András Szőllősy
From Unearthing The Music
András Szőllősy was a Hungarian composer and musicologist. His oeuvre exemplifies both the survival of the tradition of Kodály and Bartók and also the break with it, as well as the linkage between composition and scientific research.
Biography
András Szőllősy was born in 1921 in Szászváros, Transylvania. After completing his high school studies, he moved to Budapest from Cluj-Napoca in 1939. At that time, he had not yet decided on a career as a composer. He enrolled in the Hungarian-French department of Pázmány Péter University, where he obtained his doctorate in 1943. He wrote his doctoral dissertation on the art of Kodály. He studied composition at the Academy of Music, where he was a student of Zoltán Kodály, Albert Siklós and János Viski.
Immediately after the war, he received a scholarship to Rome, where he attended Goffredo Petrassi's master class at the Santa Cecilia Academy in the 1947/48 academic year. Between 1950 and 1991, he was a teacher at the College of Music (Zeneművészeti Főiskola), where he assisted in founding the Hungarian Department of Musicology. His way of thinking and artistic creed was most influenced by three important locations: Cluj-Napoca, the Eötvös Collegium in Budapest (Eötvös Collegium was established after the model of the École Normale Supérieure in Paris), and Rome. The members of his circle of friends were Rudolf Maros, György Ligeti, Gábor Darvas, and Kálmán Halász. The company was featured by the seeking new ways to compose.
As his studies were characterized by the parallelism of artistic and philological studies, András Szőllősy's work in music and musicology were also developed in parallel. However, there was a time when more emphasis was placed on scientific activity. As a musicologist, he enriched the heritage of two great masters of Hungarian music (Kodály and Bartók) with text publications and bibliographies. It resulted in numerous publications related to Bartók and Kodály, written with philological precision, such as a bulky volume of Bartók's writings collected in 1967. He created an easy-to-use list of Bartók's works which was translated into many languages and is still used worldwide. The forced closure of the fifties, the detachment from the parallel aspirations of contemporaries, and at the same time from the ideological illusion of the creation of a kind of national “classicism” may have been the reason why András Szőllősy's works were barely visible during this period. As he stated, they perceived that “their isolation from the new European musical currents inevitably pushes them into some provincialism”.
In Szőllősy's case, the experience of his years as Kodály's student naturally raised the possibility of a kind of classicization, but the year spent at the Petrassi school decreased his confidence in classicization. From the beginning, Szőllősy was aware that Bartók's solution was such an individual path that it could not provide a sample for the development of his own compositional toolbox. The Latin spirit that he learned from the Italian master, Petrassi, had a fertilizing effect on him. Szőllősy was struggling with the hitherto obligatory tone of the Hungarian folk song but finally found his true place in Hungarian music with the encouragement of another Italian musician, Gazzelloni. During the sixties, an important turning point took place in the whole art of music: by this time all the conditions for breaking away from the almost oppressive Kodály tradition were nurtured. A new generation grew up which found its voice free of all “paternal” attachments, orienting itself impartially between East and West trends. At the same time, in the healthier political atmosphere, the older generations were able to revise their activities, too.
The flute piece, Tre pezzi per flouto e pianoforte composed in 1964 represented a turning point for him and helped him find his voice. The work was also performed at the modern music festivals in Darmstadt, Madrid, and Venice, worthily representing the sound and aspirations of new Hungarian music at these international forums.
The III. Concerto was internationally significant, particularly after winning the first prize at the International Grandstand of Radio Companies in Paris in 1970. Following the path started by this piece of music, András Szőllősy presented two large-scale works in 1972: Trasfigurazioni and Musica per orchestra. The apparatus of the two works had already shown a new concept of a grand orchestral sound: a large symphony orchestra that does not include percussion or plucking instruments, expressing in itself the author's confrontation with the then fashionable bell-bongo sounding ideal.
In the early eighties, Szőllősy's interest turned to the vocal genre: four closely related, yet very different vocal compositions were born: a mixed choir (In Pharisaeos), a female choir (Planctus Mariae), and two sextets commissioned by the world-famous King´s Singers. (Fabula Phaedri, Miserere). From the second half of the decade onwards, instrumental chamber music came to the fore. In addition, Szőllősy was active in applied music, composing music for thirty-one films, seventeen stage pieces, and eighteen radio plays between 1954 and 1977.
Regarding András Szőllősy's second career, it can be said that his oeuvre was actually made of occasional pieces. It was not an irresistible inner urge but almost always an invitation, an order which stood behind his works. However, according to András Wilhelm, his work proves that the occasional challenge, when combined with constant internal readiness, can create works that are as valid as those emerging from spontaneous internal coercion. It is only necessary to create new works if the work is really new, interesting, surprising - and in the case of Szőllősy, the reverse is also true: the work of art created by different orders should always show something new that could not be easy to infer. One of the (perhaps the main) features of András Szőllősy's creative activity is considered to be the realization of a high degree of synthesis. One cover of this synthesis is secure selection; he knows well what is worth using, and this applies as much to the elements preserved from tradition as to the latest contemporary achievements.
Szőllősy was a very well-informed composer who monitored what happened in the world, how Italian composers were creating, what the latest achievements of the Polish school were, or what was the trend in Darmstadt. His composer attitude and way of thinking were shaped by a strong bond to traditions. Furthermore, this attitude took the inner unity of his oeuvres very seriously: the organic interdependence and interdependence of pieces. The music of András Szőllősy is a deeply humane art: it is about people and for people. Its synthetic nature is manifested in the fact that it does all this by using, testing, sieving, and reshaping the latest tools of the age.
Among his awards he received the Kossuth Prize in 1985, and in 1987 he was awarded the title “Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres” by the French Government. He died in 2007 in Budapest.
References
- János Kárpáti. András Szőllősy. Muzsika 17, no. 1. (1974)
- János Kárpáti. András Szőllősy. Muzsika 16, no. 12. (1973)
- András Wilheim. Esszék. Írások zenéről [Essays. Writings about music] Budapest, 2010