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Az előadások tartalma

Malcolm BILSON (Cornell University, Ithaca, NY)

The Opening Bars of Beethoven’s G Major Piano Concerto – a Fresh Look

The opening bars of the Beethoven G Major Piano Concerto, Opus 58, are often referred to by pianists as “the most difficult passage in all five Beethoven concertos.” If we understand why Beethoven chose to begin this work with such an unusual procedure we can demonstrate that its execution would have been radically different from what is heard today, launching the entire work on a somewhat different trajectory.

Malcolm BILSON began his pioneering activity in the early 1970s as a performer of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert on late 18th- and early 19th-century pianos. Since then he has proven to be a key contributor to the restoration of the fortepiano to the concert stage and to fresh recordings of the “mainstream” repertory.
Bilson has recorded the three most important complete cycles of works for piano by Mozart: the piano concertos with John Eliot Gardiner and the English Baroque Soloists for Deutsche Grammophon Archiv, the piano-violin Sonatas with Sergiu Luca for Nonesuch records, and the solo piano sonatas for Hungaroton. His traversal on period pianos of the Schubert piano sonatas (including the so-called incomplete sonatas), likewise on Hungaroton, was completed in 2003. In 2005 a single CD of Haydn sonatas appeared on the Claves label, and in 2008 his first recording on an English pianoforte of Haydn, Dussek and Cramer was released on Bridge Records.
Bilson, a member of the Cornell Music Faculty since 1968, is also Adjunct Professor at both the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York and the Franz Liszt Academy in Budapest, Hungary. He gives fortepiano workshops at various locations in the United States and Europe, as well as master classes and lectures (generally in conjunction with solo performances) around the world.
An educational video entitled “Knowing the Score” was released in 2005, in which Bilson discusses the question: Do we really know how to read the notation of the so-called “classical” masters? A second DVD titled “Performing the Score”, was released in early September, 2011. If we now know how to read notation, how can it be realized in sound? (www.malcolmbilson.com). A third DVD “Knowing the Score, Vol. 2”, recorded at the Franz Liszt Academy earlier this year, has recently appeared.
Malcolm Bilson is a member of the National Academy of Arts and Sciences, has an honorary doctorate from Bard College and is the recipient of the 2006 James Smithson Bicentennial Medal.
 

Hermann DANUSER (Humboldt-Universität, Berlin)

Der Erste Weltkrieg – eine „Urkatastrophe“ der Musikgeschichte?

Der amerikanische Historiker und Diplomat George F. Kennan hat bekanntlich 1979 den Ersten Weltkrieg als „the great seminal catastrophe of this century“ bezeichnet. Ist dieser Krieg auch für die Musikgeschichte – und wenn ja: inwiefern – eine „Urkatastrophe“ gewesen? Ich möchte einige Überlegungen zu einer Antwort auf diese Frage beisteuern, und zwar auf zwei ganz verschiedenen Ebenen. Heute, in einer globalisierten Welt, kann eine Diskussion über den ersten „Weltkrieg“ nicht mehr auf einer nationalen Basis stattfinden, sondern muss von der internationalen Forschung geleistet werden, wie es die jüngsten Bücher von Christopher Clark, Herfried Münkler und Jörn Leonhard zeigen. Die erste Ebene liegt begriffsgeschichtlich in einer Opfersemantik – lat. victima und lat. sacrificium –, die bei Arnold Schönberg eine enge Verbindung zwischen Skandal und Krieg bzw. Frieden offenbart. Die zweite Ebene betrifft die Historiographie der Musik seit dem Ersten Weltkrieg: Sie kann, so meine These, nicht mehr nur als Sprengung eines musikalischen Gattungssystems, Indiz einer Epochenzäsur im Sinne von Carl Dahlhaus, aufgefasst werden, sondern stellt vielmehr nachgerade die Implosion einer Musikkultur dar, welche seither – und bis heute – als tendenziell globale Genese von teils sich überschneidenden, teils unabhängig voneinander existierenden Teilkulturen der Musik (Kreationskultur Neue Musik: Avantgarde; Kompositionskultur Neue Musik: Moderne; Traditionelle Musikkultur; Interpretationskultur; Multimediale Klangkultur; Jazz- und Tanzkultur), mithin wahrlich als eine „Urkatastrophe“ zu begreifen ist.

Hermann DANUSER, geb. 1946, studierte ab 1965 Musik (Oboe, Klavier), Musikwissenschaft, Philosophie und Germanistik in Zürich (Promotion 1973; Musikalische Prosa, 1975), übersiedelte dann nach Berlin, wo er sich 1982 an der Technischen Universität habilitierte (Die Musik des 20. Jahrhunderts, 1984). Er lehrte darauf in Hannover und Freiburg im Breisgau und publizierte u.a.: Gustav Mahler und seine Zeit (1991); Musikalische Interpretation (1992); Im Zenit der Moderne (1997); Musikalische Lyrik (2004). Von 1993 bis 2014 hatte er an der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin den Lehrstuhl für Historische Musik-wissenschaft inne. Er koordiniert zudem die Forschung der Paul Sacher Stiftung Basel, ist Mitglied der Berlin-Brandenburgischen Akademie der Wissenschaften sowie des Kuratoriums der Ernst von Siemens-Musikstiftung. Seine Hauptinteressen liegen in der neueren und neuesten Musikgeschichte, Historiographie, Ästhetik, Theorie, Analyse und Interpretationsforschung. In jüngster Zeit wurden veröffentlicht: Weltanschauungsmusik (2009) und, hrsg. von Hans-Joachim Hinrichsen u. a., Gesammelte Vorträge und Aufsätze (vier Bände, 2014). In Vorbereitung befindet sich das Buch Metamusik.
 

Katalin KOMLÓS (Liszt Academy of Music, Budapest)

Tonus primus in Haydn’s instrumental music

The fundamental systems of music theory, established in certain historical periods, have a long life of their own, and often survive the changes that happen in the development of the musical language. This phenomenon is clearly manifest in the long process that led from the modal to the tonal organization of music.
The Bible of contrapuntal studies for all eighteenth-century composers, Fux’s Gradus ad Parnassum (1725), was still based on modal theory, and the medieval hexachord system. Considered somewhat out of date in its own time, the treatise was of fundamental importance in the early education of Joseph Haydn. The Alpha in the art of counterpoint, the cantus firmus in mode I (tonus primus) with its various contrapuntal species, clearly remained a model of learned composition for Haydn.
Throughout in Haydn’s instrumental oeuvre, there is a type of monotonal, three- or four-movement cycle in D, where the slow movement, written in an archaic style, invariably in D minor, evokes the spirit of the one-time tonus primus. The paper attempts to trace the contrapuntal technique, and other elements of strict composition in some of these D-minor movements, selected from keyboard trios, string quartets, and symphonies.

Katalin KOMLÓS, musicologist and fortepiano recitalist, received her diploma at the Musicology Department of the Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest. She has been on the faculty of the same insitution since 1973; at present, she is Professor Emerita.
Katalin Komlós received her PhD degree in musicology from Cornell University in 1986 (“The Viennese Keyboard Trio in the 1780s”). As a result of further scholarly achievements, she became Doctor of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 1998.
Prof. Komlós has written extensively on the history of eighteenth-century keyboard instruments and styles. Her book Fortepianos and Their Music was published by Oxford University Press in 1995. Recently, her name has appeared among the contributors to The Cambridge Companion to Mozart (2003), The Cambridge Companion to Haydn (2005), Mozart’s Chamber Music with Keyboard (Cambridge, 2012), and Engaging Haydn: Culture, Context, and Criticism (Cambridge, 2012).
In addition to research and teaching, Prof. Komlós has pursued a fortepianist concert career as well.
 

Vera LAMPERT (Brandeis University, Waltham, MA)

Benny Goodman, Bartók’s Contrasts, and Free Playing

Benny Goodman was only 28 years old when he reached the pinnacle of his career, bringing his big band to Carnegie Hall in January 1938. Joseph Szigeti, who took an interest in jazz and admired Goodman’s playing for its expressiveness and technical proficiency, was present at that tremendously successful historic concert. In the same year, he suggested the idea to Goodman to underwrite a commission for a short concert piece by Bartók for clarinet, violin, and piano with virtuoso candenzas, in the vein of the violin rhapsodies. Bartók completed the piece in September 1938, and Goodman returned to Carnegie Hall a year after his famous jazz concert with the premier of two movements (Verbunkos and Sebes) of Bartók’s work.—Two years ago the manuscript sources of the Contrasts once in Goodman’s possession came to the collection of Yale University. The lichtpaus copy of the holograph score and the clarinet parts (of which the second movement, Pihenő, is holograph) provide a few hitherto unknown details about the work’s formation.—The reviews of the sound recording of the Contrasts, made during the composer’s visit to the United States in the spring of 1940, are unequivocal in the praise of Goodman’s performance, while the reception of his later recordings of classical music was less enthusiastic. In searching for the sources of this discrepancy, I will look into the various manifestations of “free playing”, so prominent in both Bartók’s and Goodman’s artistry.

Vera LAMPERT studied musicology at the Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest and started working at the Budapest Bartók Archives in the last year of her studies. Under the guidance of László Somfai, she familiarized herself with the holdings of the Archives, cataloguing and analyzing Bartók’s sheet music collection, the manuscripts of his works and his folk music collections. In 1978 she moved to the United States where she worked as music librarian at Brandeis University since 1983 until her retirement this spring. The focus of her interest is Bartók’s ethnomusicological work and its influence on his compositions. In her book, Folk Music in Bartók’s Compositions: A Source Catalog (Budapest, 2008) she published the original sources of the melodies appearing in Bartók’s folksong arrangements. She contributed essays to The Bartók Companion (Oxford, 1993), Bartók and His World (Princeton, 1995), and The Cambridge Companion to Bartók (Cambridge, 2001). Professor Somfai remained her mentor and friend, inviting her to major projects of the Bartók Archives: to the collected edition of Bartók’s writings and the complete edition of his works.
 

David E. SCHNEIDER (Amherst College, Amherst MA)

Virtuous Virtuosity: the Violin, the Concerto, and the Topic of Transcendence

Spiritual transcendence, an almost obligatory concluding gesture in post-Beethovenian symphonic music, and virtuosic display are strange bedfellows in nineteenth- and twentieth-century concertos. The coda of the first movement of Ernő Dohnányi’s Piano Concerto No. 1 in E minor (1898) and the finale of Ferruccio Busoni’s Piano Concerto (1904) show the challenge of reconciling the two in their abandonment of the leading role of the solo instrument at the moment of transcendence—Dohnányi puts the spotlight on a solo violin, Busoni uses an off-stage male chorus. Only with the novel approach to form in Serge Prokofiev’s Violin Concerto No. 1 in D major (premiered 1923) does the music of transcendence keep the soloist front and center.
Drawing inspiration from László Somfai’s seminal essay “A Characteristic Culmination Point in Bartók’s Instrumental Forms” for the notion that short passages often epitomize entire compositions, and using examples ranging from the Chorale-like secondary theme in Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto in E minor (1844) to the apotheosis closing John Adams’s clarinet concerto Gnarly Buttons (1997), in this paper I argue for topical analysis as a means for exploring how composers of different eras and aesthetics struggle with providing concertos with meaning beyond that of virtuosic showpiece.

David E. SCHNEIDER is Professor of Music at Amherst College where he has taught since 1997. Author of Bartók, Hungary, and the Renewal of Tradition (University of California Press, 2006), he has published essays and reviews in JAMS, Music and Letters, Notes, Studia Musicologica, Bartók and his World, The Cambridge Companion to Bartók, and The Cambridge Companion to the Concerto. Support for his work has been provided by grants from the American Musicological Society (AMS 50), the International Research and Exchanges Board, and the American Council of Learned Societies. A former professional clarinetist, he has recorded Copland’s Clarinet Concerto for AFKA Records; and in January 2014 Albany Records released a CD of chamber music written for him. He is currently working on a book of essays on the poetics of the concerto. He credits his scholarly interest in Bartók and Hungarian music to László Somfai, with whom he studied at University of California, Berkeley, and the Budapest Bartók Archives.
 

Elaine SISMAN (Columbia University, New York, NY)

Avian Mechanisms in Haydn’s Variations in F minor

This paper draws connections between Haydn’s most powerful set of keyboard variations (1793); the popular contemporaneous exhibit in Vienna known as “Müller’s Kunstgalerie,” with its mausoleum in honor of the late General Laudon that featured Mozart’s Trauermusik in F minor, K. 594, for mechanical organ; and the “Grand Sonata” in F minor by Friedrich Kalkbrenner dedicated to Haydn’s memory (1821) in which the “subject” of the second movement is “the call of the quail.” It suggests that the generic confusion of Haydn’s designations “sonata” and “un piccolo divertimento” arises from the conjunction of birdsong and mechanism, and points to hitherto neglected sources of expressivity.

Elaine SISMAN is the Anne Parsons Bender Professor of Music at Columbia University. The author of Haydn and the Classical Variation, the Cambridge Handbook Mozart: The ‘Jupiter’ Symphony, and editor of Haydn and His World, she has published numerous essays on music of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that interweave history, biography, aesthetics, and analysis. She received the PhD in music history from Princeton University and has taught at the University of Michigan and Harvard University. Sisman was awarded the Alfred Einstein Award of the American Musicological Society in 1983 for best article by a younger scholar, serves on the boards of Haydn and Mozart societies as well as The Musical Quarterly and The Journal of Musicology, and completed a term as president of the American Musicological Society, which elected her to Honorary Membership in 2011. In 2014 she was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
 

Richard TARUSKIN (University of California, Berkeley, CA)

Resisting the Rite

Almost immediately after its stormy première, Le Sacre du printemps was compared with Beethoven’s Ninth, which also had a memorable first night. And like the Ninth it has inspired devotion and resistance in equal measure, and often simultaneously. A brief survey of the ballet’s reception over the course of its first century will indicate that audiences were far less resistant to the work than its creators and performers, who transformed it, and continue to work at transforming it, into an expression of sentiments and ideas at an almost diametrical remove from its original conception.

Richard TARUSKIN has numbered László Somfai among his cherished friends since the mid-1980s, when he lived in New York and taught at Columbia University. In 1987 he moved across the continent, to the University of California at Berkeley, where he was joined two years later by his friend Laci, who delivered the Ernest Bloch lectures as Visiting Professor in the fall of 1989, which allowed him placidly to enjoy the California vistas and weather while dramatic events were unfolding behind his back at home. Since then, between delightful trips to Budapest for conferences and conviviality, Richard Taruskin has published books on Musorgsky, on Stravinsky, and on twentieth-century performance practice, as well as the Oxford History of Western Music. He will join Laci in what he hopes will be an equally productive retirement at the end of this calendar year.
 

James WEBSTER (Cornell University, Ithaca, NY)

The Origins of Haydn’s Genius

In perhaps his most famous utterance, Joseph Haydn climaxed a long account of his working conditions at the Esterházy court with the assertion, “… and so I was forced to become original.” Recently, I offered a fresh interpretation of this account as a whole, which led to the thesis that his assertion is actually erroneous: except in certain relatively superficial senses, he did not become original at all, but — as implied by Kant’s later discussion of originality and genius as in effect forces of nature — had ‘always already’ been original, from the earliest stages of his career.
I will support this thesis by offering close readings of a number of very early Haydn movements, from various genres, in an attempt to describe and characterize some features of his ‘original’ originality. Although these features are most evident in various technical domains, such as motivic development, free handling of form, and variety of texture, they pertain to aesthetic aspects of his music as well, such as genre, stylistic orientation, and referential associations.

James WEBSTER is the Goldwin Smith Professor of Music at Cornell University. He is the author of Haydn’s “Farewell” Symphony and the Idea of Classical Style, and an editor of Haydn Studies, Opera Buffa in Mozart’s Vienna and Beethoven Forum. He has published widely on Haydn (including the Haydn article in the revised New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, also published as a separate volume), Mozart (especially his operas), Beethoven, Schubert, and Brahms, as well as editorial and performance practice, and the historiography of music. His critical edition of the string quartets Opp. 42, 50, and 54–55 recently appeared in the complete edition, Joseph Haydn: Werke. In theory he specializes in issues of musical form, Schenkerian analysis, and analytical methodology.
Webster’s honors include the Einstein and Kinkeldey Awards of the American Musicological Society, two Senior Research Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Research Fellowship of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. He has served as President of the American Musicological Society, and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the Executive Committee (Vorstand) of the Board of Directors of the Joseph Haydn Institute (Cologne).

Dokumentumok

A konferencia brossúrája (pdf)

Az esti koncert programja (pdf)

BESZÁMOLÓ

Szabó Ferenc János:

MEGTILTOTT ÜNNEPLÉS

Konferencia a 80 éves Somfai László tiszteletére

Nem mindenkinek adatik meg, hogy szakmájának nemzetközi krémje ünnepelje őt életének egy-egy kerekebb születésnapja alkalmából. Tavaly Marton Éva tiszteletére Grace Bumbry és Jonas Kaufmann utazott Budapestre, s hasonló jelentőségűnek tekinthető, hogy a Somfai László 80. születésnapja alkalmából rendezett konferencián a világ zenetudományának olyan nagyságai emelkedtek szólásra az MTA BTK Zenetudományi Intézetének Bartók-termében, akik bármely nemzetközi konferencián meghívott, nagy tiszteletnek örvendő keynote speakerek lennének. Somfai személyében egyúttal a magyar zenetudomány számára is elismerés, hogy ilyen rangos vendégek egy napra Budapestre utaztak.
Komoly szervezőmunka állt tehát ennek a konferenciának a hátterében. Annál is inkább, mivel Richter Pál, az Intézet igazgatója megnyitó beszédében visszaemlékezett arra, hogy Somfai László 75. születésnapján azt kérte kollégáitól, ígérjék meg, nem szerveznek neki többet ünnepi születésnapi rendezvényt. A kollégák ezt megígérték, s ígéretüket be is tartották: a 80. születésnap tiszteletére a konferenciát nem a Zenetudományi Intézet, hanem a Magyar Zenetudományi és Zenekritikai Társaság szervezte - persze titokban. E szervezés oly eredményes volt, hogy az ünnepelt valóban csak akkor értesült a meglepetésről, amikor a meghívót a kezébe vehette.
Somfai László a nemzetközi zenetudományban nagy tiszteletnek és ismertségnek örvend. Ezt jelzi az is, hogy a születésnapi konferencián egy budapesti és egy berlini mellett hat amerikai - köztük egy több mint harminc éve kint élő magyar - zenetudós tartott előadást. Ugyanakkor jó érzés volt több külföldi előadótól is magyar nyelven hallani: „Kedves Laci!" vagy éppen „Boldog születésnapot, Laci!". Az előadók kivétel nélkül reflektáltak az ünnepelt kutatásaira, publikációira, de az egész konferencia is ezekre épült. [...]

Bővebben:  Muzsika, 2014 november