Overview
Introduction
Mosonyi's talent was small but genuine, his production imposing but fitful, his music attractive but not compelling. Mosonyi and Liszt, however, shared accidents of birth that made them kindred spirits. Both were born in western Hungary, in villages near the Austrian border, which are now part of Austria. German was the first language of both, though Liszt was educated in Paris from the age of 11 and French was the language in which he was most comfortable. Mosonyi was, in fact, born Michael Brand in 1815 and did not adopt Mihály Mosonyi as his legal name until 1859 in a decisive turn, culturally and musically, toward his identity as a Hungarian. Liszt also strongly identified with the Magyars, though he was never fluent in Hungarian and began to visit Hungary annually only from 1871, as he entered his sixties. But given the wave of "Lisztomania" which swept Europe from the 1830s and fixed Liszt in the European psyche as a permanent icon, his sporadic appearances in Hungary were treated as national occasions. Accepting the invitation of Hungarian notables, for instance, Liszt gave seven concerts in Pest in 1840, attended by listeners from every part of the nation, on the second of which, January 4, he was approached on-stage by a deputation of Hungarian nobles and presented with a jewel-encrusted Sword of Honor. His role in spearheading a Hungarian national identity can hardly be overestimated. Mosonyi, meanwhile, made his way as an accomplished but largely self-taught musician working as a copyist, typesetter, Kapellmeister in Aachen, piano teacher to a nobleman's children, editor, composition teacher, and a composer beholden to the classical style. His embrace of a Hungarian identity began in 1856 and was immediately reflected in his music. In that year Mosonyi and Liszt became acquainted when the former played double bass in the premiere of Liszt's Gran Mass at Esztergom. He performed the same office in 1867 at the first performance, in Budapest, of Liszt's Hungarian Coronation Mass. Between these events he received encouragement from Liszt who, in that year, composed a piano fantasy on Mosonyi's opera Szép Ilonka. Liszt responded to Mosonyi's untimely death in 1870 with a mourning piece of rare eloquence, Mosonyis Grabgeleit (Mosonyi's Funeral Procession), a lament en mode hongroise set off by angry tolling, echoing Mosonyi's own lament for national hero and cavalry officer Count Istvan Széchényi (1791-1860), which, in 1885, Liszt included among his Hungarian Historical Portraits, which also contains a lament for Széchényi.
