Overview
Introduction
After the Hungarian bid for independence from Austria in the 1848-1849 revolution was crushed, the search for a distinct Hungarian cultural identity became urgent. Few things highlight more clearly the confusion attendant upon such an endeavor than the career of Michael Brand (1815-1870), known to the world -- if at all -- as Mihály Mosonyi, though the change of name did not occur until 1859. As Michael Brand, his music -- including several string quartets and the First Symphony -- is beholden to the German classical composers, with Beethoven to the fore. With the finale of his Second Symphony (1856), he essayed self-conscious Hungarianisms carried to their logical extreme in his second opera Szép Ilonka (Pretty Helen, libretto by Mihály Fekete, after Vörösmarty), premiered in Pest on December 10, 1861, and composed, as Mosonyi avowed, "entirely in the Hungarian idiom to the exclusion of all foreign elements." Mosonyi became acquainted with Liszt when the latter led the premiere of his Gran Mass at Esztergom; Mosonyi played double bass at that performance. Liszt was impressed with Mosonyi's music and asked him to compose the Offertory and the Gradual for the ceremony, though in the event they were replaced with settings by the cathedral's chorus master. Liszt, however, conducted them himself in Pest. Moreover, he offered to stage Mosonyi's first opera, Kaiser max auf der Martinswand, at Weimar, though he asked for revisions that were not completed until after he had resigned his post as kapellmeister to the court of Saxe-Weimar. When he returned to Budapest for the premiere of his Hungarian Coronation Mass in June 1867, Liszt renewed his friendship with Mosonyi and reaffirmed his confidence in the latter's music by composing his Fantasy on Szép Ilonka; though more tersely compact, almost a throwback to the operatic fantasies of the 1830s. In Szép Ilonka, as in Liszt's own Hungarian Rhapsodies, the question of what specifically constitutes the national idiom arises. For Mosonyi, it is largely a mélange of popular song, verbunkos (or recruiting dances) and czárdás, effusively ornamented, after the Gypsy manner, with snapping grace notes, turns, trills, and syncopations shot through with the Gypsy scale (the harmonic minor scale with augmented fourth and seventh). Not until the ethnomusicological explorations of Bartók and Kodály at the turn of the century would authentic Hungarian folk music begin to permeate the work of serious composers. In the upshot, the Szép Ilonka Fantasy faithfully reflects the melancholy original while looming as a heavy dose of paprika.
