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Liszt's Plan for a German Année de pèlerinage
“Was ist des Deutschen Vaterland?”
According to the evidence of an entry in the so-called Lichnowsky sketchbook, at the beginning of the 1840s, Franz Liszt proposed - in addition to the Swiss and Italian books - also a German volume to his cycle Années de pèlerinage. The study deals with this compositional plan, identifying and analysing the pieces referred to in the sketchbook. Interestingly, the plan consists rather of vocal works than piano pieces including the titles of nationalistic male choruses and romantic Rheinlieder inspired by German poets such as Ernst Moritz Arndt, Theodor Körner, Heinrich Heine and Felix Lichnowsky. The study also examines the autobiographical and political background of the proposed volume, which seems to be in close connection partly with Liszt's German concert tours, partly with the contemporary French-German conflict concerning the national identity of the Rhinland.
Abstract
Die Studie ist ein Versuch auf dem Gebiet der musikalischen Quellenforschung; zwei Facetten der Genese von Liszts Klavierzyklus Années de pèlerinage werden darin behandelt. Zuerst werden vier handschriftliche Quellen der Dante-Sonate dargestellt, die bisher in die Untersuchungen zur Entstehungsgeschichte des Stückes nicht einbezogen bzw. falsch interpretiert wurden. Anhand dieser Quellen werden einige wichtige Unterschiede zwischen der Frühfassung bzw. der Fassung letzter Hand von Après un lecture du Dante nachgewiesen. Dann wird eine neue Lesart des Planes für den Italien-Band vom sogenannten Ce qu'on entend-Skizzenbuch geboten. Aufgrund dieses Planes wird die bisher unbekannte Beziehung der Genese der symphonischen Dichtung Tasso und des Klavierzyklus Années de pèlerinage dargestellt.
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.
It is strange to find Wagner and Offenbach mentioned together at the time of their reception in nineteenth-century Budapest, and measured against each other in the Hungarian press. This study seeks to interpret that juxtaposition in terms of the system of theatrical institutions in Budapest at the time. Factors identified that concern directly the way Hungarians received the two stage composers are the multinational, multicultural character of theater life, the want of distinctions between genres, and the ongoing changes in the institutional system of the theater.
Mihály Nádor’s and Jenő Faragó’s three-act operetta entitled Offenbach was one of the biggest theater successes in Budapest in the period following World War I. The piece, whose first performance took place at the Király Theater in 1920, was also premiered in Vienna, Prague, Munich and in different adaptations in Berlin and New York. It represents a popular type of operetta of the era, whose main protagonists are nineteenth-century composers, and whose music was partly or entirely compiled of melodies taken from the musicians in question. In my study, I examine the extant musical and textual sources of the piece partly belonging to the composer’s estate preserved at the Music Department of the Széchényi National Library. I interpret Nádor’s work as a document of the Budapest Offenbach reception, and I reveal some intriguing differences between the Budapest and Vienna versions of the piece. I also demonstrate that the operetta was in all likelihood an imitation of Henrich Berté’s similar piece, Das Dreimäderlhaus, which was performed in every Budapest operetta theater between 1916 and 1924. At the same time, however, a successful new production of Offenbach’s La Belle Hélène was likewise an important antecedent for Nádor’s operetta.
