Bartók Spring Magazine 2021

Magazine of the Bartók Spring International Arts Weeks

EXPERIENCE! In every respect.

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Corporate partner:

Müpa Budapest is supported by the Ministry of Human Capacities

mupa.hu

Csaba Káel | Photo: Szilvia Csibi / Müpa Budapest

The Time is Ripe INTERVIEW WITH CSABA KÁEL, CEO OF MÜPA BUDAPEST, ABOUT THE BARTÓK SPRING INTERNATIONAL ARTS WEEKS In spring 2021 a new festival appears on the cultural map of Budapest: highlighting the unparalleled creative output of Hungarian composer Béla Bartók, who was born 140 years ago, his unique scholarly work, and the important role he played in European intellectual life, this event series seeks to underline his relevance for our time. The festival is organized by Müpa Budapest, a leading performing arts centre of Central Europe. We spoke to Csaba Káel, CEO of Müpa Budapest, about the concept of the festival, which this year can be enjoyed online, free of charge, with world premieres and concerts broadcast from some of Europe’s famous concert halls.

Many things in Hungary are named after Béla Bartók, including the Müpa concert hall. What did you have in mind when choosing a name for the Bartók Spring International Arts Weeks?

It was high time we made a link between the work of Béla Bartók and our own time by naming an arts festival after him. Bartók is not only one of the greatest Hungarian composers of the 20th century, but also someone whose influence on Hungary’s image of itself has been very important. The endeavour to conserve things of value, which took a significant step forward at the beginning of modernism in musicology, thanks to Bartók, is of inestimable importance.

What are the responsibilities associated with this new project compared to those event series Müpa formerly had a hand in organizing, such as the Budapest Spring Festival, and the CAFe Budapest Contemporary Arts Festival?

This is the first time we have single-handedly created a city festival. We hope to involve fellow institutions and other cities, and turn the Bartók Spring over time into a national event series – perhaps even stretching it beyond the borders of Hungary. For most of Bartók’s life, Budapest was his home: the places and venues related to him trace out his wide-ranging network of contacts, which extended considerably outside the music world, into other arts – especially

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the visual arts. It is worth discovering our capital in this way, and coming closer to the world of Bartók.

We look on two important institutions as partners in our endeavour: the soon-to-open House of Hungarian Music, and the Ethnographic Museum, which is moving to a new location.

This year’s Bartók Spring is the first arts festival in Hungary in which every event will be “virtual.”

Müpa started broadcasting concerts ten years ago, for the first few years as a pilot project, then more regularly, and exclusively in HD quality.

Before, there was the question of why this is even necessary, because after all live concerts are what constitute the key part of Müpa’s profile. However, the experience of the past year shows that this was a useful investment. Now we are taking another unconventional step by moving an entire festival’s worth of events into an online space. Müpa’s mission is to convey energy through the arts: cultural events can give hope in a time when the pandemic is confining us more and more.

How can Müpa contribute to restarting cultural life and thereby to boosting tourism to Budapest?

Since the beginning of the pandemic we have been using creative solutions that generate new opportunities. The idea of creating the festival is another example: we are launching Bartók Spring at a time when there is no opportunity to organize an event with a live audience. These events can be watched anywhere in the world, and this itself is a tourist campaign, because we are proclaiming to the world that Budapest is still present in the cultural life of Central Europe. Performances of world stars

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we had originally invited to Budapest will be broadcast from their own cities: thanks to this we are creating a truly European festival, in which we are joined by Oxford, Milan, London and Basel.

To what extent does the music of Bartók, whose name the festival bears, feature in the programmes?

Will Bartók fans have something to watch too?

We asked performers whose repertoire includes Béla Bartók to dedicate a part of their programmes to him. In addition, we had the idea of taking the fruitful alliances that Bartók made with other branches of the arts and bringing them into the present: thinking along these lines we asked the Szeged Contemporary Dance Company to make a choreography to Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra, which can be seen on the opening Bartók evening of the festival, with the Hungarian National Philharmonic Orchestra.

The image of the festival is informed by the rich motifs of Hungarian Art Nouveau from the beginning of the last century. Why have you chosen this particular style, which existed for such a brief period?

This artistic movement was perhaps the last in the world which materialized with different stylistic traits in the different countries. Hungarian Art Nouveau is just as individual as its French, Austrian, or Spanish counterpart, representing a particular world of visual art that cannot be found elsewhere.

It is a unique national treasure, of which little is said, and that is why we see it as our task to bring the world of Art Nouveau closer to people, by linking it to Bartók’s art.

Photo: Hungarian Tourism Agency

The festival also presents a restored version of Alexander Korda’s Man of Gold (1918), a silent film long thought to be lost and recovered recently.

The beginnings of the Hungarian film industry coincide with Bartók’s being admitted to the Budapest Academy of Music in 1899, and the Man of Gold, a successful silent film based on the novel by Mór Jókai, was shot about twenty years later, the same year as the premiere of Bluebeard’s Castle. Müpa launched its Composition Competition last year so that new collaborations could come about in the performing art, thanks to today’s Hungarian composers, Béla Bartók’s “colleagues.” So this will be a double world premiere: the film, beautifully restored thanks to the Hungarian National Film Archive, will be presented with incidental music written for the film by Bence Farkas, performed live in the Béla Bartók National Concert Hall. With this premiere we create a link between an important early stage in Hungarian film production (which goes back 120 years) and contemporary Hungarian music.

In October Müpa will create another series of events, the Liszt Fest International Cultural Festival. How are the respective profiles of the two distinguished?

We are dealing with exceptional characters, who left completely different creative legacies behind them, even though in the case of Bartók we can speak of an indirect Liszt influence, because his teacher at the Academy of Music was István Thomán, a famous pupil of Liszt’s. Bartók, who was born at the dawn of modernism, recognized that the folklore of the Carpathian Basin must be researched and preserved, before it disappeared forever.

However, in his own works, he chose a radically new method of acquainting others with folk music: transformation – a technique later adopted by world music. Compared to Bartók’s sensitivity, Liszt was quite a different cultural phenomenon: he was the nineteenth-century herald of today’s pop icons, the archetype of the artist sending audiences into rapture, city after city. While he had all Europe at his feet, he became an influential conduit for the music of others too: he often made transcriptions and adaptations of popular orchestral works and operas for the piano, the instrument most often present in middle-class homes. It was through the works of Liszt that Europe encountered the “passionate Hungarian style,” and the stamp of his influence can to this day be traced in the image the world has of Hungary. In autumn, on the 210th anniversary of the composer’s birth, we will build on this fame.

MARCELL NÉMETH

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Six Keys to Bartók As a genre, the string quartet enjoyed a special place in Béla Bartók’s career. So much so, that the composer himself placed his quartets in pride of place in his 1945 autobiography. Beethoven, as we know, took to composing string quartets when he wanted to consolidate a creative period, or to set off boldly in a new direction.

The analogy might not be exact, but what stirred Bartók to write his six quartets was similar to the motivation of the German composer he considered an artistic paragon.

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The String Quartet No. 1 from 1908–1909 has first and foremost a consolidating role, and rounds off Bartók’s Secessionist stylistic period, with his relationship with violinist Stefi Geyer in the background, and is the first to demonstrate the achievements of new Hungarian music in the field of quartet writing. Composed between 1915 and 1917, String Quartet No. 2 is one of the key works of Bartók’s expressionist period, which coincided with the Great War and the difficulties in his private life, and is an important harbinger of the two sonatas for violin and piano. String Quartets Nos. 3 and 4, written in the summers of 1927 and 1928, respectively, herald another change of style: in addition to summing up his achievements to date, they include the latest experiences of the composer, who now had international attention, from pre-Classical composers to the Second Viennese School and Stravinsky through to the compositional output of 1926, Bartók’s “piano year.” String Quartet No. 5 (1934) – a work of symphonic breadth, and the only quartet he wrote

to a specific commission – lay the foundation for works which have since become classics, such as the Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta and the Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion. It is of symbolic significance that the last work Bartók completed before he left Europe was also a chamber work for strings, the String Quartet No. 6, written in late summer 1939.

In addition to their density, depth, complexity, and the moral message of their poetic content, Bartók’s quartets can also be seen as the legacy of Beethoven’s late quartets because that was the genre in which their composer was at his most radical, as well as his most consistent. Also, as in the works of the Classical maestro, the string quartets clearly show Bartók as the native speaker of musical traditions while he ventures out on diverse paths barely trodden by others, if at all. Bearing this in mind, and the dates of the works (thirty-one years passed between the genesis of the first quartet and the completion of the last), it is easy to reach

Kelemen Quartet | Photo: Ora Hasenfratz

the conclusion that Bartók’s works in this genre form the pillars of his output, and offer a key to understanding his entire œuvre.

Just a few years after the composer’s death, Bartók’s quartets were held to be an “inexhaustible reserve of gold.” The first important steps in this direction were taken in the composer’s lifetime, with the Waldbauer–Kerpely, Pro Arte, Kolisch and New Hungarian Quartets playing an enduring role in collaborating with the composer in the premieres of the works.

“It is easy to reach the conclusion that Bartók’s string quartets form the pillars of his output, and offer a key to understanding his entire œuvre.”

Another consideration very likely contributed to the fact that posterity very soon started treating the six quartets as an independent cycle: in the European musical tradition a series of works consists of six parts. This quantity makes it possible to discuss contrasts and similarities between the works, identify a system of references and interactions, and their distribution in time means the listener can discern stylistic development. Another important concern is their performability; the total duration of the compositions is less than three hours.

The Belgian Pro Arte Quartet considered programming Bartók’s “complete quartets” as early as 1937, before the last work was written, but the project remained a mere plan. In 1945, Bartók’s British publisher, Ralph Hawkes suggested playing the six works as a cycle, and at the same time commissioned a seventh work (though nothing came of this due to the composer’s untimely death).

When the Juilliard Quartet formed in 1946 they com­mitted themselves to Bartók’s quartets, and not long afterwards they were the first to play all the works in a row. Shortly afterwards, the Tátrai Quartet were the first to repeat this enormous challenge in Hungary.

The general belief is that the musicians in a truly good quartet make music together day after day for decades, and their playing gradually becomes homogeneous in the process. However, a good decade ago, the Mikrokosmos Quartet, which happens to specialize in the Bartók quartets, proved that in certain special cases, an outstanding, aesthetically mature performance can be achieved without prolonged preparatory collaboration.

Compared to them, the newly re-formed Kelemen Quartet, who first take to the stage at the Bartók Spring, have a head start: they came about as a fusion of two pairs of artists in similar professional circles (the married couple Barnabás Kelemen – Katalin Kokas, and Jonian Ilias Kadesha and Vashti Mimosa Hunter, who are also a couple off the stage).

Their performance will without doubt persuade us once again that Bartók’s string quartets are inexhaustible masterworks, which outstanding performers can always reveal new aspects of.

ZSOMBOR NÉMETH The author is a junior research fellow at the Bartók Archives, Institute for Musicology – Research Centre for the Humanities.

On page 4: Bartók and Zoltán Kodály with the members of the Waldbauer–Kerpely String Quartet (March 1910) | Photo: Aladár Székely

Budapest Music Center – Concert Hall

KELEMEN QUARTET Bartók’s string quartets The members of the string quartet: Barnabás Kelemen, Jonian Ilias Kadesha – violin, Katalin Kokas – viola, Vashti Mimosa Hunter – cello

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Ballet Pécs | Photo: Betti Borbás

A Country for Dancers In the post-war political space only two genres flourished unfettered in the countries of the Soviet bloc, including Hungary: folk dance, and classical ballet. As from the 1960s the political climate was growing more and more benign, innovative endeavours could not but appear in these fields. The guarantee of renewal at the time was, understandably, not to be sought in Budapest: the history of three large provincial dance companies, the Ballet Pécs, the Ballet Company of Győr, and the Szeged Contemporary Dance Company, shows that if someone wanted to innovate, they went to the provinces, where young artists who wanted change and action were not burdened by tradition.

A mere enumeration of years, names, and titles cannot give justice to the importance of the fact that these companies were founded, and have been active ever since. Over the decades, the companies and their members have constantly redefined themselves and their relationship to the surrounding world.

Though they must often have rightly felt that the time and place given to them for work were not the best, now it is they who stand to win. Their progression from the periphery to the centre has reached its destination, and declares the Hungarian provinces are, after all, a good place for dancers!

“COURAGEOUS AND PROBLEMATIC”

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The Ballet Pécs got off to a rollicking start in the 1960s: in a couple of years fourteen one-act pieces were made to works by eight contemporary

Hungarian composers. The miracle of Pécs could not have come about without Imre Eck, who was visiting from the Opera House, but as the years passed, the advantages of the monopoly situation melted, as his pupils, and then other cities, also got in the mood to repeat his feat. The idea that a new ballet company should be formed became a reality in a matter of months: the class of 1960 from the Institute of Ballet were obliged to sign a contract with the Pécs company. Eck opened up a new world to these young people with a background in academic ballet: the anxieties of urban people, moral dilemmas, and questions of modern life were addressed. According to Teodóra Uhrik, a founding member and currently managing director of the Ballet Pécs, they were artistic samizdat: the fact that Eck spoke about the present in the symbolic language of dance caused a stir.

Iván Vitányi, who followed the course of the ensemble, believed a trip to see the Eck ballet was a real pilgrimage: “Painters, writers, and other artists [...] looked on it as an event, a sign, a call to arms, a beginning.” The unusual repertoire, called “courageous and problematic” by one of the first reviews, relied heavily on productions that were based on the works of contemporary composers – and of course Bartók, whose was considered Eck’s “in-house composer.”

Although Eck stayed with the company as artistic director and choreographer until the beginning of the 1990s, in actual fact he started to drift away from Pécs in the 1970s. Between 1969 and 2005 the company, which early on achieved considerable international success and had a solid fan base in Pécs, was managed by Sándor Tóth, István Herczog, then Gábor Keveházi and Attila Egerházi.

Balázs Vincze, who has been managing the team since 2005, said: “We need emotion, we need a story.”

His main ambition for the Ballet Pécs, which always thinks in terms of innovation, was to make it independent from the Pécs Theatre, a goal he achieved in 2017. The company then bound up its fate with the cultural centre set up in the city, the Zsolnay Quarter, and its new aims included reaching out to the public at large and young people in particular, with artistic, thought-provoking productions. The new premiere, the Vasarely Etudes, creates a bridge between the past and the present: when the Vasarely Museum was opened in 1976 in the presence of the famous Pécs-born painter, dancers from the Ballet Pécs were also performing.

TRADITION AND RENEWAL In the 1980s the imaginary stage spotlight was undoubtedly on Iván Markó and the Ballet Company of Győr. Borrowed from the dance theatre of Maurice Béjart, their aesthetic affected the senses rather than the intellect. The company was founded in a strikingly different manner to the Pécs group: a class in the Institute of Ballet decided themselves to stay together, and they invited Markó, one of Béjart’s leading dancers, to lead them. Alongside the chore-ographer, mention must be made of Judit Gombár, who had worked with both Béjart, and an Imre Eck she later called merciless but of impeccable taste. She assisted her beloved dancers with entrancing set designs.

To take part in a performance of the Ballet Company of Győr was tantamount to being at a demonstration. As Judit Gombár put it: “…you didn’t have to worry about whether you become pathetic or not. Whether the feeling was something to be ashamed of, or owned. One production followed another, and every move of the Győr company was met with huge enthusiasm from the public. It was as if they were marching and demonstrating for us.”

The company suddenly fell from its glory when Iván Markó left.

The efforts of János Kiss, who took over from him as director in 1991, and had to build things up from scratch, were crowned with success: the repertoire was built up again, and recurrent invitations abroad helped them to get back on their feet. Also, the decades following the political transition of 1989

Ballet Company of Győr | Photo: Szilvia Csibi / Müpa

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saw the operating conditions of the Ballet Company of Győr stabilize. As regards themes, the company drew and draws from many sources: literature, art, music, and even history, but the idea has always been of prime importance.

The Ballet Company of Győr's next change of director was much smoother, partly because of the way it was prepared: since 2020, it has been directed jointly by András Lukács and László Velekei, who has been closely associated with the company since the end of the 1990s. László Velekei’s application to be director emphasized the simultaneous presence of tradition and innovation, evidence of which is that in past decades he had the chance to work with Markó and Kiss, and indeed many founding members of the Ballet Company of Győr. Velekei is a great believer in ballet with a story that engages the audience: Giselle, the gem of the classical repertory, premiered in 1841 and considered to be one of the hardest pieces in the ballet repertoire, was transformed with the active participation of Félix Lajkó into a highly contemporary GisL. ENTERTAINING AND THOUGHT-PROVOKING The Szeged Contemporary Dance Company marks 1987 as the year of its foundation, though it has used its current name only since 1993. The year of genesis is a salute to the great dancer and choreographer Zoltán Imre, who already in the 1960s, spurred by the success in Pécs, wanted to create a competent dance company in the south of the Great Hungarian Plain. Distinguished by an interest in unusual music and an outstanding musicality, Imre was at his best in plot-free ballets.

Zoltán Imre left for the West in the late 1960s but was invited back in 1987 by Roland Bokor to the

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Szeged Ballet, then being (re-)formed: he arrived with great plans, and invited guest choreographers, to inspire the company with new techniques and a fresh way of thinking. Conditions were however not ideal, and in 1993 Imre left, passing the company to artistic director Tamás Juronics and director András Pataki, who have managed it successfully ever since.

By then Juronics had already gained a reputation with his choreographies; audiences, especially young people, liked his work for its more dynamic, acrobatic idiom. The Szeged Contemporary Dance Company proceeded unchecked on its chosen path, and in 1995 one critic wrote that “again and again they confront us with the present of European dance.”

As a choreographer, Juronics’s declared ambition is to be entertaining and thought-provoking, endeavours which have produced notable results: their performances have a serious following, and when the Szeged National Theatre was about to terminate their joint contract, the whole town, and indeed the country, spoke out for them, and a compromise was reached.

Juronics’s works feature clearly understandable emotional relationships and situations, in a framework most often given by the heated struggle between women and men. The impressive spectacle and sweeping movements have over the decades grown into a trademark. It’s no secret that they aim to speak to a broad section of the public, while in some of their pieces the atmosphere is more important than the story. Their new production is a pantomime of the grotesque, based on the Concerto for Orchestra, which Béla Bartók, a composer especially important for Juronics, composed in America.

TAMÁS JÁSZAY

Szeged Contemporary Dance Company | Photo: János Lakatos

Müpa Budapest – Béla Bartók National Concert Hall / Festival Theatre

AN EVENING OF BARTÓK

WE BUDAPEST

Performance by Gergely Madaras, the Hungarian National Philharmonic and the Szeged Contemporary Dance Company Bartók: Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta, Sz. 106, BB 114 Bartók: Concerto for Orchestra, Sz. 116, BB 123 Lighting: Ferenc Stadler Costumes: Dóra Mojzes Assistant to the choreographer: Gergely Czár Concept, choreographer: Juronics Tamás

Müpa Budapest – Festival Theatre

FÉLIX LAJKÓ AND THE BALLET COMPANY OF GYŐR: GisL Performed by: the dancers of the Ballet Company of Győr Featuring: Félix Lajkó – violin, Attila Sidoo – guitar, Endre Kertész – cello, József Barcza Horváth – double bass, János Mazura – tuba, Tamás Czirják – drums

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Music: Félix Lajkó Dramaturgy: Alexandra Csepi Set: Éva Szendrényi Costumes: Gabi Győri Lighting: Ferenc Stadler Assistant to the choreographer: Zsuzsanna Kara Choreographer: László Velekei

Müpa Budapest – Festival Theatre

BALLET PÉCS: VASARELY ETUDES Performed by: the dancers of the Ballet Pécs Music: Richárd Riederauer Set: Balázs Cziegler Costumes: Fruzsina Nagy Lighting: Miklós Hepkó, Balázs Vincze Assistant to the choreographer: Katalin Ujvári, Zsolt Molnár Choreographer, director: Balázs Vincze

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Béla Bartók’s Internationalism “Genuine and valuable art, at least for the time being, can only be conceived of in the form of a national art.”

Thus began the proposal Béla Bartók made, in response to the increasingly threatening atmosphere of the time, about the relationship between the state and art, to the standing committee on literature and the arts of the most international organisation of the time, the League of Nations. From 1931 he took part in the sessions presided over by Jules Destrée, former Belgian Minister of Arts and Sciences, where Karel Čapek, Henri Focillon, Thomas Mann, and Paul Valéry were also present.

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The only Hungarian participant, Bartók had been invited to represent musical matters, and he set out recommendations on musical issues, the importance of recording composers and folk music, the need for facsimile editions of musical manuscripts. However, he also spoke out, on several occasions, for the freedom of the arts and sciences. But how did a composer, pianist, and ethnomusicologist, who was equally at home on European concert platforms and in remote Hungarian villages, but was known to be reticent in larger company, come to be at the committee meetings of the League of Nations?

His international career as a concert pianist began early. Though the novel compositions he published with Hungarian publishers were noticed abroad, his composing career became international mainly after the First World War. In 1920 a small festival was arranged in Berlin with his works, and in 1922, when the Frankfurt opera was the first to perform Bluebeard’s Castle and The Wooden

Prince outside Hungary, Bartók arrived at the premiere from a concert tour in England and Paris.

The Dance Suite, which he wrote for a gala concert held in Budapest in 1923, set off in its path to international fame with the Prague premiere two years later. He first went to the USA at the turn of 1927–28, and in 1929 he appeared in the Soviet Union. In the 1930s he was a regular performer at the BBC, and went to the Netherlands with increasing frequency.

He composed the 44 Duos for two violins at the instigation of German educator Erich Doflein.

Between 1936 and 1939, he wrote three masterpieces, including Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta, on commission from the Swiss arts patron and conductor, Paul Sacher. During his selfimposed exile in America he broke his silence with the Concerto for Orchestra (1943), which was commissioned by Serge Koussevitzky, and soon thereafter he wrote the Solo Sonata for Violin for Yehudi Menuhin (1944). He had foreign publishers

to disseminate his works: from 1918 until the German occupation of Austria, the Viennese Universal Edition, and from 1939, the British Boosey & Hawkes.

Though until the end of the First World War he did his ethnomusicological field work mostly among the various peoples (Hungarians, Slovaks, Romanians, Serbs, and Ukrainians) living in his own country, the Hungary of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, for the purposes of his field work he made connections with local Slovak and Romanian intellectuals, and he approached the Romanian Academy in Bucharest and Matica slovenská, a Slovak cultural association, to secure publication of his collections. Of the trips he planned later, he managed to make the one to Biskra, Algeria, in 1913. He studied the languages he had not been exposed to, like Romanian, Slovak, and Arabic, as assiduously as he had learned Western European languages since childhood; with the help of a dictionary, he read Goethe in German, Dickens in English, Flaubert in French, and Goldoni in Italian.

Of the scholarly works he published between the wars, his Romanian collection from Maramureş was published in a highly regarded German series of books, while the English translation of his monograph on the Hungarian folk song was published

by Oxford University Press. He corresponded with countless foreign ethnomusicologists.

“He sent a composition to Paris in memory of Debussy, and he was present at the founding of the Salzburg chamber music festival, as well as at the creation of the International Society for New Music.”

He was glad to be a part of the international cooperation following the Great War. For a while he wrote dispatches on music life in Hungary for French, Italian, German, and American journals.

He sent a composition to Paris in memory of Debussy, and he was present at the founding of the Salzburg chamber music festival, as well as at the creation of the International Society for New Music. He was the Hungarian contributor of the most important musical dictionary of the time, the Dictionary of Modern Music. He was invited to the most important international folk music conferences: to Prague in 1928, and to the congress of Arab music in Cairo in 1932. In 1936 he accepted an invitation from Turkey to travel to Ankara, to give recommendations for organizing the collection of folk music, and he himself collected a volume’s worth of Turkish music.

His was only 40 when he was celebrated on his birthday by important international journals: Musikblätter des Anbruch in Vienna published a special Bartók issue, and La Revue musicale in Paris carried a long study by Zoltán Kodály. His two decorations from Romania (in 1924 and 1932) and most especially the French Légion d’honneur which he received for his fiftieth birthday in 1931, clearly

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showed the respect accorded to him internationally, as did the honorary doctorate that was awarded to him in 1940 by Columbia University in New York, where he was entrusted with the musical cataloguing of Milman Parry’s south Slav collection.

As in his scholarly work, so in his music, internationalism was closely entwined with the rigorous study, exploration and representation of national treasures – at a time when the concept of the national played a decisive intellectual-aesthetic role in public thinking. This may well have been the reason why Bartók, when he spoke out for the freedom of the arts at the committee session of the League of Nations, started off by saying “True and valuable art […] can only be envisaged as national art” – with the caveat, “at least for the time being.”

LÁSZLÓ VIKÁRIUS The author is a musicologist and Head of Department at the Bartók Archives, Institute for Musicology – Research Centre for the Humanities.

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Walter Gropius, Béla Bartók, and Paul Klee in Dessau (1927) | Hungart © 2021 Bartók with violinist Zoltán Székely in Nijmegen (1925) | Photo: Igminia Székely | Hungart © 2021

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John Eliot Gardiner | Photo: Sim Canetty-Clarke

“The Little Passion” This is how Robert Schumann referred to Johann Sebastian Bach’s St John Passion in one of his writings, where he stated that in his view this work was “much bolder, more powerful, more poetic than the one from Matthew’s Gospel.” It took the historical movement of the second half of the 20th century to give the St John Passion the treatment it deserves.

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Today such comparisons play little part in assessing Bach’s Passions, but in the 19th century this little brother to the St Matthew Passion suffered much discrimination due to both its length and performing forces. Not everyone was as enthusiastic as Schumann: the music historian Philipp Spitta, known for his comprehensive Bach biography published in 1873, played a large role in shaping the Bach canon, and explicitly denied that this masterpiece attained “the highest degree of perfection.” But if we take into account the approach to the arts in the Romantic era, and the attraction to the monumental, this statement is nothing to be surprised at.

The first passion oratorio to be performed in Leipzig, in 1721, was the St Mark Passion by Bach’s predecessor, Johann Kuhnau. It renders the Passion

story through literal quotes from the Bible, and comprises dramatic recitatifs, and choral movements, or turbae, which symbolize crowd scenes.

There are poetic observations as well, by way of arias and ariosos, with texts in verse. Another important element are the chorales, which represent the reaction of the congregation: these were arrangements of existing folk hymn melodies and texts. Bach was thirty-nine years old when he set to work on the St John Passion: it was his first year in this new position, and he was as ambitious as he was eager to please.

He could not break with the traditions, which made the libretto a difficult challenge, since the short passages from the Bible had to be complemented with verse, to have text for the

arias, ariosos, and chorales. While the text of the St Matthew Passion is homogenous and uniform, thanks to the work of the librettist, Picander, when he wrote the St John Passion, Bach had no recourse to a poet to fashion the text into a rhyming scheme, so the lyrics of the arias and chorales came from diverse sources.

Perhaps the first misunderstanding marked the fate of the work: Bach believed in all good faith that the performance of the Passion, planned for 7 April 1724, would be in the large Thomaskirche – as befitting both the solemnity of the occasion and the performing forces. When the council told him, four days before Good Friday, that Thomaskirche was but one of the two alternating venues, and it was the year of the Church of St Nicholas, even the programme flyer had been printed, stating the venue (incorrectly) as Thomaskirche. Resigning himself to the change, the composer then asked for sufficient space for the musicians, and for the harpsichord to be repaired. Bach enlarged the string section, and prescribed a harpsichord accompaniment for the recitatifs of the Evangelist, with organ to accompany Christ, and also added to the ensemble instruments that were by then antiquated: transverse flutes, two viole d’amore, a viola da gamba and a lute, for additional nuance to the musical expression.

Over the years, Bach revised the St John Passion several times, so it must have been close to his heart.

In 1725 he made substantial alterations, then in 1728, after more changes, had the work performed again.

In 1739 Bach wished to make another revised version and started to make a clean copy similar to the manuscript of the St Matthew Passion, but this ends at page 20, most likely because ten days before Good Friday the city clerk sought out Bach to inform him that “the music you intend to perform on the coming Good Friday should be omitted until you receive proper permission for it.” To this the composer replied that it was “all the same to him, because in any case he would have derived no benefit from it, it was nothing but a burden to him.” In other words, Bach presumably took offence at the decision, and did not continue the fair copy of the score. In 1749, the year before he died, Bach worked on it again: in this last version he withdrew the earlier alterations, practically restoring the first form of 1724.

As Bach scholar Christoph Wolff writes in his book, “the St John Passion is surrounded by an aura of incompleteness.”

According to Wolff, Bach’s work emphasizes the omnipotence of the heavenly kingdom of Jesus

Johann Sebastian Bach

“Bach believed in all good faith that the performance of the Passion, planned for 7 April 1724, would be in the large Thomaskirche.”

Christ, and the most important point is when Jesus triumphs over death. Other analysts point to the dramatic conciseness of the music as the piece’s greatest virtue, noting that in this work Christ appears more as a suffering human. With the St John Passion Bach aimed to express in music a kind of universal completeness which from time to time drew him back to the work, in order for its author, a committed believer, to pour this completeness into sound in the most perfect manner available to him.

ENDRE TÓTH

Sheldonian Theatre

JOHN ELIOT GARDINER WITH THE ENGLISH BAROQUE SOLOISTS & MONTEVERDI CHOIR Bach: St John Passion, BWV 245

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Riccardo Chailly | Photo: Gert Mothes / DECCA

“A Musician Cannot Choose Silence!”

Hungarian audiences can count themselves lucky: thanks to Riccardo Chailly’s regular guest appearances in Budapest over the last four decades, they have been able to watch the growth of his extraordinary career, and see close up how Claudio Abbado’s former assistant became one of the busiest conductors in the world.

This time, unusually, the Italian director will not come to Budapest, but will “take the audience on a journey” to La Scala, where he will conduct his orchestra, the Filarmonica della Scala in a concert broadcast from Milan as part of the Bartók Spring festival. In this interview with us he spoke about working in these unusual circumstances, the “Budapest milieu,” and his relationship to Bartók.

How have you been since the Covid pandemic started?

It’s a difficult time for us, but with the Filarmonica della Scala we are trying to look to the future, in spite of the fact that a while ago we had to suspend rehearsals of Kurt Weill’s The Seven Deadly Sins because several singers were infected with the virus.

The pandemic is a great worry for us all, and it struck Lombardy particularly badly. Milan, our home for months has been the Italian city most afflicted by the disease.

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As a conductor, what is it like to conduct a live-stream­ed concert but without an audience?

Somehow the very essence of music-making is missing from it: we convey emotions, and for that we need to feel the audience’s reactions, the “adrenalin” in the air.

Without the public there’s only one thing we can do: concentrate utterly. If it comes to that, I count myself lucky, because I’m not alone on the platform with a piano or violin, but I give a concert surrounded by an orchestra of living musicians. I need my fellow musicians on the platform, and that makes up at least in part for the lack of an audience presence, even in such extraordinary circumstances.

Can online concerts be a substitute for music experienced live, in person? Do these perhaps represent the triumph of art over the pandemic?

We can hardly speak of victory; rather, it’s a kind of alternative solution. The real victory will be when humanity wins the battle against the pandemic.

Until then, technology helps us to keep in touch with

audiences. This is a stopgap solution, but I think it’s much better than silence. Musicians must make music, they cannot choose silence!

The Bartók Spring, Hungary’s new international arts festival, makes its debut with online broadcasts.

It’s important for Hungary to exploit this opportunity. Music festivals named after composers can be found in Bayreuth (Wagner), Parma (Verdi) and Pesaro (Rossini), so it’s quite right that Budapest should have a series of events dedicated to Bartók.

It’s a lucky city that can boast such a “crowd-puller,” if I can refer to Bartók in that way. I remember my Budapest debut in 1980, when at the age of 27 we performed Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring in the Opera House. I recall the first rehearsals too, and the concert we gave in the Erkel Theatre a couple of days later. I well remember realizing something I managed to sense through my contact with Hungarian musicians: just how important music is in this city. That’s why I’m very pleased to be taking part in launching a festival dedicated to Bartók.

I’ve programmed a short piece by him, a real gem: the Romanian Folk Dances. This brilliant work, barely five minutes long, is full of joy, and Bartók gave it a very special orchestration.

“I well remember realizing something I managed to sense through my contact with Hungarian musicians: just how important music is in this city.”

If we look at all your recordings to date, it’s striking that you have a very broad repertoire, from Bach to contemporary music. Where does Bartók fit in?

I made a Bartók recording with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, and I conduct about eight or nine of his pieces regularly. Currently I’m learning the concert suite version of his masterpiece The Wooden Prince, which we plan to play next year with the Filarmonica della Scala. When a few years ago I conducted the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra in Budapest, my wife and I visited the Bartók Memorial House, and we saw Liszt’s study at the Old Academy of Music. As a musician it was a moving experience to seek out these places, and experience the milieu in which these great composers worked and laid the foundations for the Hungarian musical tradition, which is now feted the world over. I hope I have the chance to travel to Budapest in person again soon.

What inspired you to choose works by Stravinsky to go alongside Bartók?

The concert will be recorded in Milan shortly before the fiftieth anniversary of Stravinsky’s death. Also, I’ve been very drawn to his music ever since childhood. I began conducting very young, at the age of thirteen, and Stravinsky’s universe opened up to me with the two suites for small orchestra, and since

Riccardo Chailly | Photo: Silvia Lelli

then the journey has never ended. The programme includes The Soldier’s Tale and The Rite of Spring.

Just like Bartók’s Miraculous Mandarin, the latter is one that fundamentally changed the course of twentieth-century music.

ISTVÁN KÖVESDI

Teatro alla Scala

RICCARDO CHAILLY AND THE FILARMONICA DELLA SCALA Bartók: Romanian Folk Dances, Sz. 68, BB 76 Stravinsky: The Soldier’s Tale Stravinsky: The Rite of Spring

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Barnabás Kelemen | Photo: Gábor Valuska / Müpa Budapest

Face the Empty Auditorium HOW LIVESTREAMING AFFECTS ARTISTS For more than a year, music and dance has been streamed into our homes in the form of online broadcasts.

The artists perform to an empty auditorium – for cameras. The Bayerische Staatsoper tries to give viewers a more realistic concert experience by simulating the noise of coughing and the rustling of paper bags, but how are things for those on the other end of the camera? How does the sight of an empty auditorium, and the lack of audience reactions, affect the artists, professionally and emotionally?

Like so many MacGyvers, the cultural institutions and organizers try to use the means at their disposal to find a solution to provide artists with an opportunity to perform, and audiences with the experience of concerts and the arts. At the moment, livestreaming functions like the music industry’s gaffer tape: it holds things together where necessary, but at the moment it’s difficult to estimate how legitimate this method would be after this crisis. Everyone we asked, be they classical or jazz musicians, opera or folk singers, pop musicians or ballet dancers, agreed that nothing can substitute for the presence of the audience. “I can see their faces, their reactions, and the link between the performer and the audience is created instantly,” says opera singer Emőke Baráth, who also mentions the drawbacks of this. “If someone is glued to their phone, that’s very annoying.

We don’t have that now. But there’s nobody to smile at me either.”

But for the artists, these rare, unusual opportunities are extremely important: after all, they all know colleagues who haven’t been on stage since the pandemic began. “We see these performances as a separate genre,” said Attila Tatár, guitarist with the Bagossy Brothers Company, revealing their survival strategy. “We feel it’s a bit like shooting a video clip. We have to play to the camera: we’ve done things like this before, for instance at the Akusztik concert for Petőfi TV, where there was an audience, but they were sitting in the dark, so we couldn’t see them.”

“For most of us, playing to an empty hall isn’t an unknown experience, because anyone who’s made a recording or an album can remember this situation,” says violinist Barnabás Kelemen. “Even when recording an album, you try to conjure up the atmosphere of a concert. Now we can prove how well we do it,” he adds with a laugh. But it would be an error to say that this situation is not affecting artists’ performances.

EMBARRASSINGLY INTIMATE In a livestreamed concert, changes have to be made to tried and tested customs. For one thing, there is no meaning to the warning so often heard in music lessons: “They won’t hear that on the back row!” because now the sound only has to reach the microphone. However, it’s wise to mute the microphones while the musicians are entering and leaving the

platform, because the clip-clopping of shoe heels in an empty hall sounds odd. On the other hand, performers can still take a bow in an online broadcast.

“When the audience comes to our concerts, they make it special, and dress up – they grace us with their presence. Now the reverse is happening: we enter the audience’s home, virtually,” says cimbalom player Miklós Lukács, offering a different perspective. In his view, the most intimate mood can be achieved by talking about the pieces, and through the musicians’ stage presence and dress.

Opera singer Emőke Baráth explained how intimacy can have the opposite effect: “The cameras show you from really close up, so everything is visible.

You can’t go on stage without paying full attention to every tiny detail.” She doesn’t just mean taking proper care over make-up, hair, and dress, but that each movement has to be blended into the performance. You have to stay in character, even while idling the time: how you sit, or fiddle with your hair, all makes a difference. The camera sees all, and there is no distance to hide anything.

GIVING PERFORMANCES A SMILE “If possible, I immediately watch the recording of myself. I want to know what was good, and what wasn’t, and I learn from it,” says Emőke Baráth, explaining how she makes the most of it, taking the recordings as an opportunity for professional development. Her views are shared by singer Mónika Lakatos, a recent winner of the WOMEX Artist Award. She and her group, Romengo, also keep an eye on comments arriving during the streaming, and they respond to them. “It’s the only way we can do it: we follow the audience, and they follow us.”

“Whether we play for one person or one hundred, the performance should be the same,” says Mónika Lakatos, laying down her artistic principles. She adds: “Your professionalism or experience should give you what it takes to perform the same way in front of the camera as in front of an audience.”

“The reaction of the audience, the adrenalin rush, the nerves of going on stage, are really important,” says Miklós Lukács, who is at home in several genres.

“This is missing now, so you look for something to stimulate you while playing. We depend on our fellow musicians much more. We play for each other, and

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try to inspire one another. That’s what brings a performance to life, and gives it a smile.”

“It works best for chamber music, for the performers to motivate one another. Between them there arises the desire to share music,” says cellist István Várdai. “I, for one, am motivated by the desire to convey a message, I like to share what I’m feeling.

It’s always inspiring to play with good fellow musicians, but without an audience the spiritual value of concerts is absent.”

CEASELESS PRACTICE TO STAY AIRWORTHY The Covid lockdown hampers not just the performances, but the preparations too. “Playing in a mask has a much greater effect on ensemble playing than we thought,” Barnabás Kelemen told us. “When someone’s eyes narrow, we assume they are smiling, but the very opposite might be the case. We’ve had misunderstandings like that in our rehearsals.”

Practising together cannot, however, substitute for live performance. “However much we practise, it’s live performance that helps you progress,” notes Mónika Lakatos.

However, for ballet dancers regular rehearsals are a prerequisite for staying in the profession.

“We’re always practising, because as soon as lockdown is over, we have to ‘fly’ just as gracefully as before,” said ballet dancer Teodóra Uhrik, a founder

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and current managing director of the Ballet Pécs.

“Our career is short, and we cannot not stay fit.

We have to keep up to standard, we rehearse the repertoire, and prepare for new premieres.”

The Ballet Pécs, which is preparing for its 60th anniversary, is affected by the anti-pandemic rules in multiple ways. “You can’t hold a ballet lesson in the kitchen,” she says pithily. In this art, where the performers are a group, physical contact and touching are as important as synchronized movement – and this can only be achieved by practising together.

MAKING YOU MORE CONSCIOUS, BUT GIVING MORE FREEDOM “As a teacher, this situation forces me to put into words instructions and technical things that would be self-evident ‘live,’” says István Várdai, sharing his experience about online teaching. ”For me and my students, the situation has a beneficial effect on systematic thinking. Now we set about planning a piece armed with a pencil and eraser.”

There are some who were fortunate enough to “ride the wave.” “The forced holiday of the spring lockdown came when we’d already spent one or two intensive years doing concerts,” says Attila Tatár, giving an idea of the Bagossy Brothers Company’s programme. “It was good to have a break. We took

Photo: János Posztós / Müpa Budapest

Photo: Bálint Hirling / Müpa Budapest

time to spend with families, with ourselves. From July to mid-October we gave concerts again, and then orchestrated some songs we’d written. In December the lads managed to come home to Gyergyószentmiklós (Gheorgheni), and in our studio here we recorded our new album, and launched it in an online concert at the end of January. We were always busy, always had something to occupy us.”

István Várdai pointed out some knock-on effects of the pandemic: it is worth thinking about whether musical content available to anyone for free to watch repeatedly might not in the long run contribute to certain genres becoming undervalued. The pandemic will almost certainly bring long-lasting changes to the music industry; in its present situation – which is gruelling for artists and music professionals as well as audiences – livestreaming can be considered a lifesaver for the performing arts.

ZSUZSA BORBÉLY

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www.bmcrecords.hu Ministry of Human Capacities

info@bmc.hu

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The Invention of Folk Music BARTÓK’S VISION AT THE CUSP OF AN ERA Béla Bartók noticed the “heavily wrought, embellished songs” of Ilona Szabó (Mrs János Péntek) when he was doing field work in Körösfő (Izvoru Crişului); recordings of about two hundred melodies preserve her unusual, archaic style of singing. When in the Budapest studio a small house had to be built for her and a bench set in front of it, because this was the only way the sensitive informant could sing the songs, it turned out that Béla Bartók was right about collecting folk music. This story from around 1937, one of a ream of anecdotes about the recordings, confronts us even today with the realization of the time: the era of folk songs has ended.

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The desire to collect folk music arose gradually in Bartók. As a student of piano at the Budapest Academy of Music, his teacher was István Thomán, a pupil of Ferenc Liszt, but in this period he also took lessons from Ernő Dohnányi, and it was under his influence that he wrote patriotic pieces. His first work for large orchestra, Kossuth, was finished in 1903, and he considered it a symphonic poem; this work presents an image of a young composer who as yet knows little of peasant culture but shows a keen interest in the destiny of Hungary, and nur-tures a naive romantic stance towards the Hungarian Revolution of 1848. He first encountered

folk song the following year, during his stay in Gerlicepuszta, a part of Ratkó (Ratková), and he realized that peasant music was not what he had previously thought; not the folkloristic art song, but more authentic, more original, and thus more suitable for creating a new Hungarian musical language.

In 1906 Bartók was already collecting folk songs systematically, first in Hungarian regions; then, as it became clear to him that the songs were not necessarily native to their locale, and because he sought to explore the influences filtering in and to identify the ancient characteristics of folk songs, he extended his research towards Slovakia, Romania,

Serbia, and Bulgaria. In 1913 he went to Algeria, and in 1936 to Turkey. Ethnomusicology has much to thank him for, along with the colleagues he often wrote of, who started field work slightly earlier: Ákos Garay, Antal Molnár, Béla Vikár and others, and above all, Zoltán Kodály.

“Bartók recognized that his work as a collector of folk music coincided with the time when folk songs were still being created, and the spread of their variants could be observed.”

He also used the works of foreign scholars, of whom the Finnish Ilmari Krohn must be mentioned, whose classification system he borrowed in order to make a “lexicon” of Hungarian, Slovak, and Romanian folk songs. We can see how Bartók, who at the same time was giving concerts all over Europe and in the USA, had a broad perspective when collecting folk songs, working deliberately, which was certainly necessary in order for him to be essentially the founder of comparative ethnomusicology. In order to classify the melodies by nature and type, fieldwork was indispensable, and recording the informants’ singing on wax cylinders enabled in-depth analysis that would not have been possible with the limitations of manual transcription. At the same time, Bartók recognized that his work as a collector of folk music coincided with the time when folk songs were still being created, and the spread of their variants could be observed. One hundred or more years after Bartók’s collections, however, we have the task of viewing in perspective the historical era that made folk music what it is. Not that recognizing what folk music actually was was a simple task.

“Actual folk music in the broader sense comprises those songs which a people living at some degree of latitude still sing today, or sang some time ago, and which are an elemental expression of the musical impulse of that people,” Bartók said in a paper in 1929.

He wrote the book The Hungarian Folk Song (published by Rózsavölgyi in 1924) in 1921, following the Trianon Peace Treaty that concluded the First World War: in it, peasant music is described at length as necessarily instinctive, folk song as a natural phenomenon, which encouraged him to consider it an example of the highest artistic perfection.

He presents the typology and differences of oldand new-style folk songs, and explains the transformation of the “parlando-rubato” in art music, “as the link between the melodies and bodily movement slowly waned, so the melodies were emancipated and lived on independently, and the originally taut, precise rhythm slackened: the rhythm of the melody could now adapt to the rhythm of the text beneath it (which was not strictly dance-like), and performers could lengthen certain notes for emphasis.” Extraordinary insights, as if he sensed that the material he had in his hands would be lost to Hungary without

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his intensive scholarly work. In our cultural consciousness, the expression “folk music” would not exist, or at least would not mean what it currently does to us. In this sense, it was Bartók who clarified the concept of folk music, before he went on to create the idiom of new Hungarian art music, of which Hungarian folk music comprised an integral part.

As sound recording became widespread, folk songs ceased to be created, and with the appearance of telecommunications, radio and television, the melodies that had been disseminated and developed by direct exposure to their singers lost an important characteristic: that of not having composers. Our task today is simply that of both cherishing and cultivating the tradition that defines and describes this historical era, and that was once passed on from generation to generation. Béla Bartók continues to be for everyone, or, as the popular band Amorf Ördögök put it: “Bartók and Kodály [are] the two remix kings.”

ZOLTÁN VÉGSŐ

1 Bartók on his field work in Turkey with the members of the Kumarlı tribe (1936) | Hungart © 2021 2 Béla Bartók (1912) | Hungart © 2021

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Odd ID | Photo: Krisztina Bilák

Off the Beaten Track ALTERNATIVE FOLK MUSIC IN HUNGARY Alongside the dance house movement that drew on authentic folk music, and the urban folk music that grew out of that, other genres were also beginning to court folk music. Back then, this developing style was called progressive folk. From this grew the category later known as world music, and many related branches, with folk jazz at the fore. This tradition, still alive and influential today, is the focus of the Budapest Ritmo, as part of Bartók Spring, with current and “classical” performers – this time with concert films made at unusual venues too.

FOLK MUSIC WITH A DIFFERENCE

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It became fashionable to incorporate local folk traditions into English-language pop music in the early 1970s, just when in Hungary people were rediscovering Transylvanian peasant culture, in one of the post-Bartók waves, in the urban dance house movement. Groups like Sebő, Muzsikás, and Téka strove for an archaic feel, and wanted to get to the roots of folk music. Alongside them appeared bands that drew from folk music and combined it with other styles, like jazz, rock, or music from other cultures, and these bands (Kaláka, Vízöntő, Kolinda, Gépfolklór, and Unikum) found themselves on the line between two worlds. The milieu was partly identical, and there was even some overlap with bands sharing musicians, but there was a kind of

ideological opposition between performers following tradition, and those who spoke archaic in the language of pop music. The latter, who were then called progressive folk, particularly Kolinda and Vízöntő, were the first in Hungary to create what the music industry has, since the late 1980s, called world music. They played songs that were familiar, and yet always sounded new, starting out from traditional folk and marrying its style to other traditions. Just as the recordings of such folk musicians as Muzsikás, Téka, and ethnologist and collector Zoltán Kallós who inspired them were first released on LP – following Bartók’s journey – in America in the late 1970s, so Kolinda and Vízöntő first appeared on Western European labels, as if to signal that the whole world was opening its ears to this individual approach.

BORDERLANDS – WORLD MUSIC AND FOLK JAZZ Once some performers had broken the ice, the field branched into many different varieties, and stood in contrast to the authenticity of the dance house movement, which in the 1980s and 1990s firmly believed in maintaining folk music through renewing it; believed that in a modern, urban milieu, this was the way for folk to remain a living tradition. Indeed, a most diverse tradition was hoped for, in which Roma music (Kalyi Jag, Ando Drom), traditional South Slav music (Vujicsics), or Balkan music (Zsarátnok), itself a mixed tradition, could interact with performers who came to folk with a jazz background. Along with those who were more liberal, more improvisatory, or even blended different cultures (Makám, Tin-Tin Q), there was ethno-jazz in the mould of György Szabados, who followed the Bartókian path (Mihály Dresch and his bands, Béla Ágoston and his bands), there was folk-rock (Barbaro, Gőzerő), and there were geniuses who were a law unto themselves, like Félix Lajkó, or lineups working on “world music in the more classical sense” (Ghymes, Besh o droM, Kerekes Band) – which already bring us up to the present. Today, a great many musical idioms are put to the service of folk music, even by bands that were previously strictly traditional, such as Csík Zenekar.

BUDAPEST RITMO Nowadays there are so many talented, original, outstanding performers in this genre in Hungary, that Budapest Ritmo, which was launched in 2016, hosts world-class productions every year. Defining

itself as a conference and a diverse musical event, this year this run of events will be part of the Bartók Spring. This time, a part of the Hungarian world music scene will come to you in a special way. Says Balázs Weyer, Budapest Ritmo founder and director of programmes: “Ritmo is a special festival because it creates encounters that continue off-stage. That’s what happened with the encounters between Miklós Both and the Ukrainian peasant singers, Félix Lajkó and the Polish Vołosi, and Söndörgő and the Amsterdam Klezmer Band. In the current situation any kind of contact is difficult, so now we focused on meetings between performers and film directors, and performers and venues. In addition to concert films we do a programme which would not otherwise have come into being: Károly Cserepes, who makes sound collages and folk music remixes, can hardly ever be seen at festivals, because he doesn’t undertake things like this any more.”

KÁROLY CSEREPES, THE REAL “REMIX KING” “Bartók and Kodály [are] the two remix kings,” sang the band Amorf Ördögök, but actually the real “remix king” is Károly Cserepes, because in Hungary he is almost unique in the way he samples sounds and reconstructs familiar folk music recordings.

With his synthesizer he added a new colour to the music of Vízöntő, the pioneering band mentioned above; the albums he made with Márta Sebestyén and Levente Szörényi were novelties in world music; on the 1989 album Kivándorlás he concealed a gem of Hungarian rap history inspired by Public Enemy… and one could go on enumerating his achievements.

Tárkány Művek | Photo: Lázár Todoroff

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Mihály Dresch | Photo: András Hajdú M.

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Most importantly, he has been in top form recently and has issued sound collage remix albums: Blacklake (2016) with sounds collected at the market at Feketetó (Crna Bara); My Name Is Elvis Presley (2018) with children’s rhymes, and nonsense verse; The Big Slalom (2020) with Transylvanian folk music. Material from these will feature in the programme with video collages.

DRESCH STRING QUARTET – A MUSICIAN WHO CANNOT BE PIGEON-HOLED Almost every tradition of Hungarian folk is incorporated in the practically unclassifiable soul music of Mihály Dresch. “Hungarian jazz” in the vein of Szabados is a label that best fits his style, but his albums and concerts also present contemporary music that stands the test of time. His performance in Epreskert will be unusual in the sense that it will be a concert film, directed by Attila Damokos, known for his video clips made for the bands Belau and Irie Maffia.

ODD ID – ORGANIC POST-POP Alongside the classics of the genre, a young group also gets a concert film in Budapest Ritmo: Ethnofil – which became Odd ID after a slight change in lineup – always played folk music in a unique fashion, spicing it up with neo-soul, electronica, psychedelia, and contemporary jazz. Odd ID are playing in Kelenföld Power Station; their concert is directed for video by Fanni Szilágyi. With their reorchestrated older repertoire and new songs, this quartet continues to be an oasis of pleasure.

Cimbaliband | Photo: Lázár Todoroff

CIMBALIBAND, TÁRKÁNY MŰVEK AND BETTIKA QUINTET Finally, performers long established in the world music scene will give concerts that will be broadcast from the Akvárium Klub, along with a folk-jazz act, Bettika Bakos’s quartet, whose music is based on free-improvisation, jazz, and world-music. With a name inspired by its main instrument, Cimbaliband has for a decade and a half been a prolific and popular group that produces a diverse, multi-flavoured and multicultural world music, which is nonetheless uniform in style and very accessible. Tárkány Művek can also pride themselves on their accessibility and cimbalom: recently re-formed and working on a new album, the band can be expected to bring new songs.

ENDRE DÖMÖTÖR

BUDAPEST RITMO

Open You Ears

Featuring: Bettika Quintet, Cimbaliband, Károly Cserepes, Dresch String Quartet, MORDÁI, Odd ID, Tárkány Művek

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Photo: Attila Nagy / Müpa Budapest

A Symphony for Ten Cameras HOW ARE LIVESTREAM CONCERTS PRODUCED? Concert halls have become unusual venues in this Covid-beleaguered world: even behind closed doors, they are able to provide a perfect concert experience. Live music and concerts are a necessary experience – and livestreaming provides them in a different form. In December last year it was ten years since Müpa Budapest launched its livestream concerts, first as an experiment, and later a regular feature. Thanks to the experience gained, in March 2020 the venue was able to switch almost from one moment to the next to operating online, using a smoothly functioning system. But how is a livestream actually made in practice?

EVERYONE LIVESTREAMS NOW – DON’T THEY? Müpa Budapest’s programmes have always been put together following strict quality guidelines and artistic principles, and the same goes for concerts destined only for livestreaming. In normal circumstances the institution plans years in advance, and for classical music the programmes are drawn up even earlier, up to two years in advance. It’s characteristic of the music industry that non-classical music operates more on the short term.

“We have been recording a lot of concerts, and many were purchased by public service television.

There was a certain logic to deciding which concerts to record, and which to broadcast. Another consideration was to make available via this format primarily concerts that had sold out,” says Dr Endre Korentsy, Director of Productions at Müpa.

The current situation, however, is simpler, yet more difficult at the same time. More and more artists are giving permission for livestreaming. Live radio broadcasts have long been a trusted format in classical music, but orchestras are less accustomed to having images broadcast. However, orchestras that used to shrink at the idea of playing in an empty hall without an audience have become much more receptive to it.

As a result, recently Müpa has been able to broadcast at least three livestreams a week.

WHAT IS A MUSICIAN WORTH WITHOUT AN AUDIENCE? Previously, the most important listeners at a concert were the physically present audience, and those following the broadcast at home were secondary.

Now this has changed: broadcasting has become the primary aim. For this we had to make certain minor changes in organization and content.

“A soloist who wants to sing for the audience now has to sing into a camera. We had orchestras who asked us to omit the final bows at the end of the concert, because they felt they would be bowing to nobody,” recounts the director of productions.

Based on these stories, we might have the impression that events without an audience are somewhat dispiriting, but certain techniques can help to counterbalance the psychological effect of the

empty auditorium. There’s room to play with stage lighting, and there’s a way to create links between the performers and the audience.

“We collect audience feedback: there’s a huge wave of affection towards the performers. Often viewers send moving personal stories, and we try to pass these on to the performers so that if there’s another streamed concert, a relationship can be built between them. We are working on displaying viewer reactions on a monitor at concerts of non-classical music, but with the performing forces customary in classical music, this task is far from simple,” says Dr Endre Korentsy.

A DIRECTOR IN CONTROL One of the pillars of the team making recordings of classical music is the director. Perhaps not surprisingly, their main tool is the score: they follow it so that everything looks right on the monitor or the television screen. László Kecskés G. has been directing recordings of classical music at Müpa for a long time, and knows very well what preparations are necessary for a concert to look appealing for people watching it on a screen.

“During the preparatory work the director reads the score while listening to the piece, organizes the orchestra’s seating, and writes into the score what should be on camera and when. First they have to figure out where to put the cameras. It’s a pity that concerts have to happen in an empty hall, but in one sense it makes things easier for us. Normally, a camera fixed onto a crane (‘jimmy’) can block the view of the audience, so if the auditorium is full of people we are forced to make compromises – but not in this case.

On the day of the recording we have a rehearsal, which in the best case means a camera rehearsal.

We look to see what the camera will ‘see’ in the evening,” says László Kecskés G. But at that point the day is far from over.

After the camera rehearsal comes more finetuning: if it turns out that something can’t actually be recorded the way the director envisaged, that leads to a few extra notations in the score. The recording, or live performance, can only go ahead if everything is prepared like this beforehand.

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Photo: Attila Nagy / Müpa Budapest

With the help of an assistant, the director coordinates the work of the camera operators. Using the score with written-in instructions, the assistant instructs the operators, while the director watches the images shown by the cameras, and using those they splice together what the viewer at home will see. And the craft of creating what the viewer sees is just as interesting, from a technical point of view.

INPUTS AND TERABYTES

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The recorded image goes into a streamer which transforms the video signal to a lower resolution suitable for internet webcasting. This lowers the data traffic, but doesn’t cause any perceptible loss of quality. To avoid problems, the equipment has two inputs, and it can stream from both at once.

If anything happens in the active stream, we can immediately switch to the other.

A programme on which considerable sums of money have been spent in bringing together is only worth broadcasting in outstanding quality. For this, professional equipment is required. Film editor and media technician János Geier has been working on recording Müpa’s concerts since the beginning, and it is his conviction that the equipment is fully suitable to produce perfect recordings.

“We work with professional Sony HD cameras, familiar from television. We’ve been recording for sixteen years, and over the years we have continually developed our equipment. Now we have ten cameras.

Of these, four are worked by operators in the hall, and

six are remote-controlled, so they can be operated directly from the control room,” says János Geier, who also reveals how much storage space is needed to keep this massive amount of data. The number of performances recorded so far tops 2500. After post-production has been done, the final cut is put into a digital tape archive, were they are stored on 12 terabyte cassettes. Currently the recordings occupy 700 terabytes of storage space.

BUDAPEST CALLING Surprising as it may sound, the livestreaming has a therapeutic effect for both the performers and the audience. For the former, concerts represent the practising of their vocation, while the latter are – perhaps we can say without exaggeration – starving for music. Sometimes it happens that four times as many people are present online for a concert than would be able to fit into the hall, something of which the experts working on the livestreams are thoroughly proud. Müpa’s opportunities have broadened, and viewers log on from all over the world, Hungarians and foreigners alike.

People need and want musical experiences, and currently it seems that livestreaming is one of the possible channels for this – with the Bartók Spring now moving online, we all can enjoy our share of the “good vibrations.”

TAMÁS HAUSCHEL

WE ARE AT HOME IN MUSIC. ENJOY OUR LIVE CONCERTS IN YOUR HOME! ZENEAKADEMIA.HU

Bartók Béla (1903) | Fotó: Mai és Társa

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A Cavalcade of Genres The genres of musical works always represent a historical reality: composers may take on board the norms, they may avoid them, or they might even transgress them. The music of Béla Bartók is often highly innovative and individual, but throughout his creative career he never once broke with the traditions of genres he had inherited from his predecessors. His œuvre is “limited” to worldly genres, but within that his work is kaleidoscopic in its variety, reflecting the image of a composer who excels in many forms.

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The genres of Western art music that exist today and govern concert programming, emerged in the 17th and 18th centuries, and gained what is considered their final form in the 19th century with Beethoven’s œuvre and its immediate reception.

Bartók’s compositions were made for the most important performing forces of his time: musical theatre, symphony orchestra, string orchestra, solo piano, and voice. He composed most of his works for his own instrument, the piano. In the first decade of the twentieth century he wrote several pioneering cycles, some of which were based on his recent experience of folk music and the most important principles he had gleaned from it, while others were linked to the latest musical trends of the time.

The Allegro barbaro (1910–11), which closed this period, is one of his best-known and most popular piano pieces.

The body of piano works he produced during the years of the Great War also shows an extremely varied picture: as well as simple folk music arrangements (for instance the Romanian Folk Dances, 1915) and original works for the concert platform (Suite, 1916), in this period he also composed daringly innovative etudes and abstract folk music arrangements (Improvisations on Hungarian Peasant Songs, 1920). After a break of a few years, in 1926 he suddenly churned out numerous keyboard works, representing the pinnacle of his achievement for the piano, including the Sonata and Out of Doors.

Between 1908 and 1911 Bartók composed For Children, his first piano cycle with an educational aim, and during the 1930s he produced what may be the most influential cycle of piano pieces in the twentieth century, Mikrokosmos.

Alongside piano music, Bartók also made a considerable contribution to another “domestic” genre, the song, with works inspired by folk music, and near-Expressionist settings of poems by Endre Ady. Naturally, we cannot overlook the six string quartets which weave through his whole œuvre (1908–09, 1914–17, 1927, 1928, 1934, 1939), a cycle which is the most important since Beethoven’s late quartets.

Other highlights of Bartók’s chamber works are the two extremely complex sonatas for violin and piano (1921–22), the educational 44 Duos for two violins (1932), the outstandingly innovative Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion (1937), the Contrasts written for the unusual trio of piano, violin, and clarinet (1938), and the Sonata for solo violin (1944), which lays siege to Bachian heights.

“With Bluebeard’s Castle (1911), a one-act opera, he created practically single-handedly a prosody for Hungarian opera which had not existed until then.”

Though his orchestral works are often short, and/or orchestrated versions of existing pieces, for instance the two Rhapsodies for violin and piano or orchestra (1928), Bartók created one of the most original orchestral works of the twentieth century, when in 1936 he gave what is basically a chamber symphony the title of Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta, and wrote one of the most frequently played orchestral pieces of the era, the Concerto for Orchestra (also a “latent” symphony), which has been considered a “classic” of the concert repertoire since its world premiere in 1944. Alongside them, the Divertimento for string orchestra (1939), the three piano concertos (1927, 1930–31, 1945), the violin concerto (1937–38), and two other works that are “problematic” in terms of his œuvre (the youthful Violin Concerto No. 1 and an uncompleted viola concerto) have taken root in the concerto repertoire.

With Bluebeard’s Castle (1911), a one-act opera which Bartók wrote to a text by Béla Balázs, he created practically single-handedly a prosody for Hungarian opera which had not existed until then.

His second stage work, The Wooden Prince (1914– 17) was again a one-act work written to a text by Balázs, this time a ballet rather than an opera.

The Miraculous Mandarin, composed in 1918–19 but not orchestrated until 1922, was seen by the composer as a “one-act pantomime”; this music, to a text by Menyhért Lengyel, is one of Bartók’s most radical works.

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Although choral works do not feature among Bartók’s best known compositions, they formed an important part of his art. Some of them are arrangements of Hungarian, Slovak, and Romanian folk songs, while others are settings of poetic texts or folk poetry. Bartók also wrote choral works accompanied by piano. But the most outstanding is the one that alongside the choir employs a tenor and a baritone soloist, and a symphony orchestra: the Cantata profana – The Nine Enchanted Stags (1930), which is the most striking musical manifestation of Bartók’s oft-expressed axiom, the brotherhood of peoples.

ZSOMBOR NÉMETH The author is a junior research fellow at the Bartók Archives, Institute for Musicology – Research Centre for the Humanities.

1 Béla Bartók (cca. 1930) | Hungart © 2021 2 Béla Bartók (1903) | Photo: Mai & Company

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Gergely Dubóczky | Photo: Zsófia Raffay

Restored Romanticism The earliest film version of Mór Jókai’s novel, The Man with the Golden Touch, has been given incidental music.

Man of Gold, Alexander Korda’s 1918 classic has had a chequered fate, with what seems like a happy end: this lavishly produced silent film was long thought lost, until it turned up in a German archive; thoroughly restored thanks to the intervention of the Hungarian National Film Archive, and, it is not even so silent now.

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Let’s start with a term that didn’t exist when Alexander Korda was a young man (he was 25 when he directed the film): a big spoiler. When according to the plot Pasha Ali Tschorbadschi hears from the old Maxim Krisstyan that there is an arrest warrant for him, Ali promises a fortune to the old vagrant if he saves them. But then the pasha feels the stirrings a strange feeling: suspicion. We know this not only because of Gyula Szöreghy’s authentic portrayal of the pasha, but because it is written out: “suspicion”!

Perhaps the young director was afraid the pasha’s beard would conceal his emotions, or that the audience, worn weary by the war (the film was shot during the last months of the fights), needed leading by the hand.

From the very first moment of the film to the last, Jókaiesque emotions whirl, clearly identifiable without intertitles. In the third act, there is an attack of mass swooning (Brazovics dies, Katschuka disappears); in the fourth the main protagonist Michael Timar’s inner voices start to speak, which must have been touching for contemporary viewers, and we are not left unmoved either. However turbulent the inner events may have been, they are dwarfed by the spectacular visuals: there is nothing in what is Korda’s only silent film in a presentable state (glue-on beards, the pasha’s palace, or other parts of the scenery) that would fall short of the works of the most chic directors of the time, even though big shots like Fritz Lang were already filming then.

With such a lavish production, we can only just wait for Ali to set off in a boat with his daughter Timéa; we hardly need say that Korda knew a thing or two about embarking and disembarking, because a good decade later he moved to London and helped the film industry flourish in Great Britain.

The ship goes, and Michael Timar comes, after all he is the ship’s officer: even after one hundred years Oszkár Beregi’s magnetic gaze would do George Clooney proud – not to mention Clive Owen, who very much resembles this great actor. All the while his ship, the St Barbara, glides along, but is unable to avoid its fate: it runs aground. The water and the tension rises in a way that would make even James Cameron envious. Captain Katschuka is the spitting image of Conrad Veidt, at least from some angles (less The Man Who Laughs and more the handsome Veidt.) But Man of Gold has laughing characters too: Theodor Krisstyan – a police informer by way of employment, whose main sphere of activity is grassing on others – makes a memorable entrance when he jumps out of a barrel of rose petals (with the intertitle “At your service!”) – regrettably putting an end to Noémi’s and Timar’s rose-petal idyll. When Timar and Krisstyan set at each other with hunter’s rifle and pistol respectively, there are no rose petals, but there is suspense a-plenty. And the way Theodor escapes galley slavery couldn’t have been bettered

by Lang himself; only with a larger cast of extras.

Korda knew how to direct both action and melodrama: perhaps the only ones he wasn’t able to instruct were the infants in arms and the goats not used to acting, but that happens to the greatest.

another interesting aspect: viewers in 1918 knew the plot of Jókai’s 1872 classic much more thoroughly than people today. The composer says: “For someone who hasn’t read the novel and isn’t clear about the plot, they can easily lose track. That’s why I decided to interpret every moment as far as possible, to make it clearer to the viewer what is going on in the film.

For this, I use a mixture of traditional and contemporary compositional techniques. Also, if there is some underlying content that is spelt out in more detail in the novel than in the film, I tried to smuggle it in through the music.”

GÁBOR KÖVES

On page 32: scene from the silent film, MAN OF GOLD. | © Hungarian National Film Institute – Film Archive

“When Timar and Krisstyan set at each other with hunter’s rifle and pistol respectively, there are no rose petals, but there is suspense a-plenty.”

What happened to composer Bence Farkas was that with his incidental music for Man of Gold he won a prize in the 2020 Composition Competition of Müpa Budapest, and the premiere of his work will be in the Bartók Spring virtual concert hall. “In the two-round competition, first ten minutes had to be submitted, then in the second round another twenty minutes, so all in all the first half-hour of the film.

After the competition was closed, I wrote incidental music for the entire film,” recounts the composer.

During the work he faced all the challenges of writing music for a silent film. “One of the greatest difficulties of the music to accompany a silent film is that there can never be silence. On top of that, the visual world of Man of Gold, similar to most silent films of the time, is difficult to interpret today, and its apparatus is completely different from that of more recent films.

The tempo seems terribly slow, and what’s more, the intertitles that tell us where we are, and who says what, interrupt the images.” Bence Farkas mentions

Müpa Budapest – Béla Bartók National Concert Hall

MAN OF GOLD – world premiere Award-Winner of Müpa’s Composition Competition Bence Farkas: Incidental music for the silent film, Man of Gold (director: Alexander Korda, 1918) Featuring: Győr Philharmonic Orchestra Conductor: Gergely Dubóczky

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Vasily Petrenko | Photo: Svetlana Tarlova

Maestro|Musician|Man Maestro. What this word strikes up in us is the mental image of a stern, uncompromising, constantly grim, unapproachable musician, whose knowledge is naturally vast, and who always has the right answer at the ready. But can the highest professional standards be coupled with a relaxed, ordinary, personable character?

Indeed, it seems they can: probably everyone would be happy to chat with Vasily Petrenko over a coffee.

What makes a conductor “likeable”? Let’s see!

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At 44, Petrenko is no fledgling any more. At this age he has the right to be taken seriously, with a long list of achievements, but compared to the “Methuselahs” he can still easily be called a young conductor. When we read concert programmes we often scroll through the usual list of cities, venues, and collaborations, because that is how most musicians draw up their biographies. But here, the picture we get is not one of a performer who packs in one tour after another, but of a person who builds his career deliberately, who is loyal and has stamina, yet whose popularity means he can hold his ground in many parts of the world. After studying in St Petersburg, at the age of 18 he was already resident conductor at the local Mikhailovsky Theatre, and not much later he was first guest conductor. After winning several important competitions he left his alma mater, and (perhaps with the help of a time turner borrowed from Harry Potter) he set off in several directions at once.

The orchestras he debuted with almost immediately offered him the position of chief conductor or music director. That is what the Oslo Philharmonic and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra did – just to mention the two largest. With the latter, he became the youngest ever chief conductor in the history of the orchestra. What’s more, every orchestra is completely satisfied with him. But why?

Is he as a musician so much better than others? Not necessarily. The answer lies in Petrenko’s personality.

He gives the impression of being an “ordinary person,” in the best sense of the expression. On Instagram we see a man with a friendly smile and comfy clothes, who in the first wave of Covid nursed a lockdown beard and grew tomatoes, and I dare say he baked bread too, just like the rest of us. His manner is disarming, he uses striking, comprehensible similes, and he doesn’t pride himself on a celebrity aura or eccentricities – if, indeed, he has any.

Vasily Petrenko | Photo: Mark McNulty

For him, music is not just something to work at: it is something to love. He is able to discover new works and new names every day (Szymanowski, Wolf-Ferrari, and contemporaries like John Tavener and Jennifer Higdon are not part of the customary repertoire), which allows him to find something new in classical music and in himself. At the age of 18 he wrote a list of the pieces of music he would like to conduct, and since then the list has merely grown.

One of his favourite composers is Shostakovich, but he very much likes the music of Kodály and Bartók too – something he is willing to pronounce outside Hungary as well. In his view, “whenever there were grave crises [...], the arts immediately following these periods played a vital role in bringing society together, in lifting up spirits,” and that’s why he believes that “music brings optimism.” A survey of his impressive discography shows that he is practically an omnivore.

“In the first wave of Covid he nursed a lockdown beard and grew tomatoes, and I dare say he baked bread too, just like the rest of us.”

Without a shadow of doubt, Petrenko is a good conductor. The Guardian, BBC Music Magazine, Bachtrack, and the Sunday Times are just a few of the major publications to praise his work to the skies. He has won Gramophone awards in the “Young Artist of the Year,” “Artist of the Year,” and “Orchestral Recording of the Year” categories.

It comes as no surprise, then, to learn that he has perfect pitch and is quite the perfectionist: rarely content with himself, he always finds something in his work to improve. Finally the latest news: from August 2021 he will be music director of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in London, whom he will be conducting now. Oslo and Liverpool are in mourning... but only partly, because even now Petrenko will not sever all ties with them.

Perhaps his relaxed relationship with the orchestras shows best the essence of the Petrenko phenomenon: the human aspect. He speaks of the musicians with kind words and professional humility.

After all, he is aware that “the conductor’s baton makes no sound,” and he only assists the work of the ensemble that creates the music. Rather than laying claim to hero worship, he believes in mutual respect.

He considers the enjoyment and enthusiasm of the audience the greatest professional recognition of all. Music education for young people is important for him, so he works as the chief conductor of the European Union Youth Orchestra. He has a reputation as a good communicator able to forge people into a team. A series of interviews with him made during lockdown show that it’s not just musicians he gets along well with. The video he made with Igudesman & Joo during the quarantine shows that he has a sense of humour too.

Almost too good to be true? There is soon to be fresh proof of his musical quality, because in the Bartók Spring we have a chance to see and hear Vasily Petrenko, the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, together with the talented British saxophonist Jess Gillam, who in January this year was in the Müpa Budapest virtual concert hall as part of the Rising Stars programme. And if you bump into Petrenko on the street, strike up a chat with him, and find out if appearances are deceptive after all.

DÁNIEL MONA

Royal Albert Hall

ROYAL PHILHARMONIC ORCHESTRA Weber: Euryanthe – Overture Villa-Lobos: Fantasia for Saxophone, Three Horns, and Strings Brahms: Symphony No. 4 in E minor, Op. 98 Featuring: Jess Gillam – saxophone Conductor: Vasily Petrenko

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Budapest at Our Feet EPISODES FROM THE FIRST EIGHTY YEARS OF POSTERS POPULARIZING THE HUNGARIAN CAPITAL Travellers have long been drawn to Budapest by its location, architecture, and colourful cultural and night life.

The first eye-catching posters to direct international attention to the sights of the Hungarian capital appeared in the 1920s and 1930s. Tourism became a leading industry between the two world wars, at a time when it became general practice in Europe to regulate working time. Society became acquainted with previously unknown concepts such as the weekend and the paid holiday, and travel gradually ceased to be a pleasurable privilege of the well-to-do. With the spread of the motor car, distances became more and more manageable, and alongside budding tourism came an era of advertising that encouraged people to travel.

A NEW INDUSTRY TESTS ITS WINGS In Hungary, the genre of tourism posters had precedents going back to the end of the 19th century, when steamboat and railway companies advertised travel.

Many illustrated posters from the Hungarian River and Sea Navigation Company and the Hungarian Royal State Railways are extant, though they were generally less poster-like, and featured the timetable, which was normally encased in an overly picturesque landscape, with the prime motifs naturally being the ship or the train. Promotion of the national image later became one of the important features of tourism posters, and the seeds of this appeared in early poster art. The use of the late 19th-century historicizing style and historical symbols that emphasized the national character was particularly characteristic of the posters that were designed for the 1896 millennial celebrations (2).

Hungary started out with a handicap in the international competition for tourists, because after the 1920 Trianon peace treaty, most of the country’s former tourist attractions ended up in the territory of foreign countries. This is when institutions dedi-

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cated to the sector were established, such as the Budapest Metropolitan Tourist Office, the National Tourism Council, and the Lake Balaton Management Committee, one of their tasks being to produce promotional material for tourism. Poster design competitions were announced, and the results were shown in exhibitions. Since there was keen international competition in tourism, the posters had to be as modern and as eye-catching as possible.

Tourism promotion focused on travellers coming from the West, for whom Vienna was a betterknown destination at the time. The first campaigns suggested travellers sojourning in Vienna take a couple of days’ detour to Budapest, thus creating the slogan “a few days in Budapest,” and it was in service of this end that the Budapest Capital Tourist Office opened a branch in Vienna, in 1931.

The facade, interior and even the promotional flyers available inside were all designed by the same graphic artist, Aladár Richter Jr. THE TEMPTATION OF SIXTY MILLION LITRES OF BATH WATER The two main destinations promoted were Lake Balaton and Budapest, and the posters highlighted many of the capital’s attractions: the old buildings, the excellent location, the lidos, and the nightlife.

One outstanding natural feature is that the city has 115 thermal springs, with a daily output of sixty million litres of water, which gave rise to the concept of the “spa city.” In 1922 the Budapest Spa City Association was formed, and the mayor himself led the Spa Committee, which oversaw the bathing scene. In 1932 the Gellért Baths advertised a competition for posters to popularize Budapest’s spas, and one of the entries was György Konecsni’s beautiful art deco style poster, which is both clas­ sicizing and elegant. The image is of a female figure holding a bowl full of water that seems to shine from within, while in the background glows a silhouette of the Buda Castle (1).

Tourist posters in the 1930s tended to make use of Budapest’s breathtaking panorama, as viewed from the Castle District or from Gellért Hill – the same lavish view that can still be enjoyed from the Savoyai Terrace today. The main elements of the panoramas

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were the vast glittering surface of the Danube, along with the Parliament, and they also often featured the Fishermen’s Bastion and the buildings in the Castle District. Because tourist posters were destined for hotel lobbies, tourist offices, and railway carriages, the designers could employ more refined, painterly techniques; there was no need for the brash appearance of street posters. These works are marked by the notable influence of avant-garde art and photographic innovations: the sights are frequently reduced to a stylized abstraction and shown from unusual angles, from above, with these views played off in counterpoint one against the other. The poster had to speak in the most modern, up-to-the-minute idiom.

Several of the early tourist posters were designed

by Pál Molnár-C., a renowned painter and graphic artist of his time. In his works the overall decorativeness owes much to the effect of contrasts: delicate gradations of tone and artfully painted parts are combined with sharp contours and skilfully drawn details and lettering. Several of Pál Molnár-C.’s important tourist posters appeared in 1933, such as Budapest, a view of the capital from the statue of St. Gellért, Balaton, and the Hungarian State Railways Travellers’ Discounts. Gitta Mallász and Hanna Dallos were also important poster artists of the period: in 1933 they designed their “little boy” poster, which advertised Hungary and was one of the first examples of the folksiness that came into fashion in promoting tourism (4). Posters advertised the city’s cultural offerings too; one of Pál Molnár-C.’s works promoted the June Festival (3).

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around the national holiday on 20 August, and the Budapest International Fair, which drew crowds of visitors from abroad. The posters advertising the fair promoted a developed country with modern industry, while the image for the feast of St Stephen was dominated by traditions and folklore. One of the highlights of this latter event was the Gyöngyösbokréta (Pearly Bouquet) show, with performances by folk dance groups from various Hungarian regions. The chief organizer was Béla Paulini, who was also a well known tourism photographer. By this time, the importance of photography as a promotional vehicle for tourism had come to match that of posters: the image of the country was fashioned through postcards and albums made for tourists.

A PAST OF A THOUSAND YEARS AND MODERNITY

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Around this time two events played a key role in Budapest’s tourist life: the Saint Stephen’s Week

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In 1938 two large events contributed to a growth in tourism: the Year of Saint Stephen was held to commemorate the 900th anniversary of the death of the first Hungarian king, and Budapest hosted the 34th Eucharistic World Congress. Both were advertised by eye-catching posters which put equal emphasis on a thousand years of Christianity and Hungary’s modernity (5).

THE END OF THE HEROIC AGE AND THE SUBSEQUENT REVIVAL The Second World War and the party state system that had become established by 1949 brought an end to tourism, and with it, the posters that advertised it – at least for a while. The thaw started at the end of the 1950s, and the 1960s saw the appearance of several memorable posters that showed the attractions of Budapest and Hungary. András Máté, one of the best graphic artists of the time, designed a particularly impressive series for the state-owned Hungarian airline Malév, in which he followed the styles of pop art and neo-Art Nouveau to show the sights in a most attractive manner (6). One of his contemporaries was István Balogh (Páter), who also designed posters of Budapest and Lake Balaton for IBUSZ, the tourism monopoly of the time; one of his most famous works promotes the Béla Bartók International Choir Festival, held in Debrecen in 1966. This work express-es the characteristics of Béla Bartók’s music clearly: at one and the same time, it is decidedly modern and also makes reference to folk art traditions (7).

Hungarian poster art encompasses many exciting depictions of Budapest, and they all capture something of the beauty of the Hungarian capital and its cultural values – treasures that are truly at our feet during the Bartók Spring.

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ANIKÓ KATONA The author is an art historian and museologist at the Collection of Prints and Drawings, Hungarian National Gallery.

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Budapest, City of Spas (1936) | György Konecsni | Hungart © 2021 XY 77.53/a, b / Collection of Prints and Drawings, Museum of Fine Arts – Hungarian National Gallery National Millenium Exhibition – Budapest, 2 May – 31 October 1896 (1896) | Károly Gerster, Géza Mirkovszky PKG.1914e/224 / Collection of Posters and Small Prints, National Széchényi Library Festival (1931) | Pál Molnár-C. | Hungart © 2021 PKG.1931/131 / Collection of Posters and Small Prints, National Széchényi Library Ungarn (1933) | Gitta Mallász, Hanna Dallos | Hungart © 2021 XY.76.145 / Collection of Prints and Drawings, Museum of Fine Arts – Hungarian National Gallery St Stephen Day in Budapest (n. d.) | Aladár Kacziány | Hungart © 2021 PKG.én/327 / Collection of Posters and Small Prints, National Széchényi Library Malév (1969) | András Máté | Hungart © 2021 XY 73.365 / Collection of Prints and Drawings, Museum of Fine Arts – Hungarian National Gallery 2nd Béla Bartók International Choir Festival (1966) | István Balogh | Hungart © 2021 XY 72.202 / Collection of Prints and Drawings, Museum of Fine Arts – Hungarian National Gallery

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A free publication of the Bartók Spring International Arts Weeks

Published by Papageno Consulting Ltd. on behalf of Müpa Budapest Founded by: Müpa Budapest Nonprofit Ltd. Csaba Káel, CEO Publisher: Managing director of Papageno Consulting Ltd. E-mail: szerkesztoseg@papageno.hu Editor-in-chief: Marcell Németh Publication manager: Bernadett Bucs With contributions from: Zsuzsa Borbély, Endre Dömötör, Tamás Hauschel, Tamás Jászay, Anikó Katona, Gábor Köves, István Kövesdi, Dániel Mona, Marcell Németh, Zsombor Németh, Endre Tóth, Zoltán Végső, László Vikárius English translation: Richard Robinson On the cover: Barnabás Kelemen Cover photo by: Gábor Valuska / Müpa Budapest Submissions closed on: 22 March 2021

The organizers reserve the right to make changes.

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