Literary Parallels: Anton Chekhov and Mór Jókai

The article as a whole describes the work of the Hungarian prose writer Mór Jókai, the topics and problemanics of his works. But the author’s attention is focused on the “Russian text” in the novels of Mór Jókai, compared with the “Hungarian text” in the works of Anton Chekhov in the 1880s.

György Kurtág’s Hungarian identity and The Sayings of Péter Bornemisza (1963–1968)

After the political and cultural seclusion of the 1950s young Hungarian composers turned to Western European new music. While learning contemporary compositional techniques they were searching for a new Hungarian identity in music. The musicological discourse about new Hungarian music concentrated on the ‘Hungarianness’ of their music too. Composers used Hungarian literary texts, and referred to Hungarian music culture with musical allusions. They inherited the idea of the combination of the up-to-date Western European compositional techniques with the old Hungarian tradition from Kodály and Bartók, i.e. they were aware of the primacy of tradition. György Kurtág’s (1926) concerto for soprano and piano, The Sayings of Péter Bornemisza (1963–1968) represented for Hungarian musicians the paradigmatic example of new Hungarian music, modern and traditional at the same time. It was based on an old Hungarian text from the 16th-century, like Kodály’s Psalmus Hungaricus (1923). The vocal part, however, refers to Webern’s melodic concept, the piano part follows Stockhausen’s piano writing, and Kurtág quotes neither Hungarian folk music nor old Hungarian art music. The paper investigates by means of musical analysis the question why contemporaries felt that Kurtág’s piece represents unambiguously a Hungarian identity. Kurtág — as well as his contemporaries — uses symbols, allusions connected to certain words and word-paintings while concentrating on the picturesque elements of music. The source of this compositional attitude is Kodály’s oeuvre, foremost the Psalmus Hungaricus. From this angle Kurtág’s The Sayings stands for the new-old Hungarian musical tradition.

Ödön Mihalovich: Toldi szerelme (Toldis Liebe). Eine ungarische Oper vom Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts

On 18 March 1893 the opera Toldi by Ödön (Edmund von) Mihalovich (1842–1929) was premiered at the Royal Hungarian Opera House in Budapest. Three month later Ferenc Erkel, founder and single most important composer of the Hungarian national opera died. One of the funeral speeches at his burial was held by Mihalovich. This gesture was meant as a symbolic mounting of the guard on the national operatic scene. However, Toldi, written on a libretto based on Toldi szerelme (Toldi’s Love), the middle epic of János Arany’s Toldi trilogy, proved to be unsuccesful. It was staged again as Toldi’s Love in 1895 after a thorough revision. One cannot overlook the fact that in the newly composed third act Mihalovich wanted to write the loyalist counterpart of the conflictuous third act in Erkel’s Bánk bán. The paper discusses the question whether the first and only opera on a Hungarian text by the solid Wagnerite Mihalovich could at the time fulfil the official national expectations and become the representative national opera of the Millennium, that is, the Thousand Year Jubilee of the Carpathian Basin’s conquest by the Hungarian tribes, celebrated in 1896.