Beethoven “in drei Charakterbildern:” Three Beethoven Images from the Interwar Hungary 1

In my study, I show how three different figures of the interwar Hungary saw Beethoven. The first of them, Dénes Bartha (1908–1993), was a musicologist and became an international specialist of Viennese Classicism. In the context of contemporary Hungarian literature, his first Beethoven monograph (1939) represents an emphatically anti-Romantic attitude. In the second part, I examine the popular image of the composer, on the basis of the planned operetta Beethoven (1929–1931) by Zsolt Harsányi, an author of popular biographical novels, and Mihály Nádor (1882–1944), a successful operetta composer. This piece follows the example of Das Dreimäderlhaus, and its music was compiled from Beethoven’s melodies by Nádor . In the third part I examine an essay about Beethoven by an important musician of the period, Ernst von Dohnányi (1877–1960), who was, according to Bartók, a leading Beethoven performer of his age. Although the text of his “Romanticism in Beethoven’s Piano Sonatas” was written during his émigré years (draft: 1948, revision: 1955), it summarizes well what the leading figure of the interwar Budapest musical life might have thought about Beethoven’s music.


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In my study, I would like to demonstrate how three very different personalities living in Hungary in the interwar period, Dénes Bartha, Mihály Nádor, and Ernst von Dohnányi, saw Beetho ven. The three authors I choose represent three different segments of contemporary musical life: Bartha (1908Bartha ( -1993) was a musicologist, Nádor (1882-1944) a successful operetta composer, while Dohnányi (1877-1960) was a "serious" composer, pianist and conductor -an outstanding figure of twentieth-century Beethoven interpretation.
In the first part of my study, I will discuss Bartha's first Beethoven monograph, 2 which, at the time of its publication in 1939, represented a surprisingly objective and emphatically anti-Romantic attitude. In the second part, I demonstrate what the average people living in Hungary might have known about the composer, on the basis of Nádor's and Harsányi's planned operetta entitled Beethoven, written in c. 1930, whose title hero is the author of the Ninth Symphony and whose music was compiled from Beethoven's own musical works. Finally, I will examine the text of Dohnányi's lecture, "Romanticism in Beethoven's Piano Sonatas." 3 Although this essay was written later than the period in question (during his émigré years), it summarizes well what he might have thought about Beethoven's music.

THE ANTI-ROMANTIC BEETHOVEN: BARTHA'S MONOGRAPH (1939)
The market of books … is overwhelmed by studies of particular subjects and Romantic biographies, so much so that for the musicians and scholars who are seriously interested in Beethoven, it often needs hard labour and leg-work to look for the scattered material concerning his musical works and style.
-can be read in the preface of Bartha's Hungarian Beethoven book (p. 7). Although this statement was meant to characterize the totality of the international literature concerning the subject, the same is even more true for Hungarian Beethoven studies published during the interwar period: before Bartha's volume in question, his compatriots were only able to consult mostly Romantic biographies and studies in particular subjects. Writings belonging to the latter category discussed mostly the episodic Hungarian aspects of the composer's biography, like the brief articles by Kálmán Isoz and Ervin Major published in the 1927 centenary year, 4 or the short volume written by Viktor Papp, whose pathetic style and tone seem to be ridiculous today. 5 In the genre of Romantic biography, it is worth mentioning the oeuvre of the littérateur and musi-2 Dénes BARTHA, Beethoven (Budapest: Franklin, 1939

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Studia Musicologica 61 (2020) 1-2, 99-112 cologist (but rather littérateur) Romain Rolland, whose popular La vie de Beethoven (The life of Beethoven) 6 was published in at least two Hungarian translations during the 1920s and 1930s. 7 His other book dedicated to the composer 8 was also available in Hungarian. 9 Bartha was a student of the University of Berlin, where among his masters were such professors as the author of the great Mozart monograph, Hermann Abert; 10 he earned his doctorate with a thesis consecrated to Renaissance music. 11 After his return to the homeland, he was active as a research fellow at the National Széchényi Library (Országos Széchényi Könyvtár) 1930-1942, as a professor at the Budapest University (Budapesti Tudományegyetem) from 1935, and as a music critic of the German-language daily newspaper Pester Lloyd (1939)(1940)(1941)(1942)(1943)(1944). Following World War II, he was one of the founders of the Department of Musicology of the Liszt Academy of Music (Liszt Ferenc Zeneművészeti Főiskola, Zenetudományi Tanszék), established in 1951; he also edited the periodicals Zenei Szemle (Music review), Studia Musicologica, as well as the serial Zenetudományi Tanulmányok (Studies in musicology).
Discussing Beethoven's works, Bartha takes over the nineteenth-century concept of the three style periods. 12 As is well known, Beethoven's work was divided into three parts already by Johann Aloys Schlosser in his 1828 Beethoven biography, 13 whose part in question was already published as early as in 1818 (that is, already in the composer's lifetime). 14 His periodization was imitated by François-Joseph Fétis; 15 later it was widely disseminated by Wilhelm von Lenz in his 1852 French 16 and 1860 German volumes. 17 It should be noted, however, that Bartha modified the nineteenth-century concept in several respects, and moreover, he does not attribute so much significance to it as earlier authors did. He uses the traditional three-part periodization only for the piano sonatas (pp. 48-51), and his partition shows interesting differences compared to those of Schlosser, Fétis and Lenz. According to him, opp. 2-28 belong to the first period; opp. 31-57 to the second one; while opp. 78-111 are representatives of the third period. Two groups of sonatas do not belong to any of the three categories: the three pieces WoO 47, which are regarded as youthful works, and op. 49 nos. 1-2, mentioned as earlier compositions than the other opuses falling into the second period.
In the cases of the remaining works, Bartha prefers other aspects instead of the style periods. In the presentation of the composer's oeuvre, he gives an overview according to genres: after the piano sonatas, the concertos are discussed (pp. 55-53); separate chapters are dedicated to Beethoven's chamber music (pp. 53-60), then to his symphonies and orchestral works (pp. [60][61][62][63][64][65][66][67][68][69][70]. It is important to mention, that the vocal works are excluded from the genre-based overview; even Fidelio and the Missa solemnis are mentioned only in the biographical chapter of the book. This division shows that Bartha regarded Beethoven first of all as an instrumental composer. The whole of the remainder of the book (pp. 71-178) is a systematic study of Beet hoven's style. Its main segments are the chapters discussing the composer's musical themes (pp. 95-123), the musical forms used by him in singular movements (pp. 124-135), as well as the order of multi-movement cycles (pp. 136-147); furthermore, separate chapters are dedicated to such subjects as Beethoven's youthful style (pp. 71-81), his compositional method and sketchbooks (pp. 82-94), the problems of musical expression (pp. 148-172), as well as the role of free fantasy (pp. 173-174) and the variation principle (pp. 175-177) in his music.
Beside the emphasis on the composer's works instead of his biography, it is also a sign of his anti-Romantic attitude that Bartha emphasizes not only Beethoven's originality and individuality but also the importance of the historical antecedents of his style. For instance, in the case of the Pastoral Symphony (pp. [63][64], he refers to the research of Adolf Sandberger, who gave an overview about the historical antecedents of Beethoven's work. 18 Similarly, in discussing Beethoven's use of instrumental recitatives (pp. [71][72][73], Bartha characterizes his practice as moderate in contrast to Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, pointing out that the latter already used this compositional device abundantly in his keyboard works well before Beethoven. Bartha expresses his anti-Romantic views most overtly in the chapter whose subject is Beetho ven's personality and character (pp. 16-46). He condemns the traditional heroic image of the composer inherited from the nineteenth century, pointing out that this image is based on the one-sided reception of his works, over-evaluating such pieces as the Third, Fifth and Ninth Symphonies while neglecting the Second, the Fourth and the Eighth (p. 16). He debates the relevance of the Beethoven image of such nineteenth-century authors as Robert Schumann and Richard Wagner, arguing that they both used Beethoven's name and authority for self-justification (p. 17). He also considers Rolland as an author perpetuating the nineteenth-century stereotypes and "regarding Beethoven as a self-overcoming moral hero" (p. 19). It is easy to understand his antipathy against a biographer, who characterized the object of his researches as "a Shakespearian visage -King Lear," who began his book with a poetic description of Beethoven's physical appearance and who closed it by quoting the Heiligenstadt Testament in full.
Bartha's critical Beethoven approach was certainly not without antecedents. According to the bibliography of his book, he used a wide array of international secondary literature as sources for his work. Among the volumes quoted, we find the fundamental nineteenth-century biographies by Franz Gerhard Wegeler and Ferdinand Ries, 19 Anton Schindler, 20 Adolf Bernhard Marx, 21 and Alexander Wheelock Thayer. 22 Beside the above-mentioned works by Lenz and Rolland, he also used Gustav Nottebohm's sketch studies; 23 the 1925 edition of his thematic catalog by Theodor Frimmel; 24 Alfred Christlieb Kalischer's and Theodor Frimmel's edition of the composer's correspondence, 25 as well as the testimonies of Beethoven's contemporaries in Albert Leitzmann's 1921 edition. 26 Among the early twentieth-century books he used, are worth mentioning Hugo Riemann's three-volume analysis of the piano sonatas; 27 the second edition of Willibald Nagel's work dedicated to the same subject; 28 as well as Gustav Becking's study about the Beethovenian scherzo. 29 By far the most influential on him was, however, Arnold Schmitz's 1927 book entitled Das romantische Beethovenbild (The romantic Beethoven image). 30 Bartha's volume proved to be groundbreaking in the Hungarian context not only because he wrote a comprehensive monograph instead of particular studies, and not only because he focused on the composer's works instead of his biography. The book is also significant because it was written by an erudite music historian, who later became an internationally reputed expert of Viennese Classicism (or First Viennese Modernism, according to James Webster). 31 Decades after the publication of his first Beethoven book, Bartha became internationally well-known as a visiting professor at several universities in the United States, 32 (1964,1965), Cornell (1965Cornell ( -1966, Pittsburgh (1966)(1967)(1969)(1970)(1971)(1972)(1973)(1974)(1975)(1976)(1977)(1978)(1979), and Seattle University (1980)(1981). where he became a member of the orchestra at the Theater am Gärtnerplatz. At first, he tried to launch a career as an art-music composer: in 1901, his String Quartet won the prize of the Bonn Beethovenhaus; his Violin Concerto was successfully revived some years ago in New York's Carnegie Hall. 41 Nevertheless, the premiere of his opera entitled Donna Anna (based on E. T. A. Hoffmann's short story Don Juan) at the Budapest Opera House (at that time called "Hungarian National Opera House," "Magyar Nemzeti Operaház") in 1920 was a failure. In the capital of his native country, he was mainly known as a popular composer of operettas and cabaret songs. His most successful operetta, Offenbach, was first perfomed in November 1920 at the Budapest Király Theater, where it was played more than 200 times. 42 Furthermore, in 1922 it was also premiered in Vienna 43 and Prague; 44 its different adaptations were also given at the Berlin Komische Oper (as Der Meister von Montmartre in 1922) 45 as well as on New York's Broadway (as The Love Song in 1925). 46 Offenbach represents a popular kind of operetta of the interwar period. The prototype of this genre is Heinrich Berté's piece on Schubert, Das Dreimäderlhaus, whose first performance took place at the Vienna Raimund-Theater in 1916, and became enormously popular in Budapest, where it was performed in all operetta theaters between 1916 and 1924 in Zsolt Harsányi's translation as Három a kislány. 47 This nostalgic operetta type, featuring nineteenth-century composers and compiled from their melodies is all the more worthy of attention, because Nádor's incidental music to Hermann Heinz Ortner's piece was preceded by a similar operetta about Beethoven. The scenario of the planned piece was sketched by Nádor and its text was written by Zsolt Harsányi. It is worth mentioning that Harsányi was an experienced journalist and a man of theater. 48 He made Hungarian versions of several operas and operettas; moreover, he was a popular author of biographic novels on such historical personalities as Franz Liszt, Galileo Galilei, Matthias Corvinus (Mátyás Hunyadi), Peter Paul Rubens and Mihály Munkácsy. 49 The plan of the Beethoven operetta is attested by the musical and textual sources of the piece that survive in Nádor's estate and are preserved today at the Music Department (Zeneműtár) of the National Széchényi Library (for a list of the extant sources, see Table 1). According to the dates in the sources, Nádor was working on the piece between 1929 and 1931. A typewritten Hungarian script not belonging to his estate is also preserved at the library; 50 this source bears the name of Sándor Marton (a publisher of musical stage works) and the copyright date 1930. A set of manuscript orchestral and choral parts (and the manuscript full score of certain music numbers) are kept under the shelf mark Népsz. 1393, which belong, however, to the incidental music and were used on the occasion of the 1937 premiere at the National Theater. The fictive plot of the piece (treating quite freely the chronology of the composer's works) concerns Beethoven's failed love of the Immortal Beloved, identified with Therese Brunswick. The three acts represent three episodes of the composer's life: Act 1 "The Enchained Titan" takes place in 1806, Act 2 "Battle with Destiny" in 1814, while Act 3 occurs in 1822.
At the beginning of the piece, Schuppanzigh's Quartet is rehearsing the String Quartet op. 59 no. 1 in Countess' Erdődy's salon. Following the event, the composer remains tête à tête with the Countess, to whom he laments his loneliness. While Beethoven is playing Andante favori in F Major, 16-17-year-old Therese appears. Love at first glance. Scene 2 takes place in a Mödling tavern where the orchestra plays the alla tedesca movement of the Piano Sonata op. 79 and Mödling dances. Accompanied by Henriette Sontag, Caroline Ungher, Anton Schindler and Ferdinand Ries, Beethoven appears, drinks some beer, then sings his Flohlied from Goethe's Faust. Therese and his brother Ferenc arrive and invite the composer to their Martonvásár estate. In scene 3, in the park of the Martonvásár castle, he wants to confess his love for Therese, but she runs away. Later, he finds the woman together with Prince Esterházy and believes that his love is unrequited. The finale is a festive party at Brunswick's, where Beethoven plays the Choral Fantasy op. 80 on the piano. Act 2, Scene 1 takes place in the home of deaf Beethoven in Vienna, where he is composing his Piano Sonata in F Minor op. 23 Appassionata (it was in fact composed ten years earlier and the nickname is not authentic). He is, however, disturbed by several visitors: his housekeeper, his copyist, his pupils Anton Schindler and Stephan Breuning. Then Caroline Ungher and Henriette Sontag arrive and deride the lovesick Beethoven after they have found on his piano the manuscript of the song cycle An die ferne Geliebte, and his letter to the Immortal Beloved. After their exit, Therese appears for Beethoven as a vision. After the first movement of the Fifth Symphony is played as an entr'acte, Scene 5 follows. In the Kärntnertortheater, the public dress rehearsal of Fidelio is taking place in the presence of Therese, countess Erdődy and archduke Rudolf. The attempt of the deaf Beethoven to conduct his work himself results in chaos. He runs 108 -these words by Ernő Dohnányi (or, as he used his name outside Hungary: Ernst von Dohnányi) were meant as an introduction to a lecture-recital he first gave during his guest performance at Ohio University in 1948, later at the University of Wisconsin on November 16, 1955. The sentences in question were, however, deleted in the draft of the text, which is a typewritten script (prepared probably by his third wife, Ilona Zachár) with his manuscript corrections. 55 The lecture-recital is also documented by a tape recording. 56 Why Dohnányi's lecture is quoted here, in a study dealing with Hungarian Beethoven reception during the interwar period, needs an explanation. The reason for this is that he was a leading figure of the interwar Budapest musical life. It is not an exaggeration to say that, as the director of the Liszt Academy of Music (1919,(1934)(1935)(1936)(1937)(1938)(1939)(1940)(1941)(1942)(1943), the leading conductor of the Philharmonic Society   The word comes from "romance," a poetical narration in verse which began in the seventeenth century, after epical chivalrous poetry had fallen in[to] decadence. The word "romantic" was then used at various times in various meanings: as individualism, as religious or national feeling, as sentimentality, as irrationalism, as idealism, as liberty in poetry and art, but generally as opposed to the word "classic," which always meant the conserving spirit. Towards the end of the eighteenth century, in different European countries a romantic school in literature {arose} [deleted: "developed"]. This school had its biggest development in Germany, where in the so-called "Sturm und Drang" period the writers almost celebrated excesses. In music we understand by romanticism a style, in opposition to the classical by the romantic period the school represented by {C Dohnányi defines Romanticism in music as the antithesis of Classicism. While Mozart is regarded as the par excellence Classical composer, and the main representatives of Romanticism would be Schumann and Chopin, Beethoven is somewhere between the two categories: Classicism is law and order. Classical music is placed on formal elements, is of symmetrical proportions, is {tries to be} impersonal, objective. Romantic music is of loose[ly] jointed structure, of strong personal feeling, impulsive, subjective. The greatest classical composer is Mozart, the most significant romantic is Schumann {Chopin}, and between these two poles stands Beethoven. In fact[,] Beethoven is both, classical and romantic, so much so that in the time after him, when the dispute about classicism and romanticism arose, both parties claimed him as their own. He combined the expression of his subjective personal feeling with the objective architecture of the classical forms in a perfect manner which cannot be surpassed.
Similarly to Bartha, Dohnányi also takes over the nineteenth-century concept of the three style periods, nevertheless he combines it with a binary partition of the composer's oeuvre on the basis of the Classic-Romantic opposition: We distinguish three periods in Beethoven's music: in the first we find Beethoven still much influenced by Haydn and Mozart, though he shows already his own personality. The striving to extend the scheme of the sonata form especially in the so-called development and the coda, is quite Beethoven-like. But in the works of this period we scarcely find romantic elements, they are classical throughout. The second period is of more individual character and shows already many specimens which could belong to the romantic school. The third and last period -without abolishing the classical forms -is music influenced throughout by personal feelings. Here Beethoven is entirely romantic.
According to Dohnányi, the first Romantic pieces of the second-period piano sonatas would be op. 27 nos. 1 and 2 (each labelled as "sonata quasi una fantasia" by Beethoven), while the beginning of the third period is marked by the Piano Sonata op. 78 in F-sharp Major. Nevertheless, it seems that for him, the Classic-Romantic division is more important than the three-part periodization. He mentions several works which are exceptional in the period in which they were composed: "We do not want to occupy ourselves now with the first classical period, though the sonata op. 13, the so-called Pathetic, which belongs to this group, has some romantic features already." Dohnányi mentions the Piano Sonata in D Minor op. 31 no. 2 and op. 57 in F Minor as the most emphatically Romantic pieces of the second period. However, "[i]t is remarkable, that the preceding great sonata, the Waldstein op. 53 has scarcely any romantic elements. This sonata like the C-Major op. 2. no. 3. has obviously pianistically virtuoso tendencies." In his view, there is an exceptional work even in the last period, which is labelled by him as "entirely Romantic:" With the sonata in F-sharp major op. 78 we come to Beethoven's last period. Here is everything personal, everything [as] self-revelation. Here Beethoven is the poet! With the exception of the Open Access. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited, a link to the CC License is provided, and changes -if any -are indicated. (SID_1)