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Abstract
After his emigration from Hungary and a longer stay in Austria and Argentina, Dohnányi settled down in Tallahassee (USA) in 1949 and lived there until his death in 1960. Besides his professorship at the Florida State University (FSU) and his continuous concert-tours in the whole country, he was also very active as a composer in this decade. The ultimate composition of this period and his life is the Passacaglia for Solo Flute (op. 48. no. 2) which is a quite unusual piece of the composer, not only because of the choice of instrument, unprecedented in the œuvre, and its theme, partly dodecaphonic, but because of its significant source-material to be found in the Kilényi-Dohnányi Collection of the FSU. This paper attempts to study this last, odd piece of Dohnányi exhaustively through the investigation of its musical and non-musical sources in parallel with its analysis.
Abstract
Ernő Dohnányi, the world-renowned musician, was almost entirely forgotten during the decades between his emigration in 1944 and the change of political regime in Hungary: his name actually disappeared from public cultural knowledge. Though there may have been several explanations for the ignorance, it is not an exaggeration to state that the main reasons behind the tragic gap in his posthumous reception are of a political nature. It is widely known nowadays that during the settlements after World War II, Dohnányi – in his absence – was charged with intellectual collaboration with the Hungarian far right-wing regime. According to the present state of research, the charges were finally withdrawn as they were mostly ungrounded. Yet, the formerly adored artist and central personality in cultural life had become persona non grata for more than 40 years. After the political changes, his oeuvre seemed to be rehabilitated but without a thorough investigation of the charges and their background. This is why political prejudices are currently experienced simultaneously with a total bagatellization of the possible mistakes in his interwar activity. Thus, a systematic research into this subject has become very urgent. This study, which is intended to be a chapter of a full-length monograph on Dohnányi and politics (expected in 2023/24), was founded by the János Bolyai Scholarship of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and is one of the very first publications of this project in English. It aims to give a thorough description of the first two years of the official proceeding against Dohnányi at the different investigative levels such as the justificatory committees, public prosecutor, and government ministry.
Compared to his contemporaries Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály, Ernst von Dohnányi (1877–1960) did not leave an extensive legacy of prose writings. He rarely spoke either of himself, the background of his compositions, his musical principles or compositional aesthetics; nor was he particularly active as a musicologist, ethnomusicologist or critic. Yet, during a long life filled with wide-ranging professional activities, he authored numerous writings pertinent to the history of music and musical life. Equally informative are the interviews he gave in his various capacities as composer, performer, teacher, and institutional leader. A volume in progress, entitled Ernő Dohnányi’s Selected Writings and Interviews, will offer an annotated critical edition of these texts (collected and edited by the author, to be published in late 2019). This study is based on the collected interview-material and gives a summary of some of their most important topics such as Dohnányi’s views on modern music, creative and reproductive talents, live-, radio-, and recorded performances. Though these transcripts cannot always be considered authentic sources, this study attempts to show that there is a great deal of information, heretofore unknown, contained in the numerous new interviews our research has brought to light.
