organized a Soviet Culture Month in Budapest from February to March 1949, during which time Soviet artists and scholars came to Budapest as cultural ambassadors. During his visit to Hungary, the Soviet composer Mikhail Chulaki attended numerous concerts, observed the activities of music educators and performing groups, and passed judgment on the music of Hungarian composers. In a lecture at the Music Academy on 24 February 1949, Chulaki revealed a new perspective on Bartók’s music. According to the diary of the music critic Sándor Jemnitz, Chulaki “rejected [Bartók’s] Miraculous Mandarin as formalist and called Bartók bourgeois.”43 It is significant that Chulaki’s visit brought The Miraculous Mandarin to the forefront. Although Hungarian Communists had pinned their hopes on Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra, tactfully leaving his more obviously unsuitable works out of the discussion altogether, the Soviet composer felt no such loyalty. By bringing up a work that obviously violated every principle of socialist art with its dissonant style and overtly violent sexual content, Chulaki emphasized what Hungarians had refused to acknowledge: that as a modernist and as a Hungarian, Bartók could not possibly serve as a model for the new socialist music. As a pro-Soviet agenda began to determine the course of Hungarian music criticism in 1949 and 1950, The Miraculous Mandarin was increasingly cited as the characteristic example of Bartók’s art, while the Concerto for Orchestra all but disappeared from critical assessments of his music. Both Mihály and Chulaki had raised serious questions about the role Bartók’s legacy should play in Communist Hungary. Mihály had even specifically invited open public debate on the questions he raised.44 Yet the two lectures evoked little open response from critics or the musical public. This lack of noticeable effect was cited as one of the reasons for the formation of a new Musicians’ Association: the very fact that Mihály’s lecture had not sparked open debate, it was said, indicated that a new forum for debate among composers was urgently needed.45 On 10 August 1949 the party secretariat created new organizations for the support and regulation of the arts, with the stated aims of bringing artists into the socialist movement, promoting Soviet artistic practices and ideology and suppressing those who spoke against those practices, and fostering socialist realism.46 In addition, the Musicians’ Association was to further the “political, ideological and ethical” education of artists, organize working groups for their mutual support,

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and work out common issues among different branches of the arts, not only for the membership of the organization but also for the benefit of the wider artistic community. It was also to help the Institute for Cultural Relations Abroad (Külföldi Kulturkapcsolatok Intézete) in strengthening connections with the Soviet Union and other friendly states and to continue to produce the Music Review, now guided in content by specifically socialist criteria. Though Kodály, Hungary’s most renowned living musician, served as the association’s honorary president, Szabó became its acting president and de facto leader.47 The new Musicians’ Association would have within it a party action committee (aktiva), a small group that would organize the Communist membership to carry out the party’s agenda within the association. In accordance with the Soviet model, membership in the new association was not open to all musicians: political and musical criteria determined who could join, although all the talented composers who were crucial to the party’s goal of developing high-quality Hungarian music had to be admitted, even if they had shown resistance to the party’s politics.The presence of dissenting viewpoints within the association was necessary; otherwise, several of Hungary’s most distinguished composers, including Kodály, would have had to be excluded. But their presence also prevented the unity of opinion the party sought. Besides the founding of the Musicians’ Association, the creation of a new government ministry for the assistance and regulation of cultural work gives evidence of increasing bureaucratic supervision over artistic matters. The press announced the founding of the Ministry of Education (Népmdvelési Minisztérium) on 10 June 1949, with Révai as minister and director of the agency.48 (Like Rákosi and Szabó, Révai was a “Muscovite”—a Hungarian Communist who had spent most of the interwar period in the Soviet Union.) The Ministry aimed to foster culture of all kinds, to bring the arts into line with the party’s goals for a worker-oriented culture, and particularly to propagate Soviet culture in Hungary. The last goal was so important that the Ministry’s official magazine would bear the title Soviet Culture. As the article announcing the creation of the Ministry observed: Powerful support is offered for our cultural tasks by Soviet culture— the culture of that nation that stands at the forefront of progress, not only in economics and politics, but also in intellectual, artistic, and ideological matters. We already have much to be grateful to this culture for. . . . If in our artistic life any purification has taken place, the merit belongs to Soviet models. . . . There is no doubt that with this great alliance of support our victory is certain, and the Ministry of Education

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will soon give an account of decisive results in the area of the creation of new public thought.49

This statement effectively denied the possibility that Hungarians could progress toward a socialist culture by their own methods or on the basis of their own traditions. The new viewpoint promulgated by the Rákosi regime contrasted sharply with the optimistic third-road politics of the Hungarian musicians who had believed that Bartók’s late style might form the basis for a new international socialist music. The emphasis on Soviet styles would increase dramatically from this point on, and hopes for an alternative Hungarian path to socialism would eventually yield to official recognition of Soviet models for all the arts as unequivocally preferable to Hungarian traditions. Despite the intent of the Musicians’ Association and the Ministry of Education to stimulate public debate, Hungarians hardly touched the question of Bartók’s position in musical life for months after Mihály and Chulaki delivered their lectures. Bartók was still cited occasionally in positive terms: in the pages of the party newspaper, Free Folk, he was described as a model of socialist internationalism because of his love for peasant songs from all nations.50 When he was mentioned at all, he continued to be presented to the public in the same glowing terms in which socialists had first framed the arrival of his late works in Hungary—with claims that his career demonstrated a progression of conscience away from formalism and toward the people.51 By and large, though, the questions raised by Mihály and Chulaki were ignored in print and in public forums for almost a year following their lectures. Communists and non-Communists alike respected Bartók, and no one wished to continue the public criticism of his music. If the leaders of the Hungarian Workers’ Party sought to establish a clear policy against Bartók’s formalist and modernist works, more concentrated efforts would be necessary.

a “sharper” debate The next attack on Bartók was much more decisive. On 5 February 1950 Free Folk sharpened its rhetoric against the composer and against formalism with the publication of an article asserting that “we do not approve of the too frequent performance on the opera stage of Béla Bartók’s stage works—especially the work entitled ‘The Miraculous Mandarin.’”52 Exactly who was meant by “we,” and indeed the very authorship of the article, has been called into question by some Hungarian scholars, but the available ev-

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idence indicates that the journalist Géza Losonczy produced the screed on the direct orders of the government’s Ministry of Education.53 Losonczy, who then was serving as a state secretary at the Ministry, was a close associate of Révai and often wrote such articles at the behest of the party; according to his own 1955 testimony, he wrote the article at the Ministry’s request after the Ministry had decided upon its content. In the context of a critique of the practices of the Opera House in general and its repertory in particular, Losonczy considered whether certain works of Wagner and Bartók should remain in the repertory. His article reversed the balance Mihály had so carefully established. Whereas in Mihály’s analysis Bartók’s late works mitigated the earlier ones, in this new account the modernism of some works cast doubt on all of Bartók’s music: Let there be no misunderstanding: we consider Béla Bartók to be one of the greatest musical geniuses, and we rank his art among the most precious treasures of Hungarian musical culture. . . . It is not possible, however, to turn one’s eye away from the fact that in Béla Bartók’s art deep traces were left by the decadence and formalism of bourgeois music. Béla Bartók’s genius was nourished not only by the pure sources of Hungarian folk music, but also by the bourgeois, decaying art of his time. Bartók’s entire oeuvre carries with it the signs of this unceasing struggle that was carried on in him between the positive inspiration of the Hungarian folk music tradition and Western bourgeois decadence.54

Despite the nearly obligatory tribute offered at the outset, the tone of Losonczy’s article became more and more strident, criticizing The Miraculous Mandarin’s explicit sexual content and its “choreography that reminds one of the writhing in Hollywood films.” The article called for a more distanced and critical standpoint with regard to Bartók’s music and warned against fetishizing any musical repertory. Indeed, as Mihály reported later that year, “Most musicians interpreted Comrade Losonczy’s claims about the formalist signs perceptible in Bartók’s work as a serious attack on all of Bartók’s work.”55 Losonczy’s article was particularly important because it forced back into public debate questions that had been tabled for nearly a year. It was surely no coincidence that this grand gesture was made in February 1950, the second Soviet Culture Month, scant weeks before the arrival in Hungary of the Soviet composers Anatoly Novikov and Vladimir Zakharov. Like Chulaki’s of the year before, Novikov and Zakharov’s visit was designed both as an educational opportunity for Hungarian musicians and as an intelligence-gathering opportunity for the Soviet Union. The appearance of Losonczy’s article just ahead of a new Soviet delegation would give Rákosi,

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Révai, and their Hungarian colleagues something concrete and dramatic to show the Soviets about the battle against musical formalism in Hungary— evidence that would be important in shoring up their own reputations in Moscow. Rákosi’s position with respect to his mentor, Stalin, had always been precarious. He had been installed as secretary general not because of any particular leadership ability, but rather because he was already well known in Hungary as a Communist who had been persecuted for his political beliefs during the 1920s and 1930s. Like many other Hungarian Communist leaders, Rákosi was of Jewish descent, making him an easy target for anti-Semitic charges of “cosmopolitanism.” This touchy situation may explain why Rákosi always leaped to do Stalin’s bidding, ever on the alert for ways to outdo the leaders of other East Bloc nations in Stalinist orthodoxy. Because of Rákosi’s eagerness to anticipate the Soviet agenda, it is difficult to discern the extent to which Soviet leaders demanded the Sovietization of the arts in Hungary and, conversely, the extent to which policy was driven by local leaders eager to accomplish the task on their own initiative. The available archival evidence suggests that Rákosi and his “Muscovite” cohort took up the program of Sovietization without specific written instructions from abroad.56 In any case, they acted with alacrity, possibly because as 1949 wore on they felt increasing pressure to provide visible demonstrations of their fealty to Stalin and to his policies. Losonczy’s article serves as one instance of the desire to impress the Soviets through renewed efforts to enforce the artistic policies that had lain fallow for a year. The two Soviet visitors arrived sometime on or before 19 February. These emissaries represented the Soviet vision of the future of socialist music: Novikov as a composer of popular songs and “mass songs” for workers to sing in large groups, and Zakharov as the leader of the Piatnitsky folklore ensemble. They stayed for several weeks, observing the activities of performing ensembles and critiquing Hungarian composers’ work. Both gave lectures before the Musicians’ Association, in which they publicly offered criticism of individual composers’ contributions and of general musical trends, and they answered numerous questions about musical life in the USSR. The Soviet composers’ remarks about Hungarian music were personal and pointed; no formality stood in the way of their blunt commentary. In a lecture on 16 March 1950, Zakharov enumerated the faults of many of the most prominent composers in Hungary. Among these, he criticized Szabó’s Homecoming concerto as too “individualistic,” but he said that since Szabó had more recently written better film music, at least he was progressing in the right direction.57 Szabó did not fare as well in Novikov’s es-

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say about Hungarian music, first published in the main Soviet music journal, Sovetskaya muzyka, and later reprinted in Free Folk. Novikov stated that “Ferenc Szabó is one of the most talented of contemporary Hungarian composers. Unfortunately, he still clings to his less successful work, such as the symphonic poem entitled ‘Homecoming,’ which is a formalist work. . . . The sooner he gives up toying with antiquated modernist ‘relics,’ the greater the contribution he will make to Hungarian musical life.”58 The reliance on Bartók in Szabó’s work may well have contributed to Novikov’s accusation of formalism. Not until the 1970s were Hungarian critics willing to comment in print on the striking similarities between Szabó’s concerto and Bartók’s; the homage remained an unmentionable open secret while radio broadcasts continued to feature both works. Novikov’s criticism also fulfilled more general purposes: as Szabó ascended to power in the administration of Hungarian musical life, the Soviet visitors found it especially important to reprimand even this most loyal follower to ensure Hungarians’ complete submission to Soviet cultural domination. Szabó took the hint, and he soon became one of Bartók’s harshest Hungarian critics. Although he continued to admit behind closed doors that he still felt strongly drawn to Bartók’s music,59 within a few months he published several articles denouncing it as “pessimistic” and claiming that it reflected “every oppression, horror, and inhumanity of the time of imperialism.”60 As one might imagine, the Soviet composers were not warmly received. In a later report for the Musicians’ Association on the achievements and failings of the year, jointly authored by Mihály, Szabó, and Endre Székely, the three Hungarians reported euphemistically that “even among our leading composers there were some who, for a time, related badly to the criticisms of the Soviet comrades,” largely because “in the course of Comrade Zakharov’s and Comrade Novikov’s stay here no comradely or collegial contact was established between the two Soviet comrades and the Hungarian composers.”61 It is not at all surprising that, in the face of severe criticism that aimed specifically to undermine any sense of Hungarian independence, Hungarian composers bristled at or rejected outright Zakharov’s and Novikov’s comments. Once Hungarian officials adopted the Soviet policy, turning away from the third road, Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra underwent a remarkably rapid rehabilitation. As time went on, it became apparent that the state would need showpieces of Hungarian music that reflected a populist outlook while still maintaining the highest artistic quality. Though the concerto was not to be emulated by composers of new music, it was played more and more often on the radio and in public concerts as an example of Hungarian or-

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chestral music that seemed to communicate to a broad audience. Not only did this and other showpieces highlight the new outlook for audiences at home, but they also were supposed to demonstrate for Western broadcast audiences that Hungary was not a mere satellite, that it was maintaining its own indigenous traditions. The party also found Bartók’s concerto useful as it sought to measure the loyalty of individual composers. Party officials viewed with suspicion the composers who had first rejected the concerto as too simple for their modernist tastes, and they used those past statements about the concerto against them as proof of their deviation from socialist ideals. Thus, during a 1950 inquisition into the errors that had been committed in the administration of musical life, the composer Pál Kadosa reluctantly admitted that he had not liked the concerto or Bartók’s other late works. Under questioning from Minister of Education József Révai, who was presiding at the meeting, Kadosa conceded that “there were many among our composers who reacted badly to Bartók’s late works. I myself the most badly.” révai: Was it so bad that these works pleased you? kadosa: I did not approve of the late works; I did not see new directions in them.62

As Kadosa well knew by this time, his admission had not only aesthetic but also political implications; his dislike of Bartók’s more accessible works left him open to the charge that he did not truly support the socialist ideal of music for all. Thus, the very work that had once represented a vital hope for Hungary’s third road became instead a tool with which the Hungarian state enforced the aesthetic conformity of composers and maintained the mere pretense of cultural autonomy. The influence of ideological factors on the reception of Bartók’s late works was not a uniquely Eastern European phenomenon. On the contrary, these works raised similar questions upon their arrival in Western Europe shortly after the war’s end. A different but related set of political pressures— particularly the urgent need to overcome the artistic legacy of Nazism and the perceived threat of socialist realism from the East—would shape the fate of Bartók’s music in Western lands.

2

A Compromised Composer Bartók’s Music and Western Europe’s Fresh Start

The sentiment that drove forward the postwar transformation of German musical life is usually described today as the Nachholbedarf, or the need to catch up. For some, catching up meant forging a new connection to the traditions of modernism that had been abandoned in the early 1930s, picking up the thread as if Nazism had never existed; for others, it meant reconnecting to international musical life after a period of isolation.1 Perhaps most important, catching up meant making judgments about what had happened to music over the past few decades and what should happen next. In the late 1940s hard-fought battles were waged over the ethical implications of aesthetic values. As people sought to deal with the troubled past, music, like other aspects of culture, demanded reevaluation; this was especially true since some of the music of the recent past, including Bartók’s, had hardly been heard in Germany and the other lands controlled by the Nazi occupation forces. This period of reevaluation would prove critical to future views of Bartók’s music: the approaches to his music that are current in Western Europe and the United States today have been shaped by the oftenuncomfortable discussions that took place in this context. Hitler’s masterful use of all kinds of cultural objects for propaganda purposes had suppressed the German tradition of regarding works of art as autonomous, or independent from social demands such as advertising and education. Many believed that restoring art to its independent status would help with the process of denazification and give artists the opportunity to create new works without the stigma that had become attached to socially committed music.The critic Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt announced in 1947 that the rehabilitation of art for art’s sake would constitute the most important task for musicians wishing to create a new musical life after the fall of Nazism.2 An institution growing directly out of the need to catch up, the 28

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Summer Courses for New Music in Darmstadt aimed “to re-create and to defend the freedom and independence, the purity and autonomy of the artwork.”3 Expressed in these terms, the goals for art differed hardly at all from many German intellectuals’ goals for their own lives after a long period of totalitarian control; many began to see support for the autonomy of art as a sign of antifascist beliefs.4 Artistic autonomy thus seemed the first essential for a newly free culture; statements in favor of music as an autonomous cultural category, such as Leonard Bernstein’s assertions quoted in the preface, became commonplace.5 Besides the tendency to regard musical works as separate from social concerns, the other characteristic feature of the “catching up” period was the process of reintroducing audiences, especially young composers and performers, to the music they had missed. “For twelve years, names such as Hindemith and Stravinsky, Schoenberg and Käenek, Milhaud and Honegger, Shostakovich and Prokofiev, Bartók, Weill, and many others, were frowned upon,” wrote Wolfgang Steinecke, the founder and director of the Darmstadt summer courses. “For twelve years a criminal cultural politics robbed German musical life of its leading personalities and its relationships with the world.”6 Recent research has shown that not all of this music was as inaccessible as Steinecke claimed.7 Nonetheless, he felt the need to catch up as a series of “gaps” to be filled, the ritual utterance of what could not be said under the Nazi regime; this feeling was shared by a number of others who were working toward the reorganization of concert life, such as Karl Amadeus Hartmann and Hermann Scherchen.8 True to this purpose, the summer courses in the first few years featured performances of a variety of twentieth-century works, including music from the early part of the century that had long gone unheard. Programs devoted particular attention to works that had been composed after 1933 but had rarely or never been heard in Germany, including music by European émigré composers, such as Hindemith, Bartók, Stravinsky, Käenek, and Schoenberg, and works by German composers both older (Fortner, Blacher, Heiß, Hartmann) and younger (Henze, Engelmann, Klebe, Zimmermann). The American occupation authorities in Germany supported this vision of filling gaps, finding it compatible with the other programs of cultural denazification they had established. The occupation government not only sponsored the Darmstadt summer courses, but also gave money to other organizations that aimed to expose Germans to modern and international music.9 The process of rehabilitating banned music helped some to believe that normal life had begun again. The composer Hans Werner Henze recalled a general feeling that once the banned music was restored, “the guilt has been

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taken from us, now the world is already nearly in order again.”10 The new attention paid to composers who had been driven into exile or banned promoted the perception that “one owed the New Music something,”11 much as states considered making reparations to other parties who had been singled out for oppression during the war. (This idea was reinforced by the fact that Schoenberg, one of the injured parties, was of Jewish birth, as were many of the other musicians who left Europe.) The concept of modernist music thus came fairly rapidly to be associated with anti-Nazism and with those who had been on the “right” side all along. This was an oversimplified belief, as the National Socialist government actually supported some music in modernist styles as long as the composers matched its ethnic and ideological criteria;12 but it was an idea that had great appeal for those who wanted to assist in the propagation of modern music. Perhaps the most vivid example of the appeal of this idea was offered by the philosopher and music critic Theodor Adorno, who suggested in 1949 that since the Nazi campaign against modern music had taken hold even among those who pretended to be liberal in other areas, a person’s taste in music could be used as a test to discern his or her true political leanings and prejudices.13 A few years later Adorno applied this kind of thinking to Bartók, suggesting that his allegiance to tonality seemed too closely aligned with the “folkish” tendencies of Nazi populism. Adorno wrote: “In a conversation in New York [Bartók] explained that a composer like him, who was rooted in folk music, could not dispense with tonality for the long term— an astounding statement for Bartók, who as a person resisted every ‘folkish’ temptation, who went into exile and poverty when fascism overshadowed Europe.”14 Adorno’s astonishment makes it apparent that he had viewed Bartók as a true political progressive—but only until Bartók made his statement about his continuing devotion to tonality, which threw his antifascism back into question. Even if we take into account Adorno’s taste for overstatement and extreme juxtapositions, the charge that if someone continued to compose with tonal resources he or she might secretly harbor politically reactionary sentiments is bold indeed.The blunt equation of tonality with Nazi populism makes conspicuous the link between ethical rectitude and modernist musical styles that was forged during the period of catching up.

leibowitz and the charge of compromise A similar juxtaposition of ethical and musical concerns, published in France, reveals the ways in which this kind of judgment shaped the interpretation

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of Bartók’s music. Perhaps the most notorious essay on Bartók from the early postwar years is René Leibowitz’s “Béla Bartók, or the Possibility of Compromise in Contemporary Music,” which challenged the validity of Bartók’s music in Adornian terms.15 Leibowitz’s perspective stemmed from his reading of the critical works of Jean-Paul Sartre and other writers whose postwar thinking embodied a dramatic response to their wartime experiences of German-occupied France and the collaborationist Vichy regime. As a sweeping series of purification trials passed judgment on whether individuals had acted morally during the war, Sartre theorized that to write was itself a political act and that writers had a special responsibility to engage themselves in the issues of the day. In Sartre’s view of the world, “Every word has consequences. Every silence, too.”16 Though Sartre believed that music’s obligation differed from literature’s because it made less specific reference to events or objects in the world, Leibowitz altered and extended Sartre’s ideas in applying them to an interpretation of Bartók’s career and his music.17 Leibowitz argued that the very sound of Bartók’s music was tinged with moral weakness: he found in it “an element of compromise and a lack of purity which are, to say the least, disquieting.”18 His critique of Bartók reflects the same concern with moral virtue and courage that dominated public discourse in Paris during the postwar purification trials.19 The moral weakness in question here was Bartók’s decision not to embrace the technique of composing with twelve tones advocated by Arnold Schoenberg and his disciples, among whom Leibowitz counted himself. In Leibowitz’s view, which follows Adorno’s to some extent, the composer has a moral obligation to further the historical development of music toward “greater complexity and symmetry” by writing in a more “advanced” style than his predecessors.20 According to Leibowitz, Bartók had achieved a bold and radical new chromatic language in certain of his works, particularly the two Sonatas for Violin and Piano. In others, such as the Third and Fourth String Quartets, he sometimes used sophisticated techniques of inversion, retrogression, and variation similar to those favored by the Schoenberg school. Although Bartók’s style had progressed toward greater formal coherence and complexity up until the middle of his career, Leibowitz believed, the composer had failed to take the final step away from tonality that the history of music required of him. Leibowitz wrote of Bartók: The lucidity evinced in his Fourth Quartet led him definitively to the threshold of a new world before which he could not shrink without failing to honor his commitments. But Bartók did not seem to be fully conscious of these commitments and in the end he did not honor them. Instead of persisting in the forward movement which his last work

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called for, instead of crossing over the threshold he had just reached into that half-discerned world which can only be approached in the state of anguish that accompanies absolute liberty and its implied responsibilities, instead of all this, Bartók chose a less praiseworthy path, which was the path of compromise.21

As far as Leibowitz was concerned, all Bartók’s works after the Fourth Quartet (1928) were tinged with compromise, the late works (such as the 1938 Violin Concerto, the Sixth Quartet and the Concerto for Orchestra) most of all. Because Bartók had pursued a different course, composing tonal music throughout his career, Leibowitz felt that Bartók had aimed for popularity and success rather than for the abstract development of musical style—a self-serving rather than a selfless choice. Leibowitz framed his judgments about Bartók in the gendered terms characteristic of post-Resistance critique.22 He described Bartók’s use of folk music sources in his compositional work and his failure to follow Schoenberg as a lack of manly bravery, a possession by “unconscious fears.”23 He even alleged that Bartók “flirted with” the new chromatic music but failed to “possess” it; this ostensible lack of masculine mastery over the musical material illustrated, in his view, the composer’s moral and psychological deficiencies.24 Leibowitz’s critique thus embodies an inseparable fusion of style-critical judgments about the quality of Bartók’s music and moral judgments about the composer’s character: the less difficult style of Bartók’s late works seemed a direct result of cowardice. Of paramount concern for Leibowitz was Bartók’s potential influence on young composers: [Stravinsky’s followers] may be disposed of with a shrug, for clearly the musicians who have chosen Stravinsky as their teacher can themselves only be ineffectual, or else so unperceptive that it comes to the same thing. This is not the case with the followers of Bartók, for here we are dealing with artists who have become aware of a certain radicalism in contemporary musical language. But whether their awareness is only partial, or whether they retreat before the necessity of seeing their problem through to the end, these composers find in Bartók’s example a justification of their own spirit of compromise.25

According to this reasoning, any composer who chose to emulate Bartók would be guilty of the same moral failings and judged an epigone. (In Leibowitz’s view, only Schoenberg could be imitated without the danger of epigonism, for only Schoenberg had chosen the most radical path, away from tonality into a new realm of musical organization.) As we shall see, the be-

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lief that Bartók should not be followed would persist for years among those who received Leibowitz’s ideas. Leibowitz’s essay exerted a significant influence on postwar perceptions of Bartók. Adorno, who in his public statements criticized Bartók’s music only circumspectly and avoided mention of the late works altogether, wrote privately to Leibowitz to express his strong agreement with the essay, stating that he had incorporated some of its insights into his forthcoming Philosophy of Modern Music.26 Echoes of Leibowitz’s accusations can be found in statements by composers such as Pierre Boulez and Olivier Messiaen, and his judgment that the quality of Bartók’s music declined after a high point in the 1920s is repeated in more recent writings.27 Bartók’s music did have its defenders; for instance, Boris de Schloezer argued contra Leibowitz that Bartók was an example of truly free art for art’s sake, independent of any abstractly conceived historical lineage.28 Still, perhaps because of the compelling nature of the fears he was playing upon, Leibowitz’s view proved durable and influential among the young generation of modernist musicians.

threats to modernism, real and perceived These visceral reactions of modernists against the legacies of Nazism and collaboration were reinforced by the 1948 Soviet resolution condemning modernist musical styles. Western Europeans who had committed themselves to modernism were horrified by the idea of socialist realism, both as a threat to the autonomy of the work and as an affront to the modern sound they were trying to rehabilitate. Stuckenschmidt framed the Soviet resolution as a new persecution of the German elite and as an act of near-sacrilege against the patron saints of modernism: “[The Soviet resolution] affected us German avant-gardists like an ice-cold shower. Not only do they agree in content down to the smallest detail with the artistic maxims of the National Socialists. . . . They also defame the same great leaders of contemporary music who were banned during the Hitler regime and, for those who lived in Germany, forced into emigration.”29 The Soviet challenge to the ethic of modernism only strengthened some Western Europeans’ resolve to protect their musical sphere against populist incursions of all types.30 The Soviet resolution and the Prague meeting of socialist composers that followed it sparked excited debate at the 1949 summer courses in Darmstadt. Hans Mayer, an outspoken advocate of socialist musical values, insisted that musicians should feel obligated to the public; others, such as

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Stuckenschmidt and Leibowitz, denied those claims. Heated discussions ensued among the students about whether music should be regarded as autonomous or as subservient to society’s needs.31 Everyone recognized that this polemic had direct implications for musical style: Stuckenschmidt wrote pointedly that “in principle one had to decide in favor of [the operetta composer Franz] Lehár (who naturally wasn’t performed) or of Schoenberg (thoughts of whom dominated the meeting).”32 The overly simplistic reduction of the musical possibilities to either operetta or twelve-tone techniques was characteristic of the panicked quality of the debates: a real fear had taken hold that, under political pressure, music might be forced to descend to a philistine level. At the same time critics such as Adorno and Leibowitz called urgently for composers to discern the style that would be most truthful and pertinent to this moment in the history of music; this request only made the debates seem more significant, as both sides claimed the justification of history. Given this ethical framework and the sense of imminent danger, the introduction of Bartók’s later, more accessible works to Western European concert life created predictable consternation, not unlike the consternation these works first produced in Budapest in 1946 and 1947. The Third Piano Concerto was performed at Darmstadt in the chaotic summer of 1949, and the ideological debates left their mark on some listeners’ experiences of the piece. Although some music critics in the West hailed Bartók’s late works as a new and admirable effort to reach out to the public,33 others remained skeptical. In the context of a diatribe against “Marxist interference,” Hermann Scherchen, a central figure at the summer courses, judged Bartók’s late style in Leibowitzian terms: A number of leading composers have belatedly made concessions in their creative work: it is enough to compare Bartók’s Mandarin and his Third Piano Concerto, or the first and second harmonizations of Hindemith’s Marienlieder [sic] or Milhaud’s Les Choéphores and Introduction et Marche funèbre, or Stravinsky’s Les Noces and the Concerto for Strings, or Shostakovich’s Third and Ninth Symphonies, to see what this compromise consists of: in stretching the boundaries of classical harmony to the utmost and even beyond, but still ensuring for oneself a tonal alibi. The twelve-tone composers alone did not shirk the task that art assigns to every truly creative artist: consciously to develop new, finer capabilities in the human being.34

The inclusion of Shostakovich on this list is striking: though he composed both the Third and Ninth Symphonies in the Soviet Union, the Third reflected the relative freedom of the 1920s, whereas by the time of the Ninth

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Hermann Scherchen with his students at Darmstadt. Photo copyright © Internationales Musikinstitut Darmstadt (International Music Institute Darmstadt). Used by permission.

(1945) Shostakovich had endured years of oppressive state intervention.The comparison of his situation to Bartók’s implies (however falsely) that similar political forces worked to achieve Bartók’s “compromise.” The Communist composer Louis Durey likewise included Bartók in the ranks of socialist realists: “It is impossible not to think of Bartók at a time when musicians of Central and Eastern Europe, creators of a new realism in music, are creating scores of such great and important novelty as Shostakovich’s ‘Song of the Forests,’ or Prokofiev’s ‘On Guard for Peace.’”35 The Milhaud works Scherchen mentioned likewise reveal the relationship between suspicions about Bartók’s late works and the explicitly political rhetoric of Leibowitz. Whereas Milhaud’s Les Choéphores, completed in 1916, exemplified French modernism with its dense, often nonfunctional harmony and its innovative passages for rhythmic speech and percussion ensemble, Introduction et Marche funèbre was composed in a simpler, pompous style for a 1936 festival of France’s Popular Front government. If this political use of Milhaud’s music was not enough to offend Scherchen’s belief in absolute music, the later appropriation of similar styles by the Vichy regime surely reinforced his sense that the simpler works constituted an act

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of collaboration.36 Bartók had not been subject to the artistic controls of the National Socialists or those of the Communist Party—indeed, he had left Europe on moral grounds when the Nazi threat approached. The accessible and tonal sound of his late works, however, evoked these negative political associations strongly enough to call his intentions into question. Scherchen thus interpreted the sound of Bartók’s Third Piano Concerto, composed in the United States, as retroactively tainted by events that had nothing to do with the work’s genesis. In the new, politically charged context of cold war politics, accessible music sounded compromised to many Western composers precisely because the Nazi and Soviet regimes demanded such music. The sense that Bartók’s late music was politically or stylistically regressive was enhanced for some Europeans by anti-American sentiments: many critics surmised, as Scherchen had, that Bartók had been forced by the pressures of the American market to compose more populist music during his exile in New York. In 1949, for instance, the French composer Louis Saguer made this link explicit: “It should be noted that many authors of the European avant-garde who emigrated to the U.S.A. before or during the war accommodated themselves to a great extent under the influence of American musical life, such as Hindemith and Schoenberg, Käenek and Martinu˚ , and even Bartók, who had to make concessions.”37 Despite efforts by the American government to present the nation as both a cultural and an industrial power, the elites of European culture continued to regard American culture as utilitarian and crude, lacking the traditions necessary to support a real artistic life.38 Bartók’s music had started to become more accessible with the 1938 Violin Concerto and the Divertimento, which were composed not for commercial sale in America but for the European audiences that were just beginning to embrace his work.39 Nonetheless, the association of the rest of his late works with America, along with the other connotations of his accessible sound, tainted all the late works in the eyes of “advanced” Europeans.

the charge of epigonism Thus, some of the musical judgments made by modernist thinkers of the late 1940s reveal thinly concealed political worries: the need to overcome the legacy of Nazism came together with more current concerns about the incursion of socialism into the heart of Europe to focus attention on questions of populism or, more generally, how artists should relate to their audiences. That some composers of the recent past had been labeled as ethically compromised in these respects made the choice of models all the more

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crucial for young composers, and some began to fear that choosing incorrectly would compromise their own music. The result was a thoroughgoing shift in thinking about what kind of musical style might be desirable. In 1949 some critics could still write about art as the product of a strong individual personality; but the belief that style should be “personal” was waning. Although that adjective was still used positively on occasion, by the early 1950s a far more typical usage implied stylistic inadequacy. As the elite modernist view won by attrition over the socialist ideal of accessible music at Darmstadt (the Eastern Europeans simply stopped coming), a new ideal of a “transpersonal” style would emerge that would make the “personal” style of the older modernists, such as Bartók, seem obsolete. The turn against the personal began around 1949, concurrently with the debates about socialist realism. One critic noticed a change in attitude at the 1949 Darmstadt summer courses: despite the tonal leanings of Bartók’s Third Piano Concerto, the work possessed “an incomparable intensity and deep effect” that was largely due to “Bartók’s entirely personal power of expression [Aussage].”40 Yet at the same time he reported, “If a young composer today wanted to write such music, people wouldn’t accept it from him.” Not only Bartók but also other composers acquired labels as composers with “personal” styles. “Whoever would imitate Stravinsky, Bartók, or Hindemith today,” explained the critic Wolf-Eberhard von Lewinski in a 1954 radio program, “would automatically fall into disrepute as an epigone: the personal style of these composers is too distinctive.”41 What were the objections that caused entire repertories to be dismissed as relevant models for new music? In Bartók’s case, what originally seemed positively “personal” (in the sense of communicating something listeners could identify with his admired person) may have come to seem too close to the communicative, accessible ideal propounded by the Soviet socialist realists. Furthermore, and ironically, “personal” seems also to have taken on the opposite sense, meaning subjective, or legitimate for only one individual. Boris de Schloezer explained that, regarded from the point of view of the increasing systematization of music theory, Bartók’s “great fault” was that for any problem of musical structure he offered only “particular solutions, uniquely valid for each concrete case.”42 Because there was no comprehensive theory that could help composers to grapple with Bartók’s harmonic and melodic worlds, using his music as a model would have meant borrowing his actual sounds, not his methods. This kind of imitation seemed ideologically untenable: one of the most repellent aspects of socialist realism, as Hermann Danuser has explained, was the historical stagnation of form and harmony—the reuse of old sounds—in the service of the social-

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ist state. Such borrowing defined epigonism.43 The borrowing of “particular solutions” from older composers thus fell even further into disrepute among modernists in the late 1940s. One critic noted that “what was brave in the twenties was perhaps still possible ten years later; it was forbidden in the forties—in Hitler’s Central Europe (which in this context is also noteworthy)—and ten years later became, if one does not shy away from the truth, impossible in principle.”44 In the search for a universally valid style that steered clear of the nationalist and folksy implications of socialist realism, the music of Anton Webern emerged as a model. As Lewinski expressed the new consensus, “Only the person who writes twelve-tone music has the possibility of shaping his personal message without reference to other composers and yet is certain of a transpersonally valid context.”45 Unlike the musics that were less systematically theorized, Webern’s music offered a compelling logic according to which a composition could be shown with mathematical certainty to be valid within the system, thus rendering it amenable to interpretation as “impersonal.” At the same time the twelve-tone method was not itself a “style”: composers could adapt it to their own purposes without risking either the validity or the individuality of the work. Perhaps most important, even though adopting twelve-tone techniques did mean borrowing a method from the past, serial methods allowed composers to develop new, nontraditional forms; they could therefore reassure themselves that they were not participating in the kind of epigonism that imitating other kinds of earlier twentiethcentury music would imply.

maderna: a model rejected The turn away from Bartók as a model for new composition is apparent in the case of the composer and conductor Bruno Maderna, a member of the generation that reached artistic maturity as part of the Darmstadt circle. Maderna’s early works demonstrate a fascination with Bartók’s music and a strong inclination to use certain features of it within his own compositions. Both Maderna’s Concerto for Two Pianos and Instruments (composed 1947–1948, revised twice in 1949) and his Fantasia and Fugue for Two Pianos (1948) borrowed significantly from Bartók’s distinctive techniques and textures. Despite this early interest, however, Maderna’s career also followed a characteristic, even stereotypical postwar path: the turn away from other models, such as Bartók and Stravinsky, to an intensive study of serialism, with Webern’s as the most significant model of musical thought. Raymond Fearn has pointed out some of the ways in which Maderna’s

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early works are indebted to Bartók’s music, but the debt is more significant than has yet been acknowledged. In his discussion of the concerto, Fearn points to the use of syncopated 3 ⁄4 versus 6⁄8 rhythms, to “percussive writing for piano,” and to the “chromatic and often canonic polyphony” of the work as markers of Bartók’s influence.46 Aside from these general traits, we can hear in Maderna’s concerto particular sounds reminiscent of Bartók’s music. Maderna’s orchestration is similar to that of Bartók’s Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion and Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta; the use of glissandi and of bell-like timbres (including a celesta), two harps, and a rich assortment of percussion places the work specifically in Bartók’s sound world. The first movement of the concerto, which was part of the work up to and including the “Darmstadt version” of mid-1949, is laden with Bartókian resonances.47 (The critical edition of this 1949 version has not yet become available; my observations here rely on a recorded performance of this version.)48 A climactic moment four minutes into Maderna’s concerto ( 3:48– 4:20) is strongly reminiscent of the high point at mm. 267–292 of the first movement of Bartók’s Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion: in both passages, intensely contrapuntal piano writing leads to heavy block chords that are accented at each occurrence by punctuating xylophone figures and alternate with brief passages in stepwise motion. As the tension subsides, each composer offers twinkling figures high in the piano, Maderna’s enhanced by the harps and xylophone. In this case Maderna has borrowed from Bartók’s arsenal not only sounds, but also an entire rhetorical flourish. Likewise, the fugato from the first movement of Bartók’s Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion (mm. 346–377) is echoed later in Maderna’s first movement, which shares with the Bartók passage not only its contrapuntal technique but also an unusual compound-meter lilt. Maderna’s decision to remove the original first and second movements when he revised the work late in 1949 may have been due in part to the advice of the Italian twelve-tone composer Luigi Dallapiccola, to whom Maderna had sent the first movement of the score in 1947. Dallapiccola warned Maderna against relying on ideas from other composers, implying that he should aim instead to compose a more original work.49 Whether Maderna still had Dallapiccola’s advice in mind when he cut the first two movements is unknown; but their removal certainly had the effect of suppressing the most obvious allusions to older music, including the Bartókian moments already described and the Stravinskian opening of the work, with its belllike tones recalling Les Noces. The question of originality seems to have been important to Maderna. In a 1961 program note he called the concerto “par-

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ticularly decisive” for his development as a composer because “in it I believe I found my personal expression for the first time, after previously having composed many works that were stylistically close to Bartók and Stravinsky.”50 When Maderna had the opportunity to publish the score in 1955, he dated the work 1948, concealing the extensive process of revision and thus obscuring his earlier debts to composers of the past.51 Even in the music that remained after the revision, a few Bartókian features persist. The ominous ostinato bass line in mm. 118–148 of Maderna’s 1955 score (example 5a) resembles that in mm. 195–216 of the first movement of Bartók’s Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion (example 5b); the prevalence of half-step motion, the low tessitura, and the compound meter all contribute to the resemblance.52 Maderna also showed a partiality for a characteristic Bartókian melodic type: a stepwise melody that turns back on itself with chromatic alterations (example 5c). The subject of a long passage of imitative counterpoint in Maderna’s concerto moves in precisely this way (example 5d).53 Compared to the borrowings eliminated in the revisions, though, the ones that Maderna retained were subtler and may have seemed less likely to trigger charges of epigonism. Maderna’s Fantasia and Fugue for two pianos, composed in 1948, recalled Bartók’s night music with shimmering tremolo octaves and a meandering melody in its molto lento section. Fearn has pointed out that Maderna’s Fantasia and Fugue also contained hints of Webern, such as the prevalent use of the B–A–C–H (B b –A–C–B) motive, appearing both in that form and in retrograde; but as Maderna’s education and early leanings tended strongly toward neoclassicism, neither the appearance of the B–A–C–H motive nor its development should be taken as a definitive sign of Webern’s influence. Still, Maderna’s next work, Three Greek Lyrics (1948), incorporated serial techniques along with neoclassical features such as canonic imitation. Though the serialism is not of the strictness most commonly associated with Webern, it seems likely that Maderna had become familiar with serial techniques while studying Webern’s music under the tutelage of Hermann Scherchen, Maderna’s conducting teacher in Venice, whom he met in 1948.54 It should be emphasized that Maderna’s turn from Bartók and other neoclassical models to Webern was not likely a result of direct peer pressure, at least not from the other composers who were attending the Darmstadt summer courses; for Maderna first attended the courses in 1950, well after the composition of his first serial works. According to Fearn’s research, Maderna had been exposed to some of Webern’s music during World War II; but his interest was intensified through his study with Scherchen.55 Maderna himself seems to have viewed the path away from Stravinsky, Bartók, and

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Example 5. a. Maderna, Concerto for Two Pianos and Instruments (1955), mm. 118–121, piano 2, l.h. b. Bartók, Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion, I, m. 195. c. Bartók, Cantata profana, mm. 5–9, flute. d. Maderna, Concerto for Two Pianos and Instruments (1955), mm. 210–211, piano 1, r.h.

neoclassicism toward serialism as the natural and timely course to take. In a 1970 interview he reported: “In my case—as for all the young Italian composers—it was a logical thing; it is impossible to compose without coming across this way of thinking [i.e., serial technique]. One begins by studying polyphony, then the polyrhythms of Stravinsky and Bartók, then, as

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one looks with curiosity, one finds the Viennese way of thinking.”56 Despite Maderna’s perception of his trajectory as a gradual progression, this new interest seems to have awakened suddenly, at the time of his contact with Scherchen. The Bartókian sounds of the Concerto for Two Pianos and Instruments likewise quickly fell out of his vocabulary in favor of more pointillistic,Webernian textures (as in his String Quartet of 1955).We cannot know whether Scherchen communicated his concerns about the political associations of Bartók’s style to Maderna, or whether Maderna took such concerns into account; but Maderna’s turn to Webern as a model occurred with such rapidity and so soon after his studies with Scherchen began that it would be difficult to avoid attributing the shift at least in part to Scherchen’s influence. Maderna’s example raises the possibility that political concerns had a marked effect even on composers who did not acknowledge those concerns explicitly. Since Scherchen was an active and widely traveled teacher, his judgments of musical value would have been authoritative even without the revelation of the political motivations for those judgments. Regardless of whether they adopted the underlying tenets, young composers who were exposed to modernism for the first time after World War II could easily have absorbed the spirit of the ethical imperative behind the “new music” from their politically motivated teachers. It seems likely that the political anxieties of the early cold war years had a further-reaching influence on young composers than they themselves recognized or felt it necessary to admit.

stockhausen’s historical bartók Under the sway of the new political criticism, perceptions of Bartók’s music changed quickly among the young generation of modernists. Like Maderna, Karlheinz Stockhausen was deeply interested in Bartók’s music for a time: he wrote a thesis on Bartók’s Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion for his degree in music education, completed in Cologne in 1951. The thesis, which effectively traces Stockhausen’s turn away from Bartók, was written over the summer that included Stockhausen’s first trip to the summer courses at Darmstadt, a trip that would significantly change his musical ideals. Although at the outset Stockhausen was enthusiastic about his topic, upon his return to work on the thesis he wrote in a letter to his fellow composer Karel Goeyvaerts: “Bartók is further from my heart than ever. There are so very many contradictions for me in this work—and so many raw spots under the wonderful organization.”57 The courses at Darmstadt instigated a dramatic shift in the character of Stockhausen’s analysis of the

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sonata. Whereas the earlier part of the thesis is devoted to minute description of the details of the sonata, in the second half of the text the descriptive analysis turns to an exposition of more general analytical principles inspired by the discussions at Darmstadt, interrupted with increasing frequency by passages that express negative judgments of larger sections or of the sonata as a whole.58 The move from analysis to interpretation in the thesis is itself worthy of comment. As a result of his intense experiences at Darmstadt, Stockhausen’s already rigorous analytical sense became infused with an ethical imperative that shaped the results of his analysis. Stockhausen explained at the end of the thesis, probably completed after his Darmstadt sojourn, that musical analysis should clarify a work’s organizing principles in part as a “test of the work’s purity” that goes beyond the audible phenomena59— even though at the beginning of the thesis, before the trip, he had acknowledged that the methods of analysis known to him had proven “inadequate or unusable in the face of the individuality of this work.”60 After many pages of detailed exegesis, Stockhausen expressed several kinds of dissatisfaction with the sonata; it seems that his analysis could not reach the aspects of the sonata that had inspired him to study it in the first place. If Stockhausen wanted to test the “purity” of Bartók’s music through analysis but found that his methods were unusable, this might imply that the purity of this work was untestable—or simply that the work had failed the test. Stockhausen was not the only analyst who has come up against the difficulties inherent in this music;61 but his frustration demonstrates with unusual clarity the complex relationship between analytical methods and critical evaluation. Stockhausen expressed reservations about several aspects of Bartók’s sonata in terms that evoke Adorno’s then-current criticisms of Stravinskian neoclassicism and popular music. Although we have no evidence that Adorno himself criticized the sonata during this period, the ideas in his Philosophy of Modern Music and those from his courses on other topics had certainly entered the analytical vocabulary of the composers who studied at the summer courses. These various elements of cultural analysis in the Adornian vein were not completely integrated into the arguments of Stockhausen’s thesis; they stand out stylistically as inserted paragraphs, written in a more complex and less telegraphic style, without Stockhausen’s customary plethora of abbreviations. In one such passage, Stockhausen accused the sonata of having “no harmony”; as he described it, the pitch content of the work, determined solely by horizontal or melodic considerations, meant that often the contrapuntal movement of melodies of like pitch content pro-

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duced the effect of a “homogeneous band” of unchanging harmony. Thus, the traditional sense of counterpoint, the movement of truly independent lines praised by Adorno,62 seemed compromised in Bartók’s sonata, so much so that the fugue in the sonata’s first movement seemed an “empty, unfulfilled gesture.”63 This interpretation of the role of melody and harmony in the fugue, Stockhausen realized, had broader implications. Stockhausen explained that in Bartók’s sonata, rhythm and melody work against each other.That is, at points where the rhythm is complex, the melody is simple or nonexistent; contrariwise, when the music is driven by its melody, the rhythm takes a subordinate role.64 In Stockhausen’s evaluation of the work as a whole, he accused Bartók of overemphasizing rhythm, thereby causing a “regression in harmony and melody” by which these elements are broken down to impoverished simplicity.65 Not only were the terms (such as “regression”) reminiscent of Adorno’s critical writing, but the musical interpretation followed suit. Whereas earlier Stockhausen had praised Bartók’s tendency to develop motivic material by stripping it to its essentials as a positive process of making the material “more precise,”66 near the end of the thesis he described the similarly altered return of the first theme late in the sonata’s first movement as “in a certain sense made more primitive, like a slogan.”67 This latter reading of Bartók’s procedure carries quasi-Adornian ideological ramifications, as if Bartók’s streamlining of the theme amounted to propagandistic pandering.68 Stockhausen’s descriptions of Bartók’s “complex monophony” and of the “elementary derivation of all the sounding processes” in the sonata culminate in a critique that resonates with Adorno’s analysis of Stravinsky. Here Stockhausen called attention to the elements of Bartók’s music that are most characteristic of Stravinsky: “Both the elements of form (short-breathed motives, ostinato, pedal points, monophony with ostinato accompaniment— block technique) and the melodic simplification (modality, small intervals, building of interval cycles—especially minor third, tritone, minor second— small tessitura of melodies, tone repetition, constant repetition of motives) point to musical primitivisms, as they are to be found in original folk music.”69 As this passage implies, the folklike attributes of Bartók’s music, which Stockhausen regarded as closely connected to the predominance of rhythm, seemed to him a particular liability. As in Adorno’s critique of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, the primacy of rhythm over melody now seemed violent and primitive to Stockhausen, who wrote that “increasing complication and independence of rhythm turns against the melody; the melody becomes petrified, is torn to pieces, is beaten into a tone formula.”70 To Stockhausen’s credit, his thinking about Bartók’s use of rhythm went

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beyond this blanket condemnation. Allowing rhythm to assert itself over melody might have worked, it seemed to him, if the rhythmic processes themselves had been more interesting, less repetitive: Bartók’s rhythms had remained “impoverished” because they were combined with static processes of harmony and melody.71 The assertion of rhythm or other elements over melody seemed a new and important idea; the only difficulty was that it would not work “until musical features of equal stature could be developed to replace melody.”72 In an article based on a radio talk Stockhausen gave after the completion of the thesis, he proclaimed that Bartók’s unambiguous preference for rhythm “raised [the work] from its isolated situation to a masterpiece, a flash of lightning to herald a comprehensive change of musical language.”73 Stockhausen regarded the perceived conflict between melody and rhythm as extending far beyond the sonata: it had become “a general, perhaps the most urgent question in the development of new music.”74 Given the young composer’s otherwise palpable disappointment with the sonata, these curious declarations indicate that more was at stake for him than the work itself.75 Stockhausen’s interest in the separation of individual musical “parameters” such as melody and rhythm originated not with Bartók, but in his recent contact with Olivier Messiaen’s piano work “Mode de valeurs et d’intensités,” one of the Quatre études de rhythme, which he had heard on a phonograph recording at Darmstadt. Messiaen’s piano work, heralded as innovative from its first performance in 1949, was an early attempt to organize elements other than pitch systematically. In addition to pitch, Messiaen manipulated independent, abstractly ordered “scales” of durations, dynamics, and articulations, creating both a new-sounding pointillistic effect and a theoretical approach that would have a lasting influence on his young listeners. Stockhausen spent much of his time at the summer courses working out the implications of these ideas with Goeyvaerts, a student of Messiaen who had applied similar principles in his 1951 Sonata for Two Pianos.76 When Stockhausen returned to his thesis, eager to find applications for these techniques, his new knowledge colored his understanding of Bartók’s sonata. He interpreted Bartók’s contrasts between melodic and rhythmic music as a historical forerunner of Messiaen’s more advanced techniques. This was the “flash of lightning” he referred to in the October 1951 radio broadcast about the sonata: Bartók’s “inadequate” innovations had nonetheless made possible Messiaen’s groundbreaking ones. Goeyvaerts understood this as the main point of Stockhausen’s radio talk: in a letter to Stockhausen, he remarked that “it was quite clear that Bartók’s position is at the edge of a transformation threatened by dissolution.” Goeyvaerts then added, in German rather than his customary French, “Dieses war klar und überzeugend!”

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(This was clear and convincing!)77 Owing to this sudden change in perspective, Bartók became for Stockhausen a composer of primarily historical merit, not to be emulated but to be understood as a precursor to more recent and more useful developments. Further, as the example of Goeyvaerts makes clear, such ideas circulated with some rapidity among the close circle who met and conversed at Darmstadt; Stockhausen’s new attitude, disseminated in conversation as well as in print and over the airwaves, found agreement among other like-minded European composers. Stockhausen’s change of heart is only one example of a phenomenon evident in criticism and in practice: the formation of a canon of historical modernism. Bartók’s works and others like them still mattered because they had formed the musical culture that made the really modern “new music” possible; yet they were treated with a certain distance, the subject of casual respect rather than continued engagement. Bartók had become a “forerunner.”

bartók’s retreat into history Stockhausen was not alone in regarding Bartók as a composer who had moved into history. In his book on Olivier Messiaen’s influential composition classes in Paris, Jean Boivin noted that, though Messiaen had taught Bartók’s string quartets and the Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta in the mid-1940s, “strangely enough, starting in the 1950s, Bartók’s name no longer appears in the notebooks of Messiaen’s students, with the one exception of sessions on Greek meter and Hindu rhythm.” (In those sessions Messiaen chose a few examples of Bartók’s uneven rhythmic groupings for comparison.)78 In interviews of the 1960s Messiaen reproached Bartók for a lack of audacity, tending to make light of his achievements as containing merely “some inspired details, two or three interesting innovations.”79 That such a prominent composition teacher deemed almost all of Bartók’s music unworthy of his students’ attention surely left an impression on the young composers in Messiaen’s class. A student of Messiaen’s, André Hodeir, wrote in 1961 that Bartók was “a composer of the past” because his music still included functional consonance and dissonance rather than the “neutral coloring and uniform density” of Webern’s music.80 Likewise, the prominent place of Bartók’s music at the 1950 Darmstadt summer courses, rather than demonstrating the composer’s continued relevance or the diversity of the summer courses’ program (as some have claimed), can instead be seen as a moment in Bartók’s transition from relevance to obsolescence.81 Steinecke, the summer courses’ director, had announced a focus for 1950 on the music of Schoenberg and Bartók—not be-

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cause he had an abiding interest in Bartók, but rather because his original plan to feature Stravinsky had not come to fruition. (The music critic Heinrich Strobel, who had been scheduled to lecture on Stravinsky, would not attend the courses that year.)82 Erich Doflein had approached Steinecke in 1949 about the possibility of lecturing on Bartók at the summer courses, but Steinecke had responded coolly; only when he needed to replace Strobel did he invite Doflein to lecture and begin scheduling Bartók concerts for the summer of 1950.83 Furthermore, Steinecke’s penciled suggestions on Hans Mersmann’s outline of lectures for that summer indicate a lack of interest; he crossed out Bartók from the list of topics, in favor of Honegger and Orff.84 (These negotiations must have continued, for Mersmann did, in the end, lecture on Bartók.)85 On the other hand, Adorno’s letters to Steinecke suggest that he planned to include Bartók among the composers discussed in his course. The lectures would aim to show that “even in New Music one can strictly distinguish good from bad, right from wrong,” and Bartók would figure along with Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern as a positive example.86 Presumably Adorno highlighted the earlier works, such as the violin sonatas, which he had warmly praised in newspaper reviews, rather than the music composed after 1930, which he had publicly ignored and privately disdained.87 The Végh Quartet performed all six of Bartók’s quartets that summer, and the concerts were apparently warmly received by critics and students; but these concerts did not inspire further demand for study of Bartók’s music, as one would expect great artistic experiences to do. Instead, in the spirit of “filling gaps,” these almost seem to have led to a lack of interest in further performances, since Bartók’s music had now been given its due.88 Doflein, who had lectured passionately about Bartók’s relevance as a composer, commented bitterly about the irony of Bartók’s new position in the repertory: “I had gone to Darmstadt with the intention of speaking out in favor of the work and the personality of a revolutionary and bold new composer. I left Darmstadt with the feeling that I had supported a classic.”89 Doflein’s comments, authored a few years after the summer to which they refer, reflect his dejection at the way an ostensibly complimentary term had come to signify little more than irrelevance. Other accounts suggest that Bartók’s move to “classic” status preoccupied Doflein for some time, for he remarked on the label again in an educational lecture months after leaving Darmstadt.90 Perhaps the best indication that Bartók’s music had begun to have historical rather than contemporary importance is that after 1950 it was seldom featured in the composition courses at Darmstadt; instead, it became prominent in the performance courses. These aimed to ensure that musicians were trained to master the difficult instrumental and vocal techniques

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necessary for the performance of modern music. Because the technical problems presented by older works continued to challenge each succeeding generation of performers, the teachers for those courses continued to use Bartók even as the teachers of the composition courses began to leave him behind. Predictably, the works chosen tended to be those that most nearly reflected “classic” modernist styles, although the Improvisations on Hungarian Peasant Songs, op. 20, a favorite of Eduard Steuermann, continued to be taught in the performance classes. During the 1950s Bartók’s Sonata for Solo Violin, the suite Out of Doors, and the Rhapsody no. 1 were all featured as the required pieces for the annual performance competition. When it was his turn to choose the required piece for violinists in 1954, Rudolf Kolisch objected to the previous year’s choice of the Rhapsody on aesthetic grounds. He wrote to Steinecke: “The choice of a ‘required piece’ for the competition has caused me some embarrassment. You say that it should pose ‘significant technical and stylistic demands’ and then you mention Bartók’s First Rhapsody as last year’s choice. Since this folkloristic arrangement does not seem to me to fulfill these conditions, I must fear that I have set my criteria too high.”91 Kolisch, himself a former Schoenberg pupil, suggested that violin works by Berg, Webern, or Käenek might be more suitable, fulfilling the stylistic as well as technical requirements of training young musicians. Thus, though Bartók remained a respected and even beloved composer for some, in Darmstadt his increasing irrelevance seemed a sure thing. Over a few short years, then, Bartók’s music largely fell out of the teaching repertory for composition students at two important European centers of innovation, in Messiaen’s courses in Paris and at Darmstadt. The thinkers who subscribed to modernism as an ethical imperative were also among Europe’s most influential teachers—Leibowitz, Adorno, Scherchen, and Messiaen—and their prominence surely hastened Bartók’s departure from the curriculum and influenced the musical preferences of the next generation of composers. The turn away from Bartók as a model was not merely a shift in taste; it reflected new views of history and of musical style that were shaped directly or indirectly by the political pressures of the early cold war years. For some, such as Scherchen and Stuckenschmidt, the new view was heavily influenced by perceptions of the Nazi past and of the threat of socialist realism. For others, such as Stockhausen, the new view seems to have been encouraged by Adorno’s philosophical criticism of musical style but applied in an abstract way to the history of style. For Maderna, it seems to have been purely a shift in aesthetic preferences, but it was nonetheless influenced, through his teacher, by the contemporaneous political discourses about musical style. None of these figures was acting alone: the move away from Bartók

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as a model and the corresponding turn to Webern were determined for the most part in conversation, through personal connections and teacher-student relationships. Thus, the political and ethical concerns a few intellectuals harbored about musical style seem to have passed easily into common parlance among composers in the guise of purely stylistic criticism. Apprehension about the influence of Bartók and the quasi-political connotations his music had acquired lingered for years. The composer György Ligeti, who left Hungary for the West late in 1956, exemplified this longlasting anxiety about Bartók in a particularly poignant way. In a 1970 seminar on the history of new music, Ligeti had the following curious exchange with one of his students. “We’re always trying to guess,” asked the student, “how you composed in Hungary; it’s supposed that in your youth you were under the influence of Bartók. Was that merely something widespread [in the culture]?” Ligeti’s evasive reply began, “In countries where there exists a certain isolation, in Eastern Europe, one cannot obtain correct information. One is cut off from the circulation of blood.” For example, he explained, there were surely important Japanese composers, but he didn’t know of any because the circulation of ideas between Europe and Japan was not particularly vibrant. Ligeti continued, “To your question: Bartók was a very significant personality and after Bartók hardly any grass could grow. There were also many talented people in the Eastern countries. If I had stayed in Hungary, I probably would not have written my pieces in the way I did.” Ligeti then changed the subject, going on to talk about Stockhausen and his other teachers and colleagues in Cologne.92 This conversation reveals that for Ligeti, as for the other figures discussed in this chapter, the question of Bartók’s influence was uncomfortably entangled with the political backwardness of Eastern Europe; for Ligeti, these were also fraught questions about his personal history and about where he belonged. The student’s question reveals an almost prurient curiosity about his teacher’s Eastern origins—what might have been an expression of ethnic exoticism earlier in the century here seems instead to exemplify a kind of musicopolitical exoticism, as students wondered about Ligeti’s mysterious early compositions. Ligeti’s response explicitly avoided addressing the question of Bartók’s influence or even acknowledging the existence of his own works before his emigration in 1956. His attempt to use Hungary’s isolation to justify the use of Bartók as a model suggests that it seemed even to him that only composers who were cut off from Western modernism would find it useful to emulate Bartók. Here the geographical judgment of Hungary as a politically regressive backwater fused with the judgment of Bartók’s modernism as passé: although Bartók’s works were not composed

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in socialist Hungary, their use as a model served as a marker of how far behind Hungary’s composers were when compared to the new music of Western European composers. Ligeti’s reluctance to discuss Bartók’s influence on him abated with time; as political circumstances thawed in the 1980s he became more and more willing to discuss his uses of Bartók’s style and to allow his early works to be heard. It is striking, though, that in 1970 he still felt the need to suppress these elements of his personal history, to draw a veil over everything that connected him to his Hungarian past. That Ligeti had to deny these facts for so long attests to their perceived importance. We have already seen that in the intense political climate of the early cold war years, arguments by association and analogy were enough to shape musical opinion (witness Scherchen’s mismatched comparison of Bartók and Shostakovich). Borrowings from Bartók’s style would hardly be regarded as shameful in the pluralistic atmosphere of today; but so long as the political criticism fostered by Adorno and other modernist teachers continued to flourish, Ligeti may have felt that the connection with Bartók would weaken his standing as a musical innovator. Occurring as it did decades after the establishment of this kind of political criticism, this incident suggests that the anxious political rhetoric that arose after World War II did not dissipate quickly; it continued to exert pressure on Western judgments about musical style for years to come. This way of thinking about music was particularly important to the narrow circles of intellectuals who were creating the theory and practice of new music, helping them to channel their energies toward a more focused set of aesthetic aims. As we will see in the following chapter, however, it also laid the groundwork for state propaganda supporting Western cultural interests. In this respect the stringent political criticism that shaped evaluations of Bartók’s and other music around 1950 formed a lasting context for a cold war aesthetics of music in the West.

3 “Bartók Is Ours” The Voice of America and Hungarian Control over Bartók’s Legacy

The summer of 1950 saw a tremendous increase in funding for American foreign propaganda efforts, largely because of concerns about Soviet jamming of broadcasts from the West as well as Soviet propaganda broadcasts to Europe and to the United States. The lion’s share of the funding increase went to the radio broadcasting project known as the Voice of America (VOA), an ongoing program administered by the U.S. Department of State. The radio shows VOA aimed at the satellite states attempted to combat information printed or broadcast in those countries and to provide complementary information that exposed and embarrassed the Soviet and satellite governments.1 The VOA by no means restricted its propaganda to the realm of foreign affairs: it offered cultural programs intended both to support the satellite peoples in maintaining their cultural traditions and to provide news about suppressed literature and other art forms. Indeed, as a matter of policy, the State Department considered it crucial to use cultural material familiar to and valued by the peoples of the satellite nations in its efforts to win their sympathy for Western political and cultural causes. By emphasizing such material, the State Department hoped to cultivate a sense of national pride that could work against the Soviet agenda in Eastern Europe even to the extent of fomenting rebellion. As Foy Kohler, the director of Voice of America, reported to a congressional subcommittee, “We do not hesitate, indeed we make a regular practice of appealing to the national cultural [and] spiritual traditions of the peoples who have a background of independence. We inevitably do that by speaking their own language. . . . We remind them of their own glorious traditions. We remind them of their own history. We remind them of their own literature, in cases where they have been suppressed by the Soviet regime.”2 The State Department expected that by demon51

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strating American respect for the cultures of Eastern European peoples, arts programming could also foster a spirit of solidarity with the United States. In the programs it broadcast to Hungary, therefore,VOA often featured news about the activities of Hungarian émigré musicians living in America and about performances of music by Eastern European composers in America. That the VOA closely followed the musical situation in Hungary as it evolved is evident in a series of telegrams between the State Department in Washington, D.C., and Nathaniel Davis, who from 25 May 1949 served as the minister of the American legation to Budapest. Davis was responsible for relaying to the State Department any information that could be used by Voice of America or other government organs in the propaganda war over the East Bloc; every day he was to supply at least two news stories that had been suppressed in the Hungarian media for use in VOA news broadcasts.3 A lengthy telegram sent to the Department of State on 10 February 1950 and relayed to VOA’s New York broadcast center, where the news programs were written, indicates in typically telegraphic language that the State Department considered the Bartók controversy interesting and useful: One of the most striking examples of progressive renunciation of Hungarian culture required by Soviet Union of her Hungarian puppets can be found article on Hungarian opera by Géza Losonczy which appeared in February 5 issue szabad nép. . . . Since Bartók considered by many Hungary’s greatest composer, and since, partially because of his reputation of having been anti-fascist and “progressive,” he has had great vogue in Hungarian leftist circles since 1945 . . . Losonczy cannot at moment’s notice declare him anathema. But Bartók’s music completely unacceptable to Losonczy’s masters, politicians-turned-music critic in Kremlin, whose dreary neo-classical aesthetic standards are violated by Bartók’s use of modern idioms, techniques, and Losonczy’s article undoubtedly heralds gradual disappearance his music from repertory Hungarian opera, concert halls.4

The telegram, like most of those sent for use in VOA broadcasts to the East Bloc, was relayed twice: once with extensive excerpts from the article in English translation, and again with the same excerpts in Hungarian so that the article could be quoted accurately in a Hungarian-language broadcast. In 1950 the Hungarian programs of VOA featured regular coverage of Bartók in news items about commemorations of the anniversaries of the composer’s birth and death, as well as about publications of his folk song research and concerts of his works in the United States.5 The news on the Hungarian program of 22 October 1950, for example, featured the story “Gibes Greet Horváth at Bartók Memorial,” which was based on a report

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in the New York Times. The Times article described how at an evening of speeches and musical performances at New York’s Town Hall, organized by the (American) Béla Bartók Anniversary Committee, the envoy of the Hungarian People’s Republic to Washington was heckled by audience members in the balcony who were quoted as shouting, “We don’t want any Communist speeches here.”6 VOA’s reporting of such events in Hungary would likely have played up this conflict in the concert hall to emphasize for Hungarian listeners both the prominence of Bartók’s music in the American concert scene and the disdain of music-loving Americans for socialism. One broadcast in particular seems to have hit a nerve.7 An essay published in September 1950 by the Hungarian composer and conductor Endre Székely complained, “‘The Voice of America,’ which at one time viewed with indifference the incredible privation Bartók suffered during his stay in America, and which at that time did not even conceive of the idea of easing the sick composer’s serious financial worries, today screams to the world that Bartók belongs to the American capitalists.”8 In an account published in a different forum, Ferenc Szabó offered more specific information about the broadcast’s content: “Let us examine all of this [evidence] and afterward judge whether America’s shamelessly duplicitous voice and the hypocritical, treacherous English radio propaganda have any right to state that Bartók is banned in Hungary, and that Bartók’s work is organically close to their ‘Western’ pseudoculture.”9 As one might guess from the excited tone of these responses, the American broadcast was an embarrassing international incident for the Hungarian government, which was just beginning to put together its cultural policy. The relatively inexperienced Rákosi regime had not anticipated a propaganda backlash against its music policy, and because it succeeded only intermittently in jamming Western propaganda broadcasts, the message is likely to have reached the public’s ears. As we have seen, most Hungarian composers resisted official denunciations of Bartók, at least to some extent; the broadcast only exacerbated tensions already present among composers and between composers and bureaucrats. This broadcast, and others like it, would shape the development of Hungarian policy about Bartók for years to come.

a conspicuous absence The Voice of America report of a ban on Bartók’s works was not mere bluster or provocation. A significant portion of Bartók’s music had been removed from all Hungarian radio programming not long before; these works would

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remain absent from broadcasts and public concerts for several years. On 9 August 1950 György Pollner, the director of the education department at Hungarian Radio, sent a letter regarding the omission of certain works from the Radio’s repertory to JenW Széll, the chief of the party’s influential Agitation and Propaganda Division: Dear Comrade Széll! The Radio does not play the following Bartók works, since the bourgeois influence can be felt most strongly in them: A./ Stage works The Miraculous Mandarin B./ Concert works Piano Concerto no. 1 Concerto for two pianos, percussion, and orchestra Piano Concerto no. 2 C./ Chamber works String Quartet no. 3 String Quartet no. 4 String Quartet no. 5 Violin-piano sonata no. 1 Violin-piano sonata no. 2 Piano sonata D./ Piano works 3 Études op. 18 Out of Doors E./ Vocal works 5 songs on poems by Endre Ady10

Pollner did not explain or contextualize the transmission of the list; the abruptness of the letter implies that it was a direct response to a request for information by Széll. Since the Voice of America broadcast about a Bartók ban presumably took place in the same month as Pollner’s letter, it is likely that immediately after the broadcast aired in Hungary, Széll requested information from Pollner about the Radio’s current practices in order to begin formulating counterpropaganda. It is noteworthy that the chief of the Agitation and Propaganda Division had to ask what was being done about Bartók’s music; but until 1950 that division had expended much more effort on political propaganda than on cultural policy. Only now that the Voice of America had drawn attention to the issue of modern music would it begin to be dealt with in a more systematic way. As Pollner’s phrasing implied, Hungarian Radio had already begun to suppress certain of Bartók’s works on ideological grounds that were justified by the 1948 Soviet resolution on music. The gradual trend over the course

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of 1949 and 1950 toward the elimination of these works from the repertory may have been harder for casual radio listeners to discern than one might at first suspect. Although Bartók had performed his own and others’ works on the radio often enough during the 1930s, his music had never constituted a large proportion of broadcast programming. The absence of certain works from the radio may therefore have been noticeable only to those few dedicated fans who were actively seeking to hear the missing pieces.11 The elimination of this portion of Bartók’s music went hand in hand with sweeping changes instituted at Hungarian Radio between 1948 and 1950. Music programming immediately after the war had comprised dance music of many varieties, from waltzes and csárdáses played by gypsy orchestras to jazz, as well as popular song, light classics, operetta, and music of the Western and Central European classical traditions. From 1946 to 1948 programs were dominated by American jazz and popular song, both in the original language and in Hungarian translation, including hits by Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy, Duke Ellington, and George Gershwin. Classical music programming, constrained somewhat by the limited number of recordings on hand, offered works with a largely Austro-Germanic orientation (Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Wagner, Brahms, and Liszt), but it also featured music of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries on recordings given to Hungarian Radio by the Soviet and American governments immediately after the war. Hungarian contemporary music was featured occasionally through live performances broadcast from concert halls or the Opera House and through new recordings made for the radio’s own use.12 Even though Bartók’s music was only a small part of the radio’s schedule, it was broadcast regularly, and listeners could expect that five to ten movements or entire pieces by the composer could be heard on the radio each month. The works of Bartók featured most often during the early postwar years were the same as those featured most often in 1950: these were the works that had the clearest basis in folk song, including selections from the Twenty-seven Two- and Three-Part Choruses for children’s and women’s voices (such as “Enchanting Song” [Jószág-igézW], “Don’t Leave Me!” [Ne menj el!], and “Pillow Dance” [Párnás táncdal]); selections from the Ten Easy Pieces for Piano (particularly “Evening with the Széklers” [Este a székelyeknél] and “Bear Dance” [Medvetánc]); and the Sonatina, often performed in an arrangement for violin and piano. Works in styles more commonly associated with international modernism were also programmed, though more sporadically: for instance, the Fifth Quartet and selections from the Ady songs were heard every few months or so, and the Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion was also broadcast. Some works seem to have been

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featured only in the late-night time slot: Bartók’s Piano Sonata and the suite Out of Doors were played occasionally between 11:30 p.m. and midnight. Thus, though Bartók’s music constituted by any measure a small proportion of the broadcast schedule, and although the choral and folk-music-based portions of his output predominated even within that small proportion, many of his other works were still occasionally accessible through the radio during the early postwar years. Noticeable changes had begun to take place at the Radio by late 1948: many new Soviet-Russian cultural programs were added both in the classical and dance music program hours; most American dance music was eliminated; and certain works of Bartók were heard less and less frequently. By mid-February 1950 most of the works on Pollner’s list were no longer being played, and after mid-March even the Fifth Quartet, the last listed work to disappear, had departed from the repertory. The favorites that were already played often were heard even more frequently during this period, some (such as the Romanian Folk Dances [Román népi táncok] and the Sonatina) as often as two or three times a week. Bartók’s late works (particularly the Violin Concerto, the Divertimento, the Concerto for Orchestra, the Third Piano Concerto, and the Sonata for Solo Violin) were heard more and more often as well. By August 1950, then, as Pollner’s letter to Széll indicated, the leadership at Hungarian Radio had already made an official determination of which works could be broadcast and which could not. This was not treated by Radio personnel as a delicate matter, but rather as a sign of increasingly nuanced judgment that allowed the good music to be separated from the bad, for the benefit of all listeners. To them the ban seemed both right and necessary as a means of aligning the sound world of the socialist state with its other aspects. The works that remained were presented as if nothing were missing at all—for, seen from this perspective, the omitted works had no value and would not be missed. An anonymous editorial that appeared in the Hungarian Radio News the week before the fifth anniversary of Bartók’s death, for instance, proudly proclaimed: “The purpose of these programs is to make known Bartók’s true face, his true art, for the working class [nép]. We introduce Bartók, the fierce scholar of the Hungarian folk song, Bartók, the progressive artist, the great composer. This week the Radio’s listeners will find practically every outstanding work of his on the program, and through lectures, popular explanations, and introductions these works will find their way to the hearts of the listeners.”13 Appendix 1 contains a complete list of the works of Bartók that were included in the broadcast listings for these two weeks. The works on Pollner’s

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list were absent, as were many works considered in the West to be among Bartók’s most important compositions: Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta, Duke Bluebeard’s Castle, The Wooden Prince, Cantata profana, Allegro barbaro, Contrasts, the op. 14 Suite for piano, the Second Quartet, the Rhapsodies for violin and orchestra, and most of the song settings. The Radio’s bold statement that practically all the important works were there to be heard underscored the shift to a new understanding of which music “the complete Bartók” included; it also offered a vivid demonstration of the fine musical discernment that the new socialist society demanded of its musicians and its listeners.

the logic behind the ban The suppression of Bartók’s “formalist” works made palpable the ideological divisions between East and West. Few musicians were allowed official knowledge of the ban; some noticed the absence of certain works and drew their own conclusions, but at this time the ban did not become a subject of public discourse. Since officials did not describe the specific musical features that marked each work as inappropriate, any explanation of the reasoning by which officials blacklisted certain pieces must remain speculative. Relying both on Pollner’s list of banned works and on musical and political arguments made in the press, however, we may infer some of the criteria for the prohibition of these works. The most obvious candidate for exclusion from the repertory, of course, was The Miraculous Mandarin, already singled out by Géza Losonczy in his February 1950 article, “Let the Opera House Be the People’s!”—the same article that had attracted the attention of the U.S. Department of State. In that article Losonczy strongly implied that Bartók’s stage works were inappropriate for the “moral and aesthetic education of the Hungarian working class.”14 The violence, grotesquerie, and explicit sexual content of the story seemed to socialist critics a prime example of “naturalism,” the improper glorification of base or degrading themes: the Ministry of Education report on the Opera House that had sparked Losonczy’s article on the subject indicated that the work had a “pornographic effect.”15 The exaggerated and violent musical treatment of the story undoubtedly contributed further to its unsuitability, but the story by Menyhért Lengyel offered reason enough for the work’s elimination from the repertory.16 The verbal texts of Bartók’s Five Songs on poems by Endre Ady (1916)17 may have been suspect, as well. Despite its revolutionary themes, Ady’s poetry had become politically undesirable by late 1950, and it was denounced

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as insufficiently populist.18 Still, other settings of his poetry by composers such as György Kósa and Béla Reinitz continued to be broadcast throughout the 1950s, so the authorship of the poems alone was probably not enough to cause the suppression of the songs. It seems likely that the musical style of Bartók’s songs contributed to their problematical status, in part through its recall of other undesirable music: in their chromaticism, in their reliance on half-step melodic motion, and in their use of harmonies based on stacked fourths and major sevenths, the Ady songs bore a resemblance to the style of Schoenberg’s Book of the Hanging Gardens. Some of the other works on the list also share features associated with Schoenberg’s music. As János Kárpáti has shown, the dense motivic work of the Third and Fourth String Quartets draws on Schoenberg’s techniques of manipulating motives (as well as on those of Schoenberg’s models, Brahms and Wagner).19 Furthermore, as Jan Maegaard has pointed out, in the second of the Three Études (op. 18, 1918) Bartók consciously employed the chromatic aggregate as a large-scale compositional device.20 The pitch content of the sparse melody and arpeggiated accompaniment of the étude complement each other: together they present between seven and eleven notes of the chromatic scale in each harmony. At major cadences all twelve notes are sounded as a culminating gesture. Likewise, the impassioned eloquence of the two Sonatas for Violin and Piano (1921 and 1922) is more reminiscent of the subjectivist style of Schoenberg than of the “revolutionary romanticism” espoused by Zhdanov and his camp. The lyrical passages of the sonatas last only a few moments, and the swells of intensity often lead not to a breakthrough or release, but instead to more tension. The freely dissonant harmonic language, often favoring sonorities based on fourths, tritones, and semitones, coincides with that of Schoenberg’s op. 11 piano pieces or the Book of the Hanging Gardens, and the extreme fluidity of tempo and the elusive chromaticism of the melodies also bear comparison with Schoenberg’s early style, even though the ornamented violin figuration, the triplets, the driving upbeats, and the characteristic Hungarian front-accented (short-long) rhythms relate more immediately to the verbunkos tradition.21 In these pieces Bartók deliberately exploited the entire chromatic scale. In the second movement of the Second Sonata (mm. 228–230), the pianist’s two hands present the notes of two nearly complete complementary whole-tone collections, with the right hand alternating between different subsets of its scale to create a sense of harmonic motion; the violin supplies the one note, A, lacking in the piano part to complete the chromatic gamut. Indeed, in his 1947 essay René Lei-

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bowitz had praised the harmonic style of these sonatas, noting that they include “more and more advanced incursions into the realm of the ‘chromatic total,’ often resulting in figures of great richness.”22 Leibowitz noted with approval that Bartók used some specifically Schoenbergian techniques in these pieces; he seized in particular upon Bartók’s occasional use of free or strict inversion as a procedure for harmonic organization. It should be stressed, however, that Bartók’s use of such techniques is occasional rather than pervasive, and it had long been a feature of his style. Leibowitz’s view was as one-sided as any Zhdanovite critic’s: many of Bartók’s techniques are patently un-Schoenbergian, such as the use of open octaves and the repetition of melodic cells or even entire tunes at the same pitch level. Perhaps most important, the folk character of the dance movements that conclude the sonatas can scarcely be reconciled with a Schoenbergian aesthetic. Leibowitz thus described not Bartók’s actual style but rather his sporadic assimilation of certain techniques and sonorities particularly interesting to Leibowitz. Nevertheless, these casual congruences between Bartók’s and Schoenberg’s techniques and sound ideals probably sufficed to keep these violin sonatas off the Hungarian airwaves. Another suppressed work, the Piano Sonata (1926), reflects the style of the other modernist accused of decadence by Hungarian commentators (and, this time, by Leibowitz as well ), namely, Stravinsky. At the moment of the sonata’s composition, Bartók was avidly interested in Stravinsky’s music and hoping to emulate his pan-European success.23 The circular melodies and repetitive, driving accompaniments that permeate the first and third movements of the sonata may reflect what the Communist writer Sándor Asztalos referred to as Stravinsky’s “obstinately returning, frightful machinemusic rhythmic formulas.”24 In the first movement of the sonata, a snippet of melody that constantly turns back on itself is fragmented, providing repetitiveness without regularity. The fragments are presented in syncopated rhythm over layers of pulsating ostinato. These elements are strongly reminiscent of the techniques Stravinsky used in The Rite of Spring and in the set of songs called Pribaoutki (of which Bartók published an analysis). The predominance in this movement of tone-semitone-tone tetrachords recalls sonorities that pervade Stravinsky’s Les Noces, a work Bartók knew and even emulated in his Three Village Scenes.25 The second movement is dispassionate rather than lyrical; frequent changes of meter preserve some sense of forward motion and allow for varied accent patterns within schemes of repetition. In these particulars Bartók’s sonata bears strong hallmarks of Stravinsky’s style.26

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The transgressions of the suppressed works may sometimes have consisted in their overall level of dissonance as well as the evocation of the styles of Western European modernist composers. As David Schneider has shown, Bartók responded in the (suppressed) First and Second Piano Concertos to Stravinsky’s hard-edged style of composing and performing.27 In the Third Piano Concerto, which remained a staple of the Hungarian concert and radio repertories throughout the early and mid-1950s, tonal triadic harmony and open-sounding textures predominate in a less percussive, more lyrical style that characterizes many of Bartók’s late works. Since all three concertos contain harmonic and melodic piquancy to varying degrees, it seems likely that judgment as to the appropriateness of particular works was made on the basis of general subjective impressions rather than the presence or absence of particular mannerisms or techniques. Both the extraordinary difficulty and the steely modernism of the First and Second Concertos surely contributed to their disfavor in 1950, the specific evocation of Stravinsky, a vocal opponent of Soviet power, merely furnishing the final blow. Finally, the presence or absence of folk song as an easily perceptible stylistic component also helped to determine a work’s acceptance or rejection. After the Zhdanovshchina, folk content became a measure of music’s compliance with socialist realist standards to such an extent that the musical idiom in which that content was couched sometimes became a subsidiary concern: according to Zhdanov, the appropriation of folk melodies could render a work of art music easier to understand, more “substantial,” and more “beautiful.”28 Thus, for instance, Bartók’s Improvisations on Hungarian Peasant Songs for Piano (1920) did not appear on the list of excluded works despite the similarity of its musical idiom to that of the blacklisted Out of Doors suite (1926). Like other Bartók pieces of the 1920s, the Improvisations feature a chromatic harmonic style in which semitones, tritones, and fourths play a prominent role. The third movement of the Improvisations and the fourth movement of Out of Doors even begin with similar gestures— pianissimo figures that are built primarily of semitones (in Improvisations, two semitones a major third apart, and in Out of Doors, a cluster spanning the notes from E # to A). In both cases the individual notes of the figure are articulated separately rather than attacked all at once, which creates a nebulous, pulsating effect. Perhaps the most striking difference between the two movements is that throughout the Improvisations, folk songs maintain a nearly constant audible presence, emerging as a coherent “vocal” line out of the dissonant accompaniment. Although almost all the works on Pollner’s list included at least some thematic material derived from folk music, the audibility of the

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relationship with folk music may have distinguished certain works as preferable to others in which folk themes were not immediately apparent. Asztalos, who lacked musical training but commented often for the party on cultural topics, defended the Improvisations on these grounds: Let us take the “Improvisations” as an example and compare them to the Six Little Piano Pieces by Schoenberg written around the same time. . . . In the “Improvisations” there are undeniably peculiar harmonic experiments. Bartók is seeking a new path: this is what we are addressing. But in every piece of the “Improvisations” there is the broadly and flexibly developed melodic material of the folk song, in many cases even left in its original purity. In Bartók’s music the human message, the deep and honest human content, seeks the form for its expression, and in the seeking, in the struggle for expression, individual constructive elements come into shocking contradiction with the basic material. At the same time, Schoenberg does not express anything for anybody; he makes inhuman, antisocial music.29

Even though Bartók’s accompaniment remains generally dissonant and achieves no clear harmonic resolution even at the end of the movement, the folk song dominates the texture throughout because it is clearly distinguished from the accompaniment by its tessitura and manner of articulation. Thus, despite the presence of “difficult” features, the folk song provides the listener with a connecting thread to follow. In “Music of the Night” from Out of Doors, the melodic thread is much more tenuous. Rather than immediately introducing a melody, Bartók sets another layer of sporadic and irregular activity against the pulsating accompaniment, creating the oft-noted evocation of the sounds of the night that became so important a part of his style. Asztalos reported that the evocations of natural sounds in Bartók’s night-music style presented no difficulties in theory, since even Beethoven had engaged in this kind of mimesis. “The trouble begins,” Asztalos explained, when the listener arrives in a mysterious shadow world that is pregnant with complaints and with oppressive, fearsome signs. Here we meet a musical composition of human speech where we do not understand the words, but only the general features, and we feel their grave emotional content. . . . In many ways this world is like the symbolic world of folk poetry or Ady’s symbolism filled with phantoms—expressing the alienation of the spirit that finds no rest in society. This is even more harrowing with Bartók, because here as a consequence of the nature of the musical language itself, the true sound hallucinations become even more shadowy, reality becomes even more ambiguous, more dreadfully featureless: they become a monstrous document of imperialism.30

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For Asztalos, Bartók’s imitation of the dark side of nature could hardly bear less resemblance to Beethoven’s pastoral landscapes: Bartók leads the listener through a fearsome nocturnal world of unrest and alienation far removed from the sunny and productive human domain envisioned by socialists as the new utopian reality. When a melody finally does appear in the movement from Out of Doors, it is a morose and distant one, moving about in circles within a very narrow compass. Despite its regular four-phrase design, the melody’s rhythmic profile, composed almost exclusively of languid quarter- and eighth-note motion, bears no resemblance to any pattern that would signify a concrete stylistic relationship to Hungarian folk song. Bartók presents the tune in widely spaced octave doublings three times during the course of the movement, well distinguished from the cluster accompaniment each time—yet because of its constrained profile and unusually remote tessitura, the rhythmically active interjections of bird and insect sounds, diverse in articulation and register, leave the most vivid impression on the listener. The absence of folk song as an easily audible organizing idea and the unsettlingly “dehumanized” nocturnal qualities present in Out of Doors conspired to keep the work out of the repertory.

hungarians respond to the voice of america The Voice of America’s challenge to Hungary’s music policy was perceived as a real threat by Hungarian officials; but they hardly knew how to respond. They had to rehabilitate Bartók quickly so that they could refute American claims to his music; but because much of his music was still deemed undesirable, he could not be rehabilitated completely. The fifth anniversary of Bartók’s death was approaching rapidly: ceremonial acknowledgment of the occasion was both appropriate and necessary to save face with the West, but given the negative assessments of Bartók’s music, it was unclear what should be said about his achievements. One further problem hampered the Hungarian efforts to reclaim Bartók from the Americans: Bartók emigrated from Hungary to the United States in 1940, and he died there in 1945. Although Hungary could and did emphasize Bartók’s poverty and illness during his stay in the capitalist world, it was also undeniable that Bartók was living in America when he composed the works the Communist regime admired most: the Third Piano Concerto and the Concerto for Orchestra. In this awkward situation, Hungarian officials were effectively pinned between Eastern and Western aesthetic and political demands, subject to intense pressure from both sides. The solution the officials ar-

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rived at was a peculiar one, and the contradictions contained within it only lessened their credibility. They rehabilitated Bartók as a Hungarian national hero, but at the same time they further dismantled his prestige as a composer of art music. As socialist essayists singled out the historical person of Bartók for rehabilitation, they brought to life a mythical socialist Bartók whose ideas and actions they conceived as profoundly sympathetic to their own. Bartók had never participated in the illegal interwar Communist Party, and he tended to keep his views private; therefore, the most that the essayists could truthfully assert was that he sympathized with certain leftist causes and that as a private citizen he took a strong stand against fascism. The authors of these essays then imaginatively filled the gaps in the history of Bartók’s political engagement, reinventing the composer altogether when necessary. In an article entitled “Bartók Is Ours,” Asztalos reported: “We have no particulars about whether Bartók would have perceived the serious error that the then-leaders of the Social Democratic Party committed—that, to be more precise, it isolated the mass struggle of the agricultural workers and poor peasants from the struggles of the factory workers and thus made easier the victory of the landowners, the suppression of the struggles, and the use of this victory against the working class. These facts, however, were the facts of the reality of Hungarian life, and Bartók must certainly have felt their effect.”31 Such hypothetical political engagements, anchored in a retrospective view of party politics in which the victory of the Communist Party was certain, cast Bartók as someone who would surely have become a socialist if only he had managed to escape the pressures of class and era that trapped him so firmly in the bourgeoisie. This historical re-creation of Bartók’s image was supported by the inclusion in the same issue of four previously unpublished Bartók letters that stressed his disgust for Hitler and Mussolini and his misery in the United States. Both Szabó and Székely, whose vivid rebuttals documented the VOA broadcast, worked hard to rehabilitate Bartók as a hero, placing particular emphasis on aspects of his life that betrayed socialist tendencies. Szabó stressed Bartók’s antifascist political views, his pacifism, and his emphasis on the brotherhood of peoples in Europe: “With equal love and respect he arranges the songs of Hungarian, Slovakian, Romanian, Bulgarian, and other peoples. But what is more essential than this, and what more than anything else deeply illuminates Bartók’s honorably democratic character, is that in his works elements of the folk music of these peoples are knit together in brotherly community and in harmonic unity.”32 In this reading, Bartók’s music became a metaphorical meeting place in which different peoples—

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and particularly different representatives of the East Bloc nations—could come together. Szabó stretched a little to make the point: Bartók never used Bulgarian folk tunes in his music, but only “Bulgarian” (additive) rhythms;33 but, of course, the more peoples who could be brought into the brotherhood, the better. Bartók’s internationalism, as described by Szabó, evidently sat well with the international socialist agenda the party wished to stress. For the purpose of refuting the American claims, it was essential to stress that Bartók was a specifically Hungarian national composer, despite the charges that had been leveled at his music by Hungarian Communist critics over the preceding two years. In his essay “Bartók Does Not Compromise” (its title a deliberate contradiction of Leibowitz’s), Szabó flatly denied the Voice of America’s claim that Hungarians had rejected Bartók: Even if we do not agree with certain details of the Bartókian worldview, Bartók belongs to us organically and cannot be separated from us. This is why the English-speaking students of Goebbels trumpet to the world that the Hungarian People’s Republic has denied Bartók, and that in his home—in Hungary—today it is forbidden to perform Bartók’s works. This statement is just as false as their claiming Bartók as their own, equating Bartók with themselves and their filthy worldview. The Hungarian People’s Republic sincerely, rightfully, and with decided openness has always acknowledged Bartók as its own. One of the loveliest streets in Budapest is named after him. One of the most important musical institutions that leads and comprises the spontaneous musical activity of the Hungarian workers carries Bartók’s name. . . . We, the composers of the Hungarian People’s Republic, down to the last man, claim him as our own.34

“Bartók is ours!” proclaimed another essayist, echoing Hungarian propaganda slogans of the time that left no doubt about what belonged to whom: it was commonplace to see news headlines such as “France Is for the French!” (against the Marshall Plan) and “Hands Off Korea!” (against American intervention there). The reclamation of Bartók as a national hero and as a national resource was in full swing. Despite these lively evocations of a politically progressive Bartók, the Hungarian Workers’ Party still regarded a complete rehabilitation of his works as undesirable.This is most evident from the continuing de facto elimination of many of the works from the Radio’s repertory and from concert programs, but it figured just as clearly in articles and essays presented to the public. Critics justified Bartók’s compositions as brave historical and political acts but insisted that the significance of those compositions was nonetheless limited to their own historical time. Asztalos wrote that none

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of Bartók’s works could be a model for new music; instead, they served only as “horrifying documents of the kind of tragic divisions that resulted from fascism and rotting imperialism.”35 The suggestion that Bartók’s music serves best as a reminder of a bygone era—that these works can offer merely historical interest, if any interest at all—allowed Bartók’s music to remain part of the Hungarian tradition and at the same time removed it from immediate relevance. For the Hungarian Workers’ Party no less than for Stockhausen, Bartók was to be consigned to history. Simultaneously reclaiming Bartók as a great national composer and denouncing his music as decadent proved awkward; critics resorted to techniques from the craft of fiction writing to smooth over a variety of contradictions. For instance, the evident affinities in technique and sound between Bartók’s music and that of Schoenberg and Stravinsky were too present to go unmentioned. Asztalos and his colleagues accounted for stylistic similarities as errors in judgment on the part of a naive Bartók, who always had the best intentions but was misled by “false revolutionaries.”36 This description of Bartók’s failed search for a trustworthy guide draws on one of the central themes of socialist realist literature under Stalin: the necessity of a wise, fatherly mentor to inspire the hero’s success.37 The other strategy critics used to make the contradictions seem less blatant was to draw vivid distinctions, setting concepts against one another in polarized terms. To justify the party’s unspoken ban, critics now divided Bartók’s music and even his character into two parts, providing an elitist evil twin to take the blame for the failings of the virtuous populist composer. As Endre Székely put it, “We can serve Bartók’s spirit only if we help the folk, optimistic, realistic Bartók to a final victory over the Bartók who was ensnared in the hundred tentacles of formalism and modernism.”38 To preserve the party’s new image of the heroic Bartók, Szabó likewise envisioned the impurities in Bartók’s music as a separate, removable part: “We must peel off the foreign influences, and all that is inappropriate to the expression of the mentality of our time, from Bartók’s healthy music—his music that is rooted in folk music. The powerful artistic value of his work— purified of the excrement—its powerful artistic drive and expressive strength can only in this way fulfill the decisive role in the development of our musical life to which it is called.”39 The mention of “foreign influences” was an implicit accusation of cosmopolitanism, artistic rootlessness deriving from a lack of connection with the masses and from a failure to represent the precise social conditions under which they lived.The charge of cosmopolitanism was applicable in a wide range of situations; it pertained equally to the mythical rootlessness of Jews and to international or transnational avant-garde

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styles in the arts that failed to retain a noticeably national character. (Given that Schoenberg, the propagator of one such prominent international style, was of Jewish descent, these aspects of the accusation cannot remain entirely distinct.) Thus, Szabó’s denunciation of the foreign aspects of Bartók’s work stemmed largely from a desire to root musical style more firmly in national and class-conscious traditions rather than in cosmopolitan aesthetics. Székely, too, recommended the complete suppression of Bartók’s degenerate works: “To continue propaganda for Bartók in the spirit of Bartók means that we remove from Bartók’s legacy that which is infected by imperialism, so that it may remain for us in a form that is all the more pure, all the more splendid, which will be appropriate for the delight and education of millions.”40 The imagery of disease was singularly apposite: it was as if a limb had to be amputated in order that the patient’s life be saved. By cutting off the formalist portion of Bartók’s work, Szabó and Székely hoped to make it possible for Hungary to embrace Bartók again—and for the whole world to see—while keeping their homeland safe from the diseases of formalism and cosmopolitanism. The new Bartók created by this process of purification would meet perfectly the Hungarian state’s need for a heroic national composer, untainted by musical decadence and sympathetic to socialist political goals. To achieve this outcome, more moderate views had to fall by the wayside. The rhetoric in Szabó’s and Székely’s articles contrasts sharply with the idea of synthesis that Mihály had presented a year before. In his lecture “Béla Bartók and the Generation Coming after Him,” Mihály had argued that the folk and modernist elements of Bartók’s work fused into a synthesis in which each element justified the other. By September 1950, however, the disparity between folk and modernist worldviews, or between socialist and nonsocialist aesthetics, could not be overcome so easily. In a direct response to René Leibowitz’s 1947 essay in Les temps modernes, Mihály now distinguished the Hungarian Bartók from the West’s. He gloated that since Leibowitz chose only a few works to praise out of Bartók’s “enormous life work,” dismissing the rest, the West’s Bartók was much weaker than the Hungarians’. Mihály was well aware that the Hungarian picture and Leibowitz’s formed a mirror image, a striking example of the postwar divergence of East and West. “Let us switch the signs,” he wrote, “as when the mathematical formula is multiplied by negative one, and before us stands the picture of Bartók that we love.”41 This switching of signs was far from coincidental: the Hungarians who sought to rehabilitate Bartók in 1950 did so with vigilant attention to Western musical events. Whereas in 1948 and

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1949 Mihály had looked eastward with fundamentally Western eyes to examine and then absorb the doctrines of Zhdanovian socialist realism, in 1950 he looked westward with Eastern eyes and sought to differentiate the two musical cultures as sharply as possible. This disparity in musical values was reinforced by Hungarian socialists’ frustrations with Western European criticism of Bartók’s music. Bartók was generally perceived by his adherents, Eastern and Western alike, as a composer who favored the genres they themselves most valued. Despite the fact that in terms of sheer numbers Bartók’s arrangements of folk music far outweigh the works in “abstract” genres, Western critics continued to regard the latter as Bartók’s most significant or even most characteristic works. The French composer Arthur Honegger, for one, had written in 1949 that Bartók’s “pronounced taste for works of so-called pure music, such as the quartet, the sonata, the piece for piano or for small orchestra, has caused his name to be affirmed by all those who are interested in the problems of new music just as permanently, if not as famously, as [the names] of Schoenberg and Stravinsky.”42 Yet that “pronounced taste” for works of absolute music was less Bartók’s than Honegger’s. Such descriptions of Bartók flourished in favorable notices he received from Western writers in the late 1940s; Mihály’s multiplication “by negative one” may thus have been a reaction not merely to Leibowitz, but also more generally to the partial view of Bartók that was prominent in the West. As Mihály recognized, the parallels between Leibowitz’s argument about Bartók and the arguments made by Szabó, Székely, and Asztalos were striking. All of them claimed value for a portion of Bartók’s works and made a case for discarding the rest. As we have seen, moreover, the works most praised by Leibowitz were precisely those derided by the Hungarians, and vice versa. All these critics professed concern for the moral leadership of young composers, lest they be deceived into imitating faulty aspects of Bartók’s compositional style, and they all sought to excuse Bartók by claiming that he had blundered onto the wrong path rather than choosing it deliberately. Perhaps most fundamentally, both the Hungarian view and Leibowitz’s critique were predicated on philosophies of history that regard historical progress as a determined trajectory. This similarity is no longer surprising when we consider that the roots of Leibowitz’s ideas were in Adorno, who in turn had been heavily influenced by Marx’s thought. The same body of texts was also the origin of the Marxist-Leninist view of history that drove socialists to see their victory as the triumph of the correct line of historical progress. Thus, the conflict over particular musical techniques and traditions, formulated specifically in terms of historical progress,

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functioned as a microcosm of the emerging struggle between worldviews, the proponents of each remaining utterly convinced that only their own line of progress could continue into the future.

dismal festivities The multifaceted process of revising and winnowing Bartók’s personality and works cast a pall over the events that commemorated the fifth anniversary of Bartók’s death in September 1950. Through the public celebrations the party aimed both to cultivate Hungarian pride in a specifically national music and to demonstrate to the world that Hungary still embraced Bartók. Yet the disparity between the negative judgments about Bartók’s music and his status as a great Hungarian gave a forced tone to the events. The commemoration included an exhibit about Bartók at the headquarters of the Musicians’ Association, sponsored by the Ministry of Education and the Institute for Cultural Relations Abroad (Külföldi Kulturkapcsolatok Intézete), which hoped to take the exhibit on an international tour after its Budapest run.43 According to an anonymous report, the memorial exhibit did not fulfill the party’s aim of grandly displaying Bartók’s life and music to the public: it was denounced as small, unpatriotic, and apolitical.44 The exhibit apparently fell short of its official purposes in almost every respect, but especially as it thwarted the party’s desire to impress the Hungarian public with the newly redesigned moral and Hungarian qualities of Bartók as a national hero. Most of the speeches given during the week of the anniversary merely recapitulated the arguments made in the press; but on the evening of 25 September, Zoltán Kodály, Bartók’s friend and collaborator and Hungary’s most eminent living composer, offered a message distinct from all the others that had been heard up to that point.45 Kodály told the guests assembled in the Opera House that Bartók was drawn by the new, the extraordinary, the never-yet-heard; he wanted to know humanity in every one of its musical expressions. These various musics opened for him ever-new horizons and possibilities, the traces of which are there in his works. And this is another sharp dividing line between him and the Western moderns—who, incidentally, never recognized him as a first-rate innovator because he stands on the soil of the folk tradition. They write and construct their works freely, dismissing every tradition. Even in Bartók’s most daring works it is possible to feel the soil of tradition; even when he flies into the stratosphere, he is never completely cut off from the earth.46

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Here Kodály recapitulated Mihály’s 1949 argument that the presence of folk and popular musics in Bartók’s art was enough to distinguish it from that of Western, formalist composers. Coming from Kodály, though, the argument had more authority (and of a very different sort) than it ever had coming from Mihály. Kodály’s constant references to the Hungarian soil indicate that he was enlisting all the nationalist tools at his disposal to persuade his audience to look kindly on Bartók’s music, not through cerebral argumentation, but through patriotic sentiment. On the question of Bartók’s suitability for public performance, Kodály’s ambivalent comments displayed moments of both extreme circumspection and overt opposition: What we shall offer from Bartók’s works, where we shall offer them, and to whom are questions of pedagogical tact. There is enough there for the children, for the beginners, for the advanced. On the other hand, as with every great master, there are also creations of his upon whose untrodden, perhaps untreadable paths only the initiated can follow, and even these not without effort. His overzealous intermediaries only injure him if they want to bring his works of this kind before the uninitiated public. His work is one and indivisible, but it cannot be appreciated in all its details without musical education. . . . If someday in the future his art also reaches those from whom it originated, the working people, and they understand it, then there will be a Hungarian musical culture, and then the people will be truly happy.47

Kodály’s admission that not all Bartók’s works are for everyone seems to indicate a certain willingness on his part to entertain the idea of withholding some of Bartók’s music from the masses.Then again, his strongly worded statement that Bartók’s work “is one and indivisible” contradicted directly and forcefully the claims of Szabó and Székely that Bartók’s work had to be divided in order for any of it to be salvaged. Yet the “but” following that strong statement retreated once more to an acknowledgment that most people could not appreciate Bartók’s more difficult music at that time; this implicitly endorsed the state’s decision not to play difficult works on the radio or in concerts. Kodály’s call for discretion in programming Bartók’s music reflected more than mere capitulation to the party’s demands: it echoed a wish Bartók himself expressed in 1925 that certain of his works not be performed for audiences likely to reject them.48 Though it was a reasonable enough precaution in itself, in the context of a Stalinist system such an appeal for discretion shades so imperceptibly into a call for censorship that the distinction becomes impossible to draw. Kodály took full advantage of this ambiguity as he sought to express his honest disapproval of the

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party’s new position on Bartók without jeopardizing his status as a tolerated, even honored, fellow traveler. Széll, who had led the party’s Division of Agitation and Propaganda, claimed many years later that while listening to Kodály’s speech he began to realize that errors had been perpetrated by arts policymakers. In 1979 he wrote: “Looking back, I see that it was the Bartók question that first blunted the harrow of Zhdanovism that had leveled everything; for me the turning point was Kodály’s remembrance spoken at the Bartók festivities in September 1950. Bartók’s genius, by then already regarded as some kind of natural phenomenon, departed on its world-conquering path, from which not even his homeland could be left out.”49 And, arguing against János Breuer’s characterization of the discussions around Bartók as “the Bartók trial,”50 Széll continued: “My second observation is that there was no Bartók trial. The phrase means a trial in which Bartók would have been the accused.There was no such thing. The waves that stirred around the works never came to the Genius’s ankle.”51 Széll’s claim that the “waves . . . never came to the Genius’s ankle” belies the fact that the debates did have a dramatic effect on what the public could hear. Despite his disingenuous statements, Széll, the recipient of the list of banned works, was certainly aware that many of Bartók’s works were withheld from listeners, and not just for a few weeks, but for several years. The composer’s legacy would be distorted for a long time to come by the division in his works that international political crisis and the need for national celebration had occasioned: most of the forbidden works did not reenter the repertory until 1955, with the elaborate yearlong festivities honoring the tenth anniversary of Bartók’s death. Széll’s revisionist account of the events of 1950 reflects the influence of some of the same propaganda that he helped to shape. His reference to Bartók as “the Genius” indicates that his idea of the composer was not left untouched by the heroic image of Bartók—a picture created by the regime so that something of Bartók would be left to celebrate even as many of his works were expunged from the repertory. The newly devised schism in Bartók’s oeuvre made it possible for socialist politicians and critics to embrace the composer publicly—despite their qualms about many of his compositions—as truly Hungarian and truly theirs. Széll’s selective memories notwithstanding, the political maneuverings surrounding the “Bartók question” continued to control what the public was allowed to hear and how that music was to be interpreted for several years after the anniversary “celebration” of 1950. Meanwhile, American attention to the Hungarian controversy continued unabated. The outpouring of critical articles in 1950 and 1951, elicited

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in part by the VOA’s propaganda, provided further ammunition: the attempts to paper over the contradictions between the heroic Bartók and the banned music were not lost on Nathaniel Davis. In April 1951 he cabled the State Department: “Hungarian musicians taken to task for failure [to] comply with ‘Musical Resolution of the Soviet Bolshevik Party’ in article magyar nemzet by Pal Kadosa, Kossuth Prize winning composer. . . . Art[icle] admits greatness Bartok music which it attempts interpret as not in conflict with musical yardstick imposed by Soviets[.] Leg[ation] suggests VOA warn Hungarian people such strangulation artistic endeavor will produce no new Bartoks.”52

4

Bartók and His Publics Defining the “Modern Classic”

We have seen that some of Western Europe’s most devotedly modernist musicians harbored serious doubts about Bartók’s music in the late 1940s and 1950s. Yet for the concertgoing public on both sides of the Atlantic, this music’s appeal was widespread and growing. The composer and critic Vincent Persichetti noted that though Bartók’s music had been neglected in the United States before his death in 1945, by 1946 several American orchestras were already programming his works as a means of “making amends.”1 In October 1947 the critic Bernard Gavoty reported that Bartók’s music had begun to enjoy enormous success with French audiences: Bartók was “the man of the hour, the fashionable composer.”2 In West Germany, too, Bartók’s music played an increasingly significant role on concert programs all over the country. It seemed to the German critic Karl Wörner that “today all of the Western world plays Bartók.”3 This new popularity was likely due to a variety of factors. Bartók’s death in 1945, under circumstances made dramatic by exile and illness, had called new attention to his music. (As the French critic Claude Rostand described it, people who heard of the composer’s death tended to say, “Ah, yes, Bartók. But who was he?”)4 The somewhat sentimental publicity surrounding Bartók’s death also arrived at an opportune moment, for concert organizers in Europe were eager to renew concert life with the presentation of new works. Postwar programming of Bartók’s music began largely with the accessible and novel works of the late 1930s and 1940s (particularly the 1938 Violin Concerto, the Concerto for Orchestra, and the Third Piano Concerto); when these proved successful with audiences, the works of the early- to mid1930s gained increasing attention as well, with the Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta and the Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion garnering widespread acclaim.5 Radio broadcasts, a particularly important medium 72

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for the dissemination of music in Europe and one that often had financial backing from governmental agencies, also followed this trend.6 Both Vera Lampert and Malcolm Gillies have shown that the wartime diaspora of Hungarian conductors and performers played an important role in encouraging the postwar dissemination of Bartók’s music. The conductors Fritz Reiner and Antal Dorati, the pianists Louis Kentner and György Sándor, and the violinists Zoltán Székely and Joseph Szigeti all demonstrated an attachment to Bartók’s music and an eagerness to perform it.7 Lampert has also noted the increasing accessibility of Bartók’s music on LP recordings; this should be understood as both a factor in disseminating the music and itself a measure of record producers’ belief in the music’s appeal. The sudden fame of Bartók’s music was so conspicuous that by 1949 Bartók’s late works were sometimes described as a variety of popular music, or as music on the boundary between serious and popular. One German critic reported that the Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion “struck, pleased, and charmed [the audience] . . . as only some hit by Richard Strauss might have done.”8 Some critics who had assessed Bartók’s music as too difficult for the public expressed surprise at audiences’ warm responses. A story that circulated widely in the German news media told of a “simple, musically uneducated housewife” (soon exaggerated in urban legend to a “washerwoman”) who called a radio station to praise Bartók’s Third Piano Concerto.9 Commentators were amused to see Bartók’s music reaching such a wide audience. The humor in the story lay precisely in its apparent unlikelihood: many music professionals assumed that Bartók’s music could hold little appeal for what they conceived of as a “mass” public. Yet the postwar publics of the United States and Western Europe were equipped to make different demands on art than publics of the past had been. The rate of access to higher education increased dramatically after the war, so that secondary and university-level education was more widely available than ever before.10 Cultural literacy seemed more and more desirable to members of this educated public.11 The housewife story and the other accounts of Bartók’s popularity raise significant questions about the role of modernist music in the postwar era, for they challenge the idea that modernism’s audience must necessarily be elite. Or, seen from another perspective, they urge a reconsideration of what constituted modernism by midcentury standards; as we will see, political circumstances inspired cultural theorists to develop ever-narrower definitions of both modernism and its proper audience. The case of Bartók, as high art that became (marginally) commercially viable as bourgeois, even “middlebrow” art, can help us to locate the new boundaries that were being drawn in the early cold war years.

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letting the masses in Bartók’s new popularity was not a coincidence: audience appreciation of modern music was actively encouraged, especially by outreach programs in Europe. Modernism was revered by some as an elevated style; but it was also understood as possibly elevating to its listeners, and some of modernism’s devotees desired to share this experience with others. Many of the newspaper critics who covered the new music scene in the late 1940s served as advocates in both directions: they explained the newest theoretical ideas and stylistic goals to the public, but they also pressed for the programming of music the public would appreciate. Edwin Kuntz, for example, cited the most important task of the intellectual elite as “helping individuals among the masses . . . to become more human,” a task he wanted to accomplish through modern yet comprehensible works such as Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra and Stravinsky’s Symphony in Three Movements.12 In addition, this high-flown ideal was complemented by a practical concern: the desire to make modern music fiscally sustainable. Most of the critics who took upon themselves the obligation of explaining modernism to the public shared the assumption that the elite advocates of the new music intended to “enlist broader interest,” with the understanding that no music could be successful without some support from the paying public.13 That critics sought to make new music accessible to the public through educational explanations was likely another important reason behind the success of Bartók’s music; for this repertoire played a significant part in the postwar effort to disseminate modern music to a mass public. From the late 1940s into the early 1950s, for example, dozens of educational programs all over Germany featured Bartók’s music. Most of them took the form of preconcert lectures; quite a few were sponsored by new organizations such as the Mannheim Society for the Encouragement of Contemporary Cultural Life14 and Munich’s Musica viva, which also had local chapters in many towns. Most of the lectures focused on Bartók’s use of folk tunes, perhaps because that was the easiest concept for new listeners to grasp as well as the best-known aspect of Bartók’s music. A few took perhaps too extreme a popularizing attitude: one lecturer compared Bartók’s Fifth Quartet to an onion because of its symmetrical construction.15 In others, though, the professional jargon used by composers and analysts to describe new music was disseminated to the public as a vocabulary for their own use. In a presentation on Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra, a lecturer in the northern German city of Lübeck cited Stravinsky’s authority in explaining to a crowded hall of con-

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certgoers that “compositions do not result from some kind of emotional inspirations. Composition is much more . . . the ‘management of tones according to certain inner patterns.’” The same speaker also used recorded and live examples to demonstrate “the suppression of third relations in favor of quartal relations.”16 This lecture, like others of its time, was calculated to give audiences some access to the technical concepts of new music without intimidating them, and to refine their listening skills through repeated examples. Pre-concert lectures were also conveyed over the airwaves, often featuring introductions to the works by important conductors or performers. Southwest German radio, for instance, sponsored a series entitled “Paths to New Music” in its late evening slot, which included a lecture by the music critic Heinrich Strobel on Bartók’s Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion. Likewise, the late 1940s and early 1950s saw the publication of a wide array of books intended as gentle and sympathetic introductions to new music for people who loved older music.17 Several accessible accounts of Bartók’s life and works, most notably Serge Moreux’s and Halsey Stevens’s, were published during this period; Moreux’s appeared in three languages and was widely distributed.18 This style of outreach extends the idea of “catching up” that prevailed in Europe during the early postwar years. The idea has usually been applied specifically to musicians’ needs, but the large number of explanatory lectures about modern music in this period suggests an equally important application to music education. For those who wanted to educate audiences, this postwar renewal of modern music may have seemed like a chance to reconcile modern music with the public after many years of alienation. This agenda came to the fore at the Institut für Neue Musik und Musikerziehung (Institute for New Music and Music Education, or INMM), which was founded in 1948 and moved in 1951 to Darmstadt, the same town that already presided over the prestigious summer courses for new music. The INMM was oriented more toward instructing music teachers about new music, whereas the summer courses focused on the education of composers; but both would encourage young performers to master techniques for the performance of new music, and the two organizations attracted some of the same people. In part thanks to the leadership of Erich Doflein, the INMM demonstrated great enthusiasm for Bartók’s music. Doflein introduced Bartók’s progressive piano cycle, Mikrokosmos, for the first time in Germany at the 1949 meeting of the INMM in Darmstadt. Doflein himself had instigated the composition of Bartók’s violin duos, another easily grasped pedagogical work, in the early 1930s; now he arranged for them to be played

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at the America House in Munich and at other places around Germany, and he gave lectures to accompany performances of the duos by his wife, Elma Doflein, and Francine Guignard.19 Musica viva, the organization founded by Karl Amadeus Hartmann in Munich, likewise sponsored many concerts featuring Bartók’s music; these have been described as “cleverly mixed programs that smoothed the path to the greats of New Music.”20 Between 1949 and 1952 more than a dozen works of Bartók were performed, some of them twice or in particularly enlightening ways. (For example, in 1950 Musica viva presented all six of Bartók’s string quartets in a series by the Végh Quartet; and in 1951 the Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion was paired with the concerto version of the same work on a single concert.) Hartmann’s programming of Bartók’s music was relatively eclectic, including not only the works tolerated by ultramodernists (such as the Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion and The Miraculous Mandarin) but also those that held the greatest popular appeal (the Concerto for Orchestra, the Third Piano Concerto, and the Dance Suite). Even among those who remember the concerts warmly, a few have suggested that the premise was naive: the idea that one could simply declare modern music “alive” again and win the public’s sympathy for it may have been overly optimistic. As Horst Leuchtmann reports, however, these concerts played a key role in gaining Stravinsky, Bartók, Hindemith, and others a popularity with the concertgoing public they had never had before the war; in this sense they fulfilled their mission.21

anxiety and exclusivity Yet, from the point of view of those devoted only to cutting-edge music, the process of popularizing modernism was unrewarding. As Pierre Boulez reported with some asperity, “[Bartók’s] most recognized works are frequently the ones of the least quality. . . . His best works are likewise loved for their weakest aspects.”22 Karl Wörner noted that audiences did not allot the most appreciation to what Wörner considered to be the “highest-quality” or “most meaningful” of Bartók’s works; they seemed to be applying some other criteria.23 Boulez’s own attempt to educate a French public for modern music through his Domaine musical concert series had correspondingly narrower aims than Hartmann’s or the INMM’s efforts. Like theirs, one of Boulez’s principal aims was to familiarize audiences with works from the first half of the twentieth century that “can be considered to have played an essential role in the evolution of music,” including those of Stravinsky, Bartók, Varèse, Debussy, and especially Webern, Schoenberg, and Berg.24 In

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contrast to the other educational series, however, Boulez’s enterprise devoted little time to Bartók’s music, with only six performances of five works (The Miraculous Mandarin, the Three Etudes for Piano, the Piano Sonata, the Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion, and—twice—the Second Violin Sonata) as opposed to fifty-eight performances of Webern’s music and twentyeight of Stravinsky’s. This selection of works indicates, not surprisingly, that what Boulez considered Bartók’s works “of the least quality” were the late pieces audiences adored. Boulez’s distaste for these works can be explained in part by the place of these works in Bartók’s own oeuvre. As David Schneider has described it, Bartók suffered from neglect in his own country; his pieces were seldom performed in the early 1930s, and he responded to this neglect by retreating from the concert stage to folk music research and more abstract composition projects. When in the later 1930s he began to receive official support for his music, he resumed performing and began composing pieces that communicated more directly with the public, beginning with the 1938 Violin Concerto.25 This shift meant less a change in style than an altered attitude, one that many commentators have had difficulty quantifying. Halsey Stevens has written of Bartók’s “undeviating adherence to the same basic principles throughout [his] entire career”; in the late works the principles of melodic construction and harmony undergo less a radical change than a subtle reorientation.26 It is possible, then, that Boulez’s unease arose less from the style of the music than from the public’s acceptance of these works. (Boulez’s contemporary André Hodeir believed that the accessibility of Bartók’s music raised “doubts as to its immortality.”)27 As Jésus Aguila has pointed out, Boulez’s ambivalence about Bartók’s music (and his corresponding neglect of Bartók in programming his concert series) seems to have stemmed in part from a fear that Bartók’s music had been hijacked by the populists. In a text introducing the eighth season of the Domaine musical, Boulez wrote: “Some would make Bartók the sole representative of a human music, opposing the abstract and heartless researchers of the Viennese School and the cosmopolitan intellectualism of Stravinsky. . . . He became the standard-bearer of the ‘reasonable’ avantgarde, the one that does not lose contact with the public. . . . The most applauded pieces are frequently the worst, . . . an ambiguity that will certainly cause him to be snubbed in the future when his listeners gain a more distanced perspective.”28 Only later, after the tension about the idea of populism began to abate, writes Aguila, could a phase of “rereading” begin, in which the populist connotations Bartók’s music had acquired no longer seemed as threatening, and “moderately modern” works could once again

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be regarded as acceptable. In this phase, Aguila argues, the pragmatism of Boulez the conductor overcame the rigidity of Boulez the composer, and Boulez began to conduct some of the very works he had previously disdained. This example highlights the extent to which the educational aspect of “catching up” contradicted the other aim of postwar modernism, the idea of moving ahead as quickly as possible into previously forbidden, uncharted territory. Public bewilderment was often considered a measure of success in this latter endeavor.Thus, while some music professionals were using every means at their disposal to bring audiences closer to modern music, others were less eager to make modern music popular and continued to value composers’ separation from the public sphere. If we take Steinecke’s definition as paradigmatic, catching up meant filling in gaps in the repertory and privileging the music not performed in regular public venues. As Steinecke explained in a 1951 radio lecture (and on many other occasions), the Darmstadt courses’ first goal had been to introduce works then unknown in Germany, above all the works that Bartók and Schoenberg, Stravinsky and Hindemith had written in American exile. . . . After two or three years, this primary task of a comprehensive orientation about the state of music in the world could be regarded as complete. By taking account of contemporary music in general musical life, above all via the radio and many modern music festivals, the gaps that had been torn open by national socialist cultural politics had been closed again, and one could rightly take for granted that the interested young musicians of Germany were aware of all the important phenomena of New Music. Therefore, from this point on, the Kranichstein Summer Courses could pull back to their more particular pedagogical tasks, and the task of orientation could be restricted from that moment to works that, despite their fundamental importance for New Music in Germany, were not available to be heard [anywhere else].29

Intentionally or not, Steinecke defined his mission in a way that strictly excluded the participation of a broad public. If the education of composers had to place emphasis on music to which the public had no access, then the contemporaneous process of educating audiences about modernism was effectively a game of shooting at a moving target. By the time the public had learned to appreciate any given musical work or theoretical idea, it would by definition have become irrelevant to composers’ education. This extension of the project of “catching up” made it unlikely that composers and the public would ever share a common language.30 The impulse to keep the public at bay seems to have sprung from the ethical concerns about political compromise already discussed in chapter 2.

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As Hans Werner Henze has noted, after the war some music professionals began to despise “the public who had assented to the Nazi terror and who had participated in this blood-and-soil pseudoculture”;31 any music embraced by this intellectually benighted mass public became undesirable for ethically aware professional musicians. Submission to the public’s taste was not merely a threat from the Nazi past; continued and well-publicized pressure on composers in the East Bloc to compose for less-educated audiences ensured that the threat remained imminent and of immediate concern. Even in free societies, the public’s motives seemed suspect for other reasons: Hannah Arendt expressed a deep mistrust toward people who were seeking contact with the arts in order “to be entertained or—and this is worse—to be ‘educated,’ that is, to acquire as cheaply as possible some kind of cultural knowledge to improve their social status.”32 Thus, while educating the public may have encouraged the growth of an enthusiastic audience for Bartók’s music, it also likely contributed to the rapid decline in Bartók’s status among composers and other intellectuals. Even some of those who participated wholeheartedly in the effort to popularize modern music had their doubts about the means of disseminating it to the public. It was difficult to distinguish between giving a broad range of people access to the music and marketing it to them; the latter threatened to take autonomy away from musicians and give it to businessmen. Hartmann, a regular participant in the Darmstadt summer courses, worried that allowing modern music to be marketed to a mass public would ensure an eventual decline in quality: For some time in Germany an inflation of music festivals and music conferences has been setting in. The Kranichstein conferences [i.e., the Darmstadt courses] have found echoes in Bayreuth, Barsbüttel, Weikersheim, and other places, and Frankfurt’s Music Weeks have been adopted in other places as well. Surely it is good if the interest in New Music becomes more and more widespread; but in the countless copies that have followed these first impulses without developing their own ideas appear the dangers of a “music business.” . . . Kranichstein can renew itself year after year because it draws on the strong, forward-driving powers of youth, and because it does not (as has happened with other meetings) get entangled with a pseudomodern music of mediocrity and least resistance, but dares fearlessly to approach the very boundaries of the creative situation of our time.33

Coming from Hartmann, who was dedicated to the popularization of modern music and to the mission of the Darmstadt summer courses, this ambivalence is telling. For him the ethical imperative to keep art music free of

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the financial and aesthetic entanglements that would come with popularity tempered the educational and cultural mission of disseminating modernism, and the two aims seemed opposed rather than symbiotic. Because of the moral implications of stylistic “compromise,” many composers remained unwilling to follow the public in simply enjoying Bartók’s music. Having intellectually accepted the ethical imperatives of the new music, they felt obliged to live up to them. Yet several statements quoted in the press evince a kind of nostalgia for the experience of Bartók’s music. Henk Stam, a Dutch student at the 1949 Darmstadt summer courses, told a journalist that “you can find Stravinsky and Bartók ‘beautiful,’ for instance, like a sunset is ‘beautiful’—and still know that you’re sitting on a dead branch.”34 Stam’s remark confirms that the initial aesthetic response to these works had not diminished; rather, it was the judgment of the validity of that response that had changed. That same year the critic for the newspaper Darmstädter Echo wrote of Bartók’s Third Piano Concerto in the by now overfamiliar terms of aesthetic compromise, describing the softening of Bartók’s previously “hard” musical language. Although this critic refused to pass judgment on whether this was a sign of diminished compositional faculties or an expression of a new artistic attitude, he admitted that “in any case, it would be difficult to withhold oneself from the effects of this balanced, perfected work, above all from the deeply felt religious middle movement.”35 Likewise, for the performance students at the summer courses, Bartók’s music seemed increasingly comfortable and familiar compared to some of the other, more demanding music they struggled to master. One participant reported, “After we had practiced Webern for an hour, we were on the verge of gouging each other’s eyes out; after five minutes of Bartók, we felt better.”36 In a musical culture that valued striving to master difficult sounds, Bartók’s music sounded increasingly tame and easily enjoyable. An account of the Musica viva concerts suggests that some of the young people who were committed to the newest of the new music continued to attend performances of older modern music, but they did so under protest. The critic Walter Panofsky reported that the youngest music fans in the standing-room section “blame Hartmann for preferring Stravinsky, Bartók, and Hindemith as ‘locomotives’ over the works of the radical innovators.”37 That the protesters were present at the concerts at all, however, suggests some level of continuing interest in this music on their part. Many among the Darmstadt circle continued to enjoy Bartók’s music as well, at least for a while. As late as 1952, several critics portrayed the Végh Quartet’s performances of Bartók’s six string quartets as a meeting place where those with opposing points of view could find common ground. According to the critic

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Hugo Puetter, Bartók was, besides Schoenberg and his school, the only one of the “old masters of new music” who was still recognized as valid.38 Another critic, Albert Rodemann, went further still, describing Bartók’s music as a meeting place not only for competing factions of composers, but also for composers and the public: “The apologists of twelve-tone technique and their antipodes (the friends of Stravinsky), the true-believing followers of Olivier Messiaen and the advocates of an expressionist art,” he explained, “sit peacefully united with each other along with the friends of music who came up from the town.”39 One can hardly imagine a happier scene, or one more conducive to the creation of a new music that included fruitful dialogue between composers and the public. Yet the détente proved temporary, perhaps even illusory. Although some composers of the Darmstadt circle would still admit to finding pleasure in Bartók’s music in the early 1950s, by the early 1960s the music seemed like a relic of a bygone age. None of the students at the 1961 summer courses chose to attend the sole concert on the program featuring Bartók’s music, significantly framed as a concert “in memoriam.” The program included the suite from The Miraculous Mandarin, the First Piano Concerto, and the Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta, all recognized as among Bartók’s most forward-looking music from a stylistic point of view. One critic blamed the organizers’ choice of pieces for the students’ absence, saying that with the exception of the still rarely performed piano concerto, these works could be heard anywhere; the critic thus reaffirmed the distinction between music available to the public and music for composers.40 Another offered the simple explanation that “folklore has been declared dead.”41 It seems more plausible to suggest that these pieces now seemed, in one deceptively damning term, “harmless”—and that was precisely what modern music was not supposed to be.42

defining the “modern classics” Beginning in the late 1940s and continuing into the 1950s, Bartók’s music gradually gained the distinction of “classic.” This designation was first applied to his last compositions, such as the Third Piano Concerto and the Concerto for Orchestra,43 but soon the Violin Concerto, the Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta, the Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion, and the third through sixth quartets also counted as “classic” repertory pieces.44 Many uses of the term classic by critics seem specifically to denote a work’s adoption by the concertgoing public as part of its listening tradition. In a 1955 account of a performance of Bartók’s Sonata for Two Pianos and Per-

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cussion, for instance, a critic noted that audiences now routinely demanded an encore of the third movement: “The da capo of the final movement, obligatory at nearly every performance—including this one—demonstrates that the ‘classical’ validity of this work within contemporary music is no longer questioned, even by the broader public.”45 If ovations from the public marked a work as classic, then Bartók’s music had surely achieved that status. Alongside this honorific use of the term, however, stood another, less complimentary meaning. Among specialist new music circles, the German term Klassiker der Moderne, modern classics, became current around 1950 as a catchall term for the superseded modern music of the first half of the century. Though on the face of it the expression seems innocuous enough, if we recall Doflein’s embittered feeling that Bartók’s classic status meant a kind of irrelevance (quoted in chapter 2), the pejorative force of the term comes into focus.The designation “modern classics” emerged precisely when Bartók’s music, as well as Stravinsky’s and Schoenberg’s, was beginning to seem historical: as we have seen, composers and other figures of the Darmstadt circle had come to regard Bartók as a composer of the past with little direct relevance to their musical concerns. The term classic seems in part to indicate that sense of irrevocable pastness, as now we might call something (or someone) “history.” The negative aspect (pastness) and the positive (public acclaim) were two sides of the same coin. The “classic” designation arose at the historical moment when a larger segment of the listening public had begun to embrace some of the modernist works composed between the wars. Given the ambivalence regarding the introduction of modern music to a mass audience, it seems reasonable to suggest that the distance Boulez and other members of his generation placed between themselves and the classics may have reflected their discomfort with the idea of a broad listening public. An antagonistic attitude toward the public had long been a hallmark of modernism, but the rejection of Nazi and Stalinist populism, prevalent precisely during the interwar decades, had lent the issue a new ideological charge. Even Schoenberg, uncompromising as he was, had occasionally voiced a hope that his art would eventually win over a public; he would likely have welcomed public acclaim had it been offered. By contrast, many composers of the postwar generation eschewed that hope, or said they did, insisting on an art for the few and claiming to be satisfied with their small but devoted audiences. The separation of classic modernism from postwar modernism ensured that the division between the public and much of modern music would remain intact; some believed that separation would preserve the ethical probity that distinguished the new music. Those who attempted to enlist broader inter-

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est in the music of Bartók and other modern classics were therefore victims of their own success; or, rather, the more they succeeded with one constituency, they more they alienated another.

middlebrow culture and modern music The American cousin of the modern classic was the idea of “middlebrow” art. The two terms are by no means interchangeable—modern classic has a historicizing function, whereas middlebrow calls attention primarily to issues of social class. Yet both ideas share origins in Marxist critics’ discomfort with popularized high culture. Through the 1930s and 1940s the writings of Theodor Adorno and Clement Greenberg pessimistically delimited the identities and capabilities of audience members and the artistic and political implications of those identities. Although their concerns about artistic quality and the nature of the audience were often presented as purely artistic matters, especially when they were transmitted by others, these concerns were thoroughly connected with the geopolitical anxieties of their time. Greenberg’s definition of middlebrow culture originated in his and others’ writings on kitsch, which, as Greenberg defined it, looted genuine art for new techniques and effects, then cheapened them by making them commercially available to less elite audiences.46 Greenberg’s beliefs about kitsch developed in conversation with Dwight Macdonald and others of the circle around the Trotskyist Partisan Review of the 1930s and 1940s; his critique had its origins in the socialist politics to which he adhered during those years. As James Herbert has described it, Greenberg followed Trotsky in envisioning art as a possible site of social revolution. In cases where revolution was not immediately feasible, art was to be kept apart from bourgeois and regressive interests to preserve its revolutionary potential.47 The condemnation of kitsch was part of a larger critique of Stalinism and capitalism, both of which fostered its production. Greenberg associated kitsch with Nazistyle fascism as well as with Stalinism: he called kitsch “merely another of the inexpensive ways in which totalitarian regimes seek to ingratiate themselves with their subjects.”48 Greenberg’s praise for abstract expressionist art, which seemed deeply vital yet portrayed no certain subject matter, reflected his belief that abstraction would help to preserve art’s independence from ideological interests, both fascist and bourgeois. Over the course of the late 1940s, the political goals of Greenberg’s critique became less explicit. The Trotskyist aim of keeping art free from bourgeois entanglements had been submerged into a purely art-historical nar-

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rative. By 1953, writes Herbert, the terms of value that had originated in socialist theory remained, but they had been stripped of any obvious ideology.49 (This is not unlike the process, described in chapter 2, by which terms of judgment derived from political convictions became part of composers’ discourse about musical style.) One important aspect that remained was the ideal of modern art as a separate and “innocent” sphere, manifesting a “radical inadaptability to the uses of any interest, ideological or institutional.”50 This ideal was highly influential and is maintained by many of those who write about twentieth-century music and art to the present day, usually with little acknowledgment of its political origins. As audiences became more tolerant of certain works embodying modernist sensibilities, particularly after the war, the problem of kitsch was reformulated to account for this new situation. Both Greenberg and the expatriate Austrian music critic Kurt List wrote of middlebrow art as an even greater (because more subtle) threat to high art. Middlebrow art is different from kitsch, wrote Greenberg, because although it too demands the cooptation of high-art techniques, “the artist must not soften and sweeten too obviously, he cannot outrightly vulgarize—for the [middle-class] public still wants something that has the smell of high art.”51 This prospect was all the more horrifying for Greenberg and List because the public was being duped by “pseudo-aesthetic” experiences, and they would never know the difference. Greenberg attributed the negative qualities of kitsch and middlebrow art specifically to the works themselves, rather than to artists’ or audiences’ intent. That is, objective, formal analysis of middlebrow art could ostensibly reveal hallmarks of modernism in a noticeably attenuated or “softened” fashion. This claim recalls the language often used to denounce Bartók’s late works as a “softening” or “simplification” of his style. Greenberg asserted that such descriptions had as their subject only the formal qualities of the art; but, as the case of Boulez illustrated, the problem resided to a great extent in the fear that a commercial or mass audience might corrupt modern music. Greenberg’s ideological preference for art that could be justified only in terms of its own logic fostered new arguments in favor of a repertory that had previously had only the most elite following. Kurt List, who, like Greenberg, wrote for Partisan Review, used the idea of the middlebrow to justify his preference for Schoenbergian atonality over any other twentieth-century style. Like Adorno, List regarded Schoenberg’s music as the historically determined “solution” to problems of structural unity and harmony that faced twentieth-century composers. Whereas middlebrow music was aimed

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at listeners who could hear only the melodic “surface” of music, “atonal polyphony” such as that of the Schoenberg school had depths that could be plumbed solely by the educated ear. And though middlebrow music was cheapened by its commercial viability, the twelve-tone music of Schoenberg and his followers existed in a pure state of isolation, apart from the commercial sphere. List’s position resembled Adorno’s of the same period: he denounced neoclassicism, folklike styles, and exoticism as equally escapist— an escape (in his opinion) not only from present-day society, but also from aesthetics. List provided a very narrow definition of what constituted “true” modernism: any music outside the atonality and twelve-tone music of Schoenberg and his pupils would not qualify under his stringent criteria, even works by composers such as Debussy or Stravinsky. (List did not name Bartók, presumably because he was beneath mention.) For List, atonal polyphony provided “the only valid guide” for modern music.52 From very early in the postwar period to the 1960s, the idea of twelvetone (or serial ) music became a standard of value for many music critics. It fulfilled Greenberg’s criterion of seeming “innocent,” or incapable of carrying propaganda content of any kind; it provided what seemed to some a coherent and self-contained set of stylistic criteria (or even “rules”); and it was still a novelty to nonspecialists. All these characteristics made the idea of twelve-tone music a serviceable ideal (though not the only one) against which other music could be measured. Sometimes this measurement took place in rarefied discussions of art’s formal qualities: as we will see, scholarly analysis of Bartók’s music was given considerable impetus by the serial idea in the 1950s. At other times, such measurement took on overtly political overtones; that serialism was notoriously forbidden in Eastern Europe added to its usefulness in the Western press and thereby its popular appeal as a standard of comparison. For instance, a 1956 New York Times article entitled “Hungarian Composers Still Live in Past” reported that Hungarian music was “reactionary” by Western standards; the author cited as evidence Hungarian composers’ failure to adopt Schoenberg’s technique of composing with twelve tones.53 The cultural climate of the cold war only heightened the desire for some clear standard of judgment, particularly one that would prove “Western” high culture superior to its populist Eastern European counterpart. Not all propagandists for Western music subscribed to serialism as a standard; but the question of which standard to use, and how to draw the boundary between high and low art, animated a great deal of critical debate in the 1950s. In what follows I will argue that a related set of anxieties about the standards for judging value in the arts shaped both American scholarship on Bartók’s music

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and U.S. government–sponsored efforts to win European sympathies for American culture.

the “serial” bartók For music scholars working in the United States and Great Britain, the political aspects of serialism as a standard of value were not defined as explicitly as they were for Europeans; nonetheless, those scholars’ writings about Bartók’s music reflected deep concern about the norms against which serious music should be judged. It is a remarkable testament to the power of the serial idea that from the late 1940s through the mid-1950s, several of the most prominent scholars of music theory and music history, including Milton Babbitt, Allen Forte, Leo Treitler, and George Perle, sought to apply it in a variety of ways to Bartók’s nonserial music. The American music theorists who considered Bartók’s music in these terms were by no means as dogmatic as List. On the contrary, they admired Bartók’s music and were unwilling to dismiss it as insufficiently modern. These pathbreaking theoretical studies from the 1950s found genuine technical similarities between Bartók’s music and that of his Viennese contemporaries: the insights of these theorists laid the groundwork for much of the analytical work that was to come. At the same time, the ways in which they applied the serial idea to Bartók’s music reveal an implicit need to relate Bartók’s less obviously systematic musical practices to a more stable and rational standard, and to justify the music according to that standard, as if to prove its value to Western culture. In an essay entitled “Bartók’s ‘Serial’ Composition,” for example, Allen Forte called attention to the use of complementary hexachords as a means of harmonic and melodic organization in the third movement of Bartók’s Fourth Quartet, a “relational system” that, according to Forte, “closely resembles a serial schema.” For Forte, the Fourth Quartet defined Bartók’s “compositional prowess” because it “offers cogent solutions to certain harmonic problems of non-triadic music, solutions matched only later by avowedly twelve-tone composers.”54 Thus, Forte’s positive evaluation of the work was predicated to a significant extent on the presence of techniques related to those of twelve-tone music. In a widely read essay on Bartók’s string quartets, Milton Babbitt outlined the central formal features of Bartók’s music principally through reference to the precepts and techniques of serial music. As Babbitt understood it, the central tension of Bartók’s music derived from the fact that Bartók was reluctant to abandon functional tonality, even though (Babbitt believed)

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Bartók saw clearly the “hazards” of using tonality, which was “overladen with connotations.” On the other hand, Babbitt explained, Bartók recognized that relying on “unique, internally defined relationships,” such as twelvetone series, to define the form “leads to a considerable sacrifice of tonal motivation.”55 Babbitt regarded the motivic strategies Bartók used to create unity as “symptomatic” of his difficult position between tonal and atonal languages.56 In discussing Bartók’s practices of motivic development, Babbitt called attention to the way in which Bartók expanded the notes of a vertical sonority out into a linear melody; he referred to this process as “serialization” (in the sense of turning the notes of a chord into a linear series), while emphasizing that Bartók’s “serialization” was a local process, rather than defining the form of the work as a whole, as it would in a serial work.57 Far from denouncing Bartók’s “solution” to the problem of musical organization, Babbitt praised it. At the same time, though, he cast Bartók’s achievement in a retrospective light, reminiscent of Stockhausen’s attitude (described in chapter 2). Babbitt proposed that “Bartók’s solution may be a specific one, it cannot be duplicated,” because Bartók had attenuated the processes of functional harmony to such an extent that no other composer could go further without total dissolution of the system. Babbitt’s characterization of Bartók’s “solution” as “personally unique” is thus both a compliment and a caution against epigonism. Though the musicologist Martin Brody has observed that Babbitt sought to write about music in objective terms unburdened by historical teleology, Babbitt’s understanding of Bartók’s music as a transitional stage between tonality and serialism nonetheless has some teleological overtones.58 Like Forte, George Perle noted Bartók’s use of complementary pitch sets, as well as his use of symmetrical pitch collections. (Perle’s work was soon extended by Leo Treitler.)59 It was important to Perle that Bartók’s symmetrical pitch arrangements were not merely “impressionistic”—rather, they served an unorthodox functional role, both harmonically and melodically, in defining central pitches. In Perle’s later writings on Bartók’s quartets, he pointed out that Bartók favored one pitch structure (the “z cell,” consisting of interlocking tritones) that was also used extensively by Alban Berg; he thus cemented the comparison to the Schoenberg school.60 Although these later writings offered unalloyed praise for Bartók’s quartets, Perle’s 1955 essay, “Symmetrical Formations in the String Quartets of Béla Bartók,” evinced frustration that Bartók’s practices were not wholly referable to the serial standard. Perle found Bartók’s symmetrical procedures “impressive,” but he said that they seemed “incidental”—the overall organization of the music “is determined instead by a curious amalgam of various

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elements, by an eclecticism seemingly inconsistent with the overwhelming unity of design and intensity of expression of the musical effect.”61 Overall, Perle found the implications of Bartók’s music “problematical.”62 Perle was not alone in his concern that analytical procedures derived from the serial idea could not adequately reveal the music’s underpinnings. At the end of an essay on “tonality, symmetry, and latent serialism” in Bartók’s Fourth Quartet, the British critic Colin Mason explained that it seemed unlikely that “a composer who was capable of creating a composition like the fourth Quartet, almost as strictly and totally thematic, in every dimension of its musical structure, as a serial work . . . would have been content in his later works without some equally strict thematic organization of his total material.” But, Mason reported, “This total organization has still to be discovered in them.”63 A theorist of the next generation, Elliott Antokoletz, reported with similar frustration in 1982 that there still existed no pitch theory “which will draw together all pitch formations in his music under one unified set of principles. Yet one senses in Bartók’s total output an allencompassing system of pitch relations.”64 Underlying all the early theoretical accounts is an intuition that Bartók was an important composer; and one can certainly sympathize with the critics’ desire to demonstrate that importance through technical discussion. Yet allowing the serial idea to shape the technical discussion to so great an extent limited the power of the description to encompass the music’s importance. Babbitt made a strong case in his metatheoretical writings for the use of objective, quasi-scientific terms to describe music, terms that were susceptible neither to history nor to ideological manipulation; Martin Brody has shown that Babbitt’s desire for such a language was derived from Greenberg’s discourse about preserving an autonomous sphere for discussions of high art. Whereas Greenberg insisted that kitsch or avant-garde tendencies were part of the artwork itself, Babbitt insisted that they were properties of the description; properly scientific description was the hallmark of good musical citizenship for both composers and theorists. Yet if the music proved resistant to the available language of theoretical description—if, as Mason pointed out, one could not find the kind of order in these pieces that one was seeking—it is difficult to imagine that this would not have a strong impact on the evaluative criticism of those pieces; and indeed, even the praise for Bartók’s music in these essays has a peculiar, strained quality. Because Mason valued this music so highly, he felt that there must be an orderly system underlying it, even if such a system could not actually be found, because such systems were a standard of aesthetic worth at the time. It is to all these theorists’ credit that they trusted their aesthetic sense enough to

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know what they liked, and their contributions have led to significant insights into Bartók’s tonal practices; but their attempts to justify Bartók’s music by the ill-fitting serial theory could take them only so far in demonstrating its value. Perle’s later work on Bartók, as previously noted, is more unambiguously positive in its praise for his compositional procedures; and the theoretical work of Perle’s student Antokoletz is still more accepting of Bartók’s harmonic and melodic practices as different from those of the Schoenberg school, yet just as important.65 These studies originated later, after the “serial yardstick” had declined in importance as a measure of music’s value.

middlebrow music and american propaganda The desire for an elite standard of value was manifest in a very different way in a conspicuous American effort at musical propaganda abroad. The music festival “L’Œuvre du XXe siècle” (dubbed in English “Masterpieces of the Twentieth Century”) took place in Paris in May 1952. The festival was sponsored by the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF); not until 1967 was it revealed that this organization had had significant backing from the CIA for its outreach programs.The CCF represented intellectuals of the nonCommunist left, many of whom were closely associated with the cultural politics represented by Greenberg, Macdonald, and Partisan Review. Its aim was to combat Stalinism, both politically and culturally.66 At the time of the festival, the CCF was led by the Russian expatriate composer Nicolas Nabokov, whose wide-ranging knowledge of the arts and fluency in many languages enabled him to communicate effectively with intellectuals around the world. The festival, vast in scope, presented a rich musical program of mostly twentieth-century works, as well as literary readings and discussions and a sizable show of paintings. Its main propaganda impulse lay in the intent to show the variety of excellent art that was created and nurtured under conditions of cultural freedom; and, conversely, to highlight the futility of Soviet censorship by showcasing art that was being suppressed by Eastern European regimes. The festival was also intended to combat anti-American feeling among European intellectuals by demonstrating that Americans had a deep appreciation of high culture, both as producers of it themselves (represented by, among others, the works of George Balanchine, Samuel Barber, Aaron Copland, and Jerome Robbins and performances by the New York City Ballet and the Boston Symphony Orchestra) and as consumers of European high culture. Nabokov hoped that if the intellectuals could be

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converted to a more cosmopolitan, Atlanticist stance, the public would follow.67 The music chosen for the festival reflected Nabokov’s personal tastes rather than a desire to promote any particular musical style for propaganda purposes. The scholar Ian Wellens reports that although he looked for links between the funding provided by the CIA and the styles of music that won support, he found “no evidence that [the CIA] sought to push the most ‘advanced’ postwar trends” (by which Wellens meant serialism).68 The diverse festival program included, among others, works of Berg, Strauss, Debussy, Mahler, Webern, Walton, Villa-Lobos, Barraud, Lourié, Fauré, Scriabin, Britten, Busoni, Poulenc, Hindemith, Ravel, Copland, Schoenberg, Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Messiaen, Dallapiccola, Barber, Chausson, Falla, Honegger, Piston, Auric, Vaughan Williams, Milhaud, Schuman, and Kodály. Bartók was represented by the early Two Portraits and the Dance Suite, the difficult and Stravinskian Second Piano Concerto, and the late Divertimento. (The Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta and the Romanian Folk Dances seem originally to have been planned but later dropped.)69 Stravinsky was far and away the most played composer on the program, with nine works ranging from The Firebird and The Rite of Spring to Oedipus Rex, finally performed in a staged version, and his more recent Symphony in Three Movements.70 Although some strands of modernism, particularly neoclassicism, received a great deal of attention, a relatively small place was given to atonal and serial music: Schoenberg was represented by his early Erwartung and his Second Quartet, Berg by Wozzeck, and Webern by the Five Pieces for String Quartet and an unnamed choral work. Pierre Boulez’s Structures for two pianos was included on the chamber music program; otherwise, the concerts were dominated by the elder statesmen of modernism rather than the young composers of Boulez’s generation. Wellens has described Nabokov’s aims in organizing the festival as decidedly anti-middlebrow. A member of the New York intellectual circles that included Greenberg and Macdonald, Nabokov felt a deep investment in supporting high art and in maintaining the divisions that separated genuine art from the mediocre or the popular. Nabokov’s criticism of middlebrow art, as Wellens describes it, took a variety of forms. His writings on Soviet music called attention to its sentimentality, its “oppressive uniformity,” its retrospectivism, and the inappropriate and crass reactions of its audiences.71 Like Greenberg, Nabokov was also concerned about the fate of artists in the Western “culture industry.” In an essay denouncing the circumstances of fascist or Stalinist censorship in which many composers of the twentieth century worked, Nabokov mentioned not only the suppression of Bartók’s

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music in the East Bloc, but also the bleak poverty and professional neglect that preceded his death in New York, thus implying that Western market forces, like censorship, could endanger composers and their art.72 (This idea undercut the festival’s intended message about Western freedom: the conductor Artur Rodzinski criticized the festival’s extravagance, noting that it would be better “to help creative artists while they are still alive, thus preventing a recurrence of the Béla Bartók case.”)73 Wellens argues that, as an ally of the New York intellectuals, Nabokov designed his festival program as a powerful statement against middlebrow music, featuring acknowledged great works of high modernism.74 In his published texts about the festival, Nabokov emphasized the musically progressive aspects of the festival, praising the “spirit of experimentation and innovation” of early twentiethcentury music as its most laudable and persistent trait.75 Despite his stated aims, Nabokov’s actual selection of works for the festival, with its heavy emphasis on neoclassicism, corresponded more to the “modern classic” ideal than to what counted as modernism in the 1950s.76 Nabokov’s remarks about music, too, often revealed a preference for older modernist works. For instance, Nabokov praised Bartók as “simultaneously cosmopolitan and admirably autochthonous—just as he was simultaneously an innovator and a traditionalist.”77 The qualities Nabokov admired in Bartók—the composer’s lack of extremism in any direction—captured not the essence of 1950s modernism, but rather an important element of an emerging middlebrow aesthetic in which the modernism of the first half of the century was becoming domesticated. Conversely, Nabokov’s openly admitted dislike for twelve-tone music won him no friends among “advanced” composers in Paris; this is attested to by his published exchange with René Leibowitz as well as his private correspondence with Boulez.78 Mark Carroll has criticized Nabokov’s choice of works for the festival as a purely propagandistic use of music that would win a public over to the American cause.79 This interpretation, however, does not account for the fact that the CCF consistently aimed to reach intellectuals and cultural leaders, not the public: Peter Coleman has written that “the Congress was an elite built on the idea of influence ‘trickling down.’”80 Nabokov’s aims for the festival, as documented in correspondence and published essays, accorded with that view. In a letter to Sidney Hook, Nabokov defended the festival as a success on these grounds: “I still believe that [the festival] was the only kind of action we could have undertaken here in Paris which would have established the Congress in the minds of the European intellectuals as a positive, and not only a political, organization. I sincerely believe that now the Congress is not only well-known, but is respected by many intellectuals who

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don’t agree with us. And it is a fact that many other intellectuals who were afraid of us before have come to know us as friends and colleagues.”81 Rather than pandering to the public taste, then, Nabokov’s choice of works seems more likely to have been a miscalculation. Believing he could reach “cosmopolitan” intellectuals like himself by presenting the classics of modernism, he failed to account for the emergence of the “modern classic” as a phenomenon that attracted the public but repelled intellectuals. Indeed, the response to the concerts among intellectuals was mixed, and more negative than Nabokov had hoped for. Janet Flanner, writing as “Genêt” in the New Yorker, said that the showy American program and the high price of tickets had elicited anti-American sentiments, especially from intellectuals.82 The tremendous financial resources backing the festival left an impression of wealth rather than of culture: Guy Dumur complained in the newspaper Combat that “they have purchased Europe.”83 The music critic for Le Monde, René Dumesnil, repeatedly expressed dissatisfaction with the works Nabokov chose for the program: Stravinsky’s Symphony in Three Movements “did not excite him” and the Symphony in C was “agreeable” but “superficial,” although the more discordant modernism of Bartók’s Second Piano Concerto pleased him somewhat better.84 The critic Marcel Schneider grumbled that the music of Ralph Vaughan Williams belonged “more to the 19th century than to the 20th” and sneered that William Schuman’s Third Symphony “will ravish anyone who lacks an interior life.”85 The paying public was another story: Flanner reported that the festival drew large crowds of French listeners.86 The New York City Ballet and the Boston Symphony Orchestra received public accolades, in contrast to their cool reception by some elements of the press; and Colin Mason described enthusiastic response to “nearly all” the concerts.87 Nabokov’s failure to reach his intended audience reveals the extent to which “classic” modernism had been domesticated by the early 1950s.When the critic Herbert Luethy compared the wildly successful performance of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring at the 1952 festival with the riot at the work’s 1913 Paris premiere, it was evident that “the works which had scandalized the public twenty-five years ago have by now become part of the patrimony of our civilization”: according to Luethy, this gave the festival a retrospective, even nostalgic quality.88 The example of The Rite of Spring demonstrates that even without alterations in the sound of the music, the meanings audiences find in art change dramatically over time, and that “modernity” is as much in the mind of the listener as in the work itself. Greenberg’s theory, with its emphasis on modernism and middlebrow as intrinsic properties of art, could not encompass this phenomenon. For, despite Greenberg’s

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claims, the categories of “middlebrow” and “modern classic” were concerned primarily not with the formal properties of art, but with the desire to maintain stringent ethical and stylistic standards in a world where art was under political pressure. The demand for music that possessed demonstrable value stemmed from the political need to show the superiority of elite Western culture to its populist Eastern counterpart; but it also had aesthetic ramifications (when, for example, Bartók’s music was measured against the standard of serialism and found “problematical”) as well as social ramifications (with the continuing redefinition of modernism to exclude mass audiences). When infused with the urgency of cultural competition, the ethical stance cultivated in 1950s new music circles took on a strangely detached perspective. Colin Mason noted that the Masterpieces of the Twentieth Century festival programs “seemed concerned more with the totalitarian attack on bourgeoisrevolutionary aesthetic conceptions than with wider notions of cultural freedom, as though Western artists were in protest not, as in the Spanish war, for the freedom of men, but simply for the freedom of their fellowartists in Communist countries to be cubists, surrealists, dodecaphonists, and existentialists.”89 It is ironic that a sincere desire to make the world safe for art and artists eventually resulted in relatively restrictive ideas of what art should be. Given that cold war cultural competition was by definition bilateral, it is not surprising that musicians in the East struggled to define standards of musical value just as their Western counterparts did. Although the parameters of socialist realism as the preeminent Eastern system of value had been explicated by Soviet theorists of the arts, the composition of socialist realist music was a more complicated task than officials had imagined. The Zhdanovian criteria called for composers to use folk song in their compositions; but, as we shall see, that practice was fraught with ideological and aesthetic perils, and it would prove difficult indeed to reconcile the political standard of value with the artistic one.

5

Beyond the Folk Song Or, What Was Hungarian Socialist Realist Music?

At the very end of his career, Béla Bartók wrote, “It is almost a truism that contemporary higher art music in Hungary has Eastern European folk music as its basis.”1 This casual acknowledgment belies the considerable effort that Hungarian composers and critics exerted throughout the first half of the twentieth century toward the creation of an art-music culture that embraced folk music. It is well known that both Bartók and his colleague Zoltán Kodály worked hard to cultivate the urban public’s acceptance of peasant music as an important resource for art music, in part by composing works that incorporated various elements of peasant music and in part by speaking and writing about these works in public to ensure that their borrowings would be recognized and understood. By these efforts over the course of forty years, they overcame significant resistance from various segments of the public and created a musical community that had a common understanding of the nature and features of a Hungarian national music. This understanding was not limited to intellectuals in Hungary, but was exported to the West as well; by the 1940s the practice of adapting and arranging folk music had become Hungarian music’s calling card abroad. After the Second World War, some audiences in the West continued to find Eastern European music charming and exotic because of its ties to folk music; but many intellectuals there became increasingly hostile to this form of populism because of its Nazi and Stalinist associations. Gertrud Runge reported in 1949 that “the West is taking precautions against a state-ordered folksiness [Volkstümlichkeit]. And rightly so. During the Third Reich we experienced what the dictatorship of mass taste means.”2 The by-now familiar reasons Western intellectuals gave for rejecting populism were most applicable to art music based on folk music: Adorno had been arguing since the 1920s that folk populism increased the danger of inculcating a false, eas94

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ily manipulated sense of community,3 and by the late 1940s enough of his claims had been borne out by history that “precautions” against folksiness seemed eminently reasonable as a cultural strategy. The American composer and critic Arthur Berger, for example, explained that Bartók’s most obviously folkloric scores (such as For Children) and his accessible works (such as Contrasts) lacked the interest that his modernist works provided: “The difference between this folk vein and Bartók’s most profound and provocative style goes far beyond being simply one of mood or content. It is more like the difference between a ‘Hit Parade’ song and a Bach fugue.”4 As the sole universally known fact about Bartók’s work, folklorism came up in nearly every review of his music. Reviewers unfamiliar with Adorno’s critiques often praised Bartók’s “freshness,” his “earthy authenticity,” and his “raw” and unstylized use of folk music in terms that would make the critics of populism cringe.5 The East German press, supporting the new Hungarian construction of Bartók as a socialist composer, likewise played up Bartók’s use of folklore, claiming erroneously in press releases that Bartók’s music had won over the composers at Darmstadt because of its progressive, folkloric tendencies.6 The more these tendencies were highlighted, the more disreputable Bartók’s music must have seemed to those who wanted to put nationalist folklore as far behind them as possible. Populist folklorism simultaneously seemed both a relic of the nineteenth century and an element of the socialist realist threat; either of those would have been enough to make Bartók’s music seem less appealing, but the lethal combination undoubtedly contributed to his loss of popularity in ultramodernist circles.7 To those who formulated and promulgated the critique of populism in the West, the associations between folklore and totalitarianism, populism and state control over artistic expression, seemed logically overdetermined and quite straightforward. Nonetheless, those in the East who had likewise set out to define the role of folklore within socialist realism in a simple and straightforward way soon discovered that the relationship between folk and art musics was a more difficult question than it had at first appeared. Stalin’s dictum that art should be “national in form and socialist in content”8 would seem to suggest that preexisting national cultures should provide a foundation for the development of socialist culture. In the field of architecture national form and socialist content came to be expressed as regionally flavored ornamentation on the surface of a standardized, monumental neoclassicism.9 In music the distinction between surface and structure, between form and signification, was not so easy to define, and the question of how to merge audibly socialist content with national traits became more difficult to adjudicate the more it was discussed. Folk song proved to be an ideolog-

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ically ambiguous category, and the proper relationship between folk song and musical form became the subject of arduous negotiation for Eastern European composers throughout the period of transition to socialism. For Hungarians, this meant that yet another aspect of Bartók’s legacy—the use of folk music as the basis for art music—would be called into question.

the zhdanovshchina and folk music Soviet policy promoted the imitation of folk motifs in all the arts as an essential strategy for conveying the national character of a work.10 The 1948 Soviet resolution on music noted that Muradeli’s opera The Great Friendship was flawed because, despite its setting in the north Caucasus, it did not contain enough folk songs or dances.11 In a speech amplifying the resolution’s tenets, Zhdanov further explained that the opera’s music “is far away from the folk music of the peoples of the North Caucasus, and foreign to it, despite the fact that in such circumstances it should have mirrored the manifestations of life there that were represented in the events of the opera.”12 Zhdanov continued his critique with claims that folk music would render art music more comprehensible, more “substantial,” and more “beautiful.”13 As we saw in chapter 1, Zhdanov’s criticism of Muradeli’s opera was at first interpreted by many in Hungary as a sign that Hungarian music was already ideologically correct. The Hungarian tradition of using folk music as the inspiration for art music, already decades old, seemed to many to meet Zhdanov’s requirements for a music that was to reflect national character. The Soviet denunciation could therefore be read as an endorsement of the Hungarian art-music tradition represented by Bartók and Kodály and as a strong encouragement to continue it. Lajos Vargyas, a folk song researcher and a former student of Kodály, explained that, with regard to the use of folk music in art music, “the unity between the existing situation in Hungary and the situation striven for in Russia is so perfect that it is obvious to the lay public and the leaders of political life.”14 Vargyas called explicitly for Hungarian musical life to be left as it was rather than rebuilt on the model of Soviet music: “The essence is that here musical life has progressed in this [Bartók’s and Kodály’s] constructive direction; education draws the new generation in this direction; [music] criticism supports it and the public is used to it. This trend came to reign here without official assistance; on the contrary, it happened through the mutual influence of musical society and the public. It is precisely this that the Soviet resolution now wants to facilitate through official assistance.”15 Vargyas concluded that because Hungarians had already developed their music along the correct course, political pro-

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gressives should simply continue to support Hungary’s advanced indigenous musical traditions. The reaction of Zoltán Kodály to the party resolution evinced less certainty about the goodwill of the Soviets. Two years before the resolution, in 1946, he had publicly praised the Russian tradition of basing works of art music on folk music: “The Russian composers came closer to their people because they lived among them, spoke in their language. For their melodies they discovered the outstanding, original forms of polyphony that preserve the characteristics of the melody. In their own creations they maintained the atmosphere of folk music, even as they also elevated its forms almost exponentially.”16 But in a note to himself dating from shortly after Zhdanov’s 1948 diatribe, Kodály was much more ambivalent about taking the Russian tradition as a model for Hungarian music: Zhdanov’s warnings are nothing new to us. For thirty years [I’ve said the same thing]. By this I do not mean to say that we are ahead of them. It is complicated: in some things we are ahead of them, in others they are ahead of us. They have already gotten over a national classicism that we have just come to. On the other hand, there was such here too (at the same time as theirs: Liszt, Erkel ), only they [Liszt and Erkel] did not succeed in such a close connection with the people as Rimsky and his fellows. We had to make up for that. . . . In any case there are many common problems, and we can learn a lot from each other.17

By 1948 Kodály was, at least in private, unwilling to grant the Soviets supremacy, or even primacy, in musical matters. At the same time, though, he did recognize in Zhdanov’s prescriptions a set of goals for musical culture that had much in common with his own.

socialist antipathies toward folk song Despite Zhdanov’s relatively clear statement that folk music was necessary for the musical representation of various national identities, another strand of Marxist-Leninist theory implied that the use of certain kinds of folk song could harm rather than help the socialist cause. The existence of this second and opposing view would cause a great deal of confusion over the next few years as Hungarian composers sought to come to grips with the party’s conflicting demands. The minutes of the newly formed Music Committee of the Culture-Political Division of the Hungarian Workers’ Party attest to the prevalence of this negative view of folk song among some of the party’s musical policymakers at the end of 1948.18 The minutes report the chief goals of the committee as follows: “We must set a course so that

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composers create a national and folk-oriented musical language, moving beyond the narrow boundaries of the folk song. We must bring original, constructive emotional content into music in a form that is not unnecessarily complicated, but not simplistic.”19 Their characterization of folk song as “narrow” was simultaneously a judgment about social class (against the peasantry) and about musical style. This belittlement of peasant music was rooted in theoretical difficulties between Communism and the peasantry as well as in practical problems the party had encountered in postwar Hungary. Marxist-Leninist theory had provided no place for the peasant; the revolutionary class was to be composed of urban industrial workers, not of peasants. In predominantly agrarian Hungary, the Communists had attempted to garner support among the peasantry through promises of land reform; nonetheless, large numbers of peasants continued to support the conservative parties that were the greatest threat to socialist hegemony, primarily the Smallholders’ Party (Kisgazdapárt).20 In 1946 and 1947, the years before the party’s attainment of power, overt political conflicts had arisen regarding peasant agitation for greater political power; peasant demonstrations were regarded by the Hungarian Communist Party as a direct attack on the Communist agenda. After the Hungarian Workers’ Party attained power and rapidly developed a totalitarian level of regulation, this hostility toward peasant culture was manifested in acts such as the nationalization of the peasant colleges, institutions that fostered remedial education and folk arts. As a site for the revitalization of peasant culture, the colleges were doing cultural work contrary to the goals of the party; they were therefore charged with “disrespect for the working class” and “peasant romanticism.” The faculties of the colleges were purged of “reactionary” elements in September 1948, and the colleges were nationalized in July 1949.21 The Communist antipathy toward the peasantry and peasant culture was reflected in the interpretation of peasant music as a topic within art music. The interpretive approach brought into play here, one typical of socialist realism, featured an unusually forceful belief in mimesis (the idea that art imitates life) combined with a particularly prescriptive version of that idea (that art should urge life to be a certain way).22 In this case, peasant music was understood as imitative of the troublesome elements of peasant life: political conservatism, traditionalism, provincialism, and the peasants’ desire to own the land they worked. Clearly this music failed to prescribe how life in a people’s democracy should be: peasant music did not teach anyone how to engage in collective action for the common good, to be progressive, or to

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participate in the national culture rather than the provincial. The peasant song, then, was heard as a metonym of the social circumstances in which it is most typically found, and it was objected to on these grounds. Mihály’s interpretation of Bartók’s use of folk music in his 1949 lecture “Béla Bartók and the Generation Coming after Him” reflects this ideological approach. In accordance with the stated goal of the Culture-Political Division to combat “the reemergence of sentimental populism,” Mihály stressed the narrowness of folk song and indicated that the folk song could not merely be adopted as it was, but had to be changed to be of use in new music. “The folk element,” Mihály argued, could not have remained in its original form. It was precisely the folk song, in its own closedness and smallness a perfect, complete work of excellence, that so inspiringly seized Bartók’s imagination. Precisely this, however, means the greatest difficulties when the transplantation of the folk element into art music takes place. This closedness, this completeness, was perfectly suitable for the closed-off, petrified society of the peasantry. In modern society this closedness, this peasant conservatism . . . cannot be a goal, but precisely on the contrary, it indicates a situation the surmounting of which is an important precondition for the further development of the entire society.23

According to Mihály, Bartók’s predominant method of incorporating folk material—often changing the melodies so that they are not immediately recognizable—was much preferable to the wholesale importation of folk music into urban culture. Mihály’s argument for Bartók as a synthesist was both appropriate to the wary approach to folk music that was prevalent at the time and creative in its use of this understanding of the folk problem to support a tentatively positive evaluation of Bartók’s achievement.

szervánszky’s symphonic folk song settings Given the emphasis that had been placed on folk song as a basis for national art music both in the Hungarian tradition and in Zhdanov’s writings, it may seem peculiar that relatively few large-scale works on folk music themes appeared during the early years of Zhdanovism. The Communist critiques of sentimental populism that had become widespread by 1949 seem to have discouraged the emulation of Bartók and Kodály in this regard. Two early attempts at using folk song themes in large-scale musical works reflecting the new socialist environment were Endre Szervánszky’s Home Guard Cantata (Honvéd kantáta), composed in 1949, and Ferenc Szabó’s Song Singing

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Endre Szervánszky. Photo: Magyar Nemzeti Múzeum (Hungarian National Museum). Used by permission.

(Nótaszó), composed in 1950. These were among the first pieces on folk song themes to have been composed entirely after the 1948 resolution on music, and they were lauded at the time of their appearance as the fulfillment of great expectations in the field of socialist music. Szervánszky’s Home Guard Cantata, a four-movement work for male chorus and orchestra, is a generic hybrid of sorts. Though choral settings of folk songs were nothing new in the Hungarian tradition, the scale of this work (both in its instrumentation and in its formal conception) indicates that it was intended as an impressive symphonic piece for the larger concert hall rather than as a project a community chorus could successfully undertake. The four movements of the piece are analogous in tempo to the movements of a symphony: the first and last movements are fast and rousing,

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the second movement is a scherzo, and the third is a slow ballad. Even the accompanimental styles demonstrate a complexity that surpasses the mere presentation of the folk song. In the second movement, for instance, Stravinskian ostinato patterns in the high woodwinds add textural interest without obscuring the presentation of melodies below. The grandiosity of the conception is offset somewhat by the relatively straightforward treatment of the simple melodies on which the work is based. Folk tunes are prominent in the texture and provide the basis for the cantata’s formal organization.24 The use of the cimbalom, a Hungarian instrument that had been employed since the nineteenth century to evoke national themes in orchestral music, enhances the folksy atmosphere. The cantata uses soldiers’ songs to present four scenes from military life. The most obvious Hungarian musical topic of this kind is the tradition of military recruiting music, or verbunkos. In the fourth movement of the cantata, for instance, the text exclaims, “Come be soldiers!” and the instrumental interludes sound the “gypsy fiddling” topos typical of the faster style of verbunkos performance (example 6a).25 This topos is featured prominently in the first movement as well. The piece also includes a lyrical love song and a dance song with a pastoral interlude. A possible model for the use of the military subject was Soldiers’ Songs, a 1947 work by the Soviet composer Anatoly Novikov, who had served as the Kremlin’s cultural emissary to Hungary. Like Szervánszky’s cantata, Novikov’s setting is based on soldiers’ songs and folk texts; the existence of the Soviet work may have indicated to Szervánszky that the theme was considered appropriate by the party. Musically, however, the works bear few similarities. In three of the four movements of his cantata, Szervánszky uses folk songs as building blocks to create large-scale formal units. For example, the first movement is a rondo (ABACA) in which each episode consists of a contrasting folk tune in a different key. Within each section, the tunes are almost always repeated two, three, or even four times. Between the sections— and therefore between the folk songs themselves—Szervánszky inserts short, modulatory orchestral interludes so that the voice parts never have to modulate; they enter after the arrival of the new key. This technique not only makes the vocal parts easier for the chorus; it also ensures that each folk song presentation remains in the same key throughout, which allows the songs to keep their original shapes despite the harmonization that has been added by the composer. Bartók made a distinction in his typology of folk songs among “oldstyle,” “new-style,” and “mixed-type” songs. Each type distinguished by Bartók is associated with particular patterns of phrase structure: the older

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Example 6. a. Szervánszky, interlude tune from Home Guard Cantata, IV. b. Folk melody used in Szervánszky, Home Guard Cantata, III. c. Folk melody used in Szabó, Song Singing, VI.

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songs feature open-ended, nonarchitectonic formal patterns (for example, AAAA, ABAB, or ABCD), whereas the newer songs are often constructed on principles of return found in Western art music (for example, ABBA or AABA). In some of his writings on the subject, Bartók expressed concern that the old-style songs, which he believed were of particular historical interest because of their antiquity, were dying out; he explained that scholars should make special efforts to collect these songs because of their value as historic documents.26 On several occasions, moreover, Bartók voiced a strong aesthetic preference for the old-style folk song. In 1933, for example, he explained that “however fresh, pleasing, and ingratiating the new melodies may be, we must nonetheless affirm that the melodies in the ancient style are, as music, of far greater value,” and he stated that the older melodies’ simplicity and the “exotic features of their melodic lines” rendered them aesthetically superior to the newer songs.27 Even though as a scholar Bartók advocated a decidedly eclectic approach to folk song, and even though his late works reflect a renewed sympathy for the verbunkos style and for newstyle folk songs,28 Bartók’s pointed statements about the musical and scholarly value of the old-style melodies left their mark on Hungarian musicians’ approach to the interpretation and evaluation of folk song styles. Bartók also noted that by the 1920s only elderly people remembered the old-style songs, whereas the new-style songs were still part of a living tradition for the younger generation at that time; the old-style songs thus had particular value. By socialist criteria, however, just the reverse was true: if new-style songs represented a living tradition, then they would serve best as vehicles for connecting with modern audiences. The songs used in the Home Guard Cantata all fit into either the new-style or the mixed-style categories. Some have architectonic designs suggestive of art-music influence (such as the AABA design of example 6b, which was published by Bartók in 1924), while others have phrase structures reminiscent of the old-style folk song (ABAB, AAAA) but have other stylistic features associated with the newer style, such as the verbunkos topos.29 This might be interpreted as a turn away from the emphasis on “authentic” models that featured the old-style song as the bearer of Hungarian identity, toward a preference for folk songs that were more likely to be in common use and therefore recognizable to audiences. The style of Szervánszky’s first and fourth movements is highly evocative of Kodály’s use of the verbunkos style in his own instrumental works, particularly of the Intermezzo from Háry János. Szervánszky’s sequential use of folk songs to build a larger and more genuinely symphonic work also recalls some of Kodály’s most famous pieces: both the opera Háry János,

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made of many songs strung together, and the Peacock Variations, a set of variations on a single folk song, are constructed on this “chain” model. This technique ensures that the folk tunes remain audible and comprehensible at every moment of the performance, even though they are presented in the context of a longer piece. In the Home Guard Cantata Szervánszky struck a balance between a traditional Hungarian musical subject and one sanctioned by the Soviet regime, and between the small-scale folk song and the symphonic scale of the work. In so doing, he produced a blend that seemed, at least for the moment, to meet the party’s standard for a work of socialist realist music.

a warning is sounded In their first responses to the 1948 resolution of the Soviet Communist Party, Hungarian critics had argued that the use of folk song in art music was enough to keep formalism at bay. By May 1950, however, that argument had been roundly rejected. In that month appeared the first issue of the newly reformed New Music Review (Új zenei szemle), the successor to the Music Review (Zenei szemle), which had ceased publication in 1949. In the first article to appear in the new journal, Miklós Csillag published a harsh critique of Kodály that included a cautionary comment about the interpretation of folk music influences in art music. He wrote: The young people of Hungarian music regarded Zoltán Kodály with great expectations. They expected that he would stand before them and show the direction for the founding of a new Hungarian music worthy of our revitalized nation. They waited for him to step forward, all the more so because they believed that his musical work of the past justified this hope. Kodály, however, still owes the people’s democracy this positive leadership. Our composers lacked direction, and thus it is understandable that when they brought with them formalist trends not only from the environment, but also from our musical education of past decades, they ran into a dead end both in general content and in the formal sense as well. Many were of the opinion that the working out of folk themes would avert the formalist dangers from the outset. However, the problem is that with us, the folk theme most often went through the mill of the kind of formal and harmonic processes that made it wholly inappropriate and unenjoyable for our working masses.30

The editorial struggles that preceded the publication of this final version of the paragraph are indicative of the level of concern and debate that went on even among the committed Communist musicians who ran the New Mu-

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sic Review. Explaining why the issue had appeared late, the editor of the journal, the young avowed Communist János Maróthy, wrote that the first version of the paragraph was objected to by the editorial committee. Szabó, a former student of Kodály, had suggested changes, significantly softening the section dealing with Kodály. Most of Szabó’s changes were rejected, and the paragraph was published “with Comrade Révai’s wishes and approval.”31 Just as the 1948 Soviet resolution was aimed both at Muradeli and beyond him to all the composers in the Soviet sphere of influence, Csillag’s criticism was directed specifically at Kodály but should also be taken as a more general statement of a shift in the Hungarian Workers’ Party’s policy on the use of folk music. The mere use of folk music in works of art music was no longer admissible as a guarantee of a work’s ideological suitability. By debunking this easy equation, Csillag forced composers to search again for ways of creating music that was “national in form.”

a tentative synthesis: szabó’s song singing In November 1950, a full six months after Csillag’s article appeared in print, a cycle of folk song settings composed by Szabó and entitled Song Singing (Nótaszó) had its premiere. Song Singing exhibits many of the features that had been pronounced desirable in the Soviet resolution and in subsequent Hungarian statements, and it seems to have taken into account Csillag’s recent criticism of Kodály as well. The six-movement work is scored for chamber orchestra and chorus, a considerably smaller and simpler ensemble than that required by Szervánszky’s cantata. In addition, Szabó included in the score a part for a single solo voice to be used if a chorus was not available, thus making the work more accessible to performing groups with limited resources. Although the accompaniments are carefully and artfully constructed, they tend to be simple and repetitive and to remain in the background. This music is much less elaborate than that of Szervánszky’s cantata. Like Szervánszky’s, Szabó’s piece uses lyrical folk texts; the overriding themes are flirtation and love, and the movements are arranged in such a way that they can be construed as telling the story of a couple from their first meeting to their wedding celebration. The narrative, however, is not made explicit in the work through dialogue, characterization, or other means; this places the piece in the genre of cantata and differentiates it from the Soviet genre of “song opera” as well as from its Hungarian antecedents, such as Kodály’s folk song opera Háry János. Among the Hungarian precursors, it is perhaps most similar to Kodály’s stage work The Spinning Room

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(Székely fonó), in which the words and music of the plot are derived entirely from folk song texts and melodies; but here, too, Kodály’s work was designed to be acted out on stage, whereas the drama remains implicit in Szabó’s modest cantata. The folk songs Szabó chose for the work are mostly new-style melodies, again suggesting an emphasis on living tradition. Indeed, the title, Nótaszó, can be understood as a polemical position against the fetishization of peasant music. Nóta is the Hungarian term for a genre of popular art song widespread in Hungary since the nineteenth century. Bartók and Kodály had reviled the nóta in favor of the more “authentic” peasant song: Bartók’s remark that the nóta was “much too vulgar to be truly valuable” was characteristic of his and Kodály’s youthful stance toward the genre.32 By entitling his piece Nótaszó, conversely, Szabó invited the listener into an experience of “song singing” that might include several different Hungarian song traditions, not only authentic peasant song. Szabó’s methods of setting folk songs in Song Singing differ somewhat from Szervánszky’s in the Home Guard Cantata. Most prominent, perhaps, is Szabó’s flexible treatment of the preexisting folk melodies: he sometimes altered them by extending phrases to effect transitions or smooth over the boundaries between phrases. The folk melody used in the sixth movement, entitled “Wedding” (Lakodalmas), originally consisted of two four-bar phrases in an antecedent-consequent pattern (example 6c, p. 102).33 In his setting Szabó extends the second phrase through repetition and alteration of motives (and, necessarily, of verbal text), so that the consequent phrase cannot close but ends again on a dominant pedal, over which the orchestra jauntily reiterates the tune.The orchestra’s version, too, remains unfinished; it is not extended but is instead interrupted by a modulation to a new key for another statement of the tune. This extension of the tune’s boundaries by elementary compositional techniques breaks down the four-square shape of the tune and allows it to be used more flexibly in constructing the piece. Szervánszky had chosen in three of the four movements of the Home Guard Cantata to include several songs as a means of differentiating sections and achieving a large-scale formal scheme. He provided modulatory passages only in the orchestral transitions; he never changed key within the vocal presentation of a particular folk tune. Szabó, on the other hand, used one folk song per movement in Song Singing, and he moved from key to key within the presentation of a single folk song. This procedure sometimes distorts the original profile of a song somewhat in the service of tonal contrast within the movement. The musical comprehensibility of the piece is

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not impaired in the least, for the art-music element of tonal contrast Szabó provides is usually of the sort a city-bred industrial worker might find familiar from nóta or other popular art music. One example of this technique occurs in the fifth movement of Song Singing, entitled “Late Evening” (KésW este, example 7).34 This movement sets a variant of the same folk song that Szervánszky used in “Evening’s Rest,” the third movement of the Home Guard Cantata. Rather than setting the version Bartók collected, Szabó chose a variant that provided a good opportunity for tonal contrast: the third, contrasting phrase of Szabó’s tune (unlike that collected by Bartók) rises above the octave compass of the preceding phrases by one note. Szabó’s harmonization of this melody highlights the contrast implicit in his chosen variant of the tune. Taking advantage of the close commonality between the C mixolydian and F major scales, Szabó sets the first two phrases of the melody with harmonies that accentuate F major. Then, in a short orchestral interlude, Szabó effects a modulation that leads to an arrival on a D major triad (sounding as the dominant of G minor) at the beginning of the third phrase. In addition to the sense of “elevation” provided by the modulation, the phrase is also distinguished by a thickening of the texture from the pointillistic accompaniment pattern that had characterized the first two phrases to a much denser treatment with tutti scoring, including divisi string parts moving in parallel motion and a heavy walking bass pattern. This heightened phrase lasts only five measures; by the end of the vocal phrase the transition back to the original tonality has already begun. By choosing a variant of the tune that reached outside the rigid octave compass, Szabó made it easier to integrate the tune into a musical structure that derives not exclusively from the folk song, but also from departureand-return principles characteristic of the European concert music tradition. In other words, the composer had taken a small step toward the “synthesis” of the folk song into another tradition, as Mihály claimed Bartók had done. This process of synthesis bespeaks an attitude toward the folk material that emphasizes not its authenticity but its utility. Szabó did not treat the folk song setting as “the mounting of a jewel”; he freely changed the substance of the song to suit the musical need of the moment.35 Szabó’s synthesis is not thoroughgoing, for the work is organized on the principle of a series of folk songs, and therefore strongly resembles the “chain” model used by Szervánszky. In this respect the construction of Szabó’s piece is even simpler than that of Szervánszky’s, for he does not build larger forms out of the folk songs. Still, in its fusing of folk song with formal characteristics

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Example 7. Szabó, Song Singing, V, mm. 11–26 (piano reduction by the composer).

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more typical of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century art music, Szabó’s Song Singing can be said to be one step closer to the synthesis end of the spectrum than Szervánszky’s Home Guard Cantata. During his visit to Hungary in March 1950, the Soviet composer Vladimir Zakharov had encouraged composers to take just these sorts of liberties with folk song. Zakharov expressed dismay in a lecture to the Hungarian Musicians’ Association that Hungarians were much too focused on the authenticity or purity of their folk song tradition, and not enough on what the folk song could do for socialist culture. Through an interpreter (and hence in the third person) he recounted to the Hungarians: Much was said during his visit about the Hungarian folk song. He himself has worked much with various areas of the Russian folk song; he understands the problems of the folk song, and he still must say that he doesn’t understand what the question is here. Many times he heard that Hungarian music, pure [tiszta] Hungarian music was finished one hundred years ago and that what has happened since then is music full of foreign influences, which must be thrown out. In his opinion this debate is unnecessary. . . . It does not matter when the melody came into being, and what influences are present in it, if this melody is needed. The essence is how the composer uses the melody. . . . It is in his opinion totally incorrect to debate about the extent to which the style of a folk song is pure.36

Here Zakharov was addressing in part the choice of folk songs to set: his dismissal of “purity” was a critique of composers’ continued respect for Bartók’s categories of old and new styles, in which the older songs were regarded as the more authentically Hungarian. As we have seen, though, some composers had already set new-style songs before Zakharov’s critique, so it is difficult to ascertain the relevance of his remarks to recent compositional practice. Zakharov’s emphasis on the utility of a given melody, on the other hand, most likely applied to issues of how the folk song is set. Rather than leaving the melodies unchanged, composers were to transform them and fit them with new contexts, as Szabó began to do in Song Singing. Among other purposes, this formal recasting of folk songs would in theory distance them from their original peasant context, thus decreasing the danger of sentimental populism and increasing their relevance to city dwellers. Zakharov’s prescription, however, did not address the crucial issue: if it was undesirable to make sweeping, formalistic changes in folk songs, but also inappropriate to leave them in their original form, how exactly were composers supposed to incorporate the folk songs into their music? No one had a ready answer, and composers were left to struggle as best they could among vague directives.

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beyond the folk song Composers, bureaucrats, and other prominent figures of Hungarian cultural life debated the use of folk song in art music at a series of meetings in December 1950. During the wide-ranging discussion, some tied the question of the proper use of folk music to that of Bartók’s acceptability. Szervánszky, irate over the fact that many of Bartók’s works were no longer to be heard, exclaimed: “I consider it deplorable that they want to rank Bartók as a simple folk song arranger. That they do not recognize Bartók according to his true worth (we experienced this with the Soviet comrades) I believe to be explainable by—Kodály told us countless times that until we understand the Hungarian folk song completely, we are closed off from this music.”37 Szervánszky seems to have seen socialist challenges to Bartók’s music as originating from an improper understanding of folk music: if the tone-deaf bureaucrats had been able to hear the folk music resonating in Bartók’s scores, perhaps they would have been more favorably disposed toward Bartók’s music. Indeed, the criticism of Bartók may have stemmed in part from the party’s unwillingness to make folk music the unequivocal center of new music culture. At the same time, though, Csillag’s provocative article that called folk-based music into question in 1950 may have been intended to limit the powerful influence of Bartók and Kodály by downplaying the importance and the political appropriateness of their reliance on folk song. The discussion reveals a tension between perceptions of Kodályan and Bartókian models of composition, broadly reduced to the “chain” and “synthesis” approaches to folk song. István Szirmai, the director of Hungarian Radio, criticized Szervánszky’s Home Guard Cantata and Szabó’s Song Singing for failing to synthesize folk song into art music in a new way. In Szirmai’s words, These new works are not of high enough quality. . . . [They are just] a somewhat primitive type of arrangement. Essentially the comrades just took folk songs and tied them into a bouquet, presenting the folk songs again in their purely original form. What aspect of this work can be considered creative work? They orchestrated [the songs] for larger orchestra, they created some kind of connecting music for them. In essence, however, there was no message, they gave them back to the people in the same form in which they received them from the people. That is not much, and it is not what we expect from our composers.38

Although, as we have seen, there are some important differences between Szabó’s and Szervánszky’s treatment of folk songs, Szirmai felt that both

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reflected too closely the Kodályan “chain” model. From his comment it is evident that, in his view, creative work should still ideally involve some substantial personal achievement on the part of the composer; simplicity of style should not be equated with the accomplishment of a simple task. Szirmai’s comments reflect two distinct objections: the “giving back to the people” of the folk songs “in the same form in which they [were] received,” which raised once again the specter of sentimental populism; and the creative failure of the composers to transform the songs. Révai, undoubtedly the most influential voice in Hungarian cultural politics, agreed with Szirmai in the main about the quality of recent works based on folk songs. Révai did not condemn Szabó’s and Szervánszky’s works outright, but he criticized their simplicity and closeness to the original folk melodies. Whereas the synthesis model remained problematical owing to its formalism, the chain model failed to be truly modern in the utopian, socialist sense.39 Szervánszky himself seems to have been somewhat dissatisfied with his Home Guard Cantata: he was overheard making sarcastic remarks about his own piece. Mihály called it “worrisome”: “Szervánszky is practicing selfcriticism precisely in connection with his successful Home Guard Cantata. If he brands this music as ‘tingli-tangli,’ then he openly echoes the opinion of the musical aristocrats.”40 Szervánszky responded to Mihály’s comment, denying nothing: Regarding Comrade Mihály’s assertion that I said that the Home Guard Cantata was tingli-tangli—I really said something like this to [the composer István] Sárközy after hearing one of my works. At one time it got to the point where the more tingli-tangli a work was, the more the comrades rejoiced. In connection with Bartók I wrote a large study. In my opinion Lehár and Imre [Emmerich] Kálmán are tingli-tangli—and the Home Guard Cantata really is too. They are really looking down on the people if they believe that they understand only this sort of thing.41

It seems particularly significant that in the midst of his comments about the prevalence of “tingli-tangli” works in new music, Szervánszky mentioned a study about Bartók he had been working on. (This study has not come to light.) That Bartók is brought up as a non sequitur in this context suggests close links between questions of quality in new music and the problem of how composers of Szervánszky’s generation should respond artistically to Bartók’s musical legacies: Bartók’s model for folk song setting seemed useful and relevant in many ways, but it had been compromised politically, leaving composers with no model at hand. Szirmai’s, Révai’s, and Mihály’s comments about the inadequacies of

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Szervánszky’s and Szabó’s choral works were framed in terms of the need to express something that has not been expressed in music before.They were also bothered by a formal problem that seemed to render these “progressive” works somehow inadequate. Their ostensible objection to the chain model of linking folk songs one after the other was its association with sentimental populism. Yet in their comments another problem is also implicit: such a model for composition is not formally complex enough to sustain the kind of large-scale, monumental work that ought to characterize the building of a great new socialist society. That large-scale works were still considered a higher goal is hinted at in one of Révai’s comments: “The establishment of this new relationship must be begun not with symphonic music, but with mass song, operetta, and perhaps opera. Not that anyone should draw the conclusion that we are opposed to symphonic music. But there is a certain order of things. If we want to build great music, symphonic music, while maintaining the new connection with the masses—and we do want this, and only thus will there be new symphonic music—then we must begin this task through the lower (if I may be permitted to say this at all ) forms.”42 Révai’s nervously phrased formulation reveals that the hierarchy of forms that had prevailed in public concert programming before and during the war years—with an emphasis on symphonic music as the highest form—was still present in the minds of those who were planning the concert life of the future. Monumentality in all the arts was widely considered the most appropriate style in which to convey the greatness of the new society. Yet Révai’s parenthetical equation of “great music” with “symphonic music,” along with the embarrassed aside about the “lower forms,” suggests some awareness of the hypocrisy of claiming a traditionally nonpopulist musical genre as the highest. Révai’s stated aim of building symphonic music on the desired new connection between composers and the listening public may have been a mitigating factor that allowed this kind of hierarchical ranking of genres to continue. Révai explained further that the great nineteenth-century Hungarian poet Sándor PetWfi had “taken over the entire richness and emotional content of the folk song as material,” but he had gone beyond this material to synthesize it into new forms; this transformation would provide the appropriate model for Hungarian musicians, who were likewise supposed to surpass the folk song.43 Révai seemed particularly concerned with linking the problem of how to use folk song to the legacies of Bartók and Kodály: The folk song cannot, it is impossible that it could, reflect the new richness of feeling, the richness of feeling that belongs to the person who is building socialism. Does this mean that we turn our backs on

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the folk song? It is not even worth debating about it. Now we are the ones who say that Hungarian poetry cannot go further on the path of Ady or even of Attila József, because neither is sufficiently part of the folk [népi]. One can go further on the path of PetWfi—naturally with new content. Now I ask you, apply this to Bartók. My opinion is that we can continue better on Kodály’s path than on Bartók’s. . . . [But] if we state that we cannot go further on Bartók’s path, this does not mean that we deny Bartók.44

Almost immediately after his statement that Kodály’s path was preferable to Bartók’s, Révai proceeded to criticize Kodály’s person and his politics in no uncertain terms, even while continuing to praise his music. “I maintain what I said, that I had not heard a work as valuable as the Peacock [Variations] in our ‘socialist music literature,’ and Háry János too is an entirely outstanding opera. Unconditionally we must work with Kodály—here there is no disagreement at all. But to believe that Kodály can be a leader ([aside:]Comrade Szabó), that he should stand at the forefront of our new music, I feel there must be a certain lack of confidence with regard to our own strength and a misunderstanding of the relationship between us and Kodály.”45 Révai went on to describe how Kodály had tried to save choruses that were affiliated with Catholic religious organizations (“cover organizations for the political reactionaries”) and to state that Kodály was a sentimental populist who wanted to hold back the development of Hungarian music. His rhetoric became irate; he concluded by remarking that he could say much more, but he did not wish to “blacken Kodály’s name.” Révai’s assertion—that the proper stylistic path for composers after the liberation of Hungary was through Kodály, not Bartók—effectively cut Bartók out of the lineage of new music. At the same time, however, Révai strongly stated that this did not mean that Bartók’s music would be denied. Likewise, the assertion that Kodály’s style was the one that should be followed was moderated by the repeated statements that the folk song could not be used as it was (as in, for instance, Kodály’s opera Háry János), but must be fundamentally changed to express the new content. Additionally, Révai’s aside to Szabó was certainly a pointed reminder of Szabó’s defense of Kodály in the editorial dispute discussed earlier, a mild reprimand serving as a warning that personal loyalty to Kodály would not be rewarded. Révai’s message can hardly have missed its mark. The party thus notified composers that even though in general Kodály’s path was better than Bartók’s, it was by no means the perfect model. Whereas the endorsement of Kodály over Bartók was a tacit pat on the back for composers such as Szabó and Szervánszky who had modeled large-scale works on a literal use of folk

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József Révai with Zoltán Kodály. Photo: Magyar Nemzeti Múzeum (Hungarian National Museum). Used by permission.

song, the criticism of Kodály and of these same works also meant that composers could not continue in that vein without risking denunciation. Once again, the ideal construct of Hungarian music was defined only negatively. It is hard to imagine how composers could have fulfilled such vague criteria. Indeed, most of the extant pieces from the period were criticized as falling short in one or another dimension of the theory. These initial “failures” did not hurt the careers of their composers. On the contrary, in 1951 both Szervánszky and Szabó were awarded the Kossuth Prize, which since 1948 had been the Hungarian nation’s highest award for artists. Szervánszky was given the silver award for his orchestral Rhapsody and for the Home Guard and Patriotism cantatas, and Szabó received the gold award for Song Singing and for the music to the 1950 film Ludas Mátyi. These works continued to be played often on the radio as well as in live performances for several years. In retrospect, then, the Home Guard Cantata and Song Singing were two of the most successful works produced in the early years of Hungarian socialist realism, even though their imperfections had been singled out for attention by Révai and Szirmai. The use of partial praise, or praise mixed with harsh critique, whether of specific works such as Song Singing and the Home Guard Cantata or of composers in the Hungarian tradition, such as Bartók and Kodály, was one of

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the more perverse elements in the developing practice of socialist realism. From the party’s perspective, of course, vague criteria were the most useful, since only the party could assess compliance with them, and none could appeal its judgments. Beyond this practical aim, though, there is a certain consistency in the aesthetic aims underlying these ambiguous and contradictory statements. They were strategies for stimulating the creation of a new, revolutionary music the likes of which had never before been heard. By characterizing the most recent achievements of Communist composers as imperfect and therefore transitional, party leaders (represented particularly by Révai) indicated that composers should push further toward a hypothetical ideal music that would, in its newness, perfectly represent the new socialist world of the People’s Democracy. The urgent demands for the creation of a language expressive of “something new” reflected a distinctly modernist brand of utopianism, according to which the music that was most valued was music so new that it had yet to be written.46 Far from being a model of premodern backwardness, the socialist music envisioned by Révai was thus in spirit an utterly modern, revolutionary creation, in a way that few in the West could imagine. Despite Vargyas’s hope that Bartók’s use of folk music could be regarded as an antecedent for this revolutionary music, it could not have fulfilled that purpose. Bartók had loved folk song for the strangeness of its sound world and had made it a central feature of Hungarian modernism—a modernism that drew strength from Western European modernist traditions even as it also sought to retain its own identity. The very strength of this practice as a strain of modernist thought, along with the class associations of peasant music, made it highly undesirable as a model for socialist modernity. The incipient revolutionary music would instead have to follow Soviet precepts; it would have to exhibit a certain grandeur and yet remain accessible and connected with some populist musical traditions. Although the folk element in Soviet socialist realism shared to some extent the problematical association with the peasantry, it remained superior to the Hungarian tradition of using folk music in that it was connected with a heroic, Russian nationalist tradition of nineteenth-century symphonic music, much preferable to the modernist and Hungarian tradition of Bartók. The existence of Bartók as a standard for Hungarians’ efforts to adapt folk song proved a real obstacle as officials attempted to convert composers to a practice more in line with Soviet models: as Zakharov’s comments show, the first task was to make way for a new, revolutionary style of composition by dismantling preexisting Hungarian ideas of how to use folk song.

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Although Bartók’s practice was rejected, the idea of folk song remained indispensable to official ideas of how this revolutionary music would take shape—this despite the fact that it was never made entirely clear for composers how they were to develop a new musical language from folk song without crossing over into formalist synthesis on the one hand or sentimental populism on the other. The Hungarian officials who tried to institute this practice remained certain, however, that when the new musical language “beyond the folk song” would be discovered, it would transform the Hungarian tradition by making a connection with the Hungarian people through the idealized medium of folk melody.

6

The “Bartók Question” and the Politics of Dissent The Case of András Mihály

The most infamous Hungarian political event of 1949 was the show trial of László Rajk. Rajk, who had served as Hungary’s minister of the Interior and then foreign minister during the early postwar years, was imprisoned in May 1949 on false charges of treason, war crimes, and espionage largely associated with his ostensible support for Tito’s Yugoslavian brand of Communism rather than Stalin’s Soviet variety. Rajk was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death; he was executed on 15 October 1949. His arrest and trial, as well as those of other prominent members of the Hungarian Workers’ Party, closely resembled the Soviet show trials of the 1930s and were carried out under the supervision of Soviet and Hungarian secret police. Through torture, false promises, and appeals to loyalty, the party obtained from the defendants and from witnesses confessions to acts that had never occurred, and it used these confessions in theatrical public trials that were covered in detail by the press and broadcast in full over the radio; transcripts of the proceedings were published in several languages immediately after their conclusion.1 By means of the show trials and the terror they evoked, the party intended to instill absolute allegiance both to the party itself and to its Soviet masters. According to ErnW GerW, Rajk’s colleague in the upper echelons of the party, Rajk’s trial impressed upon the public that “anyone who is reluctant to pay homage to the leading role of the Soviet fatherland and its great leader, Comrade Stalin, is guilty of treason against the party.”2 These highly visible trials were only the beginning of a series of terrifying party purges and expulsions that continued throughout the early 1950s. The earliest purges targeted former members of the Social Democratic Party; soon they ravaged the ranks of the “home Communists,” both the old guard who had taken part in Hungary’s brief 1919 revolution and 117

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those who had participated in Hungary’s illegal Communist Party before and during the Second World War. The party imprisoned, tortured, or executed thousands of its own adherents; by the time of the Hungarian uprising in 1956, the party had expelled from its ranks more than 350,000 of its members.3 In the face of these tragic events, the political machinations of the local music establishment may seem of little concern; as far as currently available evidence allows us to speculate, musical goings-on only dimly reflected the horrors of the public trials. Still, the party’s purges did not leave musical life untouched: like other citizens, musicians had to perform ritual demonstrations of loyalty, and no one knew who would be victimized, on what pretext, or with what results. Among musicians, the mandatory public pledges of allegiance became intertwined with the question of how Bartók’s legacy ought to fit into the contemporary music scene to the point where judgments about music became inseparable from estimations of personal loyalty to the party’s aims. Late in 1950 the “Bartók question” played an important role in a small-scale show trial driven both by the party’s relentless pursuit of musicians’ fidelity and by an acute need to determine Bartók’s place in Hungarian culture. The main defendant in this show trial, András Mihály, believed in the socialist cause and tried to serve the party loyally. At the same time, like many of his colleagues, he continued to harbor a devotion to Bartók’s music. As we have seen, Mihály made several attempts to reconcile his conflicting loyalties, adopting a variety of public stances toward Bartók’s works between 1948 and 1950. Although his changes of attitude reflected the changing party line, the unfortunate fact that he had left a trail of publications detailing his and the party’s inconstancy made his position increasingly precarious as political support for a purge grew stronger. Mihály’s experience of the trial and its aftermath demonstrates how the political meanings attached to music affected the fate of individuals and how these meanings continued to resonate once the threat of repression began to recede.

the beginnings of a purge A sinister, unsigned document, dated 24 October 1950 and preserved in the archives of the Party’s Agitation and Propaganda Division, indicates that someone in the Hungarian Workers’ Party planned to instigate a purge in music:

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Since the unmasking of the Rajk gang a large-scale purge has taken place in the areas of politics, government, and economics; many enemies of our people have received their proper punishment, and even cadres who were merely suspected have been removed from their leading functions in our party. In the area of culture, however, and especially in the area of the arts, not a single enemy element has yet been unveiled among the leading and middle cadres. Knowing the importance of cultural work, we cannot presume that the enemy has not stealthily introduced its own cadres into the area of cultural politics. . . . This fact increased our vigilance, and for a long time we have been observing the initially surprising developments that are evident in the direction of various arts, but especially in the area of musical politics.4

It is particularly striking that the author recommended a purge simply because none had yet occurred in the arts. The purge in music, like those in politics, must have seemed advantageous on its own merits as a means of ensuring the loyalty of party members. In fact, contrary to the pronouncement of this document’s anonymous author, a sort of purge had already occurred in the field of literature. The philosopher, literary critic, and Marxist aesthetician György Lukács had played a leading role in literary and cultural matters since he had returned from Moscow in 1945 at the invitation of his fellow “Muscovite” József Révai. In April 1949, however, about a month before Rajk’s arrest, the highest leadership of the party commissioned an article sharply critical of Lukács’s writings.5 Though Lukács published several self-critical confessions with supervision from Rákosi and Révai, these confessions were deemed insufficient and Lukács retreated under a barrage of public attacks that continued well into 1950. According to Révai, Lukács had failed to recognize the leading role of the Soviet Union, and Lukács’s version of socialist realism was merely a slightly revised version of the bourgeois doctrine of “art for art’s sake.”6 Lukács continued to support Hungarian and Soviet policies, preaching realism at peace conferences and other such events abroad. Nevertheless, he was discredited in Hungary—his works disappeared from university curricula and he withdrew from public life. The purge in music, then, was not without precedent; on the contrary, it could follow from the literary purge as logically as Zhdanov’s criticisms of Soviet musicians had followed from his literary critiques.7 In setting up a purge, Communist leaders could hardly attribute the ostensible lack of progress toward socialist goals in the arts to unwillingness on the part of Communists; to do so would be to admit the lack of widespread support among musicians for these goals. To confess ineptitude must

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have seemed equally unappealing. Therefore, in typically paranoid terms, they attributed their failures to enemy action. The anonymous document cited above framed the problem this way: Whereas in the other branches of the arts serious progress is shown . . . our musical culture demonstrates nonetheless a constant and rapid regression. The leadership, or one might say “rule,” is held in the hands of a narrow little clique, which in directing our musical politics keeps in its sights not the goals of our party or the interests of the working people, but rather the individual interests of the clique’s members. Many signs point to the fact that here we are speaking not merely of the careerism of individuals, but rather of enemy influence, intentional troublemaking, and sabotage.8

The accusation of sabotage and the portrayal of the accused as a dangerous enemy agent mirrored the accusations against Rajk and his fellow defendants. The anonymous author of the typescript announced that Endre Székely was the leader of the clique accused of obstructing Hungarians’ progress toward socialist realist music. Székely, who had written one of the most divisive of the critiques published for the anniversary of Bartók’s death a month earlier, was primarily a choral conductor and a composer of mass songs; he had been an underground Communist in Hungary during the Second World War and had long been involved with the workers’ chorus movement. After the war he became president of the newly formed Béla Bartók Society, which fostered choral singing. The author of the typescript indicted Székely as a brutal dictator who controlled nearly every facet of musical life and who hindered every socialist development. He also accused Székely of “political crimes”: the corruption of Hungarians through the appropriation of politically tainted melodies (including the tunes of fascist marches and Zionist songs); the placement of “enemy elements in important functions”;9 the intentional alienation of Kodály; and the programming of “reactionary” (sacred) choral music by composers such as Handel, Lassus, and Viadana. Shortly before this call for a purge against Székely, his “Muscovite” colleague Ferenc Szabó had lodged complaints about him to the Ministry of Education and to the party’s Division of Agitation and Propaganda. In its language and content, Szabó’s account of a petty squabble over Székely’s Peace Cantata appears to have served as an important antecedent for the anonymous indictment of Székely. In one of his complaints, Szabó also reported that both András Mihály and Miklós Csillag (who worked in the Ministry of Education) sided with Székely. Later that year, the association be-

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Endre Székely. Photo: Magyar Nemzeti Múzeum (Hungarian National Museum). Used by permission.

tween Mihály and Székely asserted by Szabó would become a point of contention as both interpersonal and musicopolitical tensions increased.10

andrás mihály’s self-criticism Although the call for a purge in music was not formulated until October 1950, the groundwork for such an action had been laid months before. In the wake of the Rajk trial, Rákosi had called for Communists to engage in the Leninist tradition of self-criticism, a ceremonial examination of conscience that usually led to public professions of errors in belief or conduct and promises to change, occasionally going so far as to include pleas for clemency. In a February 1950 speech, Rákosi had announced that between 15 March and 1 June

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the leaders of all party organizations should be chosen anew, with special attention to bringing in fresh talent and to removing leaders who were not appropriate for their posts by virtue of ideology or qualifications.11 Rákosi also indicated that the old leadership of each party organization was to give an account of its activities and to practice self-criticism. This policy statement would not apply directly to the Musicians’ Association, which did not have a formal party organization of its own. Instead, its members belonged to party cells in their residential districts or in their places of employment. Within the association, which comprised both party and nonparty composers, an “action committee” (aktiva), a less official Communist group than a party organization, directed the activities of composers who were party members. An inner circle of thirteen or fourteen constituted the action committee’s leadership, which consisted mostly of Communist composers but also included representatives from the government’s Ministry of Education and from the party’s bureaucracy.12 Even though the action committee’s reorganization was not imminent, the party had already begun to apply the new policy of sharper self-criticism to the chairman of the action committee’s leadership, András Mihály. The archives of the Hungarian Workers’ Party preserve two self-critical essays attributed to Mihály, the composer and critic from whom the party had first commissioned articles criticizing Bartók’s legacy in socialist terms. Mihály was an important figure: one of the more significant Hungarian composers of his generation, he was also secretary general of the Opera. The first of the two typescript essays bears the handwritten date January 1950, and the second was probably written soon after the first. The circumstances under which these essays were obtained from Mihály remain unknown, although the first statement seems to have been written immediately after Mihály’s dismissal from his position at the Opera. Written self-criticism was practiced by Communists at all levels of party organization under a wide variety of circumstances. It played a particularly important disciplinary role as part of interrogations in which a party member would be summoned, questioned, and then required to write out and turn over an account of the events under investigation.13 Mihály’s first self-critical statement is an unusual instance of the genre. Although parts of it did contain a confession of errors in the party spirit, the tone was far from humble. Rather, Mihály sought to justify the actions he had taken as secretary general of the Opera, even criticizing harshly the party bureaucrats who, he felt, had failed to support his reform efforts. He obviously believed that he was fulfilling the party’s mission and that officials at a higher level would come to his aid once they understood his

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situation. The second statement, by contrast, took a much more submissive approach: it was a straightforward and detailed enumeration of “serious errors” Mihály had committed in 1948 and 1949. It seems likely that in composing this second statement Mihály was working from a list of errors provided by some official source. Whereas in the first self-criticism he had had difficulty finding any fault at all with his past work, the second self-criticism not only listed his failings at length but also scrutinized the ideological causes of his transgressions. Mihály’s second self-criticism included significant detail about how both he and others perceived his role in discussions of the “Bartók question” in 1950. He acknowledged that he had erred in his role as secretary general of the Opera by not doing enough to prevent Bartók’s music from reaching the stage: The standpoint I represented in the Bartók question was not without fault. That Bartók’s work contains a mixture of both progressive and reactionary ideas is still my conviction today. But now I see (and this is only one example among many) that my intention of solving the Bartók question through praising the Concerto [for Orchestra] was a vain attempt to set up the person of Bartók as a model for the young generation. Here I confused the appearance with the essence. The essence of the concerto is Bartókian loneliness, isolation from society, and pessimism—and the relatively comprehensible, clarified language is only the surface.14 This vacillation in the Bartók question explains why I only superficially and hesitantly carried out the practical matters for which I was responsible following my own Bartók lecture. . . . I should have fought sharply so that at least The Miraculous Mandarin would disappear from the program. I did not do it.15

This self-criticism, nearly or exactly contemporaneous with the writing of Géza Losonczy’s critical article about the performances of Bartók at the Opera, provides an intriguing secret counterpoint to that splashy public statement. It seems likely that Mihály’s self-criticisms were elicited as part of an investigation of the Opera by the Ministry of Education: since Mihály and Aladár Tóth determined the Opera’s programming, they were the central figures in that investigation.16 Mihály’s statements thus served as fodder for Losonczy’s harsh public criticisms of him in the February 1950 article.17 The accuracy of Mihály’s second self-critical statement is questionable: other documents suggest that Mihály did in fact oppose the performance of The Miraculous Mandarin on at least one occasion.18 Mihály had realized by the time of his second self-criticism that his former estimation of Hungarian music as equal to or even superior to Soviet

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music was fundamentally incorrect with respect to party doctrine, and possibly dangerous to his career and to his personal well-being. Not only did he retract his previous statements about Bartók’s superiority, but he also actively asserted a growing admiration for Soviet music. I thought that as a consequence of uneven development an opportunity was open to us Hungarians for the creation of socialist music without and despite Soviet music. The “socialist” music I envisioned, however, would have borne a perilous resemblance to Bartók’s and Kodály’s music. Comrade Zhdanov’s critique, and later the revelation of György Lukács’s deviations, drove this dangerous theory out of my head. I realized that the Hungarian music I praised remained immeasurably far behind Soviet music. . . . I also became convinced that all the outstanding works that were created in Hungarian and Western music over the past fifty years, even the arsenal of refined techniques and occasional capacities for intense expression, mean nothing but the decadence of music and its move toward inhumanity.19

Mihály’s representation of history conflates some events, perhaps to minimize the duration of his errors: far from having his mind changed by Zhdanov, it was in response to Zhdanov’s critique that he first formulated his nationalistic ideas about Hungarian music as the basis for an international socialist music. Mihály ended his second statement with a humble plea: “I hope that this time I have succeeded more fundamentally in finding those errors that marred my culture-political and artistic activity. I believe that after the correction of my errors I can serve the party and the Hungarian people in the current struggle for socialist music, and I will apply all my strength to the achievement of this end.”20 Although Mihály was evidently trying hard to tell party officials what they wanted to hear, there does seem to be an element of sincerity in his supplication as well. The confident tone of his first statement reflected Mihály’s strong belief that the party would act justly; if he was chastised between the writing of his first and second statements, it seems to have convinced him not that the party was unjust, but only that he had truly done wrong. His faith would persist even through the harsher criticisms that were to follow.

the bartók question: still unresolved? The personal wrangling among composers and the political hostility between certain individuals and the party were linked in various ways to the ques-

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tion of each composer’s personal loyalty to Bartók. During the anniversary festivities in September 1950 the party had attempted to treat as resolved all questions about the value of Bartók’s legacy, but as the autumn wore on, musicians and even some officials began to realize that this was not the case. The Musicians’ Association’s Communist action committee met on 4 and 9 November 1950 to discuss the achievements and failures of the association’s work during its first year. At these meetings most of the participants in the discussion commented on the need to clarify exactly which music of Bartók was acceptable. Several composers, including Endre Szervánszky and Pál Kadosa, called for open debate about Bartók’s music, and for its continued presence in the repertory. Széll expressed the conviction that the party’s inept handling of the Bartók question had offered its enemies a valuable opportunity to embarrass the party before the public.21 Thus, after the public relations debacle of the Voice of America broadcast a few months before, questions arose about who was responsible for the party’s policies on Bartók and thereby culpable for the international embarrassment that resulted from these policies. The “Bartók question” came to mean more than the problem of handling Bartók’s legacy in the socialist context; now it also served as a term encompassing the recent scandal. Having already written two self-critical statements for the party ten months before, Mihály may have believed that if personal blame was to be assigned for the Bartók debacle, it would fall upon his shoulders. He had already been removed from his position at the Opera and he may have been aware that further reprisals were possible. As a preemptive defensive measure, Mihály stressed that since the founding of the Ministry of Education the handling of Bartók’s legacy had become a significant source of strain between the action committee’s leadership and the staff of the Ministry. Apparently the existence of an official ban on certain works of Bartók was still known definitively to only a few persons, but Mihály had deduced its existence and believed it was the Ministry’s doing. He accused the Ministry of “leftist radicalism,” the tendency to progress toward a goal more quickly than the party in general would judge wise or desirable. Mihály seems genuinely to have believed that the party, as the provider of freedom, would not approve of the Ministry’s overzealous censorship.22 Both Széll and Szabó came down hard on Mihály both for denying any responsibility in the Bartók question and for encouraging an atmosphere of personal distrust and competition. Széll, himself highly placed in the party’s Agitation and Propaganda Division, cautioned that musicians should practice self-criticism rather then blaming the Ministry’s policies. Probably to protect his own department, Széll rejected calls for an inquiry into

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the origins of the party’s anti-Bartók policies: “I do not consider it important that we track down the source of this anti-Bartók sentiment. It would be difficult and it is also not important.”23 Széll went on to allege that Székely and Mihály had spoken dishonestly and that they were not assisting the party adequately. Szabó similarly accused Székely and Mihály of colluding against others in setting musical policy, suggesting that they had arranged the outcome of important meetings in advance. The assertion that Székely and Mihály were operating together as a clique was potentially very damaging. Lenin and his followers had long decried factionalism, the tendency of those who opposed particular elements of party policy to join together into groups with their own agendas; and a prominent element of the fictitious accusations against Rajk and the others tried with him was that they had operated as a “gang” in plotting against the state.24 It was not such a great step from the perception of a clique to the suspicion of treasonous behavior, and Szabó’s accusation was framed so as to indicate that Mihály and Székely’s clique, which undermined the Musicians’ Association’s decision-making processes, was a significant form of subversion in the administration of musical matters.

székely and mihály come to trial On 16 and 21 December 1950 two further meetings were held at which the party’s stance on several controversial issues was debated, this time under the auspices of the Culture-Political Working Group of the Party’s Central Lecturing Office.25 The Central Lecturing Office developed lecture material for the ideological and technical training of educators. The acknowledged purpose of these meetings was to evaluate a new lecture given by Mihály on the subject of contemporary Hungarian music, weeding out ideologically incorrect material so that the most correct standpoint would be disseminated. Another purpose of the meetings, however, emerged as they progressed: they served as a show trial in camera, in which the education minister, József Révai, conducted an inquisition into Mihály’s and Székely’s activities and ultimately found them unacceptable. Several old problems were revisited, including Mihály’s activities at the Opera and Székely’s as director of the Bartók Society. Still a concern of pivotal importance, moreover, was the Bartók question, which had now festered for months. Mihály’s public role in discussions of Bartók’s music was a central element of the accusations against him. János Breuer has written of “Bartók’s trial,” describing how Bartók’s music was effectively tried and convicted in published

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music criticism between 1948 and 1950;26 but as archival documents show, it was also Mihály’s and Székely’s trial, and they were the ones who suffered the consequences. Mihály’s lecture—presumably delivered at the request of the Central Lecturing Office—compared the state of music in Hungary in 1950 with that earlier in the century, suggesting avenues for further progress in the areas of music for the masses (including folk song and mass songs), new art music, music criticism, pedagogy, and the work of the Musicians’ Association.27 Mihály criticized the unjustified preservation of the “mood and content” of Bartók’s and Kodály’s music in contemporary music, offering his own Requiem Symphony and his string quartet as examples that incorrectly followed Bartók.28 Still, he asserted, composers were now better equipped to handle these repertories than ever before, and they would transform aspects of Bartók’s and Kodály’s styles for socialist use. Mihály also broached the subject of disagreements among Communist composers, worrying aloud that, to a member of the association, it might appear that a certain group of musicians enjoyed a monopoly over both compositional progress and the right to criticize others. In stating this problem, Mihály strategically asserted that all the members of the association’s Communist action committee (including himself, Székely, and Szabó, among others) were on the same side, or at least in the same group, in the eyes of the association’s membership. The question of cliques—or, more specifically, of who belonged to which clique—would become a persistent theme of these meetings. As the discussion opened, though, those present were more eager to discuss the substantive ideas Mihály had communicated in his lecture. Szabó, Csillag, Szervánszky, and Kadosa in turn took issue with various points Mihály had brought up, challenging the lack of discussion of Bartók in the lecture and questioning Mihály’s position on the value of gypsy music. Révai, apparently unsatisfied with the course the debate was taking, stepped in to challenge the participants to make the debate politically “sharper.”29 He stated that Mihály’s paper, with its generally optimistic tone, did not address the problems and failings of musical life comprehensively enough. In terms that vividly echoed the anonymous call for a purge in music, Révai suggested that, although concrete improvements had been achieved in socialist realist literature and painting, no similar results had been obtained in the field of music—and the party’s duty was to uncover the reasons for this backwardness. He then enumerated the topics that he felt would be most germane for further debate: the treatment of text and music, composers’ appropriation of folk song, the problem of cliques, and attitudes to-

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ward the tradition of Bartók and Kodály. Révai linked the question of cliques specifically to the Bartók question, charging that because no genuine debate was possible among composers, the Bartók question had become impossible to resolve. Alluding to the disagreements between Szabó and Székely, Révai announced that the party would step in to resolve these conflicts so that they would not continue to hinder musical progress. In so doing, he invited specific criticism of Székely and Mihály in terms more appropriate to the courtroom than to any other setting: “What are the charges against Székely and against Mihály’s activity, in practical cadre politics, in musicalcultural politics, and in creative work?” As Révai’s formulation suggested, much of the rest of the meeting on 16 December, and its continuation on 21 December, would be devoted to exploring charges of misconduct against Mihály and Székely. After Révai’s request for charges (and following a brief interruption by Székely in which he disputed Révai’s interpretation of events and griped about Szabó’s failure to accept criticism) various participants in the discussion brought a series of complaints against Mihály and Székely. “The greatest deficiency of András Mihály’s lecture,” asserted the composer Béla Tardos, “is the lack of sincerity.”30 Tardos said he felt sure that Mihály and Székely were working together, and he implied that perhaps a clique was responsible for the general problems affecting composers—particularly the lack of adequate resources for the performance, publication, and recording of new works. The composer György Ránki, in his turn, described an illegitimate faction of composers within the leadership who used their influence to promote their own works at the expense of other music. Whereas Mihály had delineated a divide between the action committee leadership and the association as a whole,Tardos and Ránki isolated Mihály and Székely as the problem, exposing them to charges of factionalism and sabotage. Mihály attempted to respond to these accusations, but frequent interruptions by Révai kept him off balance. Révai and Márton Horváth, the chairman of the Culture-Political Working Group, hammered Mihály with questions that were specifically intended to make him admit to a conflict between his statements about socialist music, voiced in critical articles and public lectures, and his own methods of putting his theories into practice in his compositions. This conflict was painfully obvious, for Mihály’s music, particularly his melodies, bore traces of Bartók’s style—even during the years of his party-mandated critiques of Bartók. mihály: My First [Requiem] Symphony was the first work that ended up on this list [of banned works]. Then the difference between my journalistic work and my compositions

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was so glaring that the comrades said that it was impossible to perform such a work. It was not easy to renounce it, because a person doesn’t write his works without conviction. horváth: And your journalistic work? mihály: The question is completely justified, and yet it is not. We didn’t speak so concretely in journalism that it was possible to know [how to apply the same principles to composition]. I created my journalistic work with the same level of conviction. . . . révai: Do you have two kinds of conviction? mihály: There is one conviction—but saying that something should be easily understandable is different from judging what is easily understandable. Even today we cannot say which of Bartók’s works are easily understandable. This has to be tried out on the public. . . . We must bring up the question: for which works was elimination appropriate and for which was it not?31

Mihály’s staunch denials demonstrate a significant degree of courage, for Révai was one of the most powerful men in the party. Mihály’s insistence on viewing his own actions in a nuanced and conditional way could not, of course, sit well with the prevailing all-or-nothing approach to ideological correctness. Yet at moments such as this he displayed a desperate determination to have the party acknowledge the complexity of his generation’s musical and political experience. For lack of time, Horváth adjourned the meeting. It was continued on 21 December.32 On this second occasion, Mihály was permitted to give an opening statement in which he defended himself against the allegations that had been brought against him in the previous meeting. In response to Révai’s charge that Mihály, as a follower of Bartók, was disloyal to the party, Mihály sought to differentiate his music and that of the “post-Bartók generation” from Bartók’s.33 He went on to repudiate the nationalist position he had taken in his 1948 article in Fórum. In so doing, he still resisted the implication that he had been disloyal to the party: he admitted that in accepting the Soviet Communist Party’s resolution on music, he had “turned the resolution on its head” by interpreting it in a way that preferred Hungarian models to Soviet ones, but he stated boldly that at least he had accepted the principles of the resolution, which was more than many Hungarian composers had done. Mihály again expressed his understanding of the interpersonal conflicts by dividing the players into groups, this time according

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to who had accepted the resolution and who had rejected it, placing himself with Szabó and Székely and opposing that group to Szervánszky and the pro-Bartók musicologist Bence Szabolcsi. Indeed, Mihály criticized Szervánszky several times over the course of these meetings; considering that the two had expressed very similar viewpoints as recently as 1948, this seems an unsavory attempt at saving himself at the expense of his openly oppositional colleague. (Perhaps because of his reputation as the most talented composer of his generation, Szervánszky attained the status of “holy fool”: his conspicuous deviations from party doctrine never became a threat to his career.) After his insinuations against Szervánszky, Mihály continued to rebut Révai’s charge of hypocrisy with an examination of the motives behind the composition of his 1948 Requiem Symphony, in which he had borrowed extensively from Bartók’s style. It is not true that the contradiction between my Bartók lecture and the Requiem Symphony follows from the insincerity of my ideological or compositional work. I wrote this symphony over a period of three and a half years in memory of my comrades who died in the fight against fascism and in memory of my mother—its content was therefore deep and sincere. The mode of expression came out of what was musically available for use after the liberation: from Bartók’s and to a certain extent Hindemith’s language. I confess that I felt during the entire endeavor that I was turning to the public sincerely and comprehensibly. After the performance of the work it was not an easy task to come to the insight that the formalist techniques and the musical argot cover up the content that was, for me, so important and sincere.34

Mihály’s impassioned words were a last-ditch effort to convince Révai and the assembled musicians that although at the time of the symphony’s composition the party’s directives about musical comprehensibility had been far from clear, he had nevertheless striven to fulfill them—even if he had failed. Mihály’s second presentation, like his first, was followed by a series of responses that seem likely to have been prepared in advance, even though this time Mihály’s lecture was not made available to the respondents before it was presented. Access to Mihály’s text would have been unimportant in the preparation of this meeting in any case, since its main objective was to bring witnesses who would testify to Mihály’s and Székely’s disloyalty and incompetence. As he had begun to do during the first meeting, Révai interrupted many of the speakers when it seemed that by direct ques-

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tioning he could obtain a statement that would more clearly contradict Mihály’s or Székely’s testimony. Csillag, Révai’s subordinate at the Ministry of Education, explicitly characterized Mihály as disloyal to the party. Révai also elicited from Csillag a direct contradiction of Mihály’s numerous assertions of fundamental agreement with Szabó: révai: Is it true what they say, that it was Szabó-Székely-Mihály against Csillag? csillag: I never experienced such unity. Not once did I experience a united standpoint between Comrades Mihály and Szabó.35

Szabó’s comments corroborated Csillag’s testimony. Szabó claimed that when he had returned home from Moscow, Mihály and Székely had controlled every aspect of musical life and had used their power against him: Comrade Mihály spoke about how they trampled me down because they could not accept the results that I brought with me; in principle they could not take up the struggle, and the positions they held in the party made it possible for them to kick me around. . . . To brush aside a not-insignificant composer and party member is not the kind of phenomenon that we can accept without further consequences. Why did they not try to persuade me that what they said was correct? Why was it that without such persuasion, they attacked me and crushed me like a dangerous enemy?—me, who never wanted any kind of position, whose only desire was to build and work. I would like it very much if they would say what I did to cause them to treat me like an enemy.36

Szabó’s plaintive remarks can only seem disingenuous, given how powerful he had become by 1950: he was the acting president of the Musicians’ Association and an obvious beneficiary of party authority. Szabó further bolstered the perception of his own loyalty by explaining that he had remained constant even when many others had not, employing much the same strategy with respect to Mihály as Mihály had with Szervánszky. Testimony from the director of the Ironworkers’ Chorus and Gyula Békési, a member of the chorus, provided further accusations against Mihály and Székely from an undeniably authentic “worker’s” perspective. The choral director accused the two of alienating composers who otherwise would be serving the cause of socialist music, including Kodály, Szabó, Tardos, and Sárközy. Békési portrayed Székely as a power-hungry, manipulative dictator whose “suspiciously many-sided activity” could not be criticized without fear of reprisal, all the while emphasizing that his own status as a worker

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should make his testimony particularly believable: “But we are workers and neither Comrade Székely nor his clique can harm us, because we do our cultural work unselfishly after our regular daily work. Although we feel that we have the heart rather than the knowledge for solving these great problems of Hungarian musical life, we also feel that at last we must bring the damaging work of this clique before the party, and we ask the comrades to examine this question with the kind of thoroughness with which our party typically creates order in such matters.”37 Mrs. Imre Garai, an administrative employee at the Opera House, echoed the charges and the tone by accusing Mihály of one of the most dreadful crimes imaginable under the dictatorship of the proletariat: “I feel that Comrade Mihály and the majority of the members of the action committee leadership are in terms of their attitude and character nothing more than bourgeois artists.” The self-righteous approach taken by Szabó, Csapó, Békési, and Garai assured that their testimony would seem more substantial than Mihály’s as the theatrical demonstration of competing loyalties was played out. A significant portion of Székely’s defense against the charges of careerism and obstruction was simply that his role in the Bartók question had been a subsidiary one, and that therefore the greater part of the responsibility fell on others. Despite the overwrought tone and ill-conceived argumentativeness of Székely’s remarks, which were full of conspiracy theories as lurid as those of the party’s own making, Székely did reveal one area of great importance to the ideological debates. He voiced a suspicion that Szabó was conspiring to alter the character of Hungarian music, saying that “the majority of Hungarian composers believed that Szabó wants to Sovietize Hungarian music.”38 Mihály, too, had felt that Szabó represented an agenda more Soviet than Hungarian. In his opening remarks about Hungarian composers’ relationships to the tradition of Bartók and Kodály, he had noted that Szabó personified an exception “who developed in the Soviet Union in the direction of Soviet music—at the cost, however, that he did not strive toward the creation of a characteristically Hungarian music.”39 Székely and Mihály’s counteraccusation against Szabó was that he was hindering the development of a uniquely Hungarian music, which had been a goal of many Hungarian musicians since early in the century. This accusation expressed their concerns about the future of their national music just as surely as it revealed their innocence of the power disparity involved in Soviet-Hungarian cultural relations. It is remarkable that Mihály and Székely still believed that their desire for a Hungarian music could overcome the party’s insistence on slavish emulation of Soviet models. Perhaps the achievements of Bartók and Kodály in creating a national

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music had left such an indelible mark that these composers were unable to alter their outlook. In any case, their naïveté was a serious liability as they strove to clear their names. Széll, as a highly placed party functionary, was a more canny observer; but he, too, sensed the relationship to the Bartók question of the reception of Soviet music in Hungary, as suggested by the curious place he gave this question in his comments: “There still lurks today a certain anti-Soviet attitude. The association has no connection with the Soviet association. There is hardly a premiere of Soviet works outside of the Radio. There are no translations of Soviet books or articles. Mihály himself did not cite Chulaki’s article in the bibliography to his lecture. The Bartók question is not resolved.”40 The statement about the Bartók question—which otherwise would stand out in this context as a non sequitur—indicates that in Széll’s mind the difficulty of resolving the Bartók question was intertwined with the problem of eliminating anti-Soviet feeling among Hungarian musicians. In this view Hungarians had remained so bound to their own national traditions that they were incapable of absorbing the Soviet culture that would teach them how to become a good satellite nation: the presence of an internationally recognized luminary of contemporary music in their heritage prevented their musical assimilation into the Soviet bloc. Until Bartók was eliminated as a viable model for composition, Hungarians surely would have a hard time adopting Zakharov or Shostakovich as part of their own tradition. Révai gave a long summation at the end of the second meeting, explaining that Mihály’s critique of his own past errors was inadequate because he had not offered it spontaneously: “One has to say on the basis of the results up to this point that we must maintain certain reservations with respect to the sincerity of these self-criticisms, because they had to be forced.”41 Révai’s most damaging critique of Mihály concerned his antiSoviet biases. Despite the fact that Mihály had retracted his anti-Soviet statements in his self-criticism nearly a year before, Révai continued to censure him on these grounds: this public rebuke would serve as an example to others in a way that the unpublished self-criticism could not. Révai rehashed Mihály’s 1948 article in Fórum, which had asserted that the breakthrough in socialist music would not necessarily arise in the Soviet Union, and renewed the charge that Mihály had stubbornly refused to learn anything from the past experience of Hungary’s Soviet mentors. Further, he connected Mihály’s “anti-Soviet” thinking with Lukács’s attitudes toward Hungarian and Soviet literature. That Mihály and Székely had erred in failing to appreciate Soviet mu-

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sic, Révai continued, extended even to their treatment of Szabó as a Soviettrained musical emissary to Hungary. Stating that he did not “find it necessary to conduct some sort of criminal investigation,” Révai decided that if Szabó saw Mihály and Székely as a clique, then they probably were acting as one. Although Szabó was certainly not the only emissary of Soviet music in Hungary, Révai added, he was perhaps the most active in bringing the ideals of Soviet music to bear in Hungary. “This,” said Révai, “is the ideological root of the opposition against him. Those who opposed him obviously impeded the progress of Hungarian musical life in the direction in which progress is necessary. Therefore, with reservations about what is to be criticized in Szabó, we may make clear that opposing him means opposing Soviet music.”42 The punishment of two of Hungary’s “home Communist” musicians for subverting the activities of a “Muscovite” thus parallels the pattern set up in the Rajk trial. The Soviets and the “Muscovite” Communists mistrusted the Communists who had participated in Hungary’s underground Communist movement between the wars; as a result, the latter tended to be replaced by those who had undergone formal party education in the Soviet Union. Révai addressed the rest of his remarks mainly to the question of Bartók’s role and the problem of how to use folk music in art music (described in chapter 4). Révai emphasized that Bartók was no longer considered a good model for new composition, yet he also deemed it inappropriate to discuss this matter publicly. According to Révai, the Ministry’s theoretical positions on artistic problems had been unimpeachable: the only fault lay in officials’ inability to express their position correctly. “So in the Bartók question, too, they instinctively felt their way toward the right direction. They saw that the Bartók problem was blocking the development of composers in the proper direction—like blinders. In order to reach a breakthrough in this area they had to remove the blinders. But in the way they formulated it there was some kind of national tactlessness.”43 By “tactlessness” Révai meant the embarrassment occasioned by the Voice of America’s attention to Bartók’s suppressed music five months before.44 The ban itself was entirely justified, according to party theory—but it had been unwise to carry out a campaign against Bartók in such a way that it could turn into a domestic or international public relations problem for the party. Had the problem been handled with greater tact, Révai implied, perhaps the West might not have noticed. Révai’s emphasis on problems of language rather than of policy enabled him to avoid conceding that his Ministry’s decision to criticize Bartók had backfired. It would have been inappropriate for a high-level represen-

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tative of the party to admit to a policy gaffe, for too much depended on the party’s supposed omniscience. Downgrading an error in tactics to a mere “tactlessness” allowed the party’s utopian power and Révai’s personal authority to remain unscathed. As his remarks went on, Révai became more and more adamant in his statements against Bartók, eventually lapsing into a tirade: In connection with the Bartók ballets, about which there was the big ruckus (to put it plainly) when they accused us of being against Bartók in general, here we turned against Menyhért Lengyel and Béla Balázs, and not primarily against Bartók.45 But Bartók too was accountable for whom he took up with. The subject of The Miraculous Mandarin is garbage. Bartók wanted to express something great, that love is greater than death, but Menyhért Lengyel cannot express something like that. And therefore we are not in favor of its being performed very often. Bluebeard is a pseudo–folk tale. In this period Bartók was mystical. This is not a folk tale, because if it were nobody would have anything against it. We are in favor of new operas being performed, which afterward must be judged. But even liberalism has a limit.46

After this agitated monologue, he abruptly changed the subject, appointed a committee to study the problems that had been raised, and adjourned the meeting. Révai did not immediately pronounce sentence upon Mihály and Székely; he awaited the committee’s recommendation.47 The party continued to collect evidence against Mihály and Székely after the December meetings. On 9 January 1951 György Ránki wrote to JenW Széll at Széll’s request, summarizing a conversation that had taken place shortly before that date. Ránki stated that though most of his wealthier contemporaries had become followers of Bartók, he had chosen to emulate Kodály instead, and in so doing “fell upon the correct path: the path of socialist realism.”48 Ránki complained that a clique consisting of “a small group of true and false Bartók followers and the careerists who have joined up with them” had long oppressed faithful socialist composers such as himself. The division of loyalties Ránki described is not altogether surprising: Szabó, too, had been a Kodály disciple and maintained an affinity with his teacher’s style throughout much of his career. Ránki’s identification of the interpersonal divisions along lines of personal and musical loyalty to Bartók or Kodály further confirms the connections between the trial of Mihály and Székely and the resolution of the Bartók question. Even though Mihály and Székely had published scathing critiques of Bartók’s art, their fates were tied to Bartók’s in a manner over which they had little control. Personal rivalries,

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their status as “home Communists,” the perception that they remained loyal to Bartók’s music, and the belief that they were hostile to Soviet influence all contributed to their demotion.

more criticisms and self-criticisms When the committee finally issued its decision, it became clear that Mihály’s and Székely’s “trial” would markedly affect their careers. An unsigned memorandum to Révai that seems to have originated in the Agitation and Propaganda Division stipulated: In the area of musical life András Mihály and Endre Székely cannot hold leading functions. From this it follows that they must resign from membership in the board of the association. We further recommend that Mihály resign his membership in the Music Academy’s board of directors, that Székely resign from the membership of the Opera’s board of directors, and that likewise both of them resign from their offices in the Association of Hungarian Librettists, Composers and Music Publishers. Only Székely must resign from the editorial committee of the New Music Review; Mihály may continue to fulfill that function. Székely’s resignation from the position as the director of the Radio Chorus may be considered if we can find an appropriate replacement. The above decisions must not mean the obstruction of Székely’s and Mihály’s compositional work. The Ministry will ensure appropriate compositional commissions for both of them.49

It is noteworthy that the recommendation did not go so far as to throw the composers out of work completely. On the contrary, they would receive support so that they could spend their newly increased free time composing.50 Although Communist Party purges had traditionally punished writers and intellectuals harshly, composers tended more often than not to escape this fate.51 The emphasis placed by Stalinist regimes on spectacular public display suggests a reason for this leniency. Music was essential to these spectacles—many of which even took place in the Opera House and were broadcast nationwide—and the party depended on its composers to produce a steady stream of festive new works for a variety of state holidays. The relative dearth of composers who were talented, loyal, and productive may have mitigated the force of the reprimand somewhat. In a time when Hungary had few outstanding composers and even fewer who were truly loyal to the party, it was essential to keep them working if at all possible. Beyond the personal consequences for Mihály and Székely, the party also

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determined that institutional consequences should follow. The Musicians’ Association would undergo a fundamental restructuring in the spring of 1951: it would expel the majority of music teachers and performers from its membership, leaving a much smaller organization of composers, scholars, and critics. Mihály, Székely, and Aladár Tóth were explicitly excluded from serving on the board of the new association, although not from membership in it. Additionally, the party would increase its control over the association with the formation of a real party organization to replace the more informal action committee, and the “Muscovite” Szabó would take over the leadership of the action committee from Mihály. It was also recommended that both Mihály and Székely practice self-criticism again when the party organization was formally established.52 Thus, though Mihály and Székely could continue as members of the association, their survival came at the cost of continual self-abnegation. Szabó helped them along with another enumeration of their errors at the first meeting of the new party organization on 1 June 1951, chastising them for their “disloyalty, unprincipled careerism, and power-hungry attitude, under the aggravating influence of which our emerging professional and musicopolitical debate degenerated ideologically into unprincipled, superficial, and sterile bickering.”53 In response, Mihály thanked Szabó for his helpful criticisms and conceded once again how wrong his words and deeds had been, though he always maintained that at least his intentions were honorable. At the end of the meeting Szabó pronounced Mihály’s self-criticism “acceptable,” although this would not be Mihály’s last opportunity for public mortification. Székely, by contrast, refused to engage in further self-criticism, arguing heatedly that his previous self-critical statements should suffice. Szabó, in turn, pronounced that he feared Székely had not grasped “the seriousness of the situation” and suggested ominously that he reconsider his position. Perhaps it was the difference between Mihály’s servile acceptance of the party’s continued criticism and Székely’s vehement rejection of it that determined the difference in their fates. Both continued to compose and each remained employed in the field of music after the unpleasant events of 1950. Mihály became a noted teacher of chamber music at the Music Academy and eventually served once again in important posts at the Opera and at Hungarian Radio.54 The fate of Székely, a less talented composer, remains more obscure. He was eventually sent to Sztálinváros (Stalin City), which was known before and after that time as Dunaújváros, to conduct municipal and workers’ choruses.55 As its name suggests, Sztálinváros was touted as the ultimate socialist industrial city; in 1950, however, it did not yet ex-

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ist except as a grandiose plan to be imposed on a tiny rural community on the Danube, roughly sixty kilometers south of central Budapest. Thus, Székely’s punishment was nothing less than exile from the nation’s musical center. As for the Bartók question, the party declared the matter closed as of December 1950. In a report to the party’s powerful Political Committee on 20 September 1951, Zoltán Biró56 explained, with Révai’s approval, that the meetings held the previous December had done their job: “The ‘CulturePolitical Working Group’ clarified in a series of high-quality debates several fundamental problems of our cultural life. Among other things, it showed the way to a correct evaluation of our relationship to Hungarian musical traditions—especially to Bartók and Kodály.”57 Of course, not everyone accepted the announced closure as final. Indeed, the suppression of Bartók’s music would only increase in musical and political importance in the coming years.

mihály’s concerto for cello (1953): sounds of dissent? The first major work Mihály composed after his humiliating demotion was a concerto for violoncello, first performed at the second Hungarian Music Week in November 1953. Perhaps the most significant feature of the Cello Concerto, vividly apparent to the listener hearing it for the first time, is that it makes frequent and explicit reference to Bartók’s music. Because Mihály’s political denunciation was so closely tied to his approach to this repertory, it is noteworthy that his first musical statement after a few years of silence engages it again so directly. A close look at the concerto may help us to understand Mihály’s and other intellectuals’ responses to the ongoing conflict about Bartók’s role in Hungarian music. The beginning of the concerto bears a textural resemblance to the opening of Bartók’s Third Piano Concerto: both feature pulsating background textures in the strings and a long singing melody for the soloist. Mihály’s use of the harps for a shimmering effect also recalls the opening of Bartók’s 1938 Violin Concerto. These resemblances to two of Bartók’s most accessible works may be understood as an attempt to write in a legitimate, acceptable Bartókian style, for these two Bartók concertos were repertory works in the early 1950s, often performed and often broadcast. By taking these works as a point of reference, Mihály may have been trying to reestablish himself as a trustworthy Communist composer. Both of the main themes of the first movement also display traits widely considered to be specifically Hungarian: the first (example 8a) features a Lydian

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András Mihály in the Alkotók Haza (Creative Artists’ House), Sárospatak, Hungary, 1955. Photo: Magyar Nemzeti Múzeum (Hungarian National Museum). Used by permission.

fourth scale degree and the second (example 8b) has front-accented dotted rhythms.58 Since Communist dogma emphasized that music should exhibit a distinctly national style, this would also have been an important legitimizing feature. The second movement, however, encompasses a wider variety of referents, including some of the Bartók works that had been judged harshly by party officials, and some whose status was ambiguous. The movement’s introduction features a melody in the bass clarinet (example 9a) that creeps chromatically in the involuted style characteristic of the middle of Bartók’s career, particularly of the Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta (example 9b) and the Cantata profana (see example 5c, p. 41).59 Unlike Bartók, Mihály chose to mitigate this “creeping” effect when he used a variant of this melody as the main theme of the movement; he smoothed it out into

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Example 8. a. Mihály, Cello Concerto, I, mm. 4–20. b. Mihály, Cello Concerto, I, mm. 219–226.

a “normalized,” diatonic form, preserving only a bit of the chromatic effect at the end of the tune (example 9c). In smoothing the melody, Mihály seems to have sought a compromise between Bartók’s chromaticism and official injunctions against modernist techniques. The thematic material of the central section of this movement (example 10a) alludes to a memorable theme from Bartók’s opera, Duke Bluebeard’s Castle (example 10b).60 This theme, dramatically elaborated by rhapsodic cello cadenzas, contrasts with the more distant, reserved material of the outer sections. The intense, emotionally laden sound of the solo instrument here resonates with the idea of tragic loneliness highlighted in the opera, an idea antithetical to the prevailing socialist realist aesthetics of cheery communal effort. As Bartók’s only opera, Bluebeard’s Castle was never banned outright—but its performance was restricted, and the work remained con-

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Example 9. a. Mihály, Cello Concerto, II, mm. 1–4. b. Bartók, Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta, I, mm. 1–2. c. Mihály, Cello Concerto, II, mm. 4–12.

troversial. As a former secretary general of the Opera, Mihály would have been particularly aware of Bluebeard’s ambiguous status. The end of this central section contains a near quotation from the third movement of Bartók’s Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta (example 10c)—a work not explicitly forbidden but rarely performed. Not only is Mihály’s allusion (example 10d) highlighted through its motivic shape and its orchestration, but its emergence out of the familiar cadenza material also points didactically to the presence of this motive earlier in the movement, both in the cello cadenza (the box in example 10a) and in the chro-

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matic tag at the end of the normalized form of the main theme (the box in example 9c). This overt transformation allows both Bluebeard’s Castle and the Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta to resonate throughout the movement. The reminiscence of the Music for Strings continues into the recapitulation of the A section. The normalized melody had originally been accompanied by some elements of Bartók’s trademark night-music style: tremolo in the strings and grace notes and trills in the woodwinds. Here, as in the Music for Strings, the melody returns with even more elaborate nocturnal surroundings, most notably the celesta and harp glissandi. Mihály’s appropriation of the dark and mysterious night-music style as the most prominent texture of the second movement was more risky than his references to Bartók’s later works in the first: by echoing music that Sándor Asztalos had called “monstrous” and inappropriate to socialist life, he opened himself to the possibility of censure.61 In the coda of the second movement Mihály placed three more allusions prominently in the solo cello part: first a brief cadenza (example 11a) recalling a motive from Bartók’s banned Fifth String Quartet (example 11b), leading into a reminiscence of the theme from the first movement of Mihály’s concerto (example 8a), and finally the transformation of part of that theme into a motto from Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra. (Compare Bartók’s motto in example 11c to the transformed theme in example 11d.)62 This transformation, like the transformation of the motive from the Music for Strings, is didactic in character: by revealing his methods step by step, Mihály indicated that his theme is derived from Bartók’s concerto in a way that few audience members could miss. This progression of ideas leads us back from questionable territory (Duke Bluebeard’s Castle, the Music for Strings, and especially the Fifth Quartet) toward safer ground: the lyrical theme from the first movement and the reference to the Concerto for Orchestra, a repertory favorite of the early 1950s. The third movement of Mihály’s concerto is a lighthearted dance in which the cello and orchestra trade stanzas of a folksy tune. This movement’s innocuous populism contrasts sharply with the intense and allusive second movement. Even here, though, Mihály may have had Bartók in mind. Many of Bartók’s finales are fast and dancelike in tone; furthermore, the trajectory of Mihály’s concerto from a light, fast movement to a dark, interior space and back into the light echoes a predilection seen in some of Bartók’s symmetrical works, such as the Fifth Quartet. Yet the dance movement was also a solid choice for a composer who wanted to end an orchestral work on an optimistic note, in the spirit of socialist realism. Mihály may well have

The Politics of Dissent Example 10. a. Mihály, Cello Concerto, II, mm. 39–40. b. Bartók, Duke Bluebeard’s Castle, m. 16. c. Bartók, Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta, III, m. 46. d. Mihály, Cello Concerto, II, m. 73.

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Example 11. a. Mihály, Cello Concerto, II, mm. 106–107. b. Bartók, Fifth Quartet, IV, mm. 91–94. c. Bartók, Concerto for Orchestra, I, mm. 76–78. d. Mihály, Cello Concerto, II, mm. 115–117.

intended to take advantage of the confluence of these two traditions as he concluded his composition. On the whole, then, the Cello Concerto treads a cautious path. The bulk of the music, including the entirety of the first and third movements, draws on officially sanctioned styles: the more controversial a work of Bartók’s, the subtler Mihály’s reference to it. Likewise, some of the most vivid allusions are accomplished through effects of orchestration, a musical element

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that is difficult to quantify or to criticize under the Zhdanovian criteria. One could thus describe it as a measured approach to the question of rehabilitating Bartók’s style. Yet the shape of the work as a whole is profoundly Bartókian, and the specific references to Bartók’s controversial works suggest an unwillingness to let that music slip out of the composing tradition. The rhetoric of the Cello Concerto suggests an argument already familiar from Mihály’s censured writings: that Bartók’s more modern techniques, judiciously transformed, could have a place in a genuinely socialist symphonic work. Mihály’s concerto also makes the case that Bartók’s more difficult works would continue to sound in the night, or in the mind of the creative individual, even as the outer world contented itself with simpler music.This stand, however carefully couched, shows courage, especially since Mihály had already borne the brunt of official displeasure because of his position on Bartók’s music. Mihály’s concerto was premiered during the second Hungarian Music Week in November 1953. Its audience received it warmly. Tamás VetW, then a music student, called the work “deep and poetic,” adding, “This is the kind of music that needs no explanation—it speaks for itself.”63 He even complimented Mihály on his deft integration of quotations into an original work. VetW’s enraptured response suggests that at least some listeners felt the work was far more than an exercise in pastiche: it allowed some of Bartók’s silenced music to speak again in a way that could not fail to move Bartók’s devotees. Some were not as pleased with the Bartók quotations. At a public discussion held to evaluate the Hungarian Music Week, Szabó issued a stern warning against the danger of epigonism, stating firmly that “realism can be achieved only through original music.”64 Comparing Mihály unfavorably to the accessible Bartók of the late works, Szabó denounced Mihály’s borrowings, noting that “just because someone is Bartókian doesn’t mean that he’s Bartók.”65 Mihály’s appropriation of elements from a variety of Bartók’s works contradicted the sanitized, circumscribed image of Bartók the party had tried to construct through its ban; the borrowings therefore offended those who desired to keep that image in place. Szabó’s remarks suggest that with the Cello Concerto Mihály had rubbed salt into an open wound by raising again the question of Bartók’s appropriateness as a model for new Hungarian socialist music. Even without Szabó’s approval, the work was judged compliant enough with prevailing socialist norms to be performed; although it brought up issues the party had hoped to remove from discussion, it was still one of the more important Hungarian orchestral works of its time, and it continued to

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be played after its premiere. In the black-and-white terms of cold war cultural criticism, Western commentators assigned value to dissident speech in proportion to the personal danger it posed for its speaker. In those terms, Mihály’s concerto cannot be called a dissident work at all; but it did not offer unequivocal support for the state’s musical agenda, either. One can certainly read in the concerto Mihály’s personal need to work out the relationship between Bartók’s music and the aesthetics laid out by the party; and it seems evident that the work tests ways of evoking forbidden works in a legitimate guise; but it would be an exaggeration to conclude that the piece indicated a dangerous stance on the part of its composer. It seems particularly important not to overdramatize the dissident force of this music because the political situation had already begun to change. As Richard Taruskin has pointed out, dissent was not a viable option under a well-functioning totalitarian order: only as social and political controls began to weaken did it become possible to express oppositional points of view without immediate and harsh reprisal.66 Since one could criticize the official dogma only when already tacitly permitted to do so, in periods of political upheaval dissent became a practice of testing the waters, taking smaller, then greater risks to determine more clearly where the boundary between the sayable and the unsayable lay. Mihály’s concerto is a boundary-testing work in this sense: it emerged after Stalin’s death, in a period of turmoil, when a Communist opposition to the Stalinist regime was beginning to find its voice. However tentative a statement the concerto may be, in its own sphere it did test the limits of acceptability in politically and musically meaningful ways as a small contribution to that emerging opposition. Mihály’s most publicly visible activity after 1950 was his role as founder and conductor of the Budapest Chamber Ensemble, starting in the mid1960s. In the 1970s, when programming such music became permissible again, he conducted and recorded a wide variety of twentieth-century works with the ensemble, including Bartók’s Three Village Scenes, Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire, Webern’s Lieder, op. 8, and Boulez’s Pli selon pli.67 Mihály’s role in bringing back these previously suppressed works might tempt us to see the composer as a dissident in the sense usually imagined in the West (the bold and virtuous man facing down threats or tanks to stand up for his values). Yet more than dissidence or any other heroic trope of the cold war, these performances reveal Mihály’s remarkable adaptability. By the 1970s the Hungarian government had recognized the prestige value of modern music in Western Europe, and it allowed Mihály and the Chamber Ensemble to perform occasionally in the West with state sanction. It seems highly significant that the Chamber Ensemble’s first performance took place at the

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Darmstadt summer courses for new music, the most renowned Western haven for modernism. In this situation it is impossible to decide who was using whom: the state used Mihály for its own propaganda purposes, to show off its modern musical capabilities abroad, even as Mihály used state resources to perform and rehabilitate modern works that interested him. If he wished to remain an active composer and performer within the state socialist system of which he was a part, there was no way in which Mihály could make music without becoming complicit in the workings of state power—the state power that persecuted him, and the state power in which he apparently continued to have faith. This thoroughgoing and relentless complicity is perhaps the most poignant aspect of Mihály’s troubled career. Compromised by his own actions and by a changing political situation that constantly rendered his past actions suspect, Mihály nonetheless found ways of working with and against state power to ensure his personal and professional survival.

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Epilogue East Bartók’s Difficult Truths and the Hungarian Revolution of 1956

The Hungarian ban on Bartók’s most modernist works remained in place from its inception in 1950 through 1955. As the tenth anniversary of Bartók’s death drew near, however, Hungarian officials were concerned about a possible recurrence of American propaganda attacks. Rákosi, who had recently resumed dictatorial control over the government as Hungary’s premier, decided that the best way to avoid this scenario was to provide internationally visible signs of support for Bartók’s music without spending too much money or making any ideological concessions to Western views of the composer’s importance. In April 1955 two high-level functionaries, Gyula Kállai and Erzsébet Andics, presented to the party’s secretariat a series of recommendations for the Bartók festivities that emphasized the competitive aspect of the planning process: “According to our information, they are preparing large-scale Bartók celebrations in Western Europe and also in America. The executor of Bartók’s will, Viktor Bátor (now a resident of New York) is attempting to make the Bartók year serve the reactionaries with his selection of the International Bartók Committee. Precisely for this reason, in the Hungarian and international organization of the Bartók year it is necessary to emphasize that Bartók is ours in two senses: he belongs to progressive humanity and to the believers in peace, and to us as Hungarians.”1 Rákosi complained that the program Kállai and Andics proposed was too large and expensive, particularly considering that “a significant portion of music, and of Bartók’s music, is extremely inaccessible to the broad masses.”2 In the end, despite his desire to downplay the anniversary, Rákosi agreed that the celebrations should begin in September 1955, “so that the Americans don’t get ahead of us.”3 To Rákosi’s unmusical mind, the Bartók anniversary was just one more event in the cultural arms race, 149

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one that should do its work in the international context but have as little effect as possible on the domestic scene.4 Despite Rákosi’s desire to limit the importance of the anniversary year, 1955 brought the reemergence into the repertory of many works that had been heard seldom or not at all since 1950. As early as January the Radio, generally one of the most doctrinaire of Hungarian institutions, had initiated a plan to broadcast the complete cycle of Bartók’s piano works in a weekly series; included on the very first of these programs, on 1 January 1955, was “Music of the Night,” part of the previously forbidden Out of Doors suite. Some of the banned works had already begun making their way back onto the Radio’s programs in 1954; but the announcement that the Radio would broadcast a systematic cycle of Bartók’s music indicated more definitely that the division of Bartók’s oeuvre would no longer be strictly enforced. Aside from Rákosi’s agenda of impressing the West with the Hungarian state’s open avowal of Bartók’s music, the new acceptance of these ideologically problematical works may also be attributed to the struggles for supremacy among different factions of the party following Stalin’s death early in 1953. Rákosi’s attitude toward Bartók’s music had not changed, but constant administrative conflicts may have permitted musicians more leeway simply because no energy could be expended to enforce the party’s musical line. To conform to the new Soviet policy of collective leadership, Soviet politicians had installed the “Muscovite” Communist Imre Nagy as premier in Hungary in mid-1953, while Rákosi remained secretary general of the party. Nagy then controlled the government’s administrative apparatus, while Rákosi oversaw the elaborate party networks, including police power. Upon his accession to the premiership, Nagy introduced a reform program, a “New Course,” which aimed to improve Hungarians’ standard of living and to undo the most severe abuses of power perpetrated by Rákosi’s Stalinist regime, from the terrorist tactics of the secret police to the suppression of art.5 Rákosi, of course, opposed Nagy at every turn, finally wresting control back from him in the spring of 1955, when he had Nagy expelled from the party.6 From 1953 to 1955, as the power relations between Nagy and Rákosi shifted, economic and cultural policy veered wildly back and forth, leading the nation into ever-greater confusion. The reemergence of dissonant music from silence thus closely paralleled the rise in public unrest that would lead to the brief, failed Hungarian revolution of 1956. These once-forbidden sounds became more and more

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widely acknowledged as symbols of resistance to the violent and exploitative policies of the Rákosi regime. Reformist intellectuals demanded the right to hear Bartók’s music; they also reclaimed him as a speaker of difficult truths and therefore as a significant symbolic ally in their quest for personal and political freedoms. As Bartók’s most dissonant works became a palpable presence for audiences, Bartók himself became a mythic figure, lauded in poetry and transformed into an icon for the struggle to be free. Demands for the rehabilitation of Bartók’s music were certainly not the main impetus behind the revolutionary fervor that seized Hungary in 1955 and 1956, but they did provide a means for intellectuals to articulate their goals for Hungarian culture and come to terms with their Stalinist past.7 Beginning in 1954 some musicians publicly challenged the party’s longundisputed positions about many of Bartók’s works. One of the first published statements of this kind was “The Changing Sound of Music in History,” an essay by the musicologist Bence Szabolcsi.8 Szabolcsi argued that great art speaks the truth, an emphasis received by many as a defense of Bartók against the forced optimism of the early 1950s.9 Szabolcsi’s account of Bartók portrayed the composer as an artist alone and suffering in the dismal, feudalistic world of turn-of-the-century Hungary—but it did so in language that reflected the situation in which Szabolcsi himself lived: “It is impossible to continue living like this”—with this gesture the young Béla Bartók resigns from Hungarian and European society in 1900. It is impossible to continue living like this, because the world has become narrow, dark, and vile—even culture and the intellect, which he claims as his own, are in travail and dying. . . . The artist must settle his accounts with the entire world of the past; he must fight it with fist, tooth, and nail and must show the better and truer [world] that is already awakening somewhere and is sure to come.10

In the text of his article Szabolcsi argued for Bartók as the continuation of the best and most enlightened elements of the European art-music traditions of the “classical” past; in its subtext he placed Bartók at the very heart of Hungarian artists’ fight for personal and artistic freedom. Likewise, in a 1955 tribute to Bartók, the Hungarian poet Gyula Illyés claimed Bartók’s most modern music as a site of active resistance to tyranny. Illyés’s poem about Bartók celebrates dissonance, noting that “what is cacophony to them is comfort to us.” Indeed, in an early stanza of this poem, Illyés asked that dissonance be allowed free rein:

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. . . Földre hullt

. . . Let the violin,

pohár fölcsattanó

let singing throats learn

szitok-szavát, fdrész foga közé szorult

the shattering curse-crash of glass

reszelW sikongató

hurled to the floor, the howling

jaját tanulja hegedd

cry of file thrust into

s éneklW gége. . . .

the teeth of the saw. . . . 11

Illyés demanded that until there existed peace in the hearts of Hungarians, there must be no sonic serenity in the concert hall. For him Bartók’s music represented the sounding of truth in the face of falsehood—an honest “cry of pain, transcending countless falsely sweet melodies”—bringing back to life all the truths that Hungary’s Stalinist government had suppressed or denied for years. Mihály, too, broke his silence with a 1955 article that explicitly endorsed several of the works the party had banned in 1950. In a conspicuous reversal of his previous public support for the party’s position on Bartók, Mihály cited The Miraculous Mandarin as a work whose message was sympathetic and progressive: “The Mandarin finds only one thing important: the will, the unbridled strength, which alone enables a person to overcome the savage, murderous world. If you truly want something, whether you are a person or a class, whether you are a nation or a people, you cannot die until you have reached your goal. In its own savage, dark symbolism, the Mandarin is the apotheosis of action.”12 By including the forbidden Mandarin in the gathering ranks of those who supported revolutionary reform, Mihály metaphorically linked the struggle within the plot of the work and the struggle to win Bartók’s music its rightful place in the repertory with the struggle of the Hungarian people against the “savage, murderous world” they were trying to overcome. Among Communist intellectuals, this kind of response to Bartók’s music—loyalty to socialism alongside rebellion against Soviet cultural norms and strict party controls—was becoming more and more common. In November 1955, at a meeting of the party organization of the Hungarian Writers’ Association, a group of fifty-nine writers and other intellectuals— all of them Communists—presented a defiant memorandum objecting to many of the party’s policies, particularly those affecting creative artists. In the memorandum’s text, read aloud by the poet Zoltán Zelk, they complained of excessive censorship, mentioning in particular the banning of Bartók’s Miraculous Mandarin as well as that of Imre Madách’s play The Tragedy of Man and other important works.13 At a 1956 meeting of the re-

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formist PetWfi Circle, the treatment of Bartók was cited prominently as one of the “crimes of the Stalinist press.”14 For many intellectuals, this protest remained symbolic, pertaining less to the sound of the music than to the ideas it represented. When writers demanded that The Miraculous Mandarin resound once again from the stage of the Opera House, they fought not specifically for that work but for what it meant to them, namely free access to all banned art of any genre. But for musicians, the particular sounds of Bartók’s music meant a great deal. On 10 October 1956, a mere thirteen days before the outbreak of the ill-fated revolution, a small group of chamber musicians presented an entire evening of Bartók’s works, most of which had seldom been heard since 1950. The group, which included the young composer György Kurtág, presented a program that included Bartók’s First Sonata for Violin and Piano, “Music of the Night,” the Third String Quartet, and selections from For Children. That anyone at all was thinking of Bartók’s music during these tumultuous times—even seizing the moment for the performance of works whose future availability remained uncertain—indicates that within a select group of musicians, these works carried a heightened artistic and symbolic significance. Elsewhere in Eastern Europe, too, Bartók’s forbidden music carried a special charge: beginning in 1956 it was featured prominently at the earliest Warsaw Autumn Festivals of modern music, which heralded the beginning of the musical thaw in Poland.15 In the spirit of Imre Nagy’s contemporaneous calls for political reform, most of the Hungarian calls for Bartók’s rehabilitation remained profoundly loyal to socialist goals. Indeed, the portrayals of Bartók adapted many of the rhetorical strategies that had been devised by the party back in 1950. Writers continued to express anxiety about the “darkness” of Bartók’s music, and even characterizations of Bartók as “stern” and “serious” reflected standard socialist realist descriptions of the positive and committed socialist hero.16 These new interpretations thus bore striking continuities with the Stalinist past. Yet they also expressed a novel and powerful sentiment in the acknowledgment that some grim representations of the world possess genuine value as conveyors of truth: rather than rejecting music that reflected these truths, Mihály and Szabolcsi now suggested that the difficult works be embraced precisely because of their truth-telling power.17 The appropriation of Bartók’s most dissonant sounds as symbols of truth in the face of tyranny might seem to be merely the logical outcome of this music’s repression by an overzealous regime: after all, art inevitably takes on greater meaning when it is forbidden. At Soviet suggestion, the satellite states had encouraged national traditions that emulated the most highly val-

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ued Soviet-Russian practices, and they tried to minimize elements—such as Bartók’s music—that reinforced “formalist” values or challenged the dominance of Soviet music. This heavy-handed attempt to impose a transnational style onto Hungarian musical culture—a culture that had learned to perceive itself as national not too many decades before—only strengthened some Hungarian artists’ desire for cultural autonomy. Another process was also at work, however: one as characteristic of the cold war as it is difficult to pin down. In emphasizing the truth of Bartók’s dissonant music, Hungarians arrived at a discourse that had existed in the West since the mid-1940s, one that equated difficult music with the idea of political freedom, and consonance with subservience or, even worse, with collaboration. As we saw in chapter 2, after the fall of the Nazi regime, the idea of modernist music came fairly rapidly to be associated with antiNazism and particularly with the ritual utterance of once-forbidden sounds. The postwar atmosphere in the West was so charged that the links between dissonance and truth, between consonance and falsehood, seemed self-evident to some thinkers. Early in the Communist period, such dogmatic stances had provided Hungarian officials with a simple way to define the correct socialist position: through a process of negation, socialists overturned Western musical values, replacing them with equal but opposite socialist values. In the face of repressive control, however, even some composers who had had little contact with the West performed the reversal of values again, coming up with a reasonable facsimile of Western aesthetics simply through negation. Especially for young composers, the private, insolent pleasure of hearing forbidden sounds guided their aesthetic preferences. In a recent interview, György Ligeti characterized the composition of his Musica ricercata (1951– 1953, premiered 1969) as follows: “In Communist Hungary, dissonances were forbidden and minor seconds were not allowed because they were antisocialist. I knew very little Schoenberg, Berg or Webern and practically nothing of Cowell or Ives, but I had heard about clusters. They were forbidden, of course, as was twelve-tone music. As a reaction to this I very naively decided to write music which was built on the forbidden minor seconds. I was an anti-harmonist because harmony, tonal harmony was permitted in Communist Hungary and chose dissonances and clusters because these were forbidden.”18 Ligeti’s reversal, a twice-reflected mirroring of Western European ideals, attempted to undo what he perceived as the distorting limitations placed by political power on musical creativity. The Western discourse of truth was so pervasive that it was eventually

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transmitted not only via this mirroring effect, but also directly, through word of mouth and the covert circulation of texts about music. What little contact Hungarian musicians had with Western music criticism after 1950 strongly reaffirmed the mapping between aesthetic modernism and freedom, allowing them to appropriate the connection between difficult sounds and the idea of truth. Despite state censorship, some Hungarian musicians became aware of Adorno’s Philosophy of Modern Music in the early 1950s, and the emphasis in that volume on the truth-telling power of dissonance surely did not go unnoticed.19 Adorno dismissed all tonal music, saying, “It is not simply that these sounds are antiquated and untimely, but that they are false.”20 This idea resonates profoundly with Illyés’s and Szabolcsi’s representations of Bartók’s dissonant music as a purveyor of difficult truths against the falsehood of tamer kinds of musical expression. In addition, Adorno’s and Leibowitz’s writings elaborated a preoccupation with the “level of development of musical style,” a desire that the techniques of music composition change continually in order to express and enhance the newness of modern life. Another Western European critic and conductor likewise denounced the Eastern European tendency to compose works that “fall back on the earlier stages of development of the musical idiom.”21 Although it is unlikely that these critics foresaw this effect, their rhetoric of musical progress may have exacerbated Hungarian intellectuals’ concern about the economic and cultural “backwardness” of their country as compared to more “developed” Western European nations. The growing sense that Soviet exploitation was stunting Hungary’s economic and cultural progress played a key role in Nagy’s acquisition of public support. Furthermore, as Judit Frigyesi has shown, Hungarian modernism had traditionally served as a cultural marker of progress away from Hungary’s feudal past toward comprehensive social and political modernity.22 In this context, Western assertions about musical “progress” can only have frustrated those Hungarian intellectuals who were educated in Bartók’s Hungarian modernist tradition. Ironically enough, Hungarians’ struggles with the problems of freedom and constraint in the arts may have integrated them more closely than ever before into the musical thought of Europe as a whole; for both Eastern and Western European musical thinkers were increasingly preoccupied with these ideas. Questions about what musical practices best represented freedom abounded in music criticism all over Europe during the early cold war years. Socialist critics on both sides of the Iron Curtain regarded increasingly systematic Western European compositional practices based on Schoen-

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bergian serialism as musical representations of constraint, and therefore as unfree; members of the Western European avant-garde and Eastern European reformists, in turn, expressed indignation at the institutional limits placed on composers in East Bloc lands and at the musical effects of these limits. Eastern Europeans were coming to ask the same questions about music’s ability to represent the truth of their situation as their Western counterparts were asking: thus, the intense mutual awareness stimulated by cold war tensions not only separated the two cultures, but also bound them together.

Epilogue West Bartók’s Legacy and George Rochberg’s Postmodernity

Looking back on the relationship between politics and music during the cold war, György Ligeti observed that “with the collapse of practical, existing socialism the ice began to crack under the feet of the true-believing, ‘socially critical’ avant-garde.”1 It is true that Western modernism fell into uncertainty after the decline of socialism in Eastern Europe in the 1980s; but the seeds of this uncertainty were sown in the 1960s, when some musicians began more openly to question the ethical superiority that modernists had been asserting since the end of the Second World War. Although the polar oppositions of cold war culture were breaking down, the dynamic of negation still played a role: challenges to modernism were mounted through the negation of its values, most notably through the range of phenomena now known as postmodernism.2 Even as composers attempted to break out of cold war strictures, the political resonances of the cold war would continue to affect their stylistic choices. A particular moment of Bartók’s reception from this period offers a telling critique of both the political and the artistic aspects of postwar culture. The American composer George Rochberg’s Third String Quartet (first performed in 1972) is famous for its conspicuous pastiche of earlier styles: it is often considered an early and significant exemplar of postmodernism in music. The quartet is perhaps equally well known, however, for the texts that accompanied it, inflammatory essays by the composer that called for the rejection of the modernist styles that had seemed central to academic music in the 1950s and 1960s—particularly serialism.3 Rochberg’s quartet draws extensively on the gestural language of past composers, most prominently Bartók, Mahler, and Beethoven.4 Rochberg’s imitation of Bartók is rarely literal, but the borrowing of both specific figures and larger formal procedures from Bartók’s quartets leaves little doubt about 157

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their provenance. The five-movement design of Rochberg’s quartet, with the second and fourth movements consisting of closely related material and the central movement providing the introspective core of the piece, pays direct homage to Bartók’s Fourth Quartet and his other symmetrically designed works. In addition, gestural references to Bartók’s music are present in Rochberg’s first movement and in the marches that constitute the second and fourth movements, and to a somewhat lesser extent in the finale; only in the third movement are they absent. The open-string accompaniment figure in mm. 12–17 of the second movement of the Rochberg (example 12a), for instance, resembles that in mm. 151–155 of the fifth movement of Bartók’s Fourth Quartet (example 12b); the figure marked “strident” in the same Rochberg passage resembles a chromatic motive prominent in the first movement of Bartók’s Fourth Quartet (example 12c).5 Rochberg’s first and fifth movements feature not only Bartókian string techniques (glissandi, tremolo sul ponticello, notes played without vibrato, and the “Bartók pizzicato” that allows the string to slap against the fingerboard) but also passages whose musical rhetoric imitates Bartók’s, particularly the use of series of contrasting textures that interrupt each other. (Compare, for example, mm. 103–127 of the first movement of Rochberg’s quartet with mm. 95–150 of the fifth movement of Bartók’s Fourth Quartet.) Rochberg’s tonal language seems indebted to Bartók’s, as well: even at its most difficult, the music seems not so much to evade tonal associations as to temporarily blur them, only to assert them more strongly at a later point.6 In short, Bartók’s music acts as an essential referent and framing device within Rochberg’s quartet. Because the Bartókian sound is featured in the introduction and returns many times, the listener may be inclined to hear it as the “natural” or unmarked modern dialect against which the allusions to styles of the more distant past stand out. This is noteworthy because, as we saw in the cases of Maderna and Stockhausen, young composers had largely turned away from Bartók’s music and embraced serialism during the early 1950s. Rochberg was no exception. His early works, such as the First Symphony (1948–1949) and the First Quartet (1950–1952), bore conspicuous traces of Bartók’s melodic and harmonic practices, presented without quotation marks or irony. In 1950, studying in Europe on a Fulbright fellowship, he came into contact with Luigi Dallapiccola and learned from him about twelve-tone music. For the duration of the 1950s and into the 1960s, almost all of Rochberg’s music was composed using twelve-tone techniques,7 and he was considered an American authority on the analysis and composition of serial music. When Rochberg abandoned serialism in favor of compositional practices common

Epilogue West Example 12. a. Rochberg, Third String Quartet, II, mm. 12–15. b. Bartók, Fourth Quartet, V, mm. 151–155. c. Bartók, Fourth Quartet, I, mm. 94–95, violin 2.

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to earlier music, he returned to Bartók’s style—using it not ironically, but as an expressive resource, a language he had earlier trusted to convey both pathos and austerity. The boundaries between different historical styles play an essential role in generating the Third Quartet’s form. In the first movement, for example, the harsh Bartókian gestures of the opening are succeeded by a sweet chorale, played molto espressivo in a Romantic vein. Just as contrasting themes might help to guide the listener through the form in a more traditional work (e.g., the first and second themes of a sonata movement), in Rochberg’s first movement the interface between the strident Bartókian material and the Beethovenian chorale is the central organizing idea. This use of stylistic contrast not only drives the form of the quartet, but also seems deliberately designed to maximize the affective force of the whole. Where in a nineteenth-century work gestures within a style would take on affective significance, here it is the conflict between styles that generates the affect: the shift from harshness to sweetness seems calculated to deliver emotional release.The stylistic diversity of Rochberg’s quartet is thus not merely a formal trick—it is part of a larger agenda of rehabilitating older tools for the purpose of heightening musical expression. Rochberg’s return to emotional expression is widely attributed to the tragic death of his son in 1964, and there is little doubt that the need to find a musical language for his strong feelings was the crucial impetus for the change in his music in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Yet in and of itself, the need for expression does not explain why Rochberg chose the pastiche of other composers’ styles as his new compositional practice. This aesthetic choice may relate not only to his personal circumstances, but also to other concerns, namely, the issues of cold war politics that were raised by the political left during that period. These concerns loom large in Rochberg’s writings. In his 1970 essay “Humanism versus Science,” Rochberg criticized the scientific disciplines for bringing the world to the brink of nuclear disaster, and he chastised humanists for their willingness to follow science to that brink. The essay, full of a sense of humankind’s imminent self-destruction, offers a parable about a group of people subsisting many years after a nuclear holocaust who learn that their ancestors had through their own hubris unleashed destruction upon their world. When the people in the story discover traces of music from before this holocaust, Rochberg explains, it is abhorrent: either “precisely logical and cold—mere patterns of sound relationships and configuration,” or “unrestrained in a hysterical, chaotic way.” Rochberg explicitly equated his vision of the “days before the terror” with the musical and political world of his own day.8 In Rochberg’s eyes, the prob-

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lems with modernism as practiced in the 1950s and 1960s were intimately connected with the arms race, the privileged position technology held in society, and especially artists’ pursuit of technical innovation at the expense of human communication: “Just as the physical survival of man has been placed in grave jeopardy by science and its technological extensions, so the survival of art as an authentic value in human life is jeopardized by the uncritical acceptance of a scientific mentality as the paradigm for artistic behavior.”9 Rochberg’s attempt to revive musical expression was a way of challenging the cold war technocracy. Thus, though Mark Berry has construed Rochberg’s commitment to “a new social, economic, racial, and political order” as having little or nothing to do with his stylistic pluralism, his social vision and artistic goals may instead be expressions of a single and coherent outlook, cultural and musical critique in one.10 Rochberg’s use of conflicting styles to generate the form of the work reflected cold war thinking about musical style even as it attempted to supersede the political categories of its time. In seeking to portray the totality of human experience, Rochberg tried to reunite the expressive spheres separated by the East-West divide. Just as Hungarians felt a need to reclaim dissonant sounds to supplement the Stalinist emphasis on the sweet and the triumphant, so some composers in the West reclaimed the sweet in a world that had emphasized harshness. Rochberg saw in postwar modernism an extension of Schoenbergian expressionism, a language suited to the portrayal of strange and alienating ideas; and he recognized the postwar generation’s language as a “cutting edge, with which you could say all those tough things.”11 Rochberg did not reject these expressive tools outright; rather, he regarded them as only part of what he needed. If he was to portray the “entire gamut of terror and joys (real and imagined),”12 then sweetness was needed as well as harshness. After his departure from serialism, Rochberg composed music that used this full expressive range, the luxuriant majormode sonorities and soaring violin lines of the Third Quartet’s third movement providing only one of many examples. The rehabilitation of sweetness overcame the cold war aesthetic divide by self-consciously reinstating expressive devices that had been vilified on political grounds. Rochberg’s choice of pastiche also deliberately violated another taboo of postwar modernist culture, that of epigonism. As we saw in chapter 2, many postwar composers tried to find a style that erased any potentially compromising resonances from the past. The imitation of another composer’s “personal” style seemed ethically problematical: given the sense of historical urgency that was supposed to drive musical style forward in the “solution” of new “problems,” rehearsing past solutions seemed to evade the ob-

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ligation of historical progress. On a less explicit level, the stigma attached to imitation was also derived from a politically motivated revulsion for socialist realism, an “epigonal music” whose heroic rhetoric owed a great deal to music of the past.13 Art from the “backward” cultures of the East has often seemed to Western observers like an intrusion of past styles into present time; this perception was cultivated with especial vigor during the immediate postwar years, in attempts to put more distance between modernism and its perceived others, and it has persisted to the present day.14 Rochberg aimed explicitly to overturn such historical teleologies. He referred to an “enlargement of perspective which potentially placed the entire past at my disposal,” freeing him from “the conventional perceptions which ascribe some goal-directed, teleological function to that past, insisting that each definable historical development supersedes the one that has just taken place either by incorporating or nullifying it.”15 With the Third Quartet, Rochberg’s attack on the idea of originality hit its mark, provoking controversy among critics loyal to modernist principles. The fear of epigonism was so strong that several critics denounced the work as either akin to forgery or a pedestrian class exercise in style imitation, both phenomena entirely separate from the realm of artistic experience: for these critics, no possible artistic purpose could be ascribed to a work written in antiquated styles.16 Rochberg’s quartet is an excellent example of postmodern “double coding”: it offered different meanings to different audiences, and in so doing challenged the hierarchy of value posited by postwar modernists.17 Audience members from the elite culture of high modernism found the use of older styles in the quartet nearly intolerable at the time of its premiere. To their ears, Bartók’s music was hardly distinguishable from pop music in practical terms—as “classic” music featured regularly in public concerts, it had lost any oppositional power it might once have had. Seen from this elite viewpoint, Rochberg’s quartet consisted almost solely of imitations of “classical hits”: Bartók, Beethoven, and Mahler acted as nearly interchangeable staples of public concert life, and the contrasts between the styles were far less significant than the fact of epigonism. For members of the general public to whom Bartók still seemed modern, though, the quartet appeared to bring together the most disparate elements: Rochberg’s distinctions seemed drawn for their ears, not for the ears of his fellow composers, and in that sense the quartet moved toward being an accessible art, if not necessarily a truly populist one. Rochberg offered this audience something both new and familiar while deliberately offending the standards of the most elite audience.18 In this sense, Rochberg’s integration of esoteric and accessible

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culture is unabashedly middlebrow, and it flew in the face of all the theories of high art (such as Greenberg’s) that strove for political reasons to keep new music apart from the concertgoing public. This aspect of Rochberg’s music overturned the categories of value defined by the Western cold war perspective. The openly polemical aspects of Rochberg’s Third Quartet were crucial to its musical importance; at the same time, they work counter to certain of its expressive purposes in ways that weaken the work’s artistic impact. The polemical stance of the quartet encourages the reading of styles as signifiers— that is, rather than the gestures or nuances within a style conveying meaning, here the mere evocation of the style is treated as sufficient to transmit the meaning. The first movement, for example, offers dramatic contrasts between sections, but within each section the music tends to be repetitive (in the tonally ambiguous sections) or predictable (in the chorales). This movement encourages us to listen not for expressive gestures within each style but for the boundaries between styles. The third movement, however, offers no conspicuous breaks between styles: the entire movement is composed in a sweet, reflective, largely Beethovenian style. As a result of its stylistic unity, this movement seems extremely static, even flat, within the world of the quartet as a whole. Once the listener has learned to attend to the boundaries between styles as the carrier of meaning, it is difficult to shift back into the mode of listening where nuances within the style matter, and this substantially weakens the expressive force of the third movement and of the quartet as a whole. Although Rochberg maintained that his primary interest was reviving a language for genuine expression of a kind that existed in earlier traditions, some of his music clearly privileges the polemical, metamusical, or even sloganlike use of tonal styles, such as the entire movement based on the much overplayed Pachelbel Canon that he included in his Sixth Quartet. The political goal of rehabilitating expression often seems to be at odds with the project of actually expressing something, and this is a serious obstacle for Rochberg’s music. One might describe the salient feature of Rochberg’s pastiche music by recalling what Richard Taruskin has written of George Crumb’s collage compositions, “the loving way in which they gather up so much that had been expressly targeted for modernist exclusion.”19 In Rochberg’s case, this included specific composers who had fallen out of favor—Bartók, Mahler, and Beethoven—but also basic aesthetic values: expressivity, intelligible communication, and connection with the past. Rochberg’s embrace of values precisely opposed to those of the academic music culture around him is in some respects a gesture utterly characteristic of the cold war era, when distinc-

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tions were made via negation in the starkest black-and-white terms. Yet Rochberg’s decision not to abandon the chromatic musical languages of modernism suggests that his aim was broader and more ecumenical: a comprehensive negation of the distinctions engendered by cold war politics in the hopes of bringing about a more humane world. Like the Hungarians who demanded the rehabilitation of Bartók’s modernist works, Rochberg was seeking to express a wholeness that was not possible under any of the divided concepts of the world the cold war had to offer—a wholeness that Alfred Schnittke has described as a “widening of the circle of expressive means, integrating ‘low’ and ‘high’ styles, ‘banal’ and ‘refined,’ . . . a wider musical world and a general democratization of styles.”20 Rochberg’s vision was thus an important step toward the dismantling of cold war aesthetic categories, and it suggests an intriguing connection between the rise of postmodernity and the loosening of cold war social strictures that arrived with the political détente of the 1960s.

listening to the cold war Participants in the transmission of values across the cold war divide could be all the more vehement about their convictions because of the political stakes involved: music was compelling not only in its own right, but also because of the position it claimed within a system of contested cultural values. Bartók’s Miraculous Mandarin became more meaningful when it was suppressed, and for many it has remained a vivid symbol of artistic freedom to the present day. Rochberg’s reuse of mannerisms from earlier styles might have seemed like innocuous pastiche had it been produced in another era; but in the cold war context, in which the imitation of styles from the past carried the stigma of socialist realism, it became a much more inflammatory artistic statement. These political meanings were not merely a supplement to the primary meanings of the works. Though Bartók could not have envisioned the postwar political implications of the Mandarin, let alone intended them, they became an essential part of Hungarian listeners’ experience of the work. Rochberg’s critique of modernism as an artistic practice and his doubts about the ethical validity of the arms race were two facets of one conviction; both facets inform our understanding of the Third Quartet in meaningful ways. This merging of musical style and political judgment may have deeper implications for the history of musical style than has previously been thought. During the early years of the cold war, political pressures led many composers and critics to dogmatism as the cultures were defined in con-

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tradistinction to one another. The Hungarian rehabilitation of modernism and Rochberg’s rehabilitation of Romantic expression indicate that borrowings across the battle lines—whether direct or via negation—could represent a retreat from one extreme toward the other. Once such borrowings became possible, they increased the range of styles available on both sides of the divide, contributing to the oft-described pluralism of concert life after about 1960. Cold war pressures may thus have helped to establish the heterogeneity of late twentieth-century culture precisely through these processes of negation. In this light, it seems advantageous to regard the competing paradigms of East and West not as separate cultural systems, but as two parts of a single, larger system in which musical values were determined by global processes of engagement and negation as well as by local judgments about music. The cases examined here suggest that the interaction between these largescale processes and local phenomena shaped the development of musical values during the early cold war years. The Soviet resolution on music and its aftermath in Eastern Europe resonated even in the West, encouraging educators to formulate and teach a musical aesthetics resistant to such directives. In the opposite direction, interventions on the international scale, such as the Voice of America’s use of Bartók’s music in its propaganda broadcasts, instigated regional responses (the Hungarian government’s attempts to reclaim Bartók) as well as personal ones (Szervánszky’s protests, Mihály’s show trial, and even, indirectly, his Cello Concerto). Thus, local and national traditions still mattered a great deal in the making of music and musical values; but the pervasiveness of international politics inflected them in new ways that allowed local traditions and opinions to influence each other over great distances. For all that Eastern and Western values claimed to be strictly opposed, it is a characteristic paradox of cold war culture that the East-West traffic in ideas went a long way toward establishing an international musical community that agreed on what issues were at stake, if not on how to resolve them.

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appendix 1

Compositions by Bartók Broadcast on Hungarian Radio 18 September to 1 October 1950

This information was culled from the periodical Magyar Rádió Újság. For works played more than once, numbers in brackets indicate the number of times played.

piano works From Ten Easy Pieces: “Evening with the Széklers” (Este a Székelyeknél ) [2], “Bear Dance” (Medvetánc), Slovak Boys’ Dance (Tóth legények tánca), Hungarian Folksong (GödWllei piactéren, listed erroneously as GödWllei vásárterem) Sonatina Selections from Romanian Colinda Melodies (Román kolindadallamok) From Three Burlesques: “A Bit Drunk” (Kicsit ázottan) From Two Romanian Dances (Két román tánc), no. 1 [2] From Mikrokosmos: March (Induló), “Jack-in-the-Box” (Paprika Jancsi), Theme and Inversion (Téma és fordítása), Peasant Dance (Dobbantos tánc), plus a group of six unspecified pieces (possibly selected from the collection “Seven Pieces from Mikrokosmos”) From For Children (Gyermekeknek): Slovak Folk Songs and Dances (Slovák népi dalok és táncok), “Stars” (Csillagok), “Joke” (Tréfa), “Outlaw’s Song” (Betyár nóta), Dance Tune (Táncdal ), “My Dear Daughter” (Kiskece lányom) From Fourteen Bagatelles: Rubato, two unspecified movements, and possibly “Elle est morte” (listed as Valaki meghalt) 167

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From Fifteen Hungarian Peasant Songs (Tizenöt magyar parasztdal ): Old Dance Tunes (Régi táncdalok, listed as Régi magyar táncok), nos. 7–15 From Nine Little Piano Pieces: Air (Dal ) Waltz (which one is unspecified; possibly from Bagatelles, no. 14) From Two Elegies, no. 2 only One of the Three Rondos

chamber works Romanian Folk Dances (Román népi táncok) (arrangement for violin and piano) Two Romanian Dances (op. 8a) (arrangement for violin and piano) First String Quartet Sixth String Quartet Sonatina (arrangement for violin and piano) Excerpts from For Children (Gyermekeknek) in two different arrangements for violin and piano Hungarian Folk Songs (arrangement for violin and piano)

choral works From Twenty-seven Two- and Three-Part Choruses: “Don’t Leave Me!” (Ne menj el!) [3], “Play Song” (Játék) [3], “Bread Baking” (Cipósütés) [2], “Loafer’s Song” (Resteknek nótája), “Boys’ Teasing Song” (Legénycsúfoló) [2], “Lonely Wandering” (Bolyongás) [2], “Pillow Dance” (Párnás táncdal ) [2], “Enchanting Song” (JószágígézW ), “Suitor” (LeánykérW ), “Hussar” (Huszárnóta), “Don’t Leave Here!” (Ne hagyj itt!), “Girls’ Teasing Song” (Leánycsúfoló), “Had I Not Seen You” (Ne láttalak volna!), “Jeering” (Csujogató) Four Slovak Folk Songs [3, including one performance in a new orchestration by Szervánszky]; also Wedding Song (Lányát úgy adta) as an excerpt Székely Songs (Székely dalok)

Appendix 1

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songs Hungarian Folk Songs From Eight Hungarian Folk Songs (Nyolc magyar népdal ): “Black Is the Earth” (Fekete fWd), “My God, My God” (Istenem, Istenem), “Wives, Let Me Be One of Your Company” (Asszonyok, Asszonyok), “If I Climb” (Ha kimegyek) From Twenty Hungarian Folk Songs: Slow Dance (Székely lassú), Fast Dance (Székely friss), Dialogue Song (Pár-ének), New-Style Songs (Új dalok) From Village Scenes: Lullaby (BölcsW dal )

orchestral works Violin Concerto Two Portraits (Két portré) Two Pictures (Két kép) Concerto for Orchestra Dance Suite Third Piano Concerto Hungarian Peasant Songs (Magyar parasztdalok) Hungarian Sketches (Magyar képek): complete [1] and, as an excerpt, Melody (Melódia) and Swineherds’ Dance from Ürög (Ürögi kanásztánc) [2]

appendix 2

Biographical Notes

Following are short biographies of the lesser-known Hungarian figures discussed in the text. Miklós Csillag (1888–1955?) An administrator in the government’s Ministry of Education under József Révai in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Csillag exercised wide discretion over all branches of the arts. Géza Losonczy (1917–1957) A journalist, Losonczy worked closely with József Révai in party propaganda matters for many years. His article denouncing Bartók in February 1950 was the most visible statement of the Hungarian state’s policy on the composer’s music. Losonczy was imprisoned from March 1951 to 1954 after taking the blame for a literary censorship campaign that had attracted Western attention. He was a minister of Nagy’s revolutionary government in 1956; after the revolution was suppressed, he was imprisoned and executed. András Mihály (1917–1993) A composer and critic, Mihály studied cello and composition at the Music Academy until 1938; he led workers’ choruses during the Second World War until he was interned in a labor camp. From 1946 to 1948 he was the cello soloist of the Opera House orchestra, and he was secretary general of the Opera from 1948 to 1950, when he was removed from that post and subjected to harsh criticism both in party circles and in public. He nonetheless continued to compose and to be active in party musical circles. From 1949 on he was also professor of chamber music at the Music Academy in Budapest; he is best remembered today as the founder of the Budapest Chamber Ensemble, which championed twentiethcentury music. József Révai (1898–1959) Révai was a founding member of the Hungarian Communist Party. Active mainly as a journalist and publisher between 170

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the wars, he published several underground Communist papers, for which he served four years in prison. He spent most of the interwar period in the Soviet Union, returning in 1944 as a leader of the party. He was a member of the Central Committee and the Political Committee, and he served both as minister of education and as the editor in chief of the newspaper Szabad nép (Free Folk). Ferenc Szabó (1902–1969) A composer, Szabó studied composition with Weiner, Siklós, and Kodály. Early in his career he wrote chamber music; he then turned to the genre of mass song and conducted workers’ choruses until his emigration to the Soviet Union (via Germany) in 1932. There he underwent several years of party education and continued to compose. He returned to Hungary in 1945 and was immediately appointed professor at the Music Academy; he also served as president of the Hungarian Musicians’ Association (1949–1951). Endre Székely (1912–1989) Székely was primarily a choral conductor and a composer of mass songs. Before and during the Second World War, he was a member of the underground Hungarian Communist Party and was involved with the workers’ choral movement. After the war he became president of the newly formed Béla Bartók Society, which organized and fostered choral singing on the national level. After he was denounced in 1950, he moved to Sztálinváros (about sixty kilometers south of Budapest) and continued to conduct and compose in relative obscurity. Endre Szervánszky (1911–1977) Szervánszky studied first clarinet and later composition under Albert Siklós at the Music Academy in Budapest (1931–1936). Early in his career he worked as an orchestrator and theory teacher; in 1948 he became a professor at the Music Academy. Among Communist composers of his generation, he was the most committed to Bartók’s legacy and to avant-garde styles in general; his Six Orchestral Pieces (1959) was one of the first Hungarian works composed under socialism to use twelve-tone techniques of composition.

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Notes

preface 1. Leonard Bernstein, “What Does Music Mean?” New York Philharmonic Young People’s Concerts, broadcast 18 January 1958. Sony Classical Video SHV54738. 2. See Boris Schwarz, Music and Musical Life in Soviet Russia, rev. ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983), 225, 246, 252; and Schwarz, “Stravinsky in Soviet Russian Criticism,” in Stravinsky: A New Appraisal of His Work, ed. Paul Henry Lang (New York: W. W. Norton, 1962), 74–95. 3. See especially István HézsW’s essay “Remarks to the History of Mandarin” in the festival program booklet, “Mandarinok Fesztiválja,” ed. Roland Bokor (Budapest, 1996). 4. Friedemann Sallis, “The Reception of Béla Bartók’s Music in Europe after 1945,” in Settling New Scores: Music Manuscripts from the Paul Sacher Foundation, ed. Felix Meyer (New York: Schott, 1998): 255–258. 5. The phrase is György Péteri’s.

1. bartók’s concerto for orchestra and the demise of hungary’s “third road” 1. I owe several of these formulations to Jeffrey Herf. See Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in Two Germanys (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), preface. 2. For three accounts of political diversity among the People’s Democracies that differ in their details but agree in their overall assessment of the postwar situation, see Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Soviet Bloc: Unity and Conflict, rev. ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967), 45–51; Miklós Molnár, From Béla Kun to János Kádár: Seventy Years of Hungarian Communism, trans. Arnold J. Pomerans (New York: Berg Publishers, 1990), 132–133; and John Lewis Gaddis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 30–33.

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Notes to Pages 1–5

3. Mátyás Rákosi, address before the Third Congress of the Hungarian Communist Party, 1946. Cited, in English translation, in Edward Kardelj, On People’s Democracy in Yugoslavia (New York:Yugoslav Information Center, n.d. [1949?]), 9. 4. István Bibó, “A magyar demokrácia válsága” (The crisis of Hungarian democracy), in Harmadik út: Politikai és történeti tanulmányok (Third Road: Political and Historical Studies), ed. Zoltán Szabó (London: Magyar könyves céh, 1960), 78 (Bibó’s italics). All translations are my own unless otherwise specified. The original language of most Hungarian quotations used in this book can be found in Fosler-Lussier, “The Transition to Communism and the Legacy of Béla Bartók in Hungary, 1945–1956” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1999). 5. Sándor Jemnitz, “Bartók ‘Concerto grosso’-jának [sic] magyar bemutatója külföldi magyar karmester vezényletével” (Hungarian premiere of Bartók’s “Concerto grosso” under the baton of a Hungarian conductor from abroad), Világosság (Clarity), 25 April 1947, 6. 6. Endre Szervánszky, “Bartók-bemutató” (Bartók premiere), Szabad nép (Free Folk), 25 April 1947, 4. 7. This opinion, widely attributed to Sándor Jemnitz in the folklore about the concerto’s premiere, was reported by Szervánszky in the review “Bartókbemutató.” 8. On the association of modernism with social progress, see Judit Frigyesi, Béla Bartók and Turn-of-the-Century Budapest (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), particularly chap. 3. 9. Szervánszky, “Bartók-bemutató”; others who stood up for the concerto included István Péterfi (“Muzsika—Bartók Béla Concertója” [Music: Béla Bartók’s concerto], Szabadság [Freedom], 27 April 1947, 4); József Ujfalussy (“Zene” [Music], Új szántás [New Ploughing] 1, no. 5 [May 1947]: 302); and András Mihály (“Bartók Béla és az utána következW nemzedék” [Béla Bartók and the generation coming after him], Zenei Szemle [Music Review], 1949, no. 1 [March]: 2–15). 10. For more detailed accounts of the Zhdanovshchina in music, see Schwarz, Music and Musical Life in Soviet Russia, 205–223, and Alexander Werth, Musical Uproar in Moscow (London: Turnstile Press, 1949). One of the best accounts to date of socialist realism in literature and the visual arts is C. Vaughan James, Soviet Socialist Realism (London: Macmillan, 1973). See also Matthew Cullerne Bown, Art under Stalin (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1991), especially 89–95, 204–227; and Piotr Fast, Ideology, Aesthetics, Literary History: Socialist Realism and Its Others (New York: Peter Lang, 1999), 31–41, 53–60. 11. “Ob opere ‘Velikaya druzhba’ V. Muradeli, Postanovleniye TsK VKP(b) ot 10 fevralya 1948 g.” (On the opera “The Great Friendship” by Vano Muradeli, Resolution of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist (Bolshevik) Party, 10 February 1948), Sovetskaya muzyka [Soviet Music] 12, no. 1 (January–February 1948): 3–8. This is translated by George S. Counts and Nucia Lodge in The Country of the Blind: The Soviet System of Mind Control

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(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1949). I quote here from the reprint of this translation in Andrey Olkhovsky, Music under the Soviets:The Agony of an Art (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1955), 281–282. 12. See Schwarz, Music and Musical Life in Soviet Russia, 123–128. 13. Olkhovsky, Music under the Soviets, 285. 14. These definitions are based on James, Soviet Socialist Realism, 1–14. See also Richard Taruskin, “Molchanov’s The Dawns Are Quiet Here,” Musical Quarterly 62, no. 1 (January 1976): 106–107. 15. The translated text of the resolution appeared in Szabad nép (Free Folk) on 17 February 1948 and in Új szó (New Word) on 19 February 1948. 16. Endre Szervánszky, “Formalizmus, hagyomány, népzene” (Formalism, tradition, folk music), Szabad nép (Free Folk), 22 February 1948, 9. 17. Ibid. 18. András Mihály, “Harc a formalizmus ellen” (Battle against formalism), Fórum 3, no. 3 (March 1948): 237. 19. Lajos Vargyas, “Zene és közösség” (Music and community), Válasz (Reply) 7 (1948): 338. 20. Mihály, “Harc a formalizmus ellen,” 238. 21. József Ujfalussy, “Zene” (Music), Új szántás (New Ploughing) 2, no. 4 (April 1948): 240. 22. Ferenc Szabó, preface to the score of Hazatérés (Homecoming) (Budapest: n.p., 1949). 23. János Maróthy made several important observations on the similarity between the two works. See Maróthy, Zene, forradalom, szocializmus: Szabó Ferenc útja (Music, Revolution, Socialism: The Path of Ferenc Szabó) (Budapest: MagvetW Könyvkiadó, 1975), 588–593. 24. Szabó, preface to the score of Hazatérés. 25. Béla Bartók, “Explanation to Concerto for Orchestra,” in Béla Bartók Essays, ed. Benjamin Suchoff (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1976), 431. 26. Examples 1a, 2a, 3a: Bartók, Concerto for Orchestra (London: Boosey and Hawkes, 1946). Examples 1b, 2b, 3b, 4: Szabó, Concerto zenekarra (Concerto for Orchestra) (Budapest: Zenemdkiadó, 1960). 27. See Bennett Kovrig, Communism in Hungary from Kun to Kádár (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1979), 234–236, and Molnár, From Béla Kun to János Kádár, 131–140. 28. József Révai, “The Character of a People’s Democracy” (anonymous translation). Foreign Affairs 28, no. 1 (October 1949): 147. The article originally appeared as “Népi demokráciánk jellegérWl,” Társadalmi szemle (Social Review) 4, nos. 3–4 (March–April 1949): 161–167. 29. The unification of the Hungarian Communist Party with the Social Democratic Party in June 1948 had formed the Hungarian Workers’ Party and had created a new bureaucratic structure; both the Culture-Political Division and its Music Committee were created at that time. Mátyás Rákosi, “Beszámoló: a bel-és külpolitikai helyzet és a Párt feladatai” (Report: The domestic and international situation and the party’s tasks), Minutes of the Central Committee of

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the Hungarian Workers’ Party, 27 November 1948, MOL-MDP, Központi VezetWség (Documents of the Central Committee), 276. f., 52. cs., 4. W.e. In citations of documents housed in the Hungarian National Archives, I follow the Hungarian practice of using a period as an abbreviation for the ordinal number: “276. f., 52. cs., 4. W.e.” means “276th department (fond), 52nd document group (csoport), fourth archival unit (Wrzési egység).” 30. Work plan of the Hungarian Workers’ Party Culture-Political Division, 4 January 1949, MOL-MDP, Központi Értelmiségi (Kulturpolitikai) Osztály (Central Intellectual [Culture-Political] Division), 276. f., 109. cs., 1. W.e. According to this plan, Mihály was to clarify the problems of musical realism for the party’s Music Committee.The minutes of the Music Committee, one of the more important decision-making organizations, are not preserved in the party’s archives; the only known extant copies appear to be in private hands. See János Breuer, “A Párt zenei bizottsága 1948–49” (The Party’s music committee, 1948–49), Kritika (Critique) 89, no. 12 (1989): 27–31. 31. Recommendation for the Culture-Political Academy, 29 November 1948, in the Minutes of the Agitation and Propaganda Committee, MOL-MDP, Agitációs-Propaganda Bizottság (Agitation and Propaganda Committee), 276. f., 86. cs., 7. W.e. 32. Mihály probably obtained the lecture through party channels; but since it had been published widely in Hungary, it would have been accessible to him in any case. Zhdanov’s comments were also reproduced in the same issue of Zenei szemle (Music Review) in which Mihály’s lecture appeared in March 1949. See Zhdanov, “A. A. Zsdanov felszólalása a szovjet zene szakemberek tanácskozásán a SzUK(b)P Központi Bizottságában (1948)” (A. A. Zhdanov’s remarks at the conference of Soviet music professionals in the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist (Bolshevik) Party [1948]), Zenei szemle, 1949, no. 1 (March): 16–27. This text appeared in English in the volume On Literature, Music, and Philosophy (anonymous translation) (London: Lawrence and Wishart, Ltd., 1950); excerpts also appear in Werth, Musical Uproar in Moscow, 78–83. 33. Zhdanov, On Literature, Music, and Philosophy, 57–58. 34. Ibid., 58. 35. Artistic and political difficulties plagued the proposed revival of one of Erkel’s lesser-known works from March 1948 through 1949. See Melinda Berlász and Tibor Tallián, eds., Iratok a magyar zeneélet történetéhez 1945–1956 (Documents Pertaining to the History of Hungarian Musical Life, 1945–1956), vol. 2 (Budapest: MTA Zenetudományi Intézet, 1986), 38–39, 55–56. 36. Mihály, “Bartók Béla és az utána következW nemzedék,” 4. 37. The synthesis argument was anticipated by, among others, Ferenc Erdei and Lajos Lesznai, in consecutive articles in a single issue of the journal Zenei szemle (Music Review): Erdei, “Bartók Béla pályája” (The career of Béla Bartók), Zenei szemle, 1948, no. 8 (December): 393–395; and Lesznai, “Bartók Béla: életrajzi vázlat” (Béla Bartók: Biographical sketch), ibid., 395–400. 38. David Schneider has argued that Bartók continued to use elements of

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the urban “gypsy” style throughout his career. Schneider, “Peasant Music or ‘Gypsy Music’? The Implications of the DdvW Accompaniment for Bartók’s Polemics” (paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Musicological Society, Boston, 30 October 1998). 39. Mihály, “Bartók Béla és az utána következW nemzedék,” 11. 40. In an essay published for Western European readers, György Ligeti echoed the belief that Bartók’s late works resolve the division between music and public. See Ligeti, “Neues aus Budapest: Zwölftonmusik oder ‘neue Tonalität’?” (News from Budapest: Twelve-tone music or “new tonality”?), Melos 17, no. 2 (February 1950): 45. 41. See János Breuer, Negyven év magyar zenekultúrája (Forty Years of Hungarian Musical Culture) (Budapest: Zenemdkiadó, 1985), 174–175. 42. Zhdanov, On Literature, Music, and Philosophy, 66. 43. Sándor Jemnitz, “Jemnitz Sándor naplójából” (From the diary of Sándor Jemnitz), comp. János Lózsy, Kritika (Critique) 83, no. 8 (August 1983): 33. 44. Mihály, “Bartók Béla és az utána következW nemzedék,” 13. 45. “Jelentés a magyar zene helyzetérWl és javaslat az ezen a téren mutatkozó legsürgWsebb teendWkrWl” (Report on the situation of Hungarian music and recommendation on the most urgent tasks in this area), 8 July 1949, MOL-MDP, Országos Propaganda (Agitációs) Osztály (National Propaganda [Agitation] Division), 276. f., 108. cs., 3. W.e. 46. MOL-MDP,Titkárság (Secretariat), 276. f., 54. cs., 57. W.e.; quoted in János Maróthy, “Zene és Párt” (Music and Party), unpublished typescript at the Institute for Musicology of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, 88–89. My thanks to Tibor Tallián for making this important early study available to me. 47. On the founding of the association, see Breuer, Negyven év magyar zenekultúrája, 203–204. 48. The name of the Ministry implies education in the broadest sense, including the arts and culture: mdvelés means both “education” and “cultivation,” and a person referred to as “mdvelt” is cultured as well as educated. 49. “Az új magyar kultúra minisztériuma” (The new Hungarian Ministry of Culture), Szabad nép (Free Folk), 12 June 1949, 4 (italics in original ). 50. “Együtt a kultúra fegyvereivel is” (Together even with the weapons of culture), Szabad nép (Free Folk), 28 June 1949, 1. 51. See, for instance, György Sólyom, “A XX. Század zenéje: végsW káoszból új rend felé” (Music of the twentieth century: Out of the ultimate chaos into a new order), in Dolgozók hangverseny-kalauza (Workers’ concert guide), ed. Bence Szabolcsi (Budapest: Népszava, [1949]), 180. 52. Géza Losonczy, “Az Operaház legyen a népé!” (Let the Opera House be the people’s!) Szabad nép (Free Folk), 5 February 1950, 10. The article was apparently commissioned by the Ministry as part of its attempts to reform the Opera. See Miklós Csillag, “As Operaház munkájának kiértékelése” (Evaluation of the work of the Opera House), 10 February 1950, MOL-MDP, Titkárság (Secretariat), 276. f., 54. cs., 81. W.e. (my thanks to György Kövér for bringing this document to my attention); and Losonczy’s statement before the PetWfi Cir-

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Notes to Pages 24–27

cle, in B. András Hegedds and M. János Rainer, eds., A PetWfi Kör vitái hiteles jegyzWkönyvek alapján, IV: Partizántalálkozó, Sajtóvita (Debates of the PetWfi Circle, Based on Authentic Minutes, vol. 4, Partisans’ Meeting, Press Debate) (Budapest: Múzsák, 1956-os Intézet, 1991), 171. 53. György Kövér has pointed out that although Losonczy himself knew little about music, political reliability was a more important determinant of the right to speak on cultural issues than was knowledge of the subject matter. Moreover, the writing resembles Losonczy’s style, and Losonczy himself offered a personal apology for his defamation of Bartók in 1955. For a discussion of political events surrounding the work of Mihály, Aladár Tóth, and others at the Opera House, as well as of the authenticity of Losonczy’s article, see Kövér, Losonczy Géza, 1917–1957 (Budapest: 1956-os Intézet, 1998), 191–196. 54. Losonczy, “Az Operaház legyen a népé!” 6. 55. Minutes of the Culture-Political Working Group of the Central Lecturing Office, 21 December 1950, MOL-MDP, Agitációs-Propaganda Osztálya (Agitation and Propaganda Division), 276. f., 89. cs., 60. W.e. 56. My thanks to Peter Schmelz for his invaluable assistance in tracking down documentation in Russian archives. 57. “JegyzWkönyv Wladimir Zaharov elvtárs elWadásáról” (Minutes about Comrade Vladimir Zakharov’s lecture), 16 March 1950, p. 5, MOL-Jelenkori, Magyar Zenemdvészek Szövetsége (Hungarian Musicians’ Association), XXVIIII-15, box 62. 58. Excerpts reprinted in “Anatolij Novikov: A mai Magyarország (Egy zenész megfigyelései)” (Anatoly Novikov: Hungary of today [A musician’s observations]), Szabad nép (Free Folk), 12 July 1950. 59. “My own heart draws me strongly toward Bartók. I have drawn much from him. I, who directly occupy myself with musical education, see that we must be very careful in the Bartók question.” Minutes of the Communist Action Committee of the Hungarian Musicians’ Association, 9 November 1950, MOL-MDP, Agitációs-Propaganda Osztálya (Agitation and Propaganda Division), 276. f., 89. cs., 384. W.e. 60. Ferenc Szabó, “Bartók Béla,” Szovjet kultúra (Soviet Culture) 2, no. 9 (September 1950): 34–35. Szabó’s article was also reprinted as “V zashchitu Bela Bartoka” (In defense of Béla Bartók) in Sovetskaya muzyka (Soviet music) 14, no. 11 (November 1950): 93–95. See also Szabó, “Bartók nem alkuszik” (Bartók does not compromise), Új zenei szemle (New Music Review) 1, no. 4 (September 1950): 3–12, which reclaimed the person of Bartók even as it denounced much of his music. 61. András Mihály, Ferenc Szabó, and Endre Székely, “Beszámoló a Zenemdvész Szövetség elsW évi munkájáról” (Report on the first year’s work of the Musicians’ Association), MOL-MDP, Agitációs-Propaganda Osztálya (Agitation and Propaganda Division), 276. f., 89. cs., 383. W.e. 62. Minutes of the Culture-Political Working Group of the Central Lecturing Office, 21 December 1950, MOL-MDP, Agitációs-Propaganda Osztálya (Agitation and Propaganda Division), 276. f., 89. cs., 60. W.e.

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2. a compromised composer 1. Accounts of the Nachholbedarf include Gottfried Eberle, “Neue Musik in Westdeutschland nach 1945” (New music in West Germany after 1945), in Musik 50er Jahre (Music of the 1950s), ed. Hanns-Werner Heister and Dietrich Stern (Berlin: Argument Verlag, 1980), 34–49; and Ulrich Dibelius, Moderne Musik nach 1945 (Modern Music after 1945), 3rd ed. (Munich: Piper, 1998), 26–31. 2. Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt, “Maßstäbe” (Standards), Stimmen: Monatsblätter für Neue Musik (Voices: Monthly for New Music) 1, no. 1 (November 1947): 12–15. 3. Wolfgang Steinecke, reported in Friedrich Hommel, “Einer hat es sein müssen. Ein notwendiges Drama: Schönberg” (Someone had to do it. A necessary drama: Schoenberg), in Von Kranichstein zur Gegenwart: 50 Jahre Darmstädter Ferienkurse (From Kranichstein to the Present: 50 Years of Darmstadt Summer Courses) (Darmstadt: Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik, DACO Verlag, 1996), 72. 4. Jost Hermand, “Die restaurierte ‘Moderne’ im Umkreis der musikalischen Teilkulturen der Nachkriegszeit” (The restored “Modern” among the musical subcultures of the postwar period), Musikpädagogische Forschung (Music-Pedagogical Research) 4 (1983): 176. 5. Cf. Hanns-Werner Heister and Dietrich Stern, “Editorial,” in Heister and Stern, Musik 50er Jahre, 6. 6. Wolfgang Steinecke, foreword to the brochure for the first summer courses, 1946, p. 3; quoted in Im Zenit der Moderne: die Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik Darmstadt, 1946–1966 (At the Zenith of the Modern: the Darmstadt International Summer Courses for New Music, 1946–1966), ed. Gianmario Borio and Hermann Danuser, vol. 2 (Freiburg im Breisgau: Rombach, 1997), 360–361. 7. See Joan Evans, “Stravinsky’s Music in Hitler’s Germany,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 56, no. 3 (fall 2003): 525–594. 8. On Hartmann, see especially “Chronik der musica viva I (1945–1964)” (Chronicle of Musica viva I [1945–1964]), in Eine Sprache der Gegenwart: Musica viva 1945–1995 (A Language of the Present: Musica viva 1945–1995), ed. Renate Ulm (Mainz: Schott, 1995), 75–118. 9. Amy Beal, “Patronage and Reception History of American Experimental Music in West Germany, 1945–1986” (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1999), 33; Beal, “Negotiating Cultural Allies: American Music in Darmstadt, 1946–1956,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 53, no. 1 (spring 2000): 105–139; and Walter Behr, “Report on the Accomplishments and Problems of the Theatre Control Section, 18 February 1947,” NARA, Record Group 260, Records of U.S. Occupation Headquarters, World War II, OMGUS Music and Theater Division, Office of the Military Government of Bavaria, Information Control Division, Theater Control Section, box 242. 10. Hubert Kolland, “Die Schwierigkeit, ein Bundesdeutscher Komponist zu

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sein: Neue Musik zwischen Isolierung und Engagement: Gespräch mit Hans Werner Henze” (The difficulty of being a West German composer: New music between isolation and engagement), in Heister and Stern, Musik 50er Jahre, 57. 11. Hermann Erpf, Vom Wesen der Neuen Musik (The Essence of New Music) (Stuttgart: Curt E. Schwab, 1949), 29. 12. Hans-Günter Klein, “Atonalität in den Opern von Paul von Klenau und Winfried Zillig: Zur Duldung einer im Nationalsozialismus verfemten Kompositionstechnik” (Atonality in the operas of Paul von Klenau and Winfried Zillig: On the toleration of a musical practice outlawed under National Socialism), in Bericht über den Internationalen Musikwissenschaftlichen Kongress Bayreuth 1981 (Report on the International Musicological Congress, Bayreuth 1981), ed. Christoph-Hellmut Mahling and Sigrid Weismann (Kassel: Bärenreiter Verlag, 1981): 490–494; and Gregory Dubinsky, “Winfried Zillig: The Career of a Schoenberg Student under National Socialism” (paper presented at the meeting of the Northern California Chapter of the American Musicological Society, 7 February 1998). 13. See Adorno, “Die Geschichte der deutschen Musik von 1908 bis 1933” (The history of German music from 1908 to 1933), in Musikalische Schriften, vol. 6, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Klaus Schultz (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1984), 620–621. 14. Adorno, “Das Altern der Neuen Musik” (The aging of the New Music). In Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 14, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1973), 146–147. On Adorno’s reception of Bartók, see János Breuer, “Adorno’s Image of Bartók,” New Hungarian Quarterly, no. 82 (1981): 29–35. 15. René Leibowitz, “Béla Bartók, ou la possibilité du compromis dans la musique contemporaine,” Les temps modernes 3, no. 25 (October 1947): 705–734. Leibowitz’s article was also published in English as “Béla Bartók, or the Possibility of Compromise in Contemporary Music,” Transition Forty-Eight, no. 3 (1948): 92–123. My citations are from the English version. For another article by Leibowitz that makes similar claims about Bartók, see “La Musique: Béla Bartók,” in L’arche 3, no. 12 (December 1945–January 1946): 125–128. 16. Introduction to Les temps modernes (1, no. 1, 1945). I quote here from the English translation by Françoise Ehrmann published in Eugen Weber, Aspects of European Thought from Romanticism to Existentialism (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1964), 434. On Leibowitz’s relationship to Sartre, see Sabine Meine, Ein Zwölftöner in Paris: Studien zu Biographie und Wirkung von René Leibowitz (1913–1972) (A Twelve-toner in Paris: Studies Pertaining to the Life and Work of René Leibowitz, 1913–1972) (Augsburg: Wißner, 2000), especially 69–72. 17. See Jean-Paul Sartre, What Is Literature? trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), 1–2. 18. Leibowitz, “Béla Bartók, or the Possibility of Compromise,” 99. Tony Judt has referred to this discourse as the “Resistance Syndrome”: see Judt, Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 1944–1956 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 45–74.

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19. The aspect of personal judgment (rather than judgment of works) prevalent in Leibowitz’s critiques of Bartók and Stravinsky was also a feature of the postwar purification trials. See Peter Novick, The Resistance versus Vichy: The Purge of Collaborators in Liberated France (London: Chatto and Windus, 1968), 171–172. 20. On Leibowitz’s relationship with Adorno, see Meine, Ein Zwölftöner in Paris, especially 154–160. 21. Leibowitz, “Béla Bartók, or the Possibility of Compromise,” 112 (italics in original ). 22. See Judt, Past Imperfect, 49–50. 23. Leibowitz, “Béla Bartók, or the Possibility of Compromise,” 122. 24. Ibid., 118. 25. Ibid., 121. 26. Adorno to Leibowitz, 26 May 1948, René Leibowitz Sammlung, Paul Sacher Stiftung. My thanks to Sabine Meine for bringing this letter to my attention and to Ulrich Mosch for access to the letter. Adorno mentions Bartók only in passing in his Philosophy of Modern Music (1948); see especially the footnote on pp. 35–36 of the English-language edition, trans. Anne G. Mitchell and Wesley V. Blomster (1973; repr., New York: Seabury Press, 1980). 27. For instance, Pierre Boulez, “Béla Bartók,” in Encyclopédie de la musique, ed. François Michel, François Lésure, and Vladimir Fédorov (Paris: Fasquelle éditeurs, 1958), 347–350; Claude Samuel, Entretiens avec Olivier Messiaen (Conversations with Olivier Messiaen) (Paris: Éditions Pierre Belfond, 1967): 132, 206; and Malcolm Gillies, “Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta: Bartók’s Ultimate Masterwork?” (paper presented at the conference “Bartók 2000,” Austin, Texas, March 2000). 28. Boris de Schloezer, “Béla Bartók (History vs. Esthetics),” Transition FortyEight, no. 3 (1948): 123–128. 29. Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt, “Was ist bürgerliche Musik?” (What is bourgeois music?) Stimmen 1, no 7 (1947–1948): 211. 30. Hermand, “Die restaurierte ‘Moderne,’” 183. 31. Klaus Wagner, “Musik der jungen Generation” (Music of the young generation), Nord-West-Zeitung (Oldenburg), 16 July 1949. 32. Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt, “Apokalyptische Gespräche und Klänge: Nachwort zum Sommer der Neuen Musik in Darmstadt” (Apocalyptic utterances and sounds: Postscript to the summer of New Music in Germany), Die Neue Zeitung 5, no. 176 (7 August 1949). See also Inge Kovács, “Die Ferienkurse als Schauplatz der Ost-West Konfrontation” (The summer courses as showplace of east-west confrontation), in Borio and Danuser, Im Zenit der Moderne, vol. 1, 116–139. 33. See Edwin Kuntz, “Zwischen Hindemith und Schönberg” (Between Hindemith and Schoenberg), Rhein-Neckar-Zeitung, 6 August 1948. 34. Hermann Scherchen, “Die gegenwärtige Situation der modernen Musik” (The current situation of modern music), Melos 16, no. 10 (October 1949): 258–259.

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35. Louis Durey, “Hommage à Béla Bartók,” La revue musicale, no. 224 (1955): 10. 36. Leslie Sprout, “Music for a ‘New Era’: Composers and National Identity in France, 1936–1946” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2000), 1–4, chap. 3. My thanks to Dr. Sprout for pointing out to me the connotations of Introduction et Marche funèbre. 37. Louis Saguer, “Die Krise im gegenwärtigen Musikschaffen” (The crisis in contemporary music making), in Borio and Danuser, Im Zenit der Moderne, vol. 3, 334. 38. See Beal, “Patronage and Reception History of American Experimental Music in West Germany,” 74–77; and Ralph Willett, The Americanization of Germany, 1945–1949 (New York: Routledge, 1989), 12. 39. See David Schneider, “Expression in the Time of Objectivity: Nationalism and Modernism in Five Concertos by Béla Bartók” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1997), 186–203. 40. E. F., “Meisterschaft und Experiment: Eröffnung der ‘Internationalen Woche für Neue Musik” (Mastery and experiment: Opening of the ‘International New Music Week’), Die Welt, Ausgabe West, Essen, 21 June 1949. 41. Wolf-Eberhard von Lewinski, “Die Kranichsteiner Ferienkurse für Neue Musik” (The Kranichstein summer courses for new music). Broadcast as part of the series “Aus dem Kulturleben” (From Cultural Life), Radio Bremen, 19 September 1954. See also the broadcast “10 Jahre internationale Ferienkurse für ‘neue Musik’ in Darmstadt” (Ten years of international summer courses for “new music” in Darmstadt), Musikalisches Nachtprogramm for Nordwestdeutscher Rundfunk, Cologne, 3 June 1955. Both are held in the Internationales Musikinstitut Darmstadt (hereafter IMD), press clippings collection. 42. Boris de Schloezer, “À propos de Béla Bartók” (Regarding Béla Bartók), Fontaine 60 (1947): 293–298. 43. Hermann Danuser, Die Musik des 20. Jahrhunderts (Music of the twentieth century), in Neues Handbuch der Musikwissenschaft (New Handbook of Musicology), vol. 7 (Laaber: Laaber Verlag, 1984), 287. 44. Hans Rutz, “Musica viva—Flucht in die Historie” (Musica viva—flight into history), Salzburger Nachrichten, 2 December 1953, reprinted in Karl Amadeus Hartmann und die Musica Viva, ed. Renata Wagner (Munich: R. Piper and Co., 1980), 132. 45. Lewinski, “Die Kranichsteiner Ferienkurse für Neue Musik.” 46. Raymond Fearn, Bruno Maderna (New York: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1990), 17, 20–21. For a brief but animated discussion of Bartók’s influence on Maderna, see also Massimo Mila, Maderna musicista europeo (Maderna: European Musician) (Turin: Giulio Einaudi editore, 1976), 12. 47. My discussion of the origins of the work and the chronology of the revisions is based on Paolo Cattelan, “Biografia di un concerto di Maderna: Il ‘Concerto per due pianoforti e strumenti’ (1947–49)” (Biography of a concerto by Maderna: The “Concerto for two pianos and instruments,” 1947–49), in Malipiero Maderna 1973–1993, ed. Cattelan (Venice: Leo S. Olschki, 2000), 299–333.

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48. Bruno Maderna, Concerto per due pianoforti e strumenti (Concerto for two pianos and instruments) (sound recording), Aldo Orvieto and Marco Rapetti, pianos; Eddy Dei Rossi and Anna Pasetti, harps; Cristiana Vianello, celesta; with the Demoé Percussion Ensemble, dir. Andrea Molino, Stradivarius STR 33536. 49. My comments on Dallapiccola’s letter follow those of Cattelan in “Biografia di un concerto di Maderna,” 308–310. 50. Cited ibid., 299. 51. Cattelan, notes to the recording of Maderna, Concerto per due pianoforti e strumenti. 52. Example 5a: Maderna, Concerto per due pianoforti e strumenti (Milan: Edizioni Suvini Zerboni, 1955). Example 5b: Bartók, Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion (New York: Boosey and Hawkes, 1942). 53. Example 5c: Bartók, Cantata profana (London: Boosey and Hawkes, 1955 [Universal Edition, 1934]). Example 5d: Maderna, Concerto per due pianoforti e strumenti. 54. Fearn, Bruno Maderna, 28–52. 55. Ibid., 6–7. 56. George Stone and Alan Stout, “A Conversation with Bruno Maderna,” ibid., 300. 57. Stockhausen to Goeyvaerts, 17 July 1951, cited in Christoph von Blumröder, Die Grundlegung der Musik Karlheinz Stockhausens (The Foundations of the Music of Karlheinz Stockhausen), Beihefte zum Archiv für Musikwissenschaft 32 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1993), 39. 58. Ibid., 40–41. 59. Karlheinz Stockhausen, “Die Sonate für zwei Klaviere und Schlagzeug von Béla Bartók: Prüfungsarbeit” (The Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion of Béla Bartók: Examination Paper) (thesis, Staatliche Hochschule für Musik, Cologne, 1951) (hereafter “Prüfungsarbeit”), 132. My thanks to Stockhausen for allowing me to view the original typescript of the thesis at the StockhausenStiftung für Musik (Stockhausen Foundation for Music), Kürten, Germany. 60. Ibid., 2. 61. See Iván Waldbauer, “Analytical Responses to Bartók’s Music: Pitch Organization,” in The Cambridge Companion to Bartók, ed. Amanda Bayley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), especially 215–216. 62. See, for instance, Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music, 90–95. 63. Stockhausen, “Prüfungsarbeit,” 162. Peter Petersen interprets Stockhausen’s negative interpretation of Bartók’s sonata as stemming from some fundamental “misunderstandings” of the music. See Petersen, “Rhythmik und Metrik in Bartóks Sonate für zwei Klaviere und Schlagzeug und die Kritik des jungen Stockhausen an Bartók” (Rhythm and meter in Bartók’s Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion and the young Stockhausen’s criticism of Bartók), Musiktheorie 9 (1994): 45–47. 64. Karlheinz Stockhausen, “Bartók’s Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion.” New Hungarian Quarterly 11, no. 40 (winter 1970): 49. A footnote in

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this article states that it is the text of Stockhausen’s radio lecture for Nordwestdeutscher Rundfunk, October 1951. 65. Ibid., 52. 66. Stockhausen, “Prüfungsarbeit,” 32. 67. Ibid., 142. 68. In Adorno’s essay “On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening,” he compares the social role of “regressive” light music to that of an advertising slogan. Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, ed. J. M. Bernstein (New York: Routledge, 1991), 48. Similarly, in 1944 Adorno and Max Horkheimer equated the repetition of cultural products or ideas with that of propaganda slogans. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972), 163. 69. Stockhausen, “Prüfungsarbeit,” 165. 70. Ibid., 125. Cf. Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music, 154–155. 71. Stockhausen, “Prüfungsarbeit,” 175. 72. Ibid., 126. 73. Stockhausen, “Bartók’s Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion,” 53. 74. Stockhausen, “Prüfungsarbeit,” 126. 75. Christoph von Blumröder has pointed out that in some respects the thesis is as much about Stockhausen’s own system of compositional values as about Bartók. Blumröder, Die Grundlegung der Musik Karlheinz Stockhausens, 40–41. 76. See Michael Kurtz, Stockhausen: A Biography, trans. Richard Toop (Boston: Faber and Faber, 1992), 32–36. 77. Karel Goeyvaerts to Karlheinz Stockhausen, Anvers, 25 January 1952, Stockhausen-Stiftung für Musik. 78. Jean Boivin, La classe de Messiaen (The Class of Messiaen) ([Paris]: Christian Bourgois, 1995), 50, 300. 79. Samuel, Entretiens avec Olivier Messiaen, 132, 206. 80. André Hodeir, Since Debussy: A View of Contemporary Music, trans. Noel Burch (New York: Grove Press, 1961), 92. 81. Some have interpreted the presence of Bartók’s music on concert programs at Darmstadt as a contradiction of the received wisdom that the summer courses were dogmatic: see Anne Shreffler, “The Myth of Empirical Historiography: A Response to Joseph N. Straus,” Musical Quarterly 84, no. 1 (spring 2000): 36. 82. Wolfgang Steinecke to Erich Doflein, Darmstadt, 27 March 1950, IMD, Wolfgang Steinecke papers. 83. Doflein to Steinecke, 23 March 1949; Steinecke to Doflein, 8 April 1949, IMD, Steinecke papers. 84. Notes penciled on Hans Mersmann to Steinecke, 26 June 1950, IMD, Steinecke papers. 85. See “Im Zeichen einer nationalen Musikkultur,” National-Zeitung (Berlin), 29 August 1950, IMD, press clippings collection.

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86. Theodor Adorno to Steinecke, Frankfurt, 18 July 1950, IMD, Steinecke papers. 87. Nearly all Adorno’s writings about Bartók’s music concern works composed before 1930. See Adorno, Musikalische Schriften, vol. 5, 275–294; see also Adorno to René Leibowitz, 26 May 1948, Paul Sacher Stiftung, René Leibowitz collection. 88. Through the early 1950s it was increasingly common to claim that the need to catch up had been met, and this claim has persisted in the literature on this period; see, for instance, Burghard Freudenfeld, “Sie pfeifen nicht mehr” (They’re not whistling any more), Sonntagsblatt (Hamburg) 14 March 1954, in Wagner, Karl Amadeus Hartmann und die Musica Viva, 133; and Heinz Pringsheim, “Die ersten Tone im eiskalten Prinzregententheater” (The first tones in the ice-cold Prinzregententheater), ibid., 103. 89. Erich Doflein, “Gleichgewicht von Geben und Nehmen” (A balance of give and take), in Musique pure dans un siècle sale: New Music Darmstadt 1950– 1960, comp. Friedrich Hommel and Wilhelm Schlüter (Darmstadt: Internationales Musikinstitut, 1987), unpaginated. 90. See “Ein Klassiker der Gegenwart: Bartók—Vollender und Neuerer” (A classic of the present: Bartók—culminator and innovator), Rheinische Post (Düsseldorf ), 4 December 1950. 91. Rudolf Kolisch to Steinecke, 20 February 1953, IMD, Steinecke papers. 92. György Ligeti, “Rückblick aus Anlaß der 25. Ferienkurse. Zwei Seminare im Kurzschrift-live-Protokoll” (A look back on the occasion of the 25th summer courses. Two seminars, live, in shorthand), in Hommel and Schlüter, Musique pure dans un siècle sale.

3. “bartók is ours” 1. See Robert W. Pirsein, The Voice of America: An History of the International Broadcasting Activities of the United States Government, 1940–1962 (New York: Arno Press, 1979), 142–151, 201–215; and Edward W. Barrett, Truth Is Our Weapon (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1953), 72–88. 2. U.S. Congress, House of Representatives, Department of State Appropriations for 1952. Hearings before the Subcommittee of the Committee on Appropriations, 82nd Cong., 1st sess. (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1951), 875. 3. United States Information Service in Europe, Implementation by the Department of State (as of 1/49) of the Recommendations Contained in the Reports of the Committee on Foreign Relations (Smith-Mundt Congressional Group), January, 1948 (Washington, D.C., 1949), cited in Pirsein, The Voice of America, 150. 4. Nathaniel P. Davis, telegram to Secretary of State Dean Acheson for VOANY, NARA, Department of State, Record Group 59, Decimal File 1950– 1954, 511.6441/2–950. 5. VOA daily broadcast content reports and script translations, 1950–1955,

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NARA, Records of the United States Information Agency, Record Group 306, Entry 1037, boxes 7 and 8. 6. “Gibes Greet Horváth at Bartók Memorial,” New York Times, 22 October 1950. 7. The script of this broadcast has not yet come to light: VOA content reports and script translations for the month of August 1950 are missing from the National Archives (NARA Record Group 306). 8. Endre Székely, “ElWre Bartók Béla szellemében a nép kulturális felemelkedéséért!” (Forward in the spirit of Béla Bartók for the cultural advancement of the people!), ÉneklW nép (Singing Folk) 3, no. 9 (September 1950): 2. 9. Ferenc Szabó, “Bartók nem alkuszik” (Bartók does not compromise), Új zenei szemle (New Music Review) 1, no. 4 (September 1950): 5. Szabó’s reference to “English radio propaganda” is ambiguous: it could refer to British broadcasts or simply to English-language broadcasts. As Béla Szász has pointed out, the distinction between British and American allegiances often went unrecognized by party officials and secret police officers. See Szász, Volunteers for the Gallows: Anatomy of a Show-Trial, trans. Kathleen Szász (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971), 143. 10. György Pollner to JenW Széll, 9 August 1950, MOL-MDP, AgitációsPropaganda Osztálya (Agitation and Propaganda Division), 276. f., 89. cs., 386. W.e. To my knowledge, this is the only direct statement extant in the party archives describing an actual ban on any of Bartók’s works in any forum. 11. Attila Boros offers general comments on the absence of Bartók from the radio in his Muzsika és mikrofón: A Rádiózenekar négy évtizede (Music and Microphone: Four Decades of the Radio Orchestra) (Budapest: Zenemdkiadó, 1985), 37–39. 12. This information and that in the following paragraphs was gleaned from the weekly program booklets published by Hungarian Radio, Magyar rádió újság (Hungarian Radio News). 13. Editorial, Magyar rádió újság (Hungarian Radio News), 18–24 September 1950 (italics mine). 14. Losonczy, “Az Operaház legyen a népé!” 15. Csillag, “Az Operaház munkájának kiértékelése.” 16. The Miraculous Mandarin returned to the Opera stage on 1 June 1956. For documents regarding this new production, see “A zene és táncmdvészeti fWosztály elWterjesztése az Operaház 1955./56. évadbeli mdsortervére” (The plan of the Department of Music and Dance for the Opera House’s 1955–56 program), in Berlász and Tallián, Iratok a magyar zeneélet történetéhez 1945–1956, vol. 2, 121–124. 17. For an explication in English of some of the connections between the two figures, see Frigyesi, Béla Bartók and Turn-of-the-Century Budapest, 168–195. 18. For some time socialists had regarded Ady’s poetry positively; it often stressed themes favoring democracy or revolution. By the end of 1950, however, Révai stated that “Hungarian poetry cannot go further on the path of Ady,

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or even of Attila József, because neither is sufficiently part of the folk [népi].” Minutes of the Culture-Political Working Group of the Central Lecturing Office, 21 December 1950, MOL-MDP, Agitációs-Propaganda Osztálya (Agitation and Propaganda Division), 276. f., 89. cs., 60. W.e. 19. For a discussion of many of the commonalities between Bartók’s and Schoenberg’s music, see János Kárpáti, Bartók’s Chamber Music, trans. Fred Macnicol and Mária Steiner (Stuyvesant, N.Y.: Pendragon Press, 1994), 36–62. 20. Jan Maegaard, “Bartók und das Atonale” (Bartók and the atonal ), Jahrbuch Peters 4 (1981–1982): 34–40. 21. See Schneider, “Expression in the Time of Objectivity,” 12–22; and Jonathan Bellman, The Style Hongrois in the Music of Western Europe (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1993), 93–130. 22. Leibowitz, “Béla Bartók, or the Possibility of Compromise,” 102. 23. Schneider, “Expression in the Time of Objectivity,” chap. 2; and Schneider, “Bartók and Stravinsky: Respect, Competition, Influence, and the Hungarian Reaction to Modernism in the 1920s,” in Bartók and His World, ed. Peter Laki (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 172–199. 24. Sándor Asztalos, “Bartók a mienk” (Bartók is ours), Új zenei szemle (New Music Review) 1, no. 4 (September 1950): 22. 25. On Les Noces, see Richard Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions: A Biography of the Works through Mavra (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 1386–1403; on the resemblance between Les Noces and Three Village Scenes, see Schneider, “Expression in the Time of Objectivity,” 55. 26. This is not to suggest that elements of Hungarian folk music are not to be heard in this work: on the contrary, they are present and especially audible in the third movement. Bartók’s treatment of these elements here differs markedly from that in the Improvisations: in the sonata the folk melodies are heard through the techniques made famous by Stravinsky. See László Somfai, “The Influence of Peasant Music on the Finale of Bartók’s Piano Sonata: An Assignment for Musicological Analysis,” in Studies in Musical Sources and Style: Essays in Honor of Jan LaRue, ed. Eugene K. Wolf and Edward H. Roesner (Madison, Wisc.: A-R Editions, 1990), 535–554. 27. See Schneider, “Expression in the Time of Objectivity,” chap. 2. 28. Andrei Zhdanov, “BevezetW beszéd a szovjet zene tanácskozásán a SzK(b)P Központi Bizottságában (1948)” (Introductory remarks at the meeting of Soviet musical professionals in the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist [Bolshevik] Party, 1948), in A mdvészet és filozófia kérdéseirWl (Regarding Questions of Art and Philosophy) (Budapest: n.p., 1948), 49. A partial translation of Zhdanov’s remarks is available in Werth, Musical Uproar in Moscow, 47–50. 29. My thanks to Iván Waldbauer for his observation that the Improvisations (1920) and Schoenberg’s Six Little Piano Pieces (1911) were not “written around the same time,” although this by no means precludes Bartók’s having known or admired the earlier work. Asztalos, “Bartók a mienk,” 21–22. 30. Asztalos, “Bartók a mienk,” 25–26.

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31. Ibid., 14. 32. Ferenc Szabó, “Bartók Béla,” 34. 33. My thanks to Iván Waldbauer for pointing out to me this inaccuracy in Szabó’s reading of Bartók. 34. Szabó, “Bartók nem alkuszik,”10. 35. Asztalos, “Bartók a mienk,” 23. 36. See ibid., 16. 37. See Katerina Clark, The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 114–135, 185–188. 38. Székely, “ElWre Bartók Béla szellemében,” 3–4. The evil twin is a recurring trope in socialist realist novels: see Boris Groys, The Total Art of Stalinism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 61. 39. Szabó, “Bartók nem alkuszik,” 11. 40. Székely, “ElWre Bartók Béla szellemében,” 4 (Székely’s italics). 41. Mihály, “Válasz egy Bartók-kritikára” (Response to a Bartók critique), Új zenei szemle (New Music Review) 1, no. 4 (September 1950): 55. 42. Arthur Honegger, preface to Serge Moreux, Béla Bartók (Paris: RichardMasse, 1949), 8. 43. See the Minutes of the Hungarian Musicians’ Association action committee leadership, 4 November 1950, MOL-MDP, Agitációs-Propaganda Osztálya (Agitation and Propaganda Division), 276. f., 89. cs., 384. W.e. An exhibit catalogue was published: see Ervin Major, ed., A Magyar Zenemdvészek Szövetsége Bartók Béla Emlékkiállításának katalógusa (Catalogue of the Hungarian Musicians’ Association’s Béla Bartók Memorial Exhibit) (Budapest: Officina, [1950]). 44. Memorandum regarding the Béla Bartók exhibit (unsigned; JenW Széll’s copy), 26 September 1950, MOL-MDP, Agitációs-Propaganda Osztálya (Agitation and Propaganda Division), 276. f., 89. cs., 385. W.e. 45. Speeches from the anniversary events are collected in Új zenei szemle (New Music Review) 1, no. 5 (October 1950). 46. Zoltán Kodály, “Kodály Zoltán elnöki megnyitója az Operaházi ünnepségen” (Zoltán Kodály’s presidential opening remarks at the Opera House festivities), Új zenei szemle (New Music Review) 1, no. 5 (October 1950): 5. 47. Ibid. (italics mine). 48. Bartók wrote: “We must simply take care not to try out works like my two violin sonatas, or the piano études and the improvisations, in places where the level of music is like that of the provincial towns of Hungary. These works will merely deter listeners who do not have the necessary level of preparation.” Bartók to JenW Takács, 31 December 1925, in Bartók Béla levelei (Béla Bartók’s Letters), ed. János Demény (Budapest: Zenemdkiadó, 1976), 323. My thanks to Iván Waldbauer for calling this letter to my attention. 49. JenW Széll, “Vita egy Bartók-tanulmánnyal” (Debate with a Bartók study), Élet és irodalom (Life and Literature), 21 April 1979, 6. 50. See János Breuer, “Bartók Béla pere” (Béla Bartók’s trial ), in Breuer, Bartók és Kodály (Bartók and Kodály) (Budapest: MagvetW, 1978), 105–138; and Breuer, Negyven év magyar zenekultúrája, 165–196.

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51. Széll, “Vita egy Bartók-tanulmánnyal,” 6. 52. Telegram, Nathaniel Davis to Secretary of State Dean Acheson, 17 April 1951, NARA, Department of State, Record Group 59, Decimal File 1950–1954, 511.6441/4–1751.

4. bartók and his publics 1. Vincent Persichetti, “Philadelphia Honors Béla Bartók.” Modern Music 23, no. 2 (spring 1946): 126. On Bartók’s American reception, see Tibor Tallián, “Bartók Reception in America, 1940–1945,” in Bartók and His World, ed. Peter Laki (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995): 101–118. 2. Bernard Gavoty, “Bericht aus Paris: Die letzten Werke von Béla Bartók” (Report from Paris: The last works of Béla Bartók), Melos 14, no. 2 (October 1947): 343–344. 3. Karl Wörner, Neue Musik in der Entscheidung (New Music at a Decision Point) (Mainz: B. Schott’s Söhne, 1954), 67. 4. Claude Rostand, “Béla Bartók: Chemin et contrastes du musicien” (Béla Bartók: Path and contrasts of a musician), Contrepoints 3 (March–April 1946): 31. 5. The recording history follows this pattern closely: see Vera Lampert, “Bartók’s Music on Record,” Studia Musicologica 36, no. 3–4 (1995): 401. See also the annual reports in Melos (generally appearing in October of each year) listing works of modern music to be performed on German concert programs, and occasional reports of concerts in the “Current Chronicle” section of Musical Quarterly. 6. See the lists of works broadcast on German, French, and Belgian radio stations published in the German radio guide Hör Zu (Listen). 7. Lampert, “Bartók’s Music on Record,” 402; and Malcolm Gillies, “The Canonization of Béla Bartók,” in Bartók Perspectives: Man, Composer, and Ethnomusicologist, ed. Elliott Antokoletz, Victoria Fischer, and Benjamin Suchoff (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 292. 8. W. D. [Walter Dirks], “Eine Woche Neue Musik in Darmstadt und in Frankfurt” (A week of New Music in Darmstadt and Frankfurt), Frankfurter Hefte 4, no. 8 (August 1949): 714. 9. “Unpopuläre Töne” (Unpopular sounds), Frankfurter Neue Presse, 30 June 1949. The exaggerated version is printed in [Dirks], “Eine Woche Neue Musik in Darmstadt und in Frankfurt.” 10. Ronald Inglehart, The Silent Revolution: Changing Values and Political Styles among Western Publics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977): 7. 11. This process had begun earlier in the century: see Joan Shelley Rubin, The Making of Middlebrow Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992). 12. Edwin Kuntz, “Zwischen Hindemith und Schönberg” (Between Hindemith and Schoenberg), Rhein-Neckar-Zeitung 4, no. 98, 6 August 1948.

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13. “Musikalische Freiheit als Aufgabe” (Musical freedom as a task), Der Rheinpfalz (Neustadt), 1 September 1950. 14. “Bartók in der Kunsthalle: Eine Manifestation des Publikums für die Neue Musik?” (Bartók in the Kunsthalle: A public demonstration in favor of the New Music?), Mannheimer Morgen, 26 February 1951. 15. “Jugend diskutiert Bartók” (Young people discuss Bartók), Neue Cannstatter Zeitung, 26 May 1954. 16. “Das neue Klangbild. GMD Lessing über Bartóks Orchesterkonzert und moderne Musik” (The new sound: General Music Director Lessing on Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra and modern music), Lübecker Nachrichten, no. 136, 9 October 1949. 17. See, for instance, Paul Collaer, La musique moderne, 1905–1955 (Modern Music, 1905–1955) (Paris: Elsevier, 1955). 18. Moreux, Béla Bartók; Halsey Stevens, The Life and Music of Béla Bartók (New York: Oxford University Press, 1953). 19. The score had been sent to Doflein by Newell Jenkins, chief of theater and music for the U.S. Military Government in Baden-Württemberg. See Doflein, Briefe an Béla Bartók, 1930–1935: Zur Entstehungsgeschichte von Bartóks 44 Duos für 2 Violinen (Letters to Béla Bartók, 1930–1935: On the History of the Creation of Bartók’s 44 Duos for 2 Violins), ed. Ulrich Mahlert (Cologne: Studio, 1995), 67. 20. Pringsheim, “Die ersten Töne im eiskalten Prinzregententheater,” 99. 21. Horst Leuchtmann, “Viva la musica viva!” in Wagner, Karl Amadeus Hartmann und die Musica Viva, 145. 22. Boulez, “Béla Bartók,” 350. 23. Wörner, Neue Musik in der Entscheidung, 68. 24. Pierre Boulez, plans for the first Concerts du Petit Théâtre Marigny, 1953. Cited at length in Jésus Aguila, Le Domaine musical: Pierre Boulez et vingt ans de création contemporaine (The Domaine musical: Pierre Boulez and twenty years of contemporary art) ([Paris]: Fayard, 1992), 139. 25. Schneider, “Expression in the Time of Objectivity,” 186–203. 26. Stevens, The Life and Music of Béla Bartók, 306. 27. Hodeir, Since Debussy, 82–83. 28. Boulez, introduction to the eighth season of the Domaine musical (1960), cited in Aguila, Le Domaine musical, 198. 29. Wolfgang Steinecke, “Kranichstein 1951,” lecture for Nordwestdeutscher Rundfunk Hamburg, August 1951, IMD, Steinecke papers. Passages to this effect were often reprinted in Steinecke’s later discussions of the summer courses; see, for example, the program booklet for the 1952 summer courses (in Borio and Danuser, Im Zenit der Moderne, vol. 1, 91); Ricordi-Nachrichten, March–April 1953; the program booklet for “Kleines Musik-Studio, Zehn Jahre Internationale Ferienkurse in Darmstadt”; and Steinecke’s lecture for a radio broadcast for Bayerische Rundfunk Munich, 11 August 1955, IMD, Steinecke papers. 30. Perhaps because of their own desire to limit populist movements as part

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of denazification, the American supporters of the European avant-garde subscribed to Steinecke’s program. See Everett Helm, “Darmstadt, Baden-Baden, and Twelve-Tone Music,” 30 July 1955, IMD, press clippings collection. 31. Quoted in Hubert Kolland, “Die Schwierigkeit, ein bundesdeutscher Komponist zu sein” (The difficulty of being a West German composer), in Hanns-Werner Heister and Dietrich Stern, Musik 50er Jahre, 52. 32. Hannah Arendt, “Society and Culture,” in Culture for the Millions? Mass Media in Modern Society, ed. Norman Jacobs (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), 49. 33. Karl Amadeus Hartmann, “Kranichstein als Impuls” (Kranichstein as an impulse), cited in Barbara Haas, “Aus dem Briefwechsel zwischen Karl Amadeus Hartmann und Wolfgang Steinecke,” in Von Kranichstein zur Gegenwart: 50 Jahre Darmstädter Ferienkurse (From Kranichstein to the Present: Fifty Years of Darmstadt Summer Courses), ed. Rudolf Stephan et al. (Darmstadt: Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik, DACO Verlag, 1996), 100. 34. “Musik der Jungen” (Music of the Young), Darmstädter Echo, 9 July 1949. 35. “Woche für Neue Musik: Erstes Sinfoniekonzert (Stadthalle)” (Week for New Music: First Symphony Concert, Stadthalle), Darmstädter Echo, 21 June 1949. 36. Anonymous student cited in Paul Eckhardt, “Kranichsteiner Fragmente” (Kranichstein fragments), Frankfurter Hefte 8, no. 9 (September 1953): 720. 37. Walter Panofsky, “Konzertante Kontrapunkte” (Concert counterpoints), Süddeutsche Zeitung, 31 December 1953, reprinted in Wagner, Karl Amadeus Hartmann und die Musica Viva, 132. 38. Hugo Puetter, “Nicht alles ist Musik . . . ” (Not all is music . . . ), Frankfurter Neue Presse, 26 July 1952. 39. Albert Rodemann, “Die Végh’s und ein paar Strümpfe” (The Véghs and a pair of socks), Darmstädter Tageblatt, 19 July 1952. 40. “Orgel, Elektronik und Bartók” (Organ, electronics, and Bartók), Darmstädter Tageblatt, 12 September 1961. 41. Alfred Baresel, “Dean Dixon dirigierte Bartók” (Dean Dixon directed Bartók), Frankfurter Neue Presse, 12 September 1961. 42. Rudolf Stephan cites the tendency to the “moderately modern” in the early years at Darmstadt, and he apologetically explains that a great deal of “harmless” music was performed. “Kranichstein. Vom Anfang und über einige Voraussetzungen” (Kranichstein: About the beginning and about certain assumptions), in Von Kranichstein zur Gegenwart, 24. 43. Elisabeth Mahlke, “Der Kritiker am Radio” (The critic at the radio), Der Tagesspiegel (Berlin), 25 June 1949. 44. See “Neue Musik mit Kranichsteiner Preisträgern” (New music with the Kranichstein prizewinners), Wiesbadner Tagblatt, 30 August 1954. 45. H. P. [Hugo Puetter], “Da capo für Bartók” (Da capo for Bartók), Frankfurter Neue Presse, 7 June 1955. 46. Clement Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” in Francis Frascina,

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Pollock and After: The Critical Debate, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 1985), 48–59. 47. James D. Herbert, “The Political Origins of Abstract Expressionist Art Criticism: The Early Theoretical and Critical Writings of Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg” (Stanford Honors Essay in the Humanities no. 28, Stanford University, 1985), 3–5. 48. Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” 56–57. 49. Herbert, “The Political Origins of Abstract Expressionist Art Criticism,” 8, 14. 50. Clement Greenberg, “Art Chronicle: Our Period Style,” Partisan Review 16, no. 11 (November 1949), 1138. 51. Clement Greenberg, “Art,” Nation, 23 February 1946, 241. In this essay Greenberg attributes the idea of middlebrow to the music critic Kurt List. 52. Kurt List, “Music Chronicle: The State of American Music,” Partisan Review 15, no. 1 (January 1948): 85–90. 53. Paul Moor, “Hungarian Composers Still Live in Past,” New York Times, 22 April 1956. 54. Allen Forte, “Bartók’s ‘Serial’ Composition,” Musical Quarterly 46, no. 2 (April 1960): 233. 55. Milton Babbitt, “The String Quartets of Bartók,” Musical Quarterly 35, no. 3 (July 1949): 377. 56. Ibid., 384. 57. Ibid., 382. 58. Martin Brody, “Music for the Masses: Milton Babbitt’s Cold War Music Theory,” Musical Quarterly 77, no. 2 (summer 1993): 161–192. 59. Leo Treitler, “Re: Harmonic Procedure in the Fourth Quartet of Béla Bartók,” Journal of Music Theory 3, no. 2 (1959): 292–298. 60. George Perle, Twelve-Tone Tonality, 2nd rev. ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996): 12–17, 161–163, 171–176. 61. George Perle, “Symmetrical Formations in the String Quartets of Béla Bartók,” Music Review 16 (1955): 312. 62. Ibid. 63. Colin Mason, “An Essay in Analysis: Tonality, Symmetry, and Latent Serialism in Bartók’s Fourth Quartet,” Music Review 18 (August 1957): 200. 64. Elliott Antokoletz, “The Music of Bartók: Some Theoretical Approaches in the USA,” Studia Musicologica 24: Report on the Musicological Congress of the International Music Council (1982, supplement): 67. 65. See Elliott Antokoletz, The Music of Béla Bartók: A Study of Tonality and Progression in Twentieth-Century Music (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). 66. See Peter Coleman, The Liberal Conspiracy: The Congress for Cultural Freedom and the Struggle for the Mind of Postwar Europe (New York: Free Press, 1989); Ian Wellens, Music on the Frontline: Nicolas Nabokov’s Struggle against Communism and Middlebrow Culture (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2002); and

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Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (New York: New Press, 1999). 67. See Nicolas Nabokov, “This Is Our Culture,” Counterpoint 17, no. 5 (May 1952): 13. 68. Wellens, Music on the Frontline, viii. Giles Scott-Smith has argued persuasively that the CCF was a chaotic, shifting alliance rather than a clear embodiment of official ideology; see Scott-Smith, The Politics of Apolitical Culture: The Congress for Cultural Freedom, the CIA and Post-War American Hegemony (New York: Routledge, 2002), 131, 164. 69. Nabokov to Editiors [sic] Musicales Amphion, 21 February 1952, CCF/ IACF Collection, Joseph Regenstein Library, Department of Special Collections, University of Chicago. My thanks to Lynn Hooker for her help in gaining access to this letter. 70. The program for the festival is reproduced in Mark Carroll, Music and Ideology in Cold War Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 177–185. 71. Wellens, Music on the Frontline, 104–106. 72. Nicolas Nabokov, “In memoriam: La mort de Béla Bartók” (In memory: The death of Béla Bartók), Preuves, no. 15 (May 1952): 10–11. See Wellens, Music on the Frontline, 55, and Carroll, Music and Ideology in Cold War Europe, 21. 73. Cited in Tom Van Dycke, “Rodzinski Hits Paris Fest’s Music Choices,” Variety, 28 May 1952, 12; for a similar criticism, see Herbert Luethy, “Selling Paris on Western Culture: Report on an American-Sponsored Exposition,” Commentary 14 (July 1952): 71. 74. Wellens, Music on the Frontline, chaps. 7–8 passim, especially p. 113. 75. Nicolas Nabokov, “Introduction à l’Œuvre du XXe siècle” (Introduction to Masterpieces of the Twentieth Century), La revue musicale, no. 212, special issue, “L’Œuvre du XXe siècle” (April 1952): 5, 6. 76. Mark Carroll faults Nabokov for choosing tonal music that differed from Soviet music “only in its political complexion.” This seems an oversimplification. Carroll, Music and Ideology in Cold War Europe, chap. 1 passim and p. 24. 77. Nicolas Nabokov, “Introduction à l’Œuvre du XXe siècle,” 7. 78. See Wellens, Music on the Frontline, 122–126; and Saunders, The Cultural Cold War, 223–224. 79. Carroll, Music and Ideology in Cold War Europe, 8–24. 80. Coleman, The Liberal Conspiracy, 101. 81. Nabokov to Hook, 3 July 1952, cited in Coleman, The Liberal Conspiracy, 56–57. See also Wellens, Music on the Frontline, 50–51, 60; Coleman, The Liberal Conspiracy, 11, 19; Nabokov, “This Is Our Culture,” 13. 82. Genêt [Janet Flanner], “Letter from Paris,” New Yorker, 31 May 1952, 72. 83. Guy Dumur, “L’Œuvre du XXe siècle et le dialogue France–USA” (Masterpieces of the Twentieth Century and French–U.S. dialogue), Combat, 15 May 1952.

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84. René Dumesnil, “L’Œuvre du XXe siècle: Igor Stravinsky et Béla Bartók,” Le Monde, 27 May 1952. 85. Marcel Schneider, “Le Boston Symphony Orchestra avec Charles Munch et Pierre Monteux,” Combat, 13 May 1952. 86. Genêt, “Letter from Paris,” 74. 87. Colin Mason, “The Paris Festival,” Tempo, no. 24 (summer 1952): 12. 88. Luethy, “Selling Paris on Western Culture,” 74. On the Rite of Spring performance, see René Dumesnil, “Pierre Monteux dirige l’Orchestre symphonique de Boston aux Champs-Élysées” (Pierre Monteux directs the Boston Symphony Orchestra at the Champs-Élysées), Le Monde, 10 May 1952, 13. 89. Mason, “The Paris Festival,” 19.

5. beyond the folk song 1. Bartók, “Hungarian Music” (1944), in Suchoff, Béla Bartók Essays, 393. 2. Gertrud Runge, “Auf den Trümmern der Tonalität: Eindrücke von der Woche für ‘Neue Musik’” (In the rubble of tonality: Impressions from the Week for “New Music”), Die Welt am Sonntag, 3 July 1949. 3. See Adorno, Musikalische Schriften, vol. 5, 282; and Adorno, “Die stabilisierte Musik: Zum fünften Fest der I.G.N.M. in Frankfurt am Main” (Stabilized music: On the fifth I.S.C.M. festival in Frankfurt am Main), in Musikalische Schriften, vol. 6, 106–107. 4. Arthur Berger, “The Two Bartóks,” Saturday Review, 29 August 1953, 53. 5. See, for example,”Zeitgenössische Musik in Darmstadt” (Contemporary Music in Darmstadt), Fuldaer Volkszeitung, 29 July 1947; “Jugend sucht ihren musikalischen Weg” (Youth seeks its musical path), Mannheimer Morgen, 31 August 1950; and “Am Ende der Ferienkurse” (At the end of the summer courses), Darmstädter Echo, 1 August 1953. 6. “Im Zeichen einer nationalen Musikkultur” (Under the banner of a national musical culture), National-Zeitung (Berlin), 29 August 1950; and “Tage der Neuen Musik in Darmstadt” (New Music days in Darmstadt), press release from the Kulturdienst Berlin, 18 August 1950, IMD, press clippings collection. 7. Hans Vogt, seeking in the 1970s to explain why Bartók had no successors, claimed that “the national attitude was a phenomenon of the nineteenth century,” and that Bartók was therefore out of date; but Vogt also placed Bartók “in the line of Dvoäák, Smetana, Grieg, Sibelius, Rimsky-Korsakov, Khachaturian.” The inclusion of Khachaturian—not a nineteenth-century composer but a socialist realist—in the list points up a certain anxiety about the political meanings of populism. Vogt, “Wo bleibt die Bartók-Nachfolge?” (Where are Bartók’s successors?), in Neue Musik seit 1945 (New music since 1945) (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam jun., 1972), 74. See also Boulez’s treatment of Bartók in his encyclopedia article, “Béla Bartók,” 350. 8. See Marina Frolova-Walker, “‘National in Form, Socialist in Content’:

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Musical Nation-Building in the Soviet Republics,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 51, no. 2 (summer 1998): 331–371. 9. See Greg Castillo, “Peoples at an Exhibition: Soviet Architecture and the National Question,” in Socialist Realism without Shores, ed. Thomas Lahusen and Evgeny Dobrenko (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 91–119; and Frolova-Walker, “‘National in Form, Socialist in Content.’” 10. Castillo has argued that the Soviet emphasis on folk themes both embodied a reaction against cultural cosmopolitanism and reflected the desire to build an empire in which each subordinated national group displayed a set of distinct but clearly comparable cultural features. See Castillo, “Peoples at an Exhibition.” 11. See Olkhovsky, Music under the Soviets, 280. 12. Zhdanov, “BevezetW beszéd,” 48. For further discussion of Zhdanov’s ideology and of the 1948 Soviet resolution on music, see Schwarz, Music and Musical Life in Soviet Russia, 205–223. 13. Zhdanov, “BevezetW beszéd,” 49. 14. Vargyas, “Zene és közösség,” 336–337. 15. Ibid. 16. Zoltán Kodaly, “A népdal szerepe az orosz és magyar zenemdvészetben” (The role of folk song in Russian and Hungarian music), in Kodály, Visszatekintés (Looking back), ed. Ferenc Bónis, vol. 1 (Budapest: Zenemdkiadó, 1964), 187. 17. Zoltán Kodály, Kodály Zoltán: Közélet, vallomások, zeneélet: Kodály Zoltán hátrahagyott írásai (Zoltán Kodály: Community Life, Confessions, Musical Life: Writings Left by Zoltán Kodály), ed. Lajos Vargyas (Budapest: Szépirodalmi Könyvkiadó, 1989), 309. 18. The committee included several noteworthy composers, along with party bureaucrats. Present at this meeting, for instance, were the composers András Mihály, Tibor Sárai, Endre Székely, Ferenc Szabó, Pál Kadosa, and Sándor Veress and the piano teacher Erna Czövek; the bureaucrats Miklós Csillag and Mrs. István Dési Huber were also in attendance. 19. Minutes of the Music Committee of the Hungarian Workers’ Party’s Culture-Political Division, 20 December 1948, MOL-MDP, Központi Értelmiségi (Kulturpolitikai) Osztály (Central Intellectual [Culture-Political] Division), 276. f., 109. cs., 3. W.e. 20. See Kovrig, Communism in Hungary, 160–165, 177–179, 202–203, and 206–208. My thanks to Klára Móricz for bringing this element of the folk music problem to my attention. 21. See Ferenc Rottler, ed. Sej, a mi lobogónkat fényes szelek fújják: Népi kollégiumok 1939–1949 (Hey, Shining Winds Lift Our Banners: Peoples’ Colleges, 1939–1949) (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1977). 22. A statute of the Union of Soviet Writers proclaimed in 1934 that “Socialist realism . . . demands of the artist the truthful, historically concrete representation of reality in its revolutionary development” (italics mine); cited in Abram Tertz, On Socialist Realism, trans. George Dennis (New York: Pantheon

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Books, 1960), 24. Katerina Clark describes this contrast between the realist and the utopian literary modes as a near-paradox that lies at the heart of socialist realist literature: “This particular dichotomy is not some misguided trend that emerged in the course of literary practice: it was actually built into the definition of what was to be distinctive in Soviet Socialist Realism.” Clark, The Soviet Novel, 37. 23. Mihály, “Bartók Béla és az utána következW nemzedék,” 8. 24. Almost all the songs used by Szervánszky are contained in the collection 111 népi táncdal (111 Popular Dance Songs), comp. Benjamin Rajeczky and Sándor Gönyey on the basis of collections by László Lajtha and others (Budapest: Zenemdkiadó, 1954). 25. My discussion of this work and the transcription in example 6a are based on aural observations made from a 1978 recording (by the Men’s Chorus and Orchestra of the Hungarian People’s Army, conducted by György Görgey, Hungaroton SPX 11922); I also consulted a choral part located at the New York Public Library. 26. See, for example, Béla Bartók, “Why and How Do We Collect Folk Music?” (1936), in Béla Bartók Essays, 15–17. 27. Béla Bartók, “Hungarian Peasant Music” (1933), in Béla Bartók Essays, 102. See also Bartók, “Hungarian Peasant Music” (1920), in Béla Bartók Essays, 305–306; and Bartók, “Hungarian Folk Music” (1921), in Béla Bartók Essays, 68. 28. On Bartók’s use of the verbunkos style in his late works, see Schneider, “Expression in the Time of Objectivity,” 212–228; and Schneider, “A Context for Béla Bartók on the Eve of World War II: The Violin Concerto (1938),” repercussions 5, nos. 1–2 (spring–fall 1996): 21–68. 29. Example 6b: Folk melody used by Szervánszky in Home Guard Cantata, III (“Evening’s Rest”). Béla Bartók, A magyar népdal (The Hungarian folk song), (Budapest: Rózsavölgyi és társa, 1924), no. 146. 30. Miklós Csillag, “Az Új zenei szemle megindulása elé” (Preface to the beginning of the New Music Review). Új zenei szemle (New Music Review) 1, no. 1 (May 1950): 2. 31. Maróthy detailed the editorial controversy in a memo explaining the lateness of this inaugural issue of the reformed music journal. Note to the Agitation and Propaganda Division, 9 February 1951, MOL-MDP, Agitációs-Propaganda Osztálya (Agitation and Propaganda Division), 276. f., 89. cs., 386. W.e. 32. Béla Bartók, “A magyar népzene” (Hungarian folk music). In Bartók Béla összegydjtött írásai (Collected Writings of Béla Bartók), ed. András SzWllWsy (Budapest: Zenemdkiadó, 1966), 579–580. 33. Example 6c: Folk melody used as the theme of Szabó’s Song Singing, VI. Rajeczky and Gönyey, 111 népi táncdal, 114. This tune was also featured in the middle section of the second movement of Szervánszky’s cantata. 34. Example 7: Ferenc Szabó, Nótaszó: magyar népdalok vegyeskarra vagy szóló énekre és kis zenekarra (Song Singing: Hungarian Folk Songs for Mixed

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Chorus or Solo Singing with Small Orchestra) (Budapest: Zenemdkiadó, 1959 [1951]). 35. The “jewel” category (in which the folk song is the most important part of the work) is one of three categories of folk song setting enumerated by Bartók: the others are pieces in which “the importance of the used melodies and the added parts is almost equal,” and those in which “the used folk melody is only to be regarded as a kind of motto.” See Béla Bartók, “The Relation between Contemporary Hungarian Art Music and Folk Music,” in Béla Bartók Essays, 351–352. 36. Minutes of Vladimir Zakharov’s lecture, 16 March 1950, MOL-Jelenkori, Magyar Zenemdvészek Szövetsége (Hungarian Musicians’ Association), XXVIII-I-15, box 62. 37. Minutes of the Culture-Political Working Group of the Central Lecturing Office, 16 December 1950, MOL-MDP, Agitációs-Propaganda Osztálya (Agitation and Propaganda Division), 276. f., 89. cs., 60. W.e. 38. Ibid. 39. On the element of modernity in socialist realist literature, see Julia Hell, Loren Kruger, and Katie Trumpener, “Dossier: Socialist Realism and East German Modernism—Another Historians’ Debate,” Rethinking Marxism 7, no. 3 (fall 1994): 37–44. 40. Minutes of the Culture-Political Working Group, 21 December 1950, MOL-MDP, Agitációs-Propaganda Osztálya (Agitation and Propaganda Division), 276. f., 89. cs., 60. W.e. 41. Ibid. 42. Ibid. 43. Ibid. 44. Ibid. 45. Ibid. 46. Boris Groys has argued for socialist realism as an alternative modernity in The Total Art of Stalinism: Avant-Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992): 33–74.

6. the “bartók question” and the politics of dissent 1. The transcript of the trial is available in English as László Rajk and His Accomplices before the People’s Court (Budapest: n.p., 1949). For in-depth accounts of the show trials, see Szász, Volunteers for the Gallows; and Tibor Hajdu, “The Party Did Everything for You,” Hungarian Quarterly 37, no. 141 (spring 1996): 82–99. 2. ErnW GerW, Harcban a szocialista népgazdaságért (In the Struggle for a Socialist People’s Economy) (Budapest: Szikra, 1950), 115; cited in Kovrig, Communism in Hungary, 244. 3. According to Bennett Kovrig (Communism in Hungary, 248), party

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Notes to Pages 119–122

membership peaked at 945,606 members in 1952; concurrent purges and recruitment drives meant that the membership was highly unstable. Historical overviews that conflict somewhat in their perceptions of how effective the trials were in swaying public opinion are available in Kovrig, Communism in Hungary, 242–249; and in Molnár, From Béla Kun to János Kádár, 142–147. 4. Memorandum about Endre Székely, 24 October 1950, MOL-MDP, Agitációs-Propaganda Osztálya (Agitation and Propaganda Division), 276. f., 89. cs., 385. W.e. A slightly differing typescript containing essentially the same text can be found in ibid., 434. W.e. This suggests that the document originated either in the Artistic Division of the Party’s Agitation and Propaganda Division or in the Budapest Party Committee. 5. The article appeared in the Party’s Social Review (Társadalmi szemle) in July 1949. Public and private documents relating to the Lukács affair have been collected in A Lukács-vita (1949–1951) (The Lukács debate, 1949–1951), edited by János Ambrus with a foreword by Dénes Zoltai (Budapest: Múzsák KözmdvelWdési Kiadó, 1985). 6. József Révai, Lukács and Socialist Realism: A Hungarian Literary Controversy (anonymous translation) (London: Fore Publications, 1950), 1–3, 9, 16. See Árpád Kadarkay, Georg Lukács: Life, Thought, and Politics (Cambridge, Mass.: Basil Blackwell, 1991), 402–403. 7. See Schwarz, Music and Musical Life in Soviet Russia, 204–248, especially 204–208. 8. Memorandum about Endre Székely, 24 October 1950. 9. This charge was in reference to the case of Tibor SzWke, whom Székely had nominated as the associate conductor of the Béla Bartók Society; SzWke allegedly embezzled a large sum of money from the society and then defected. 10. Ferenc Szabó to Ágnes Kenyeres, 17 September 1950, MOL-MDP, Agitációs-Propaganda Osztálya (Agitation and Propaganda Division), 276. f., 89. cs., 386. W.e.; and Szabó to JenW Széll, shortly after 17 September 1950, ibid. Széll received a further complaint about Székely from JenW Zolnai, who accused Székely and Tibor Sárai of obstructing the presentation of concerts, both by appointing unqualified people to handle money and by canceling concerts at short notice on questionable grounds. See JenW Zolnai, “Feljegyzés a ZenemdvészszakszervezetrWl (1949. április–1950. február) és a Muzsika HangversenyrendezW N.V.-rWl (1949. szept.–1950. május)” (Memorandum about the Musicians’ Union [April 1949 to February 1950] and the Muzsika Concert Organizing Company [September 1949 to May 1950]), ibid. 11. Mátyás Rákosi, “Politikai helyzet és Pártunk feladatai” (Political situation and the tasks of our Party), reprinted as “ErWsítsük Pártunk kapcsolatait a tömegekkel, fejlesszük a pártonbelüli demokráciát, a kritikát és önkritikát” (Let us strengthen our Party’s connections with the masses; let us develop democracy, criticism, and self-criticism within our Party) in Rákosi, Válogatott cikkek és beszédek (Selected Articles and Speeches) (Budapest: Szikra, 1950), 522–556. 12. In attendance at the meeting of the action committee leadership on 4 November 1950, for example, were JenW Széll, János Maróthy, Mrs. Nándor Szá-

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vai, István Sárközy, Erzsébet Kozma, Endre Székely, Endre Szervánszky, Pál Kadosa, JenW Fehérvári, András Mihály, Ferenc Szabó, Sándor Asztalos, and Tibor Sárai. See Minutes of the Hungarian Musicians’ Association action committee leadership (hereafter HMA action committee), 4 November 1950, MOL-MDP, Agitációs-Propaganda Osztálya (Agitation and Propaganda Division), 276. f., 89. cs., 384. W.e. 13. See Szász, Volunteers for the Gallows, 36, 47. 14. Mihály here invokes the socialist realist literary trope of the hero as a visionary who is able to see the inner “forms” of reality; by admitting his lack of vision he confessed his outsider status, since the process of coming to “see” was a metaphor for a person’s integration into the party hierarchy. See Clark, The Soviet Novel, 142–144. 15. [Mihály], “Önkritika kiegészítése” (Addendum to self-criticism), MOLMDP, Agitációs-Propaganda Osztálya (Agitation and Propaganda Division), 276. f., 89. cs., 386. W.e. Though the typescript statements are unsigned, a penciled attribution indicates that they were written by Mihály; their content seems to confirm this attribution. 16. Losonczy himself stated in 1956 that Mihály and Tóth had been present at the February policy meeting at which the Ministry resolved to reform the administration of the Opera and commissioned the article from Losonczy. 17. This hypothesis coincides to an extent with the one offered by János Breuer (personal communication with the author, December 1996): that Mihály wrote Losonczy’s article. My hypothesis allows that Mihály may have been used as an informant, but that Losonczy wrote the article himself. 18. In July 1949 Sándor Jemnitz attested in his diary that, according to Tóth, Mihály had opposed performances of The Miraculous Mandarin, a position for which neither Tóth nor Jemnitz had any respect. See Jemnitz, “Jemnitz Sándor naplójából” (From the diary of Sándor Jemnitz), comp. János Lózsy, Kritika (Critique) 83, no. 8 (August 1983): 34. 19. [Mihály], “Önkritika kiegészítése.” 20. Ibid. 21. Minutes of the HMA action committee, 4 and 9 November 1950, MOLMDP, Agitációs-Propaganda Osztálya (Agitation and Propaganda Division), 276. f., 89. cs., 384. W.e. 22. Tamás Aczél and Tibor Méray report that although the population at large and even the “Muscovite” Communists became deeply cynical early on, the “home Communists” and particularly the intellectuals among them remained idealistic until 1949 and even beyond. See Aczél and Méray, The Revolt of the Mind: A Case History of Intellectual Resistance behind the Iron Curtain (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1959), 24–25. 23. Minutes of the HMA action committee, 9 November 1950. 24. See “Fractionalism [sic],” in R. N. Carew Hunt, A Guide to Communist Jargon (New York: Macmillan, 1957), 79–80. 25. The Culture-Political Working Group, led by the party official Márton Horváth, consisted of representatives from a wide variety of fields in the arts

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and academia, as well as representatives of the party. It consisted of thirty-six members, among them Éva Lakatos, Ferenc Jánosi, József Darvas, Sándor Erdei, György Lukács, Tamás Aczél, Béla Illés, Sándor Ék, Ferenc Szabó, István Kende, Bence Szabolcsi, András Mihály, István Szirmai, and JenW Széll. See “Kulturpolitikai munkaközösség” (Culture-political working group), MOL-MDP, Agitációs-Propaganda Osztálya (Agitation and Propaganda Division), 276. f., 89. cs., 60. W.e. 26. Breuer, “Bartók Béla pere,” in Breuer, Negyven év magyar zenekultúrája, 165–196; also in Breuer, Bartók és Kodály, 105–138. 27. András Mihály, “A mai magyar zene kérdései” (Questions of contemporary Hungarian music). My thanks to György Kövér for making available to me a copy of Mihály’s lecture, which he located among the personal papers of Géza Losonczy. Mihály’s lecture was not included in the minutes of the meetings, presumably because copies had been circulated in advance. In the advance copies, the lecture was not completely written out: at the top is typed the notice “The lecture’s first twenty-two pages are worked out, the rest are only theses.” 28. Mihály’s Requiem Symphony, also known as his Symphony No. 1, was completed in late 1946 or early 1947. Unfortunately, the score was never published; it remains in private hands and has not been available for study. Sándor Jemnitz described the symphony in 1949 as an intensely personal work that recalls the composer’s experience in internment camps during the Second World War; Jemnitz, “Mihály András: Symphonia da Requiem,” [Népszava] 9 April 1949. (The article is in the Sándor Jemnitz Collection, Institute for Musicology, Budapest.) János Kárpáti has characterized the musical language of the symphony as “tightly woven tonally unspecified chromaticism, straining sevenths and melodies of suspended tonality.” Kárpáti, Mihály András (Budapest: Zenemdkiadó, 1965), 6. 29. Révai’s language here echoed the words of a request for “sharpness” made to Béla Szász, who had been a potential witness for the Rajk trial, by his interrogators. See Szász, Volunteers for the Gallows, 136. 30. Minutes of the Culture-Political Working Group of the Central Lecturing Office (hereafter Minutes of the CPWG), 16 December 1950, MOL-MDP, Agitációs-Propaganda Osztálya (Agitation and Propaganda Division), 276. f., 89. cs., 60. W.e. 31. Ibid. 32. There are two copies of minutes from this meeting in MOL-MDP, Ágitácios-Propaganda Osztálya (Agitation and Propaganda Division), 276. f., 89. cs., 60. W.e. The second copy has been corrected in ink in an unknown hand. The one that appears before it is a retyping of that copy, including most but not all of the corrections; those notated at the bottom of sheet no. 103, which were intended to be placed before an insertion mark on sheet no. 102, were left out of the retyped version. This is a significant omission, for it includes Révai’s peculiarly worded statement that has since circulated in the oral tradition that the

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Bartók question had been a “national tactlessness.” (See Sándor Asztalos, “Az elsW Bartók-életrajz” [The first Bartók biography], Muzsika [Music] 8, no. 10 [October 1965]: 4–5.) The version of the text I use here retains this correction. 33. Minutes of the CPWG, 21 December 1950. 34. Ibid. 35. Ibid. 36. Ibid. 37. Ibid. 38. Ibid. 39. Mihály, “A mai magyar zene kérdései.” 40. Minutes of the CPWG, 21 December 1950. 41. Ibid. 42. Ibid. 43. Ibid. 44. Szabó remarked during the meeting that the Voice of America events had had a significant effect on Hungarian policy: “At that time Csillag took a very rigid position on the Bartók question. The Voice of America’s attacks were very perceptible in the Bartók question and our feeling was that if they expose the Bartók question, we are handing the trump card over to them”; minutes of the CPWG, 21 December 1950. 45. Lengyel authored the tale on which The Miraculous Mandarin was based; Balázs was the author of the scenario for The Wooden Prince as well as the librettist for Duke Bluebeard’s Castle. 46. Minutes of the CPWG, 21 December 1950. 47. According to Révai’s somewhat offhand remarks, the committee was to consist of lay people as well as musicians, and it would include Sándor Asztalos, István Antal, Béla Tardos, István Szirmai, and Mihály himself. The committee was to report within ten days to the party’s Agitation and Propaganda Committee. No formal records of the committee’s activities have come to light. 48. György Ránki to JenW Széll, 9 January 1951, MOL-MDP, AgitációsPropaganda Osztálya (Agitation and Propaganda Division), 276. f., 89. cs., 386. W.e. 49. “Feljegyzés Révai elvt. részére” (Memorandum to Comrade Révai), MOL-MDP, Agitációs-Propaganda Osztálya (Agitation and Propaganda Division), 276. f., 89. cs., 386. W.e. 50. No evidence has been found that details the nature of these commissions or whether they were actually awarded. 51. See Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Permanent Purge: Politics in Soviet Totalitarianism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1956), 85–88, 148–149. 52. Memorandum about the Musicians’ Association, early 1951, MOL-MDP, Agitációs-Propaganda Osztálya (Agitation and Propaganda Division), 276. f., 89. cs., 386. W.e. 53. “JegyzWkönyv mely felvétetett a Zenemdvész Szövetség Magyar Dolgozók Pártja alakuló taggyülésén, 1951 junius 1-én” (Minutes of the inaugu-

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ral meeting of the Musicians’ Association’s Hungarian Workers Party [organization], 1 June 1951), MOL-MDP, Agitációs-Propaganda Osztálya (Agitation and Propaganda Division), 276. f., 89. cs., 384. W.e. 54. See Éva Bieliczky, “‘Alap-atmoszférája: a tragikus harmónia’—Beszélgetés a 75 éves Mihály András zeneszerzWvel” (“Basic atmosphere: Tragic harmony”—Conversation with the seventy-five-year-old composer András Mihály), Magyar zene (Hungarian Music) 33, no. 4 (December 1992): 430–436. 55. Székely seems to have remained in Budapest until early in 1952, probably because it was difficult to find a suitable replacement for him as director of the Radio Chorus. Árpád Darázs began directing the chorus in January 1952. See Béla Lévai, A rádió és televízió krónikája 1945–1978 (Chronicle of Radio and Television, 1945–1978), vol. 1 (Budapest: Tömegkommunikációs központ, 1980), 116. In an obituary, Ferenc Bónis states that Székely was forced from his position in 1952 by “the internal struggles that divided musical life” (a zenei életet megosztó belsW harcok). See Bónis, “Székely Endre halálára” (On the death of Endre Székely), Parlando 31, no. 9–10 (September–October 1989): 40. 56. Biró, Rákosi’s brother, was the head of the party secretariat’s Education Committee. 57. “Jelentés a központi ElWadói Iroda elméleti munkaközösségeinek munkájáról” (Report on the work of the theoretical working groups of the central Lecturing Office), Minutes of the Political Committee of the Hungarian Workers’ Party, 20 September 1951, MOL-MDP, Politikai Bizottság (Political Committee), 276. f., 53. cs., 83. W.e. 58. Examples 8a, 8b, 9a, 9c, 10a, 10d, 11a, and 11d: András Mihály, Versenymd gordonkára és zenekarra (Concerto for Violoncello and Orchestra) (Budapest: Zenemdkiadó, 1956). 59. Examples 9b and 10c: Bartók, Musik für Saiteninstrumente, Schlagzeug und Celesta (Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta) (Vienna: Universal Edition, 1937). 60. Example 10b: Bartók, Herzog Blaubarts Burg (Duke Bluebeard’s Castle) (London: Boosey and Hawkes, 1952 [Universal Edition, 1925]). 61. See Sándor Asztalos, “Bartók a mienk,” 25–26. 62. Example 11b: Bartók, Streichquartett V (String Quartet no. 5) (Vienna: Universal Edition, 1936). Example 11c: Bartók, Concerto for Orchestra (London: Boosey and Hawkes, 1946). 63. Minutes of the Second Hungarian Music Week, MOL-Jelenkori, Magyar Zenemdvészek Szövetsége (Hungarian Musicians’ Association), XXVIII-I-15, box 61. 64. Ibid. 65. Ibid. 66. Richard Taruskin, Defining Russia Musically (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 536–537. 67. He also supported new Hungarian music in modern styles; for instance, he conducted the works of György Kurtág. Three of Kurtág’s works were com-

Notes to Pages 149–152

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posed with Mihály in mind: Hommage à Mihály András, 12 Microludes for String Quartet (1977–1978); Hommage à Mihály András for piano in book III of Játékok (Games) (1979); and Stele (1994).

epilogue east 1. Erzsébet Andics, “Javaslat a Titkárságnak Bartók évforduló megünneplésére” (Recommendation to the secretariat regarding celebration of the Bartók anniversary), 9 April 1955, MOL-MDP, Titkárság (Secretariat), 276. f., 54. cs., 363. W.e. 2. Minutes of the Secretariat of the Hungarian Workers’ Party, 25 April 1955, MOL-MDP, Titkárság (Secretariat), 276. f., 54. cs., 363. W.e. 3. Ibid. 4. An internal government document reports that the public took an “immense interest” in the anniversary festivities; since official reports generally portrayed events in the most positive possible light, it is difficult to assess the extent of this interest. See “A zene és táncmdvészeti fWosztály jelentése a hangverseny rendezésrWl” (Report of the music and dance division on the organizing of concerts), in Berlász and Tallián, Iratok a magyar zeneélet történetéhez 1945–1956, vol. 1, 241. 5. See Aczél and Méray, The Revolt of the Mind, 153–154. 6. These struggles closely mirrored the maneuverings in the USSR, for each Hungarian faction was backed by particular players in the Soviet power struggle, and each Hungarian player’s fate hung together with that of his Soviet mentor. Nagy was supported by Georgi Malenkov, who was striving to introduce his “New Course” in Soviet politics at the same time. Rákosi’s victory corresponded precisely to Khrushchev’s: Khrushchev did not entirely approve of the Stalinist Rákosi, but the two had similar approaches to economic policy. 7. On the social role of intellectuals in the pre-1956 period, see György Péteri, “New Course Economics: The Field of Economic Research in Hungary after Stalin, 1953–1956,” Trondheim Studies on East European Cultures and Societies, no. 6 (November 2001): 47–49; B. András Hegedds, “The PetWfi Circle: The Forum of Reform in 1956,” Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics 13, no. 2 (1997): 108–133; and Paul Zinner, Revolution in Hungary (New York: Columbia University Press, 1962), 188–191. 8. During the early postwar years, Szabolcsi (1899–1973) led the Bartók Seminar at the Academy of Music in Budapest, where the analysis of Bartók’s works was central to the study of new music. See Ligeti, “Neues aus Budapest,” 47. 9. György Kroó, Szabolcsi Bence, vol. 2 (Budapest: Liszt Ferenc Zenemdvészeti FWiskola, 1994), 586. 10. Bence Szabolcsi, “A zene történelmi hangváltásairól” (The changing sound of music in history), in Szabolcsi, Népzene és történelem: tanulmányok (Folk Music and History: Essays) (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1954), 174. 11. Gyula Illyés, “Bartók,” in Csak tiszta forrásból: Antológia magyar írók és költWk mdveibWl Bartók Béla emlékére (Only from a Pure Source: Anthol-

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Notes to Pages 152–157

ogy of the Works of Hungarian Writers and Poets in Memory of Béla Bartók), ed. Ilona Fodor (Budapest: Zenemdkiadó, 1965), 11. I have aimed for literal fidelity to the text here, but more poetic translations of Illyés’s poem are available: see Claire Lashley’s in Gyula Illyés, Selected Poems, ed. Thomas Kabdebo and Paul Tabori (London: Chatto and Windus, 1971), 50–53 (reprinted in Peter Laki, ed., Bartók and His World [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995], 302–305); or Robert C. Kenedy’s in In Quest of the “Miracle Stag”: The Poetry of Hungary, ed. Adam Makkai (Chicago: Atlantis-Centaur, 1996): 639–643. Illyés’s “Bartók” and other poetic utterances about Bartók are discussed in Peter Laki’s “The Gallows and the Altar: Poetic Criticism and Critical Poetry about Bartók in Hungary,” in Laki, Bartók and His World, 79–100. 12. András Mihály, “Bartók Béla,” Társadalmi szemle (Social Review) 10, no. 10 (October 1955): 25 (italics in original ). 13. Aczél and Méray, The Revolt of the Mind, 345–350. The Miraculous Mandarin returned to the Opera House on 1 June 1956. See Berlász and Tallián, Iratok a magyar zeneélet történetéhez 1945–1956, vol. 2, 121–124. 14. Géza Losonczy’s statement before the PetWfi Circle, in Hegedds and Rainer, A PetWfi Kör vitái hiteles jegyzWkönyvek alapján, vol. 4, 171. 15. The Fifth String Quartet was performed at the first Warsaw Autumn Festival in 1956; The Miraculous Mandarin was played in 1958 (orchestral suite) and 1960 (staged ballet), the Fourth String Quartet in 1958, the Second Piano Concerto and the Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta in 1960, and the Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion in 1961. The Concerto for Orchestra was also performed in 1956 and 1959. 16. See Clark, The Soviet Novel, 61–63. 17. It is also noteworthy that both Mihály and Losonczy expressed their regrets in the ritual form of self-criticism—their remarks went well beyond what the custom required, to be sure, but the form of their statements only confirmed their support for that tradition. See Kövér, Losonczy Géza, 252. 18. György Ligeti, “Interview: György Ligeti in Conversation with Toru Takemitsu.” Ligeti Letter, Ligeti Collection of the Paul Sacher Foundation 1 (1991): 8; cited in Friedemann Sallis, An Introduction to the Early Works of György Ligeti (Cologne: Studio Verlag Schewe, 1996), 104. 19. Ligeti, for instance, apparently had access to Adorno’s book from the early 1950s. See Wolfgang Burde, György Ligeti: Eine Monographie (György Ligeti: A Monograph) (Zurich: Atlantis-Musikbuch-Verlag, 1993), 43. 20. Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music, 34. 21. Scherchen, “Die gegenwärtige Situation der modernen Musik,” 258. 22. Frigyesi, Béla Bartók and Turn-of-the-Century Budapest, particularly chap. 3.

epilogue west 1. Constantin Floros, “Wohin orientiert sich die Musik? György Ligeti im Gespräch mit Constantin Floros” (Where is music heading? György Ligeti in

Notes to Pages 157–162

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conversation with Constantin Floros). Österreichische Musikzeitschrift 49, no. 1 (1994): 5–8. 2. The connections between postmodernism and cold war politics have only begun to be addressed. Paul Griffiths makes the link implicitly through the juxtaposition of topics in the last few pages of his Modern Music: A Concise History, rev. ed. (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1994), 194–197. See also Andreas Huyssen, “Mapping the Postmodern,” in his After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 197; Boris Groys, “A Style and a Half: Socialist Realism between Modernism and Postmodernism,” in Socialist Realism without Shores, ed. Thomas Lahusen and Evgeny Dobrenko (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 76–90; and Augustin Ioan, “A Postmodern Critic’s Kit for Interpreting Socialist Realism,” in Architecture and Revolution, ed. Neil Leach (New York: Routledge, 1999): 62–66. 3. Rochberg’s essays have been collected in a volume entitled The Aesthetics of Survival, ed. William Bolcom (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1984). 4. Many critics mention the presence of Bartók as one of the referents of the quartet; but few have acknowledged the specificity of the borrowings or their pervasiveness.That the quartet is modeled in its overall shape on Bartók’s Fourth Quartet is mentioned by Michael Walsh in “Kronos Quartet Passes the Test,” San Francisco Examiner, 28 March 1980, 31; the resemblance between Rochberg’s marches and the march in Bartók’s Sixth Quartet is mentioned by Max Harrison in “Rags to Rochberg,” Times (London), 20 April 1974, 9. 5. Example 12a: Rochberg, String Quartet no. 3 (New York: Galaxy Music Corporation, 1973). Examples 12b and 12c: Bartók, Streichquartett IV (String Quartet no. 4) (Budapest: Editio Musica Budapest, n.d. [Universal Edition, 1929]). 6. See Joan Templar Smith, “The String Quartets of George Rochberg” (Ph.D. diss., Eastman School of Music, 1976), 192, 309–310. 7. The notable exception, in the present context, is Rochberg’s “Bartókiana,” a brief, light piano work composed around 1956 that utilized Bartók’s polymodal approach to tonality. 8. Rochberg, “Humanism versus Science,” in The Aesthetics of Survival, 167, 173. 9. Rochberg, “The Avant-Garde and the Aesthetics of Survival,” in The Aesthetics of Survival, 220. See also Rochberg, “Humanism versus Science,” 173. 10. Mark Berry, “Music, Postmodernism, and George Rochberg’s Quartet,” in Postmodern Music/Postmodern Thought, ed. Judy Lochhead and Joseph Auner (New York: Routledge, 2002), 237. 11. Robert R. Reilly, “The Recovery of Modern Music: George Rochberg in Conversation,” Tempo, no. 219 (February 2002): 9. 12. Rochberg, notes to “Contra mortem et tempus,” CRI 231 USD-A, cited in Lisa Brooks Robinson, “Mahler and Postmodern Intertextuality” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1994): 91. 13. Danuser, Die Musik des 20. Jahrhunderts, 287.

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Notes to Pages 162–164

14. On epigonism and eclecticism in socialist realism, see Groys, The Total Art of Stalinism, 49. A recent New York Times article portrayed art from Eastern Europe as a kind of “Brigadoon,” untouched by the modernism of Jackson Pollock, and stressed its need to “catch up.” Michelle Falkenstein, “Art Nurtured in Communism Has Advocate,” New York Times, 15 July 2001. 15. Rochberg, “On the Third String Quartet,” in The Aesthetics of Survival, 239. 16. See, for instance, Steven D. Block, “George Rochberg: Progressive or Master Forger?” Perspectives of New Music 21, no. 1–2 (fall–winter 1982– spring–summer 1983), 407–409; and Hugh Wood, “Thoughts on a Modern Quartet,” Tempo, no. 111 (December 1974): 23–26. 17. See Charles Jencks, “Postmodern and Late Modern: The Essential Definitions,” Chicago Review 35, no. 4 (1987): 33–37, especially 37. 18. This inverts Thomas Crow’s paradigm in which modernists deployed low-cultural topics for the purpose of criticizing common tastes and behaviors before a high-culture audience. Crow, Modern Art in the Common Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), chap. 1, especially 32–33. My thanks to Jonathan Gilmore for calling this parallel to my attention. 19. Richard Taruskin, The Oxford History of Western Music, vol. 5 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 426. My thanks to Professor Taruskin for sharing this text in advance of its publication. 20. Cited in Peter J. Schmelz, “Listening, Memory, and the Thaw: Unofficial Music and Society in the Soviet Union, 1956–1974” (Ph. D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2002), 615.

Selected Bibliography

archival sources Internationales Musikinstitut Darmstadt (International Music Institute, Darmstadt, Germany) Press clippings collection Wolfgang Steinecke papers

Joseph Regenstein Library, Department of Special Collections, University of Chicago Records of the Congress for Cultural Freedom and the International Association for Cultural Freedom

Magyar Országos Levéltár, Jelenkori Gydjtemény (MOL-1945 utáni) (Hungarian National Archives, Documents after 1945) Magyar Zenemdvészek Szövetsége (Hungarian Musicians’ Association), XXVIII-I-15.

Magyar Országos Levéltár, MDP-MSZMP-iratok (MOL-MDP) (Hungarian National Archives, Documents of the Hungarian Workers’ Party and the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party) Archival numbers listed here refer to the department (fond) and the document group (csoport); individual archival unit numbers (Wrzési egység) are cited in footnotes (e.g., 276. f., 89. cs., 383. W.e.). MDP, Agitációs-Propaganda Bizottság (Hungarian Workers’ Party, Agitation and Propaganda Committee), 276. f., 86. cs. MDP, Agitációs-Propaganda Osztálya (Hungarian Workers’ Party, Agitation and Propaganda Division), 276. f., 89. cs.

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Selected Bibliography

MDP, Központi Értelmiségi (Kulturpolitikai) Osztály (Hungarian Workers’ Party, Central Intellectual [Culture-Political] Division), 276. f., 109. cs. MDP, Központi VezetWség (Hungarian Workers’ Party, Central Committee), 276. f., 52. cs. MDP, Nemzetközi Kapcsolatok Osztálya (Hungarian Workers’ Party, International Relations Division), 276. f., 98. cs. MDP, Országos Propaganda (Agitációs) Osztály (Hungarian Workers’ Party, National Propaganda [Agitation] Division), 276. f., 108. cs. MDP, Politikai Bizottság (Hungarian Workers’ Party, Political Committee), 276. f., 53. cs. MDP, Révai József titkári iratai (Hungarian Workers’ Party, official writings of József Révai), 276. f., 68. cs. MDP, Titkárság (Hungarian Workers’ Party, Secretariat), 276. f., 54. cs.

National Archives of the United States at College Park, Maryland (NARA) Records of the Department of State, Record Group 59. Records of the United States Information Agency, Record Group 306. Records of U.S. Occupation Headquarters, World War II, Record Group 260.

Paul Sacher Stiftung, Basel René Leibowitz Sammlung

Stockhausen-Stiftung für Musik (Stockhausen Foundation for Music), Kürten, Germany Papers of Karlheinz Stockhausen

other sources This section includes only major published sources. For citations to brief newspaper articles and translations of titles, please see the notes. Aczél, Tamás, and Tibor Méray. The Revolt of the Mind: A Case History of Intellectual Resistance behind the Iron Curtain. New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1959. Adorno, Theodor W. “Das Altern der Neuen Musik.” In Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 14, edited by Rolf Tiedemann, 143–167. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1973. ———. The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture. Edited by J. M. Bernstein. New York: Routledge, 1991. ———. Die gegängelte Musik: Bemerkungen über die Musikpolitik der Ostblockstaaten. Frankfurt: Verlag Eremiten-Presse, 1954. ———. “Die Geschichte der deutschen Musik von 1908 bis 1933.” In Adorno, Musikalische Schriften, vol. 6, edited by Rolf Tiedemann and Klaus Schultz, 620–629. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1984.

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209

———. Musikalische Schriften. Edited by Rolf Tiedemann. 6 vols. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1978–1984. ———. Philosophy of Modern Music. Translated by Anne G. Mitchell and Wesley V. Blomster. 1973. Reprint, New York: Seabury Press, 1980. Agárdi, Péter. “Révai József Bartók Béláról.” Kritika 72, no. 1 (February 1972): 13. Aguila, Jésus. Le Domaine musical: Pierre Boulez et vingt ans de création contemporaine. [Paris]: Fayard, 1992. Ambrus, János, ed. A Lukács-vita (1949–1951). Budapest: Múzsák KözmdvelWdési Kiadó, 1985. Antokoletz, Elliott. “The Music of Bartók: Some Theoretical Approaches in the USA.” Studia Musicologica 24: Report on the Musicological Congress of the International Music Council (1982, supplement): 67–74. ———. The Music of Béla Bartók: A Study of Tonality and Progression in Twentieth-Century Music. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. Asztalos, Sándor. “Bartók a mienk.” Új zenei szemle 1, no. 4 (September 1950): 13–32. ———. “Az elsW Bartók-életrajz.” Muzsika 8, no. 10 (October 1965): 4–6. Babbitt, Milton. “The String Quartets of Bartók.” Musical Quarterly 35, no. 3 (July 1949): 377–385. Barrett, Edward W. Truth Is Our Weapon. New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1953. Bartók, Béla. Bartók Béla levelei. Edited by János Demény. Budapest: Zenemdkiadó, 1976. ———. Bartók Béla összegydjtött írásai. Edited by András SzWllWsy. Budapest: Zenemdkiadó, 1966. ———. Béla Bartók Essays. Edited by Benjamin Suchoff. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1976. ———. Cantata profana. London: Boosey and Hawkes, 1955 [Universal Edition, 1934]. ———. Concerto for Orchestra. London: Boosey and Hawkes, 1946. ———. Herzog Blaubarts Burg. London: Boosey and Hawkes, 1952 [Universal Edition, 1925]. ———. A magyar népdal. Budapest: Rózsavölgyi és társa, 1924. ———. Musik für Saiteninstrumente, Schlagzeug und Celesta. Vienna: Universal Edition, 1937. ———. Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion. New York: Boosey and Hawkes, 1942. ———. Streichquartett IV. Budapest: Editio Musica Budapest, n.d. [Universal Edition, 1929]. ———. Streichquartett V. Vienna: Universal Edition, 1936. Beal, Amy. “Negotiating Cultural Allies: American Music in Darmstadt, 1946– 1956.” Journal of the American Musicological Society 53, no. 1 (spring 2000): 105–139. ———. “Patronage and Reception History of American Experimental Music in West Germany, 1945–1986.” Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1999.

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Berger, Arthur. “The Two Bartóks.” Saturday Review, 29 August 1953, 52–53. Berlász, Melinda, and Tibor Tallián, eds. Iratok a magyar zeneélet történetéhez 1945–1956. 2 vols. Budapest: MTA Zenetudományi Intézet, 1986. Bernstein, Leonard. “What Does Music Mean?” New York Philharmonic Young People’s Concerts, broadcast 18 January 1958. Sony Classical Video SHV54738. Berry, Mark. “Music, Postmodernism, and George Rochberg’s Quartet.” In Postmodern Music/Postmodern Thought, edited by Judy Lochhead and Joseph Auner, 235–248. New York: Routledge, 2002. Bibó, István. Harmadik út: Politikai és történeti tanulmányok. Edited by Zoltán Szabó. London: Magyar könyves céh, 1960. Bieliczky, Éva. “‘Alap-atmoszférája: a tragikus harmónia’—Beszélgetés a 75 éves Mihály András zeneszerzWvel.” Magyar zene 33, no. 4 (December 1992): 430–436. Block, Steven D. “George Rochberg: Progressive or Master Forger?” Perspectives of New Music 21, no. 1–2 (fall–winter 1982–spring–summer 1983): 407–409. Blumröder, Christoph von. Die Grundlegung der Musik Karlheinz Stockhausens. Beihefte zum Archiv für Musikwissenschaft, 32. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1993. Boivin, Jean. La classe de Messiaen. [Paris]: Christian Bourgois, 1995. Borio, Gianmario, and Hermann Danuser, eds. Im Zenit der Moderne: die Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik Darmstadt, 1946–1966. 4 vols. Freiburg im Breisgau: Rombach, 1997. Boros, Attila. Muzsika és mikrofón: A Rádiózenekar négy évtizede. Budapest: Zenemdkiadó, 1985. Boulez, Pierre. “Béla Bartók.” In Encyclopédie de la Musique, edited by François Michel, François Lésure, and Vladimir Fédorov, 347–350. Paris: Fasquelle éditeurs, 1958. Bown, Matthew Cullerne. Art under Stalin. New York: Holmes and Meier, 1991. Breuer, János. “Adorno’s Image of Bartók.” New Hungarian Quarterly, no. 82 (1981): 29–35. ———. Bartók és Kodály. Budapest: MagvetW, 1978. ———. Negyven év magyar zenekultúrája. Budapest: Zenemdkiadó, 1985. ———. “A Párt zenei bizottsága 1948–49.” Kritika 89, no. 12 (1989), 27–31. Brody, Martin. “Music for the Masses: Milton Babbitt’s Cold War Music Theory.” Musical Quarterly 77, no. 2 (summer 1993): 161–192. Brzezinski, Zbigniew. The Permanent Purge: Politics in Soviet Totalitarianism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1956. ———. The Soviet Bloc: Unity and Conflict. Rev. ed. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967. Burde,Wolfgang. György Ligeti: Eine Monographie. Zurich: Atlantis-Musikbuch-Verlag, 1993. Carroll, Mark. Music and Ideology in Cold War Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

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Castillo, Greg. “Peoples at an Exhibition: Soviet Architecture and the National Question.” In Socialist Realism without Shores, edited by Thomas Lahusen and Evgeny Dobrenko, 91–119. Durham: Duke University Press, 1997. Cattelan, Paolo. “Biografia di un concerto di Maderna: Il ‘Concerto per due pianoforti e strumenti’ (1947–49).” In Malipiero Maderna 1973–1993, edited by Paolo Cattelan, 299–333. Venice: Leo S. Olschki, 2000. Clark, Katerina. The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981. Coleman, Peter. The Liberal Conspiracy: The Congress for Cultural Freedom and the Struggle for the Mind of Postwar Europe. New York: Free Press, 1989. Crow, Thomas. Modern Art in the Common Culture. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996. Csillag, Miklós. “Az Új zenei szemle megindulása elé.” Új zenei szemle 1, no. 1 (May 1950): 1–7. Danuser, Hermann. Die Musik des 20. Jahrhunderts. Laaber: Laaber Verlag, 1984. DeKoster, Lester. Vocabulary of Communism. Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans, 1964. Dibelius, Ulrich. Moderne Musik nach 1945. 3rd ed. Munich: Piper, 1998. [Dirks, Walter.] “Eine Woche Neue Musik in Darmstadt und in Frankfurt.” Frankfurter Hefte 4, no. 8 (August 1949): 713–714. Doflein, Erich. Briefe an Béla Bartók, 1930–1935: Zur Entstehungsgeschichte von Bartóks 44 Duos für 2 Violinen. Edited by Ulrich Mahlert. Cologne: Studio, 1995. Dubinsky, Gregory. “Winfried Zillig: The Career of a Schoenberg Student under National Socialism.” Paper presented at the meeting of the Northern California Chapter of the American Musicological Society, 7 February 1998. Durey, Louis. “Hommage à Béla Bartók.” La revue musicale, no. 224 (1955): 10–11. Eberle, Gottfried. “Neue Musik in Westdeutschland nach 1945.” In Musik 50er Jahre, edited by Hanns-Werner Heister and Dietrich Stern, 34–49. Berlin: Argument Verlag, 1980. Eckhardt, Paul. “Kranichsteiner Fragmente.” Frankfurter Hefte 8, no. 9 (September 1953): 719–720. Erpf, Hermann. Vom Wesen der Neuen Musik. Stuttgart: Curt E. Schwab, 1949. Evans, Joan. “Stravinsky’s Music in Hitler’s Germany.” Journal of the American Musicological Society 56, no. 3 (fall 2003): 525–594. Fast, Piotr. Ideology, Aesthetics, Literary History: Socialist Realism and Its Others. New York: Peter Lang, 1999. Fearn, Raymond. Bruno Maderna. New York: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1990. Floros, Constantin. “Wohin orientiert sich die Musik? György Ligeti im Gespräch mit Constantin Floros.” Österreichische Musikzeitschrift 49, no. 1 (1994): 5–8. Fodor, Ilona, ed. Csak tiszta forrásból:Antológia magyar írók és költWk mdveibWl Bartók Béla emlékére. Budapest: Zenemdkiadó, 1965.

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Forte, Allen. “Bartók’s ‘Serial’ Composition.” Musical Quarterly 46, no. 2 (April 1960): 233–245. Fosler-Lussier, Danielle. “The Transition to Communism and the Legacy of Béla Bartók in Hungary, 1945–1956.” Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1999. Frigyesi, Judit. Béla Bartók and Turn-of-the-Century Budapest. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Frolova-Walker, Marina. “‘National in Form, Socialist in Content’: Musical Nation-Building in the Soviet Republics.” Journal of the American Musicological Society 51, no. 2 (summer 1998): 331–371. Gaddis, John Lewis. We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997. Gavoty, Bernard. “Bericht aus Paris: Die letzten Werke von Béla Bartók.” Melos 14, no. 2 (October 1947): 343–344. Genêt [Janet Flanner]. “Letter from Paris.” New Yorker, 31 May 1952, 72–77. Gillies, Malcolm. “The Canonization of Béla Bartók.” In Bartók Perspectives: Man, Composer, and Ethnomusicologist, edited by Elliott Antokoletz, Victoria Fischer, and Benjamin Suchoff, 289–302. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. ———. “Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta: Bartók’s Ultimate Masterwork?” Paper presented at the conference “Bartók 2000,” Austin, Texas, March 2000. Greenberg, Clement. “Art.” Nation, 23 February 1946, 241–242. ———. “Art Chronicle: Our Period Style.” Partisan Review 16, no. 11 (November 1949): 1135–1139. ———. “Avant-Garde and Kitsch.” In Pollock and After: The Critical Debate, edited by Francis Frascina, 48–59. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 1985. Griffiths, Paul. Modern Music: A Concise History. Rev. ed. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1994. Groys, Boris. “A Style and a Half: Socialist Realism between Modernism and Postmodernism.” In Socialist Realism without Shores, edited by Thomas Lahusen and Evgeny Dobrenko, 76–90. Durham: Duke University Press, 1997. ———. The Total Art of Stalinism: Avant-Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992. Hajdu, Tibor. “The Party Did Everything for You,” Hungarian Quarterly 37, no. 141 (spring 1996): 82–99. Hegedds, B. András. “The PetWfi Circle: The Forum of Reform in 1956.” Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics 13, no. 2 (1997): 108–133. Hegedds, B. András, and M. János Rainer, eds. A PetWfi Kör vitái hiteles jegyzWkönyvek alapján. Vol. 4, Partizántalálkozó, Sajtóvita. Budapest: Múzsák, 1956-os Intézet, 1991. Heister, Hanns-Werner, and Dietrich Stern. Musik 50er Jahre. Berlin: Argument Verlag, 1980. Hell, Julia, Loren Kruger, and Katie Trumpener. “Dossier: Socialist Realism and

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213

East German Modernism—Another Historians’ Debate.” Rethinking Marxism 7, no. 3 (fall 1994): 37–44. Herbert, James D. “The Political Origins of Abstract Expressionist Art Criticism: The Early Theoretical and Critical Writings of Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg.” Honors Essay in the Humanities no. 28, Stanford University, 1985. Herf, Jeffrey. Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in Two Germanys. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997. Hermand, Jost. Kultur im Wiederaufbau: Die Bundesrepublik Deutschland 1945–1965. Munich: Nymphenburger Verlagshandlung, 1986. ———. “Die restaurierte ‘Moderne’ im Umkreis der musikalischen Teilkulturen der Nachkriegszeit.” Musikpädagogische Forschung 4 (1983): 172–191. HézsW, István. “Remarks to the History of Mandarin.” In the program booklet to the festival “Mandarinok Fesztiválja,” edited by Roland Bokor. Budapest, 1996. Hodeir, André. Since Debussy: A View of Contemporary Music. Translated by Noel Burch. New York: Grove Press, 1961. Hommel, Friedrich. “Einer hat es sein müssen. Ein notwendiges Drama: Schönberg.” In Von Kranichstein zur Gegenwart: 50 Jahre Darmstädter Ferienkurse, 67–74. Darmstadt: Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik, DACO Verlag, 1996. Hommel, Friedrich, and Wilhelm Schlüter, comps. Musique pure dans un siècle sale: New Music Darmstadt 1950–1960. Darmstadt: Internationales Musikinstitut, 1987. Hooker, Lynn. “Modernism Meets Nationalism: Béla Bartók and the Musical Life of Pre–World War I Hungary.” Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 2001. Hunt, R. N. Carew. A Guide to Communist Jargon. New York: Macmillan, 1957. Huyssen, Andreas. “Mapping the Postmodern.” In After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism, by Andreas Huyssen, 178–221. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986. Inglehart, Ronald. The Silent Revolution: Changing Values and Political Styles among Western Publics. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977. Ioan, Augustin. “A Postmodern Critic’s Kit for Interpreting Socialist Realism.” In Architecture and Revolution, edited by Neil Leach, 62–66. New York: Routledge, 1999. Jacobs, Norman, ed. Culture for the Millions? Mass Media in Modern Society. Boston: Beacon Press, 1964. James, C. Vaughan. Soviet Socialist Realism. London: Macmillan, 1973. Jemnitz, Sándor. “Bartók ‘Concerto grosso’-jának [sic] magyar bemutatója külföldi magyar karmester vezényletével.” Világosság, 25 April 1947, 6. ———. “Jemnitz Sándor naplójából.” Compiled by János Lózsy. Kritika 83, no. 8 (August 1983): 33–38. Jencks, Charles. “Postmodern and Late Modern: The Essential Definitions.” Chicago Review 35, no. 4 (1987): 31–58.

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Judt, Tony. Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 1944–1956. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. Kadarkay, Árpád. Georg Lukács: Life, Thought, and Politics. Cambridge, Mass.: Basil Blackwell, 1991. Kardelj, Edward. On People’s Democracy in Yugoslavia. New York: Yugoslav Information Center, n.d. [1949?]. Kárpáti, János. Bartók’s Chamber Music. Translated by Fred Macnicol and Mária Steiner. Stuyvesant, N.Y.: Pendragon Press, 1994. ———. Mihály András. Budapest: Zenemdkiadó, 1965. Klein, Hans-Günter. “Atonalität in den Opern von Paul von Klenau und Winfried Zillig: Zur Duldung einer im Nationalsozialismus verfemten Kompositionstechnik.” In Bericht über den Internationalen Musikwissenschaftlichen Kongress Bayreuth 1981, edited by Christoph-Hellmut Mahling and Sigrid Weismann, 490–494. Kassel: Bärenreiter Verlag, 1981. Kodály, Zoltán. “Kodály Zoltán elnöki megnyitója az Operaházi ünnepségen.” Új zenei szemle 1, no. 5 (October 1950): 3–5. ———. Kodály Zoltán: Közélet, vallomások, zeneélet: Kodály Zoltán hátrahagyott írásai. Edited by Lajos Vargyas. Budapest: Szépirodalmi Könyvkiadó, 1989. ———. The Selected Writings of Zoltán Kodály. Edited and translated by Fred Macnicol and Lili Halápy. London: Boosey and Hawkes, 1974. ———. Visszatekintés. Edited by Ferenc Bónis. 3 vols. Budapest: Zenemdkiadó, 1964, 1989. Kóla, Margit. “Bartók Béla 1881–1945.” Képes világ 1, no. 21 ( 5 October 1945), 6. Kovács, Inge. “Die Ferienkurse als Schauplatz der Ost-West Konfrontation.” In Im Zenit der Moderne: Die Internationalen Ferienkurse für Neue Musik Darmstadt 1946–1966, edited by Gianmario Borio and Hermann Danuser, vol. 1, 116–139. Freiburg im Breisgau: Rombach Verlag, 1997. Kövér, György. Losonczy Géza 1917–1957. Budapest: 1956-os Intézet, 1998. Kovrig, Bennett. Communism in Hungary from Kun to Kádár. Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1979. Kroó, György. Szabolcsi Bence. Budapest: Liszt Ferenc Zenemdvészeti FWiskola, 1994. Kurtz, Michael. Stockhausen: A Biography. Translated by Richard Toop. Boston: Faber and Faber, 1992. Laki, Peter. “The Gallows and the Altar: Poetic Criticism and Critical Poetry about Bartók in Hungary.” In Bartók and His World, edited by Peter Laki, 79–100. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995. ———, ed. Bartók and His World. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995. Lampert, Vera. “Bartók’s Music on Record.” Studia Musicologica 36, no. 3–4 (1995): 393–412. László Rajk and His Accomplices before the People’s Court. Budapest: n.p., 1949. Leibowitz, René. “Béla Bartók, or the Possibility of Compromise in Contemporary Music.” Transition Forty-Eight, no. 3 (1948): 92–123.

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———. “Béla Bartók, ou la possibilité du compromis dans la musique contemporaine.” Les temps modernes 3, no. 25 (October 1947): 705–734. Lévai, Béla. A rádió és televízió krónikája 1945–1978. Vol. 1. Budapest: Tömegkommunikációs központ, 1980. Ligeti, György. “Neues aus Budapest: Zwölftonmusik oder ‘Neue Tonalität’?” Melos 17, no. 2 (February 1950), 45–48. List, Kurt. “Music Chronicle: The State of American Music.” Partisan Review 15, no. 1 (January 1948): 85–90. Losonczy, Géza. “Az Operaház legyen a népé!” Szabad nép, 5 February 1950, 10. Luethy, Herbert. “Selling Paris on Western Culture: Report on an AmericanSponsored Exposition.” Commentary 14 (July 1952): 70–75. Maderna, Bruno. Concerto per due pianoforti e strumenti. Milan: Edizioni Suvini Zerboni, 1955. ———. Concerto per due pianoforti e strumenti. Sound recording. Aldo Orvieto, Marco Rapetti, Eddy Dei Rossi, Anna Pasetti, Cristiana Vianello, and the Demoé Percussion Ensemble, conducted by Andrea Molino. Stradivarius STR 33536. Maegaard, Jan. “Bartók und das Atonale.” Jahrbuch Peters 4 (1981–1982): 34–40. [Magyar] Országos Filharmonia. Ünnepi hangversenyek Bartók Béla (1881– 1945) emlékére: Mdsorfüzet 1955. Budapest: n.p., 1955. Magyar rádió újság, 1946–1956. Major, Ervin, ed. A Magyar Zenemdvészek Szövetsége Bartók Béla Emlékkiállításának katalógusa. Budapest: Officina, [1950]. Maróthy, János. “Zene és Párt.” Typescript, Institute for Musicology of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. ———. Zene, forradalom, szocializmus: Szabó Ferenc útja. Budapest: MagvetW Könyvkiadó, 1975. Mason, Colin. “An Essay in Analysis: Tonality, Symmetry, and Latent Serialism in Bartók’s Fourth Quartet.” Music Review 18 (August 1957): 189–201. ———. “The Paris Festival.” Tempo, no. 24 (summer 1952): 12–19. Meine, Sabine. Ein Zwölftöner in Paris: Studien zu Biographie und Wirkung von René Leibowitz (1913–1972). Augsburg: Wißner, 2000. Mihály, András. “Bartók Béla.” Társadalmi szemle 10, no. 10 (October 1955): 16–41. ———. “Bartók Béla és az utána következW nemzedék.” Zenei szemle, 1949, no. 1 (March): 2–15. ———. “Harc a formalizmus ellen.” Fórum 3, no. 3 (March 1948): 236–238. ———. “Válasz egy Bartók-kritikára.” Új zenei szemle 1, no. 4 (September 1950): 48–56. ———. Versenymd gordonkára és zenekarra. Budapest: Zenemdkiadó, 1956. Mila, Massimo. Maderna musicista europeo. Turin: Giulio Einaudi editore, 1976. Molnár, Miklós. From Béla Kun to János Kádár: Seventy Years of Hungarian Communism. Translated by Arnold J. Pomerans. New York: Berg Publishers Ltd., 1990.

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Moreux, Serge. Béla Bartók. Paris: Richard-Masse, 1949. Móricz, Klára. “Bartók Béla: Concerto zenekarra.” Diss., Liszt Ferenc Zenemdvészeti FWiskola, 1992. Nabokov, Nicolas. “In memoriam: La mort de Béla Bartók.” Preuves, no. 15 (May 1952): 10–11. ———. “Introduction à l’Œuvre du XXe siècle.” La revue musicale, no. 212, special issue, “L’Œuvre du XXe siècle” (April 1952): 5–8. ———. “This Is Our Culture.” Counterpoint 17, no. 5 (May 1952): 13–15. Novick, Peter. The Resistance versus Vichy: The Purge of Collaborators in Liberated France. London: Chatto and Windus, 1968. Olkhovsky, Andrey. Music under the Soviets: The Agony of an Art. New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1955. Perle, George. “Symmetrical Formations in the String Quartets of Béla Bartók.” Music Review 16 (1955): 300–312. ———. Twelve-Tone Tonality. 2nd rev. ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. Péteri, György. “New Course Economics: The Field of Economic Research in Hungary after Stalin, 1953–1956.” Trondheim Studies on East European Cultures and Societies, no. 6 (November 2001): 47–79. Petersen, Peter. “Rhythmik und Metrik in Bartóks Sonate für zwei Klaviere und Schlagzeug und die Kritik des jungen Stockhausen an Bartók.” Musiktheorie 9 (1994): 39–48. Pirsein, Robert W. The Voice of America: An History of the International Broadcasting Activities of the United States Government, 1940–1962. New York: Arno Press, 1979. Rajeczky, Benjamin, and Sándor Gönyey, comps. 111 népi táncdal. Budapest: Zenemdkiadó, 1954. Rákosi, Mátyás. Válogatott cikkek és beszédek. Budapest: Szikra, 1950. Reilly, Robert R. “The Recovery of Modern Music: George Rochberg in Conversation.” Tempo, no. 219 (February 2002): 8–12. Révai, József. “The Character of a People’s Democracy.” Foreign Affairs 28, no. 1 (October 1949): 143–152 (anonymous translation). ———. Lukács and Socialist Realism: A Hungarian Literary Controversy. London: Fore Publications, 1950. Robinson, Lisa Brooks. “Mahler and Postmodern Intertextuality.” Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1994. Rochberg, George. The Aesthetics of Survival. Edited by William Bolcom. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1984. ———. String Quartet no. 3. New York: Galaxy Music Corporation, 1973. Rostand, Claude. “Béla Bartók: Chemin et contrastes du musicien.” Contrepoints 3 (March–April 1946): 31–37. Rubin, Joan Shelley. The Making of Middlebrow Culture. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992. Sallis, Friedemann. An Introduction to the Early Works of György Ligeti. Cologne: Studio Verlag Schewe, 1996.

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Somfai, László. “The Influence of Peasant Music on the Finale of Bartók’s Piano Sonata: An Assignment for Musicological Analysis.” In Studies in Musical Sources and Style: Essays in Honor of Jan LaRue, edited by Eugene K. Wolf and Edward H. Roesner, 535–554. Madison, Wisc.: A-R Editions, 1990. Sprout, Leslie. “Music for a ‘New Era’: Composers and National Identity in France, 1936–1946.” Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2000. Stephan, Rudolf, et al., eds. Von Kranichstein zur Gegenwart: 50 Jahre Darmstädter Ferienkurse. Darmstadt: Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik, DACO Verlag, 1996. Stevens, Halsey. The Life and Music of Béla Bartók. New York: Oxford University Press, 1953. Stockhausen, Karlheinz. “Bartók’s Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion.” New Hungarian Quarterly 11, no. 40 (winter 1970): 49–53. ———. “Die Sonate für zwei Klaviere und Schlagzeug von Béla Bartók: Prüfungsarbeit.” Thesis, Staatliche Hochschule für Musik, Cologne, 1951. Stone, George, and Alan Stout. “A Conversation with Bruno Maderna.” In Bruno Maderna, by Raymond Fearn, 298–308. New York: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1990. Stuckenschmidt, Hans Heinz. “Maßstäbe.” Stimmen: Monatsblätter für Neue Musik 1, no. 1 (November 1947): 12–15. ———. “Was ist bürgerliche Musik?” Stimmen: Monatsblätter für Neue Musik 1, no. 7 (1947–1948): 209–213. Szabó, Ferenc. “Bartók Béla.” Szovjet kultúra 2, no. 9 (September 1950): 34–35. ———. “Bartók nem alkuszik.” Új zenei szemle 1, no. 4 (September 1950): 3–12. ———. Concerto zenekarra. Budapest: Zenemdkiadó, 1960. ———. Hazatérés: Concerto zenekarra. Budapest: n.p., 1949. ———. Hazatérés: Concerto zenekarra. Sound recording. Hungarian State Orchestra, conducted by János Ferencsik. Hungaroton SLPX 11829. ———. Nótaszó: magyar népdalok vegyeskarra vagy szóló énekre és kis zenekarra. 1951. Reprint, Budapest: Zenemdkiadó, 1959. ———. “V zashchitu Bela Bartoka.” Sovetskaya muzyka 14, no 11 (November 1950): 93–95. Szabolcsi, Bence. Népzene és történelem: tanulmányok. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1954. ———, ed. Dolgozók hangverseny-kalauza. Budapest: Népszava, [1949]. Szász, Béla. Volunteers for the Gallows: Anatomy of a Show-Trial. Translated by Kathleen Szász. New York: W. W. Norton, 1971. Székely, Endre. “ElWre Bartók Béla szellemében a nép kulturális felemelkedéséért!” ÉneklW nép 3, no. 9 (September 1950): 2–5. Széll, JenW. “Vita egy Bartók-tanulmánnyal.” Élet és irodalom, 21 April 1979, 6. Szervánszky, Endre. Honvéd kantáta férfikarra és szimfónikus zenekarra. Sound recording. Men’s Chorus and Orchestra of the Hungarian People’s Army, conducted by György Görgey. Hungaroton SPX 11922. Tallián, Tibor. “Bartók Reception in America, 1940–1945.” In Bartók and His

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World, edited by Peter Laki, 101–118. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995. ———. Magyarországi hangversenyélet 1945–1958. Budapest: MTA Zenetudományi Intézet, 1991. Taruskin, Richard. Defining Russia Musically. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997. ———. “Molchanov’s The Dawns Are Quiet Here.” Musical Quarterly 62, no. 1 (January 1976): 105–115. Tertz, Abram [Andrei Sinyavsky]. On Socialist Realism. Translated by George Dennis. New York: Pantheon Books, 1960. Treitler, Leo. “Re: Harmonic Procedure in the Fourth Quartet of Béla Bartók.” Journal of Music Theory 3, no. 2 (1959): 292–298. Ujfalussy, József. “Zene.” Új szántás 1, no. 5 (May 1947): 302–303. ———. “Zene.” Új szántás 1, no. 11 (November 1947): 662–663. ———. “Zene.” Új szántás 2, no. 4 (April 1948): 240–241. Ulm, Renate, ed. Eine Sprache der Gegenwart: musica viva 1945–1995. Mainz: Schott, 1995. Váli, Ferenc. Rift and Revolt in Hungary: Nationalism versus Communism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961. Vargyas, Lajos. “Zene és közösség.” Válasz 7 (1948): 336–343. Vogt, Hans. Neue Musik seit 1945. Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam jun., 1972. Wagner, Renata, ed. Karl Amadeus Hartmann und die Musica Viva. Munich: R. Piper and Co., 1980. Waldbauer, Iván. “Analytical Responses to Bartók’s Music: Pitch Organization.” In The Cambridge Companion to Bartók, edited by Amanda Bayley, 215–230. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Wellens, Ian. Music on the Frontline: Nicolas Nabokov’s Struggle against Communism and Middlebrow Culture. Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2002. Werth, Alexander. Musical Uproar in Moscow. London: Turnstile Press, 1949. Willett, Ralph. The Americanization of Germany, 1945–1949. New York: Routledge, 1989. Wood, Hugh. “Thoughts on a Modern Quartet.” Tempo, no. 111 (December 1974): 23–26. Wörner, Karl. Neue Musik in der Entscheidung. Mainz: B. Schott’s Söhne, 1954. Zhdanov, Andrei Alexandrovich. “A. A. Zsdanov felszólalása a szovjet zene szakemberek tanácskozásán a SzUK(b)P Központi Bizottságában (1948).” Zenei szemle, 1949, no. 1 (March): 16–27. ———. “BevezetW beszéd a szovjet zene tanácskozásán a SzUK(b)P Központi Bizottságában (1948).” In A mdvészet és filozófia kérdéseirWl, by A. A. Zhdanov. Budapest: n.p., 1948. ———. On Literature, Music, and Philosophy. Anonymous translation. London: Lawrence and Wishart, Ltd., 1950.

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Index

abstract expressionism, 83 accessibility: association with Nazism, 36, 79; association with socialist realism, 36, 37, 79; as an ideological test, 27, 162, 238; as a liability, 2, 36, 77, 78; to performers, 80, 105; to public, xiv, 3, 72, 74, 129, 149 action committee (Hungarian Musicians’ Association), 22, 122, 125, 127, 128, 137 Adorno, Theodor, 33, 34, 47, 48, 83; on “folkish” tendency, 30, 94–95; Philosophy of Modern Music, 43–45, 155 Ady, Endre, 54, 55, 57–58, 113 Aguila, Jésus, 77–78 aktiva, 22, 122, 125, 127, 128, 137 Allegro barbaro, 57 allusions to Bartók: in Ligeti, 50; in Maderna, 38–40; in Mihály, 138– 42, 144–45; in Rochberg, 157–60; in Szabó, 8–10 allusions to past styles, 37–38, 158 ambiguity, 61 analysis: and compositional system, 43, 88; of middlebrow music, 84; Stockhausen’s, of Bartók, 42–45 Andics, Erzsébet, 149 anti-Americanism, 36, 92

anti-Semitism, 25, 65–66 Antokoletz, Elliott, 88, 89 Arendt, Hannah, 79 arms race, 164 Association of Hungarian Librettists, Composers, and Music Publishers, 136 Asztalos, Sándor, 59, 61–62, 63, 64, 67, 142 atonality, 4, 84, 85 autonomy, 28–29, 34, 48, 79, 83–85 avant-garde, xiv, 65–66, 88, 157 Babbitt, Milton, 86–87 Balázs, Béla, 135 ban. See Bartók, Béla: suppressed works; censorship Bartók, Béla: accessibility, 36, 129, 138, 149; anniversaries, 52, 53, 68, 149– 150; association with folk song, 81, 110–111; as autonomous, 33, 67; as compromised, 30–33; death of, xiii, 2; division of oeuvre, xiv, 18–21, 65– 67, 70, 150; eclecticism, xii, xiii–xiv, 2, 88, 103; familiarity, 80; use of folk music, 59, 61–62, 94–95; as formalist, 19–21, 24; as historical, 45–48, 65, 82, 87; internationalism of, 64; late works rejected in West, xv, 7,

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Bartók, Béla (continued ) 26–27, 34–35, 47, 56, 77; memorial exhibit, 68; as model for socialist realism, 7–10, 138–146; as model in West, xiii, 32, 37–42, 157–160; as national composer, xii, 132, 149; and Nazism, 29, 36, 63; as outmoded, xiv, 42; as personality, 62–64, 68, 70; poetry about, 151–152; as popular, 72–74, 76, 95; poverty in United States, 53, 62, 91; rehabilitation of, 62–70, 145, 150–153; as rejected model in Hungary, 20–21, 65, 113, 115, 124, 127, 133–134; as serialist, 86–89; as socialist, 63, 95; as socialist realist, 34–35; suppressed works, 53–62, 64–66, 69, 125, 134, 138, 140–141, 142, 145, 146, 149, 150, 153, 164; typology of folk song, 101, 103, 109, 197n35. See also modernism “Bartók question,” 126–127; defined, 125; in show trial, 118, 123–128, 132; Révai on, 134; as closed, 138 Bátor, Viktor, 149 “Bear Dance,” 55 beauty (outmoded), 80, 81 Beethoven, 157, 160, 162, 163 Béla Bartók Anniversary Committee (U.S.), 53 Béla Bartók Society, 120, 126 Berg, Alban, 47, 48, 87, 90, 154 Berger, Arthur, 95 Bernstein, Leonard, xi Bibó, István, 2 Biró, Zoltán, 138 Bluebeard’s Castle, 57, 135, 140–141, 142, 143ex Boivin, Jean, 46 Boulez, Pierre, 33, 76–78, 90, 91, 146 Breuer, János, 126, 199n17 broadcasting. See radio Brody, Martin, 87, 88 Budapest Chamber Ensemble, 146 “Bulgarian” rhythm, 64

Cantata profana, 41ex, 57, 139 Carroll, Mark, 91 catching up, 28, 47, 75–76, 78 censorship, 6, 69, 152, 155; denounced in U.S. propaganda, 51–52, 89. See also Bartók, Béla: suppressed works chain model, 104, 107, 110–114 chromaticism, 9, 40, 139–140 Chulaki, Mikhail, 21, 133 cimbalom, 101 classic: Bartók as, 47, 48, 81, 162; as pejorative term, 47, 82 classicism, 6, 7, 18 cliques, 126, 127–128, 131, 134, 135 cold war: categories, xi–xvii, 73; dissent and, 146–150, 160–161; political pressure, 36, 48–50; transmission of ideas in, 42, 154–157, 164–165 commercialism, 79, 85, 91 Communist Party (Hungarian), 98, 175n29. See also Hungarian Workers’ Party Communist Party (interwar Hungary), 8, 118, 120 compromise, 30–33, 34, 36; and the public, 78, 79–80 Concerto for Orchestra: allusion to, by Mihály, 142, 144ex; allusions to, by Szabó, 7–10, 11–13ex; Hungarian reception of, 2–4, 19–20, 26–27, 56, 62, 123; Western reception of, 32, 72, 74–75, 76, 81 Concerto for Two Pianos, Percussion, and Orchestra, 54, 76 Congress for Cultural Freedom, 89–93 consonance, 152, 154, 161 Contrasts, 57, 95 conversation: across Iron Curtain, 66– 67; among Western composers, 42, 46, 49 cosmopolitanism, 25, 65–66 Csillag, Miklós, 120, 170; criticism of Kodály, 104–105, 110; criticism of Mihály, 127, 131

Index Dallapiccola, Luigi, 39, 158 Dance Suite, 76, 90 Danuser, Hermann, 37 Darmstadt summer courses for new music: aims of, 28–29, 78, 79; Bartók’s music at, 46–48, 80; in propaganda, 95; reception of Soviet resolution at, 33–34, 37; transmission of ideas at, 40, 42–43, 45, 46 Davis, Nathaniel, 52, 71 decadence, 124 denazification, 28–30 détente, 164 difficulty: in Bartók, 60, 61, 73; and freedom, xv, 151–156; and value, 80 dissent, xv, 150–155; Mihály’s, 146– 147; in Musicians’ Association, 22 dissonance: in Bartók, 58, 60; as “true,” xv, 150–155; Zhdanov on, 4 Divertimento, 36, 56, 90 division: of Bartók’s oeuvre, xiv, 18– 21, 65–67, 69–70, 150; cold war, xi, 66–67, 164–165 Doflein, Erich, 47, 75 Domaine musical, 76–78 Dorati, Antal, 73 double coding, 162–163 Duke Bluebeard’s Castle, 57, 135, 140– 141, 142, 143ex Durey, Louis, 35 eclecticism, xiii–xiv, 2, 88, 160–164 education: about modernism, 74–80; Kodály on, 69 émigrés, 36, 52, 73 enjoyment, 80, 81 entertainment, 79 epigonism: criticized in Hungary, 145; criticized in the West, 32, 36–40; and Rochberg, 161–162 Erkel, Ferenc, 18, 97 ethical criteria: 67, 157; transmission of, 40–42, 46, 49 ethics: and autonomy, 79–80, 93; and evaluation of style, 30–34, 43, 47, 48;

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and the public, 78, 82; in socialist realism, 56, 57 “Evening with the Széklers,” 55 expression, xv, 160–164 expressionism, 161 factionalism, 126 Fearn, Raymond, 38–39, 40 Festival of Mandarins, xv Five Songs on poems by Endre Ady, 54, 55, 57–58 folk song: alteration of, 106, 107, 109– 113; in art music, 94, 97; authenticity of, 95, 103, 106–107, 109; in Bartók, 55, 59, 61–62, 74; “chain” model, 104, 107, 110–114; negative socialist views of, 19, 97–99, 104– 105, 109, 115; perceptibility of, 60–62, 104; in socialist realism, xiv, 4, 5, 18, 63, 95–116, 127; “synthesis” model, 108–109, 110–114; Western views of, 30, 67, 68, 85, 94–95; and Zhdanovshchina, 96–97, 99, 104 For Children, 95, 153 formalism, xiii, 130; in Bartók, 19– 21, 24; in Zhdanovshchina, 5, 18 Forte, Allen, 86 Forty-four Duos for two violins, 75–76 freedom, xv, 29, 93, 154–156, 164 Frigyesi, Judit, 155 Garai, Mrs. Imre, 132 gaps, filling. See catching up GerW, ErnW, 117 Gillies, Malcolm, 73 Goeyvaerts, Karel, 42, 45, 46 Greenberg, Clement, 83, 89, 92–93, 163 “harmless” music, 81 Hartmann, Karl Amadeus, 29, 76, 79–80 Henze, Hans Werner, 29–30, 79 Hindemith, Paul, 29, 34, 36, 37, 80, 130

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history: Bartók as, 45–47, 65, 87; “classic” modernism as, 46, 82; in criticism of socialist realism, 85; philosophies of, 67–68 Hodeir, André, 46, 77 home Communists, 117, 124, 125, 134, 135–136 Honegger, Arthur, 29, 67 Horváth, Márton, 128, 129 Hungarian Musicians’ Assocation, 22, 109, 126, 131, 133, 137; action committee of, 22, 122, 125, 127, 128, 137; formation of, 21–23; party organization of, 122, 137 Hungarian Music Week, 138, 145 Hungarian revolution, 150–151, 152–153 Hungarian Workers’ Party: Agitation and Propaganda Division, 118, 120, 125–126, 136; artistic goals of, 127, 146, 132; Central Lecturing Office, 126, 127; challenges to, 151; CulturePolitical Division, 16, 97, 175n29; Culture-Political Working Group, 126, 138; faith in, 118, 124, 125; Music Committee, 176n30; and peasants, 98; purges, 117–121; secretariat, 21, 149 Hungarian Writers’ Association, 152 Illyés, Gyula, 151–152, 155 Improvisations on Hungarian Peasant Songs, 48, 60–61 Institute for Cultural Relations Abroad (Hungary), 22, 68 Institute for New Music and Music Education (Germany), 75 intellectuals, 89–93, 152–153 International Bartók Committee, 149 Iron Curtain, xvi, 155 Jemnitz, Sándor, 2, 21 József, Attila, 113 judgment. See standards of value Kadosa, Pál, 3–4, 27, 71, 125, 127 Kállai, Gyula, 149

Kálmán, Imre, 111 Kárpáti, János, 58 Kentner, Louis, 73 Khachaturian, Aram, 4, 194n7 kitsch: and analysis, 88; and middlebrow, 83–85; socialist critiques of, 16, 111 Kodály, Zoltán, 114fig; on Bartók’s legacy, 69–70, 110; and folk song, 94, 96, 110–111, 112; in national tradition, 18, 68–69, 132; relations with party, 22, 69–70, 104–105, 120, 131; and socialist realism, 6, 97, 113–114, 124, 127, 135; and Szabó, 8, 104–105, 113–114. Works: Háry János, 103, 105, 113; Peacock Variations, 104, 113; The Spinning Room, 105–106 Kohler, Foy, 51 Kolisch, Rudolf, 48 Kossuth Prize, 114 Käenek, Ernst, 29, 36, 48 Kurtág, György, 153, 202n67 Lampert, Vera, 73 Lehár, Franz, 34, 111 Leibowitz, René: on Bartók, 30–33, 58–59; and Mihály, 66–67; and Nabokov, 91; on progress, 34, 155; as a teacher, 48 Lengyel, Menyhért, 57, 135 Ligeti, György, 49–50, 154, 157 List, Kurt, 84–85 Liszt, Franz, 18, 97 Losonczy, Géza, 24–25, 52, 57, 123, 170, 178n53 loyalty: to Bartók, 3–4, 125, 135; to party, 27, 125, 129, 130, 131; to socialism, 152, 153 Lukács, György, 119, 124, 133 Macdonald, Dwight, 83, 89 Madách, Imre, 152 Maderna, Bruno: 38–42, 48. Works: Concerto for Two Pianos and Instruments, 38, 41ex, 42; Fantasia and Fugue for Two Pianos, 38;

Index String Quartet (1955), 42; Three Greek Lyrics, 40 Maegaard, Jan, 58 Mahler, Gustav, 157, 162, 163 market forces, 79, 85, 91 Maróthy, János, 105 Marxism, 67–68, 97–99 Mason, Colin, 88, 92–93 masses (public), 73, 74, 79 Masterpieces of the Twentieth Century, 89–93 Mayer, Hans, 33 Mersmann, Hans, 47 Messiaen, Olivier, 33, 45, 46, 47, 81 middlebrow, 73, 83–85, 89–93, 162– 163 Mihály, András, 17fig, 111, 118, 133, 139fig, 142, 170; accusations against, 120, 126, 128, 135; “Béla Bartók and the Generation Coming after Him,” 16–21, 69, 99, 107; and dissent, 146– 147, 152; and Leibowitz, 66–67; selfcriticisms, 121–124, 133, 137; show trial, 118, 125–137, 165; on Soviet resolution, 6–7, 17–120, 129–130. Works: Cello Concerto, 138–146, 140ex, 141ex, 143ex, 144ex; Requiem Symphony, 127, 128–129, 130; String Quartet, 127 Mikrokosmos, 75 Milhaud, Darius, 29, 34–36 mimesis, 98–99 Ministry of Education, 22, 23, 68, 120, 122, 177n48; and criticism of Bartók, 24, 125, 134; and investigation of Opera, 57, 123 The Miraculous Mandarin: as formalist, 21, 23–24; return of, xv, 152– 153; suppression of, xv, 54, 57, 123, 135, 164; Western reception of, 34, 76, 77, 81 mixed-type songs, 101, 103 modern classic, 80, 81–83, 91–93 modernism, 30, 85, 146–147, 157, 164; Bartók’s, xv, 2–3, 19–21, 24, 47, 52, 58–62, 65, 73–81, 85–89, 115, 140; and freedom, 154, 155–156; moder-

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ate, 77, 79, 81, 91–93, 191n42; and progress, 34, 87, 155; and the public, xiv, 73, 74, 78, 163; and socialist realism, xi, xii, 24, 115, 145 monumentality, 112 moral judgment. See ethics Moreux, Serge, 75 Muradeli, Vano, 4, 96 Muscovite, 22; Lukács and Révai as, 119; Nagy as, 150; Rákosi as, 25; Szabó as, 120, 132, 134; Székely as, 120 Music Academy, 136, 137 Musica viva (Munich), 74, 76, 80–81 Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta, 46, 57, 72, 81, 90; allusions in Maderna, 39; allusions in Mihály, 139–142, 141ex, 143ex Musicians’ Association. See Hungarian Musicians’ Association “Music of the Night,” 60–62, 150, 153 Music Review ( journal ), 22, 104 Nabokov, Nicolas, 89–93 Nachholbedarf. See catching up Nagy, Imre, 150, 153, 155 nationalism, 18, 51, 115; in Hungarian response to Soviet resolution, 7, 18, 129, 133, 154; and Mihály, 18, 123– 124; in rehabilitation of Bartók, 64, 149; and Szabó, 10, 132 national style: negative views of, 94– 95, 194n7; in socialist realism, xii, 66, 96–99, 105, 138–139 “national tactlessness,” 134, 200n32 naturalism, 57 Nazism, 28, 33, 38, 48, 79, 83 negation, 154, 157, 163–165 neoclassicism, xiii, 41, 52, 85, 95 New Course, 150, 203n6 New Music Review ( journal ), 104–105, 136 new-style songs, 101, 103, 109 night-music style, 10, 61–62, 142 nostalgia, 80, 92 nóta, 106 Novikov, Anatoly, 24–26, 101

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L’Œuvre du XXe siècle. See Masterpieces of the Twentieth Century old-style songs, 101, 103 Opera: critiques of, 24, 57, 123, 136; and Mihály, 122, 125, 126, 132, 137 Opera House, 136, 153 operetta, 34, 111 optimism: of Hungarians, 1, 19; in socialist realism, 10, 142 orchestration, 144–145 originality, 39, 162. See also epigonism Out of Doors, 48, 54, 56, 60–62, 150, 153 parameters, musical, 44–45 paranoia, 120 Partisan Review, 83, 84, 89 party organization, of Hungarian Musicians’ Association, 122, 137 pastiche, 145, 157–164 peasant colleges, 98 Perle, George, 86, 87–88, 89 personal style, xv, 37, 87, 161 PetWfi, Sándor, 112, 113 PetWfi Circle, 153 Piano Concerto no. 1, 54, 60, 81 Piano Concerto no. 2, 54, 60, 90, 92 Piano Concerto no. 3: Hungarian reception, 56, 60, 62, 138; reception in the West, 34–36, 37, 72, 73, 76, 80, 81 Piano Sonata, 54, 56, 59, 77 pluralism, xvi, 161–165 Pollner, György, 54, 57 popularity: of Bartók, 72, 74, 76; and compromise, 32; and modernism, 79–80 popular music: Bartók compared to, 73, 95 populism, 7, 142; pejorative associations, 77, 79, 36, 82, 94–95; sentimental, 19, 98–99, 109, 111, 113 postmodernism, 157, 164 primitivism, 44 progress: Marxian view, 67–68; and

pressure on Hungarians, 85, 155; Rochberg’s critique of, 161–162 Prokofiev, Sergei, 4, 7, 18, 35, 29 propaganda, xiii, xvi, 28, 44; Hungarian, xvi, 62–70, 146–147, 150, 203n4; United States, 51–53, 71, 89–93, 149, 165 public, 34, 72, 77, 81, 92; education of, 73–76, 79; exclusion of, xiv, 76–80; and modern classics, 81–83, 162 purges, 117–121, 136 purification trials (France), 31 purity, 29, 43; of divided Bartók, 65– 66; of folk song, 61, 109 radio: as propaganda vehicle, xiii, 51– 53, 136; Western Europe: 72–73, 75 Radio, Hungarian: music on, 54–57, 64, 133, 150; personnel, 110, 136, 137, 202n55 Rajk, László, 117, 119, 120, 121, 134 Rákosi, Mátyás: on Bartók, 149, 150; and self-criticism, 119, 121; and Sovietization, 1, 16, 25 Ránki, György, 128, 135 reception history, xiv–xv, 164 recordings, 73 regression, 44 Reiner, Fritz, 73 resolution on music (Soviet), 4–5; application to Bartók, xiv, 6–7, 16– 21, 54, 57–62; reception in Hungary, 5–7, 96–97, 99–100, 105, 124, 129; reception in West, 33–34, 71, 165. See also Zhdanovshchina Révai, József, 114fig, 22, 170–171; and Bartók, 24, 112–113, 134–135, 138; criticism of composers, 27, 105, 111, 113, 114; and Hungarian socialist realism, 112, 115, 119; role in show trial, 126–131, 133–136; on Soviet models, 16, 134 Rhapsodies for violin and orchestra, 57; no. 1, 48 Rochberg, George, xv, 157–164. Works: String Quartet no. 1, 158; String Quartet no. 3, 157–160,

Index 159ex, 161, 162, 164; String Quartet no. 6, 163; Symphony no. 1, 158 Rodzinski, Artur, 91 Romanian Folk Dances, 56, 90 sacred music, 113, 120 Saguer, Louis, 36 Sallis, Friedemann, xvi Sándor, György, 73 Sárközy, István, 111, 131 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 31 satellite nations, 16, 27, 51–52 Scherchen, Hermann, 29, 34–36, 35fig, 40–42, 48, 50 Schloezer, Boris de, 33, 37 Schneider, David, 77, 80 Schnittke, Alfred, 164 Schoenberg, Arnold, 29–30, 36, 48, 66, 76, 82, 154; as model for Bartók, 20, 31–32, 58–59, 65; as model in West, 34, 46–47, 85. Works: Erwartung, 90; Pierrot lunaire, 146; Six Little Piano Pieces, 61; String Quartet no. 2, 90 self-criticism, 121, 122, 125, 133; Lukács’s, 119; Mihály’s, 121–124, 137 sentimental populism, 19, 98–99, 109, 111, 113 serialism: and Bartók, 85, 86–89; and freedom, 154, 155–156; and Maderna, 38, 40–42; as model in the West, xiii, 31–32, 34, 81, 85, 90; Western critiques of, 91, 157, 158 Shostakovich, Dmitri, 7, 29, 34–35; Bartók’s allusion to, 3; denunciation, 4, 18 show trials: Mihály’s, 126–136; Soviet, 117 simplification: in Bartók’s late style, 2–3, 84; in socialist realism, 10, 139–140 Smallholders’ Party (Hungarian), 98 Social Democratic Party (Hungarian), 117, 175n29 socialist realism, xi, 4–5; applied to Bartók, 18–21, 65, 66–67; and

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epigonism, 145, 162; and folk song, 95–116; literary tropes, 65; Lukácsian, 119, 133; modernism in, 115, 145; negative views in West, 33– 35, 37, 48, 79, 83, 90; persistence of, 153; Soviet, 4–5, 17–18, 115; and style, 20, 95, 98–99, 110–116, 140, 142, 145; utopianism, 111, 115, 196n22 Society for the Encouragement of Contemporary Cultural Life (Mannheim), 74 softening (of style), 3, 80, 84 solution of problems (in composing), 37–38, 84, 87, 161–162 Sonata for piano, 54, 56, 59, 77 Sonata for Solo Violin, 48, 56 Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion, 55, 72, 73, 75, 76, 77, 81; allusions in Maderna, 39–40, 41ex; criticism by Stockhausen, 42–46 Sonatas for Violin and Piano, 31, 47, 54, 58; no. 1, 153; no. 2, 77 Sonatina, 55, 56 Sovetskaya muzyka ( journal ), 26 Soviet Communist Party resolution on music. See resolution on music (Soviet) Soviet Culture (magazine), 22 Soviet Culture Month, 21, 24–26 Soviet models, 22–23, 56, 124, 132– 134, 153–154 Stalin, 16, 25, 150 Stalinism: and kitsch, 83; persistence, 153; and purges, 117–118; in satellite nations, 16, 25, 146, 150, 152– 153; and socialist realism, 10, 95 standards of value, xii, xiv, xvii, 164– 165; in socialist realism, 4–5, 110– 116; in West, 85, 86–89, 93, 162– 164 State Department, 51–52, 71 Steinecke, Wolfgang, 29, 46–47, 78 Steuermann, Eduard, 48 Stevens, Halsey, 75, 77 Stockhausen, Karlheinz, 42–46, 48, 65 Strauss, Richard, 20, 73

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Index

Stravinsky, Igor, 29, 74, 76–77, 80, 81; criticized in East, xiii, 59; criticized in West, 34, 37, 43, 44, 82; as model for Bartók, 59–60, 65; as model for Maderna, 38, 39–40. Works: Concerto for Strings, 34; Firebird, 90; Les Noces, 34, 39, 59; Oedipus Rex, 90; Pribaoutki, 59; Rite of Spring, 44, 59, 90, 92; Symphony in Three Movements, 74, 90 String Quartet no. 2, 57 String Quartet no. 3, 31, 54, 58, 81, 153 String Quartet no. 4, 31–32, 54, 58, 81, 86, 88, 159ex String Quartet no. 5, 54, 55, 56, 74, 81, 142, 144ex String Quartet no. 6, 32 Strobel, Heinrich, 47, 75 Stuckenschmidt, Hans Heinz, 28, 33, 34, 48 style: political implications of, xi–xii, 66–67, 164–165; political implications of, in East, xii–xiii, 58–62, 113; political implications of, in West, 42, 48–49, 83–85, 90, 157, 161; transfer of, 40–42, 46, 49 Suite for piano, op. 14, 57 symmetry, 87–88, 142, 158 symphonism, 100, 103, 104, 112 synthesis: of folk and art music, 19–20, 66, 99, 107; model of folk song setting, 108–109, 110–114 Szabó, Ferenc, 9fig, 171, 127, 130; comments on Bartók, 26, 63, 65, 178n59; criticisms of colleagues, 120, 125, 126, 131, 137, 145; and Kodály, 105, 113, 135; leadership roles, 22, 137; as Muscovite, 132, 134; about Voice of America, 53, 201n44. Works: Homecoming Concerto, 7–10, 11– 15ex, 25–26; Ludas Mátyi, 114; Song Singing, 99, 102ex, 105–109, 108ex, 110, 111, 112, 114 Szabolcsi, Bence, 130, 151, 155, 203n8 Székely, Endre, 53, 65, 121fig, 127,

136–138, 171; accusations against, 120, 126, 128, 130, 131–132, 133– 134, 135, 198n10 Székely, Zoltán, 73 Széll, JenW, 54, 70, 125–126, 133 Szervánszky, Endre, 6, 100fig, 127, 130, 131, 171; on Bartók, 2–3, 110, 125, 165; criticisms of Home Guard Cantata, 110–112; Home Guard Cantata compared with Szabó’s Song Singing, 105, 106, 107, 109; Kossuth Prize for Home Guard Cantata, 114. Works: Home Guard Cantata, 99–104, 102ex; Patriotism Cantata, 114; Rhapsody, 114 Szigeti, Joseph, 73 Szirmai, István, 110, 114 Tardos, Béla, 128, 131 Taruskin, Richard, 146, 163 Ten Easy Pieces for Piano, 55 third road, 1–2, 7, 16, 23, 26 Three Études for piano, 54, 58, 77 Three Village Scenes, 59, 146 tonal music: association with Nazi populism, 30, 36; as “false,” 155; negative connotations, 86–87 Tóth, Aladár, 123, 137 Treitler, Leo, 86, 87 twelve-tone music. See serialism Twenty-seven Two- and Three-Part Choruses, 55 Two Portraits, 90 Ujfalussy, József, 7 United States Department of State, 51–52, 71 United States Legation to Budapest, 52, 71 United States occupation government in Germany, 29 unofficial music, xvi–xvii utopianism, 111, 115, 135, 196n22 value. See standards of value Vargyas, Lajos, 6, 96–97

Index Végh Quartet, 47, 76, 80 verbunkos, 58, 101, 103 VetW, Tamás, 145 Vichy, 31, 35 Violin Concerto (1938), 32, 36, 56, 72, 77, 81, 138 Violin duos, 75–76 Violin Sonatas, 31, 47, 54, 58; no. 1, 53; no. 2, 77; Sonata for solo violin, 48, 56 Voice of America: aims, 51; on Bartók, 52–53, 54, 70–71, 165; Hungarian responses to, 62–68, 125, 134, 201n44

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229

Warsaw Autumn Festival, 153 Webern, Anton, 46, 76–77, 80, 90, 146, 154; as model for new composition, xiii, 38, 40–42, 47, 48 Wellens, Ian, 90–91 wholeness, xv, 161, 164 The Wooden Prince, 57 Zakharov, Vladimir, 24, 25–26, 109 Zelk, Zoltán, 152 Zhdanov, Andrei, 4–5, 16–21, 60, 124, 145 Zhdanovshchina, 4–5, 60, 96–97, 99, 119