CENTRAL EUROPEAN MUSIC SINCE 1875
The second international conference of the Central European Music Research Group in the Musicology Department at the Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music
An event of the Bartók World Competition 2025
Celebrating the Liszt Academy at 150
Liszt Academy
Budapest, 5–6 September 2025
CENTRAL EUROPEAN MUSIC SINCE 1875
The second international conference of the Central European Music Research Group in the Musicology Department at the Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music
An event of the Bartók World Competition 2025 Celebrating the Liszt Academy at 150
Liszt Academy, Room XXIII (1061 Budapest, 8 Liszt Ferenc Square)
Organizing and programme committee: Gabriella Murvai-Bőke, Lóránt Péteri
Friday 5 September 2025, 9.30
Chair: Katalin Komlós
The conference will be opened by Dr Gábor Farkas , Rector of the Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music.
LISZT AND BARTÓK
Máté Cselényi
Liszt and Travelling
László Vikárius
Farewell to Budapest, Farewell to Europe: Meanings in Bartók’s Last Concert at the Liszt Academy of Music
Discussion
coffee break
PIANISTS
Christian Utz – Viktor Lazarov
Early Recordings of Franz Liszt’s Piano Sonata in B minor by Artur Friedheim, Eugen d’Albert and Other Pianists: The Impact of the ‘Liszt School’ on Performance
History
Cecilia Oinas
(Im)perfection as the Goal of the Recording Process? Annie Fischer, Beethoven’s D major Sonata op. 28 and Shaping the Sonata-Form Structure in Performance
Discussion
Friday 5 September 2025, 14.30
Chair: Márton Kerékfy
INTERWAR YEARS
Ferenc János Szabó
Eternola Mechanikai Rt.: A Hungarian Record Company with Central European Ambitions and Central European Obstacles
Stephen Downes
‘Szymanowski’ in 1925: Listening for Histories and Identities in the Mazurka Op. 50 no. 1
Discussion
coffee break
IMAGE AND IDENTITY
Beata Bolesławska
‘Hungaria 1956’: On Polish Musical Responses to the Hungarian Revolution
Olha Kushniruk
Ukrainian Choral Tradition: Construction of National Identity on the Modern Stage
Discussion
Saturday 6 SEPTEMBER 2025, 9.30
Chair: Lóránt Péteri
CZECH LANDS
Heidy Zimmermann
Victor Ullmann’s The Emperor of Atlantis – Central European Contexts
Miloš Zapletal
Three Avant-garde Tendencies in the Czech Interwar Music
Discussion
coffee break
PROFESSORS OF THE LISZT ACADEMY
Veronika Kusz
Inconsistent Intersections? Ernst von Dohnányi and Leó Weiner at the Liszt Academy of Music
Gergely Fazekas
‘Fail Again. Fail Better’: Kurtág’s Concept of Musical Performance
Discussion
Saturday 6 SEPTEMBER 2025, 14.30
Chair: Gergely Fazekas
FILM AND PHILOSOPHY
Lóránt Péteri
Trauma, Nostalgia, and Irony – Musico-Cinematic Intertextuality in István Szabó's Father
Péter György Csobó
Albrecht Wellmer’s Musical Hermeneutics: The Legacy and Potential of Adorno’s Philosophy of Music at the Turn of the 21st Century
Discussion
coffee break
ENTERTAINMENT, STAGE, STATE SOCIALISM
Lynn M. Hooker
Gyula Farkas (1921–1990) and Entertainment Music in Twentieth-Century Hungary
Gabriella Murvai-Bőke
Cultural Transfer under the Cold War? Lyubimov's Theatre and Political Revues at the Hungarian People’s Army Theatre (1966–1968).
Discussion
BEATA BOLESŁAWSKA (Institute of Art, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw)
‘HUNGARIA
1956’: ON POLISH MUSICAL RESPONSES TO THE HUNGARIAN REVOLUTION
The Hungarian Revolution in 1956, bloodily suppressed by the communist regime, made a great impact on Polish community, including artists. In music, there are three symphonic works, which can easily be considered a response to the event. Artur Malawski’s Hungaria 1956, completed in early 1957, openly refers to the revolution. Two other pieces: Witold Lutosławski’s Musique funèbre (1954–58) and Wojciech Kilar’s Ode Béla Bartók in memoriam (1957) – both with a dedication to the greatest Hungarian master of contemporary music – may be regarded as a more safe (in terms of political censorship) gesture of solidarity. In my paper, I will focus on these three works as musical responses to the Hungarian revolution and will discuss them in the context of the political situation of the time, as well as in terms of their musical meaning.
beata.boleslawska-lewandowska@ispan.pl
MÁTÉ CSELÉNYI (Liszt Ferenc Memorial Museum and Research Centre, Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music, Budapest)
LISZT AND TRAVELLING
Travelling is one of the most ancient topoi. The image of the travelling composer, even if it cannot be traced back to Homer, is an integral part of Western music history, from rhapsodists of the time and from the Middle Ages onwards, to travelling masters and artists. Since Charles Burney, travelling has been an integral part of writing music history, and since Mozart at the latest, the travelling composer has lived on as a defining and exemplary figure. In the nineteenth century, travelling was similarly a popular, even necessary activity for certain professions and social classes. For Franz Liszt, too, travel was a twofold necessity in his early life. On the one hand, his father wanted to bring his son to the best masters – so they set off for professional reasons. On the other hand, he wanted to follow the Mozartean example and present him as a pianist throughout Europe. After his father’s death in 1827, Liszt settled in Paris, and after his escape to Switzerland with Marie d’Agoult in 1835, he began what was in essence a travelling period of his life. His travels in Europe and, more specifically, in Central Europe, not to mention in Hungary, were of
various kinds: at first Byronic and Romantic. In the 1840s in particular, he became a travelling (virtuoso) artist, and finally a cultural ambassador. In my paper, I will look at the cultural and literary-historical background (Goethe, Heine, George Sand) of these often coexisting types of travel as well as some of the characteristics and literary and musical results of Liszt’s Central European journeys. cselenyi.mate@zeneakademia.hu
PÉTER GYÖRGY CSOBÓ (Central European Music Research Group, Musicology Department, Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music, Budapest)
ALBRECHT
WELLMER’S
MUSICAL HERMENEUTICS: THE LEGACY AND POTENTIAL OF ADORNO’S PHILOSOPHY OF MUSIC AT THE TURN OF THE 21ST CENTURY
The presentation will examine the question of how Th. W. Adorno’s philosophical premises and theses about music changed in the thought of Albrecht Wellmer, a second generation member of the Frankfurt School, with special reference to his late, summarizing essay (Versuch über Musik und Sprache, 2009). Throughout, Adorno was a firm believer that musical works are a profound document of history and of an age, and that philosophical criticism can read this meaning from the work. At the same time, he considered the musical work as a meaning structure whose communicative potential has ‘linguistic character’. Wellmer attempts (largely following Adorno) a philosophical analysis of musical modernity from the perspective of the relationship between music and language, in order to then revise his master’s dialectical conception of history and his critical view of reason through a hermeneutic expansion of the role of language. According to Wellmer, the complex relationship between music and language is constitutive for the ‘explication’ of works – not only in the formal-syntactic sense, but also in the sense that linguistic interpretation and aesthetic discourse are parts of the very existence of the work. By reinterpreting the concept of the work of art, Wellmer attempts to both preserve the framework of Adorno’s philosophy of music (and to include authors such as Cage or Lachenmann who do not seem to fit into it) and step outside it at important points. The claim that music refers to the world, that it says something, which is so self-evident to many, yet so difficult to ground theoretically, seems to have been provoked by post-serial developments and ideas that ‘de-linguisticize’ music. Wellmer therefore examines whether music
born in opposition to linguistic character and the notion of the work of art is necessarily outside the hermeneutical possibilities of the explication of musical works. His answer to this question is negative, while modifying the framework of Adorno’s philosophy of music in important respects. This lecture will explore these points.
csobopgy@gmail.com
STEPHEN DOWNES (Royal Holloway, University of London)
‘SZYMANOWSKI’ IN 1925: LISTENING FOR HISTORIES AND IDENTITIES IN THE MAZURKA OP. 50 NO. 1
Anniversaries always invite a rethinking of how we tell histories and the problem of how to know historical persons. For musicologists they furthermore invite reflection on how musical works, and the way they are disseminated and interpreted, might either reflect or create these histories and subjects. In this paper I will explore these issues by considering how we can (re)construct an historical figure of ‘Szymanowski’ from a hundred years ago. In January 1925 the leading magazine Muzyka published his first Mazurka, Op. 50. It seemed to mark the public confirmation of the arrival of a ‘new Szymanowski’ for the ‘new Poland’. Ever since, the opening of this mazurka has become something of an icon, a symbol or synecdoche standing for the post-First World War ‘Szymanowski’. It has been heard, in particular, within the context of Adolf Chybiński’s understanding of its relation with Góral folk music, one that he expounded in an accompanying article on the Mazurkas, published in the same issue of Muzyka. Chybiński’s reading became the dominant critical trope. But the first mazurka’s very familiarity obscures its strangeness. I want to listen to its oddness, and the multiple (and sometimes latent or repressed) ‘old’ things that combine in the creation of something seemingly ‘new’. Inspired by theories of virtual agents, actants and subjectivities in the work of Robert Hatten and Seth Monahan I will explore the multiple histories embedded in this mazurka by listening for multiple musical identities. Through hearing just a few bars of music in this way the histories and identities that assemble under the idea of ‘Szymanowski’ in 1925 are revealed as multiple, complex and possibly also conflicting.
stephen.downes@rhul.ac.uk
GERGELY FAZEKAS (Central European Music Research Group, Musicology Department, Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music, Budapest) ‘FAIL AGAIN. FAIL
BETTER’: KURTÁG’S CONCEPT OF MUSICAL PERFORMANCE
The concept of musical performance has changed from era to era and region to region throughout the history of Western art music, and even at a given time there can be, and are, many different approaches. However, a distinct Central European tradition of the 20th century can be seen in the Budapest Academy of Music, which was founded in 1875 in Austria-Hungary. Within the walls of this institution, authentic musical performance was (and perhaps still is) seen as the realization of the composer’s intentions, made possible by fidelity to the score. In my paper, I will try to show how György Kurtág, who as a composer, pianist and teacher looked at the concept of musical performance from different angles, stood by this tradition. To this end, I will draw on his own statements and the recollections of his students to show that the composer’s intention (even his own) and fidelity to the score were much less important to him than what he called ‘human presence’ in a performance. As Rachel Beckles-Willson points out, German idealism and a certain Central European mentality form the roots of Kurtág’s thinking, which considers the perfect performance of any musical work to be unattainable. The realized musical interpretation can only be a failure. But there is hope. We can try again and fail again. And in the spirit of Samuel Beckett, it is possible for us to fail better.
fazekas.gergely@lisztakademia.hu
LYNN M. HOOKER (Jacobs School of Music, Indiana University)
GYULA FARKAS (1921–1990) AND ENTERTAINMENT MUSIC IN TWENTIETHCENTURY HUNGARY
Romani (Gypsy) musicians have played an outsized role in the musical culture of Central Europe, particularly that of Hungary, for centuries. Yet with a few important receptions, there is relatively little written history of this role. More often, writers, composers, painters, and filmmakers have envisioned them through Romantic stereotypes that exist outside of time. This presentation examines how entertainment music changed over the course of the twentieth century through the biography of one Hungarian Romani musician, Gyula Farkas.
Farkas, born in Budapest in 1921, began his musical studies with his family and in a neighborhood music school, then played violin in the Rajkó Orchestra at the Ostende Café; around 1937 he was admitted to the Liszt Academy of Music. After working in restaurant bands in the 1940s, he joined the orchestra of the Hungarian State Folk Ensemble in 1951 as both a violinist and an arranger. In 1952 he became one of the founding directors of the Youth Folk Orchestra of the Working Youth League’s Artists Ensemble – or ‘as the young people call it among themselves: the Rajkó Orchestra’. The Rajkó performed frequently around Hungary and around the world, and Farkas led the group until his death in 1990. Farkas’ surviving score collection and teaching materials provide an overview of the kinds of music a working Romani musician was called on to create from the 1940s to the 1980s. These documents, press coverage, and interviews with former Rajkó musicians allow twenty-first-century scholars and audiences to understand what it meant to provide entertainment music of different kinds in different settings, from the ‘silver-mirrored café’ to state-socialist concert platforms.
lhooker@purdue.edu
OLHA KUSHNIRUK (University of Cambridge)
UKRAINIAN CHORAL TRADITION: CONSTRUCTION OF NATIONAL IDENTITY ON THE MODERN STAGE
The limited historical experience of Ukraine’s statehood and the ongoing war have highlighted a critical issue in the country’s modern history: the construction of a national identity as a key factor in ensuring the survival of Ukrainians as a nation. In my research, I draw on Myroslava Novakovych’s concept of national identity in musical art, which she describes as ‘a phenomenon of a procedural nature, constructed through the national community’s awareness of its musical identity. This identity emerges from the search for and gradual selection of the most characteristic original forms of musical expression, recognized both by the community itself and by others.’
The choral tradition, which has evolved over centuries, remains one of the most significant musical expressions of Ukrainian culture. Since 1991, this tradition has developed more vibrantly and intensively. This growth is characterized by several key features: the founding of numerous new choirs, particularly chamber
ensembles such as the Khreshchatyk, the Kyiv, the Oreya, the Female Choir of the Glier Academy, the Oranta, and the Gloria, along with their successful international tours; the expansion of their repertoire to include sacred music, which was banned during the Soviet era; a strong interest among Ukrainian composers in various choral music genres; and the wide promotion of choral music through festivals, competitions, and concerts.
A notable contribution to the Ukrainian choral tradition from the 1990s to the 2010s is the work of Alexander Jacobchuk (born 1952). His output includes two oratorios, 17 cantatas, 15 chamber cantatas, and over 350 arrangements of folk songs for choir, as well as sacred music, including a Liturgy, three concertos and ten psalms. Jacobchuk’s stylistic originality is rooted in his use of modality as the foundation of musical development, his vivid polyphonic technique, the contrasts in choral timbres, the sensitive application of intertextuality and stylization, his innovative compositional solutions, and his thematic focus, which derives from a deep engagement with the text and its influence on the melodic context of his work.
okushniruk@yahoo.com
VERONIKA KUSZ
(Institute for Musicology of the HUN-REN Research Center for the Humanities, Budapest)
INCONSISTENT INTERSECTIONS? ERNST VON DOHNÁNYI AND LEÓ WEINER AT THE LISZT ACADEMY OF MUSIC
Both Ernő (Ernst von) Dohnányi (1877–1960) and Leó Weiner (1885–1960), two Hungarian composers from the same generation, played a significant role in the history of the Liszt Academy of Music, Budapest. Dohnányi, eight years Weiner’s senior, was not only a professor at the renowned institution, but also its director: the first time, in 1919 for only a few months – due to the rapidly changing political circumstances –, the second time, from 1934 for nearly a decade (although he resigned in 1941 resisting to the anti-Semitic laws, his resignation was not officially accepted until 1943). Weiner did not take on a leading position, apart from a few years of membership on the Directorial Board that ended in a professional confrontation, but thanks to his almost legendary chamber music class, he was one of the most respected teachers at the Academy for almost half a century. There is surprisingly little documentation of their relationship
at the Liszt Academy of Music, and most of them testify conflictual situations. This lecture attempts to trace the intersections of their careers at the Academy from their juvenile experiences and pedagogical concepts until their struggles during the Second World War and in the 1950s, when first Weiner and then Dohnányi were persecuted. The parallel examination of the activities of these two composers makes all the more sense because they both belonged to the conservative branch of 20th-century Hungarian music composition and served as a kind of creative inspiration for each other.
kusz.veronika@abtk.hu
CHRISTIAN UTZ (University of Music and Performing Arts Graz) – VIKTOR LAZAROV (Observatoire interdisciplinaire de recherche et de création en musique, Montréal)
EARLY RECORDINGS OF FRANZ LISZT’S PIANO SONATA IN B MINOR BY ARTUR FRIEDHEIM, EUGEN D’ALBERT AND OTHER PIANISTS: THE IMPACT OF THE ‘LISZT SCHOOL’ ON PERFORMANCE HISTORY
Since the 1990s, a growing body of work has acknowledged the creative role of musical performers in ‘giving music shape’ and creating formal relationships based on phrase structure and other factors (Rink 2013). An adequate understanding of performing practices points to networks of relationships between different performers, performances, and traditions that are influential in forging diverse interpretations of a score (Cook 2007). Many 19th-century performance practices considered the score mainly a guide for revealing a musical creation through performance, rather than a fixed representation of a composer’s final work (Doğantan-Dack 2012). This presentation focuses on early performances of Franz Liszt’s emblematic B minor Piano Sonata. The diversity of practices demonstrated by Liszt’s students point to a broad stylistic range within the ‘Liszt school’, while a certain number of key performance strategies have been suggested as the principal components of Liszt’s own performance style such as ‘declamatory’ phrasing and scepticism toward ‘sentimental’ practices (Ramann
1902, Hamilton 2005, Fontaine and Menrath 2015). Given this framework, we will examine three piano roll recordings by Liszt’s students Artur Friedheim on Hupfeld from 1905 (1859–1932), Eugen d’Albert on Welte-Mignon from 1913 (1864–1932), and Josef Weiss on Philipps-Duca from 1911 (1864–1945). In an augmented listening of these three recordings, including their comparison with more recent recordings (Arrau 1970, Ránki 1975, Brendel 1981, Levit 2023), we will discuss a possible common lineage or style in these performances. We also consider Friedheim’s planned and d’Albert’s (1917) published editions of the Sonata as well as a possible link to today’s analytical and creative practices (e.g., Vande Moortele’s 2009 analysis). The Introduction and Coda, the two strettas, the scherzando, the Andante sostenuto, and the Fugue will serve as key examples in our presentation, providing a close analysis of tempo relationships, timing patterns as well as stylistic features such as dislocation (asynchronous playing), rubato, or arpeggiations in the three recordings. We ultimately suggest that revisiting and appreciating early recordings implies questioning ubiquitous literalist interpretive traditions in and beyond the core repertoire.
viktor.lazarov@umontreal.ca; christian.utz@kug.ac.at
GABRIELLA MURVAI-BŐKE (Central
European Music Research Group, Musicology Department, Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music, Budapest)
CULTURAL TRANSFER UNDER THE COLD WAR? LYUBIMOV'S THEATRE AND POLITICAL REVUES AT THE HUNGARIAN PEOPLE'S ARMY THEATRE (1966 –1968)
During the Cold War, the Eastern Bloc’s ambition was to compete with the Western world in the areas of economics, politics, military affairs and diplomacy, but cultural ‘warfare’ was also considered to be of equal importance. At a meeting of the state socialist concert bureaux in Budapest in 1960, it was stated that the infiltration of Western influences into the socialist countries made it even more important to spread communist ideology and maintain active contact with other satellite countries. In the 1960s Western modernism’s partial opening up to state socialist societies led to a serious existential crisis of the musical ensembles which had promoted official cultural policy since their founding in the 1940s and 1950s . To ensure the survival of these professional
groups, their leaders began looking for new ways to reach audiences. As a result of this paradigm shift, the avant-garde composer Kamilló Lendvay was appointed artistic director of the Artistic Ensemble of the Hungarian People’s Army in 1966. During his three years with the company, Lendvay aimed to create a completely new, modern performance style in which the dance group, the male choir, and the orchestra would work together as a unified ensemble, rather than performing separately on raised platforms. He drew on a number of models for his latest experiments: the cabaret and political revue performances of the Erich-Weinert-Ensemble in East Germany, the Artistic Ensemble of the Czechoslovak People’s Army, and Lyubimov’s experimental Taganka Theatre. In my paper, I wish to examine the dimensions of these cultural transfers and the experimental theatre of the Hungarian Ensemble from the perspectives of modernism and aesthetics.
boke.gabriella@gmail.com
CECILIA OINAS (University of the Arts Helsinki, Sibelius Academy) (IM)PERFECTION AS THE GOAL OF THE RECORDING PROCESS? ANNIE FISCHER, BEETHOVEN’S D MAJOR SONATA OP. 28 AND SHAPING THE SONATA-FORM STRUCTURE IN PERFORMANCE
This paper presents a case study of Annie Fischer’s (1914–1995) recording of the opening movement of Beethoven’s piano sonata no. 15 in D major op. 28, ‘Pastorale’, which was made during 1977–1978 as part of her recording of Beethoven’s complete piano sonatas for the Hungaroton Classic label. I suggest that her distinct playing style, such as fluctuating tempo and using bold agogics, may orientate us to hear the sonata-form process in a novel way. In particular, I will concentrate on the motion from primary to secondary key in the exposition section (bars 1–164) which includes surprising twists and turns that delay expected harmonic arrivals until the dominant key of A major is finally secured with a perfect authentic cadence (V:PAC) in bar 135.
To offer a kaleidoscopic overview of the exposition’s formal and harmonic layout, I discuss how various analysts have interpreted it during the last one hundred years. Against this backdrop, I present my own deep listening insights into how Fischer shapes the music’s ebbs and flows in the opening movement of ‘Pastorale’.
To highlight the differences between her interpretation and other performances, I will also briefly discuss other recordings of the ‘Pastorale’ movement, both before and after Fischer’s Hungaroton recording. These include Karol Szreter (1930), Artur Schnabel (1933/37), Wilhelm Backhaus (1960), Friedrich Gulda (1967), Maria Grinberg (1970), Emil Gilels (1971), Alfred Brendel (1976), Glenn Gould (1980), Richard Goode (1993) and H.J. Lim (2012). By juxtaposing these recordings, I also want to show that musical structure is not a fixed compositional feature but something that can be shaped and created by the performer’s myriad choices (see, for instance, Lochhead 2015).
Finally, I propose that Fischer’s novel interpretations of Beethoven and her eloquent pianism serve as a missing link between the older and more recent playing styles that Nicholas Cook (2013) defines as ‘rhetorical’ (focusing on moment-to-moment expressivity) and ‘structural’ (emphasising the formal boundaries). It is precisely the combination of these two that Fischer’s distinctive performance style encapsulates. cecilia.oinas@uniarts.fi
LÓRÁNT PÉTERI (Central European Music Research Group, Musicology Department, Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music, Budapest)
TRAUMA, NOSTALGIA, AND IRONY – MUSICO-CINEMATIC INTERTEXTUALITY IN ISTVÁN SZABÓ'S FATHER
The lecture’s main focus is Father [Apa], a 1966 Hungarian feature film directed by István Szabó, whose Mephisto (1981) was the first Hungarian movie receiving Academy Award (Oscar) for Best Foreign-Language Film. The music of Father is based on extended quotations from and allusions to the third movement of Mahler’s First Symphony, and is composed by musicologist, pianist, composer, and jazz musician János Gonda. Spanning the historical period from World War II and the Holocaust till the aftermath of the supressed Hungarian revolution of 1956, the film’s screenplay embraces such topics as childhood, loss, trauma, nostalgia, the interconnectivity of remembrance and subjectivity, and the fragile construction of identity. Father raises questions of a specific Jewish experience both explicitly and implicitly. Together with other layers of signification and ways of expression present in the music, the film also exploits the satirical and ironical
aspects of Mahler’s symphonic movement. The last scene captures, in the manner of cinéma vérité, the often relaxed individual behaviour of and the lively social interactions between people gathering dynamically at a major cemetery of Budapest on All Soul’s Day. It seems, therefore, that Szabó’s dialogue with Mahler’s music culminates in his own cinematic Todtenmarsch in ‘Callots Manier’. peteri.lorant@zeneakademia.hu
FERENC JÁNOS SZABÓ
(Institute for Musicology, HUN-REN RCH; Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music, Budapest)
ETERNOLA MECHANIKAI RT.:
A HUNGARIAN RECORD COMPANY WITH CENTRAL EUROPEAN AMBITIONS AND CENTRAL EUROPEAN OBSTACLES
Eternola Mechanikai Rt., founded in Budapest in 1927, was the first Hungarianowned gramophone and record company in Hungary after the First World War. As a pioneering enterprise in interwar Hungary, it tried to establish its own image among the major international record companies present in Hungary with a sophisticated and diverse repertoire. It wanted to supply the entire Hungarian gramophone market not only with turntables, but also with records, and several young Hungarian artists were able to make their first recordings thanks to Eternola. However, the company was part of an international network as well: lacking an own recording equipment and record factory, Eternola created its record repertoire in collaboration with the British record company Edison Bell and its Zagreb subsidiary, Edison Bell Penkala. Edison Bell provided the recording equipment and the sound engineer, while some of the records were pressed in the Penkala factory in Zagreb. Eternola’s history coincided with the Great Depression, consequently it did not really have a chance to develop, but some of its recordings were still being reissued in the United Kingdom or in Yugoslavia years after the company’s demise.
In my presentation I intend to give an overview of the history of Eternola Mechanikai Rt. Using archival documents, I place the Hungarian company in the hierarchy of Edison Bell in London and its Zagreb subsidiary. The archival documents help to illustrate how Edison Bell-affiliated record companies in Central Europe were forced to cooperate while trying to put obstacles in each other’s way. I analyse the discography and record catalogues of Eternola from the perspective of Central
Europe, and through an examination of the catalogues, I highlight Edison Bell’s Central European repertoire policy. I seek answers to questions such as why Hungarian-language spoken word or vocal recordings appeared in Edison Bell Penkala’s Yugoslavian catalogue, and why this relationship was not reciprocal.
szabo.ferenc.janos@abtk.hu
LÁSZLÓ VIKÁRIUS (Budapest Bartók Archives, Institute for Musicology, Research Centre for the Humanities; Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music, Budapest)
FAREWELL TO BUDAPEST, FAREWELL TO EUROPE: MEANINGS IN BARTÓK’S LAST CONCERT AT THE LISZT ACADEMY OF MUSIC
On the 150th anniversary of the foundation of the Academy of Music in Budapest, Bartók’s alma mater where he also taught piano between 1907 and 1934, a closer look at Bartók’s famous “farewell” concert at the grand hall of the Academy seems particularly appropriate. Taking place on 8 September 1940, just four days before he and his wife left Hungary for a concert tour of the U.S.A. that would remain his last residence in exile before his death in New York in 1945, the concert was both conclusive and preparatory for the final years. It featured Ditta Pásztory as well as Bartók as soloists in Bach’s and Mozart’s concerti, conducted by János Ferencsik, and it ended with a selection of Bartók’s most recent solo piano work, Mikrokosmos. The paper will discuss Bartók’s long and complex relationship to the Academy of Music, its importance as venue for some of his most significant premières and the symbolism of the event at that historical moment for the reception of the composer’s life and work – both then and now. vikarius.laszlo@abtk.hu
MILOŠ ZAPLETAL (Institute of Historical Sciences, Faculty of Philosophy and Science, Silesian University in Opava)
THREE AVANT-GARDE TENDENCIES IN THE CZECH INTERWAR MUSIC
In the history of Czech interwar music, the term “avant-garde” must be used with care. Primarily because a radical departure from domestic tradition was not proclaimed here (except in rare cases), let alone fulfilled. This also applies to
the tradition represented by the work of two generations of the late Romantic “modernism”. This tradition produced its most mature fruits precisely in the interwar period, and from a quantitative point of view it still represented the dominant form of Czech musical creativity. Leoš Janáček was recognized as the leader of the Czech musical avant-garde in the 1920s, but at the same time he enjoyed the position of the official composer of the First Czechoslovak Republic. And Bohuslav Martinů, the pivotal avant-gardist, wrote in 1935: “I have never been an avant-gardist.” Therefore, we should rather talk about avant-garde tendencies, especially with regard to reflections and applications of some foreign avant-garde impulses or to more significant deviations from the established norms of the long-19th-century music; or wherever the production, distribution, performance and reception of music were placed in the contexts of avant-garde artistic groups and discourses, avant-garde theatre, etc. In my paper, I will outline the initial situation of the Czech Lands’ musical culture after 1918, particularly the debate about the “physiological music”, connected with the search for the new Czech music. Then I will deal with the ideological and spiritual connections and starting points of the avantgarde tendencies in Czech music. And, finally, I will take a more detailed look at three of them: neoclassicism, neofolklorism, and civilism.
m.zapletal1987@gmail.com
HEIDY ZIMMERMANN (Paul Sacher Foundation, Basel)
VICTOR ULLMANN’S THE EMPEROR OF ATLANTIS – CENTRAL EUROPEAN CONTEXTS
Victor Ullmann’s one-act opera The Emperor of Atlantis or The Refusal of Death is a harrowing document of its time, and a parable, which has lost none of its relevance today. Faced with the tyrant Overall’s killing machine, Death goes on strike: His service to humankind will only be resumed when the ruler has abdicated. The parable written by the young Czech artist Peter Kien and composed by Ullmann in 1943–44 was rehearsed in the Theresienstadt ghetto camp, but could not be performed in the end. The composer and the librettist
were both murdered in Auschwitz in the fall of 1944, but the documents related to the piece miraculously survived. Since its premiere in Amsterdam in 1975, The Emperor of Atlantis has been staged in numerous productions worldwide and is firmly established in the repertoire.
Being rooted in the multilingual city of Prague and framed by the experience of German speaking Jews living around, the opera is a prime example of Central European Culture during the interwar years. On the other hand it also represents the linguistic, social, and national tensions of the years before and during the Second World War, especially in the Terezín Camp. Departing from the opera, the paper will focus on the bridging function of the German language in Central Europe, the lingua franca which connected the cultural elite and opened a wide echo chamber for literary references. Both the composer and the librettist were educated in the German tradition but interacted with Czech artists as well. Peter Kien – who was fluent in Czech and active as an art designer – merged in his poems and plays the tradition of Heine and German modernists with his own sarcastic wit. Finally, the composition and its genesis also reflect the intensified conflicts of nationalisms and world views.
heidy.zimmermann@unibas.ch
IMPRESSUM
Publisher: Dr Gábor Farkas, President of the Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music
Editor in chief: Lóránt Péteri
Print preparation: András Váradi
Finalized: 21 July 2025
Liszt Academy (1061 Budapest, 8 Liszt Ferenc Square) lisztacademy.hu