A Wayfaring Stranger: Ernst von Dohnányi's American Years, 1949-1960

A Wayfaring Stranger

The publisher and the University of California Press Foundation gratefully acknowledge the generous support of the Roth Family Foundation Imprint in Music, established by a major gift from Sukey and Gil Garcetti and Michael P. Roth.

CALIFORNIA STUDIES IN 20TH-CENTURY MUSIC

Richard Taruskin, General Editor

A Wayfaring Stranger

Ernst von Dohnányi’s American Years, 1949–1960

Veronika Kusz

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

University of California Press

Oakland, California

© 2020 by The Research Centre for the Humanities, Hungarian Academy of Sciences

Published with the generous support of the National Cultural Fund of Hungary

Translated by Viktória Kusz and Brian McLean

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Kusz, Veronika, 1980- author. | Kusz, Viktória, translator. | McLean, Brian, 1944- translator.

Title: A wayfaring stranger : Ernst von Dohnányi’s American years, 1949–1960 / Veronika Kusz ; translated by Viktória Kusz and Brian McLean.

Other titles: Dohnányi amerikai évei. English (Kusz and McLean) | California studies in 20th-century music ; 25.

Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2020] | Series: California studies in 20th-century music; 25 | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019024378 (print) | LCCN 2019024379 (ebook) | ISBN 9780520301832 (cloth) | ISBN 9780520972261 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Dohnányi, Ernő, 1877–1960. | Dohnányi, Ernő, 1877–1960—Criticism and interpretation. | Expatriate composers—United States—Biography. | Composers—Hungary—Biography. | Hungarians—United States—Biography.

Classification: LCC ML410.D693 K8713 2020 (print) | LCC ML410.D693 (ebook) | DDC 780.92 [B]—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019024378

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019024379

Manufactured in the United States of America

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To P. and S.

CONTENTS

List of Figures and Tables

List of Music Examples

Acknowledgments

Preface

Abbreviations

1. From the Ramparts of Hungarian Music to Emigration: Dohnányi’s Career

2. Life as an Émigré: The American Period

3. Representative Works: Stabat Mater and American Rhapsody

4. Independent Compositions: Works for Piano and Flute

5. Two Concertos, Two Stories

Epilogue: Spontaneity, Flexibility, Adaptation

Appendix 1. Timeline of Dohnányi’s Life in the United States

Appendix 2. Main Specifications of Dohnányi’s American Works

Appendix 3. Dohnányi’s Concerts in the United States

Appendix 4. Dohnányi’s Concert Repertoire in the United States

Notes

Bibliography

Index

FIGURES AND TABLES

FIGURES

2.1. Dohnányi at his Tallahassee home

2.2. Dohnányi teaching

2.3. The number of Dohnányi’s American concerts per season (1949–1960)

2.4. The key of the city being given to Dohnányi in Atlantic City in the company of the city management

2.5. Late portrait

3.1. Dohnányi conducting in Athens, Ohio

3.2. Dohnányi and his wife receiving their American citizenship (in the company of their children and son-in-law)

4.1. The number of works by composer in Dohnányi’s American piano repertoire

4.2. After a concert

4.3. The Dohnányis with the Bakers

5.1. Dohnányi with Frances Magnes

5.2. A smiling portrait

TABLES

3.1. One-movement forms in Dohnányi’s American Rhapsody and Stabat Mater

4.1. The typical structure of Dohnányi’s late piano recitals

4.2. The structure of Burletta

MUSIC EXAMPLES

3.1. Examples of motivic development in Variations and Fugue on a Theme of E. G.

3.2. Motivic development in Nocturne Cats on the Roof

3.3. Motivic development in Stabat Mater

3.4. The " Stabat Mater " theme

3.5. " O quam tristis " in Dohnányi’s setting

3.6. " O quam tristis " in Verdi’s setting

3.7. The " Inflammatus " section

3.8. Modulation before " Sancta Mater " (harmonic extract)

3.9. The beginning of " Sancta Mater "

3.10. Variation theme Wayfaring Stranger in American Rhapsody

3.11. Variation theme in Symphonic Minutes, movement IV

3.12. Variation no. 2 in American Rhapsody

3.13. Variation no. 2 in Symphonic Minutes, movement IV

3.14. The Riddle section in American Rhapsod y

3.15. Variation no. 2 in Variations on a Nursery Song

3.16. The appearance of Turkey in the Straw in American Rhapsody

3.17. Variation no. 5 in Suite in F-sharp Minor, movement I

4.1. The beginning of Burletta

4.2. Trio theme in Burletta

4.3. Theme of Aria for Flute and Piano

4.4. Theme and its recapitulation in Passacaglia for Solo Flute

4.5. Summary of Passacaglia

5.1. Grotesque variation in the Intermezzo of Violin Concerto no. 2

5.2. The beginning of the development section in Violin Concerto no. 2, movement I

5.3. Thematic transformations in Concertino for Harp and Chamber Orchestra

5.4. The last measures of Concertino for Harp and Chamber Orchestra

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to express thanks to all who have contributed professionally, psychologically, or financially to the creation of this book. I began the dissertation on which it rests in 2003 at the Doctoral School at the Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest, headed by László Somfai, and I completed it in 2009 while serving, as I do now, as a research fellow at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences’ Institute for Musicology. Among the assistance I received in those years were a Zoltán Kodály Music Scholarship and a János Bolyai Research Scholarship. A Fulbright Scholarship in 2005–6 allowed me to study the most important source materials for Dohnányi’s American years, in the Dohnányi Collection at Florida State University in Tallahassee and at the composer’s former home. My researches, then and since, have been made possible by Dr. Seàn Ernst McGlynn, the heir to Dohnányi’s estate. Without his rare pliancy, cooperation, and enthusiasm, research into Dohnányi could not have gained its present momentum, and for that all researchers, musicians, and music lovers owe him a great debt. Thanks also go to the former and present staff of FSU’s Warren D. Allen Music Library, especially Dan Clark, Don Fortner, Mark Froelich, Laura Gayle Green, Eric Harbeson, Sarah Hess Cohen, Lonnie Hevia, and Sara Nodine, for their frequent efficacious help. Many other collections similarly made source materials available, notably the British Library, Hungarian National Széchényi Library, Ohio University’s Vernon R. Alden Library, the Music Library of the University of North Texas, and the George Bragg Estate in Fort Worth. I owe them great thanks, not only for making their documents available but for the helpfulness of their staff members: Sara Harrington, Éva Kelemen, Carrie McLain, Kenneth Polito, and Gregory Sigman. I received further important information or other help from Sara Cutler, Larry Ford, Denise von Glahn, László Gombos, Péter Halász, Deborah Kiszely-Papp, Ilona Kovács, Elizabeth Morse, István Csaba Németh, Douglas Neslund, Gergely Prőhle, Joyce Rice, Pál Richter, Joan Solaun, and Saul Davis Zlatkovsky.

Production of this English version of the book, translated by Viktória Kusz and Brian McLean, was made possible by the support of Hungary’s National Cultural Fund (NKA) from funds assigned to mark the 140th anniversary of Dohnányi’s birth. The manuscript was completed at the Institute for Musicology of the Research Centre for the Humanities of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest, and also funded by the Hungarian National Research, Development and Innovation Office (NKFIH, K 123819). The music examples appear with the kind permission of Associated Music Publishers, Boosey & Hawkes Music Publishers Ltd., Broude Brothers Ltd., Ludwig Doblinger, and Rózsavölgyi és Társa. The photos appear with the kind permission of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. My heartiest thanks go to all who inspiringly commented on the Hungarian and then the English text in preparation: Melinda Berlász, Anna Dalos, Gergely Fazekas, James A. Grymes, Katalin Komlós, Anna Laskai, Lóránt Péteri, László Somfai, and Tibor Tallián. Among them, I owe special gratitude to László Vikárius, my doctoral supervisor, for unparalleled patience and attention to my work. The book would never have come into being without Richard Taruskin, who saw scope for publishing the book in America and brought it before those who were not familiar with Hungarian. I am very grateful to my associates at the University of California Press, especially the readers who performed peer review, for their extraordinarily helpful suggestions, to Raina Polivka for her constant help, and to Jeff Wyneken for his brilliant work as a copy editor. Finally, I wish to thank my husband and colleague, Péter Bozó, and my family and friends for their constant support and encouragement.

PREFACE

Ernő (Ernst von)¹ Dohnányi (1877–1960), the composer, pianist, conductor, professor, and institutional head, a contemporary of Béla Bartók (1881–1945) and Zoltán Kodály (1882–1967), belongs among the greatest figures in twentieth-century Hungarian music and is remarkable generally in twentieth-century music. Nobody now would dispute this, although Dohnányi, whose compositional oeuvre has been growing worldwide in popularity in recent decades, was largely ignored in international music life and musicology from about 1944 until the 1990s.

I had a chance in 1996, in my second year of high school, to take part in a performance of Dohnányi’s Stabat Mater at the Europa Cantat Junior international choral festival, held in the small Hungarian city of Kaposvár. Such a performance was still a curiosity in those days. Little was known about the composer, at least by the largely amateur performers and their provincial Hungarian audience. Even the better-informed professional musicians hoping for a performance of his works knew next to nothing of his years in America, where his Stabat Mater had been written. I can say plainly that the work enthralled the young choir performing it. In my case it led to a choice of career and even the direction my interests took me when I became a musicology student at the Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest.² Yet all that I had to go on when compiling my entrance essay or first seminar assignments on Dohnányi was Imre Podhradszky’s list of his works³ and a monograph in Hungarian (rather a popular account than a scholarly study) written by Dohnányi’s former student, the pianist and journalist Bálint Vázsonyi, in 1971.⁴ Scarcely any secondary literature was available until the turn of the millennium. When I set about writing this book twenty years later, then, I had considerable new literature at my disposal, although most of it written in Hungarian.

There were mainly political reasons behind the disappearance of Dohnányi, once known widely in Europe and America and seen as the biggest influence in Hungarian music life in the 1930s. After World War II he was accused of war crimes and of collaborating intellectually as a pro-German, although no official charges, proceedings, or statements of blame have been discovered to this day. The calumnies could be found mainly in the press. He had indeed been a major public figure in Hungary, and as such he and his alleged crimes had been the subject of talk that still echoes today. Yet from this it does not necessarily follow that he should have vanished from cultural life for four decades after his 1944 departure from Hungary. Although people closed up in a dictatorship often have no idea where or how their exiled countrymen live, Dohnányi’s works, which had been heard constantly, were withdrawn altogether from concert halls and radio broadcasts. To account for this shocking rupture would call for much research. Yet after 1989–90, following forty years of Soviet political subservience, the Hungarian state underwent a process of democratization as an independent country with a multiparty political system. With that, musicians and music lovers alike turned with mounting interest to an almost forgotten oeuvre; indeed, a Dohnányi renaissance can be said to have begun in the late 1990s.

Dohnányi’s rediscovery in Hungary largely coincided with renewed interest in the United States, where he had given many concert tours in the 1920s and spent the last period (1949–60) of his life. A study and a dissertation by James A. Grymes, based on musical sources in the Dohnányi Collection at Florida State University (FSU),⁵ was followed by his 2001 volume in the Greenwood Press series Bio-Bibliographies,⁶ which can be seen as one of the foundation stones of modern research. Also in 2001 came a thirty-two-page booklet by Deborah Kiszely-Papp (in Hungarian and English) in the Hungarian Composers series of a Hungarian publishing house.⁷ These two important sources summarize the knowledge of Dohnányi at the time of his modern rediscovery. Another spur to the burgeoning international research into Dohnányi was an institutional frame, the Dohnányi Archives at the Institute for Musicology, Budapest, which was set up in 2002 by Hungary’s Cultural Ministry and the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. This archive and its successor, the Archives for 20th–21st Century Hungarian Music (hereafter AHM), started conducting fundamental research: the Dohnányi Yearbooks of 2002–7 and 2015–⁸ illuminated Dohnányi’s career as a performer,⁹ his press reception as such and as a composer,¹⁰ his work at Hungarian Radio¹¹ and the Academy of Music,¹² and listings of various materials in the Dohnányi bequests.¹³

Research and collection of the sources began with great verve in the Dohnányi Archives. Most of the materials from Dohnányi’s Hungarian period found their way into the Music Collection of the Hungarian National Széchényi Library, while some late sources (mainly autographs) were presented by his widow to the British Library.¹⁴ These basic source materials can now be found as copies in one place, at the AHM. A start has also been made to mapping the whereabouts of materials in other institutions, in private hands, and at Dohnányi’s American employer, FSU in Tallahassee, which also gathered large quantities of sources. That prompted me to spend a period in Tallahassee in 2005–6, when I began my doctorate, to process the materials which had remained in Dohnányi’s old house and include them with the sources already held by the university, not least because some of them were in Hungarian, which made them difficult for American scholars to tackle. The nine months of intensive research I did there automatically became the subject of my doctoral dissertation, which I defended in 2010 and which appeared in Hungarian in 2015.¹⁵ The Hungarian book has served as a basis for the present work, although the two are not identical. The difference results not only from my research experiences in the intervening years, but from a marked change in the situation with the American sources.

The collections at FSU grew steadily after the composer’s death. His third wife, Ilona Zachár (1909–88), then his step-grandson, Dr. Seàn Ernst McGlynn (born 1956), cooperated in bringing hundreds of musical autographs, letters, printed scores, books, scrapbooks (albums of original press cuttings and other documents), and sound recordings into the care of the library.¹⁶ After long struggles, McGlynn decided in 2014 to donate important uncatalogued documents (letters, financial and travel documents, books, diaries, newspaper cuttings, and programs), still found in Dohnányi’s house, to the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. In a move perhaps influenced by the increasing Hungarian interest in his grandfather, McGlynn finally, in 2015, offered for sale to the Hungarian state the collection that was on loan to FSU. The whole material, then, is now held at the AHM.¹⁷ The release of the material was naturally a disappointment for FSU, and there is no disputing the key role in Dohnányi’s renaissance and reevaluation played by former and present students and the staff of the Warren D. Allen Music Library. Moreover, FSU still owns valuable material (musical autographs, letters, and political documents) obtained from the heirs of Dohnányi’s former student and colleague Edward Kilényi (hereafter FSU Kilényi–Dohnányi).

This book sets out to survey the final creative period in Dohnányi’s life, relying on the rich and formerly almost-unknown primary source materials. For the biographical parts, there are some antecedents in earlier literature. The sequence of events, particularly those linked to FSU, was considered by Marion Ursula Rueth in her MA thesis of 1962.¹⁸ A later work is Bálint Vázsonyi’s above-mentioned monograph in Hungarian, of which one chapter of some twenty pages embodies the then most versatile account of this period.¹⁹ Vázsonyi’s book provided an important starting point for this study, although the primary sources reveal that his interpretations are often open to question. For behind his colorful, outspoken style is the understandable partiality of a former student, not to mention that the absence of references does not meet the requirements of a scholarly text. A curious blend of primary source material and secondary literature is a biography/memoirs written by Dohnányi’s third wife, Ilona Zachár (Ilona von Dohnányi), in the 1950s, entitled Ernst von Dohnányi: A Song of Life. This was published at the beginning of the Dohnányi renaissance under the auspices of James A. Grymes.²⁰ Zachár, who described herself as a writer in view of her translations and original works, such as fictionalized composer biographies,²¹ gave an objective description of her husband’s first sixty years but acknowledged a personal interest in the second period, from 1937. Her chapter on the American years covers only the first third of the 1950s, as the somewhat fictionalized biography—apart from a short epilogue—ends with a discussion of the only concert Dohnányi gave at Carnegie Hall in this period, in 1953. It is true to Ilona von Dohnányi’s dramatic sense to see this concert as a victorious culmination of the composer’s battle against the difficulties he had faced as an émigré, and so as the climax of his story.

Dohnányi’s own Message to Posterity, from 1960 (Búcsú és üzenet, 1962, in Hungarian),²² is also of a mixed type and represents quite a difficult case.²³ Scholars have long suspected that the booklet, covering Dohnányi’s childhood, life philosophy, teaching experiences, and political questions, cannot be seen as a wholly authentic source.²⁴ The suspicion is confirmed beyond reasonable doubt by a new group of documents discovered in 2014.²⁵ These concern a special, confidential type of source: fictive/imaginable conversations between Ilona von Dohnányi and her recently deceased husband. Among these curious writings—very similar in style to the recollections ostensibly written by Dohnányi himself—is the only known autograph of the Message to Posterity; it is in Ilona’s handwriting. Of course most of the information in the text is reliable, as Ilona, having consciously collected the material from her husband, obviously meant it to appear as an authentic representation of the composer’s thinking. The text has been treated here as more or less reliable—though with much caution.

Taken together, these primary or quasi-primary sources and secondary literature suggest that the elderly émigré had to cope with a physical and social habitat unfamiliar to him in every respect. He was no longer in a leading position or internationally renowned as a performer, but found himself an employee with no special entitlements and on the periphery as a concert pianist. These factors had clear effects on his creative output. Regarding the analytical chapters, I had hardly any earlier scholarly analysis on which to base my own. In discussing the late Dohnányi works—the Violin Concerto no. 2 in C Minor (op. 43), Three Singular Pieces for Piano (op. 44), the Concertino for Harp and Chamber Orchestra (op. 45), Stabat Mater (op. 46), American Rhapsody (op. 47), and the two last pieces for flute (op. 48/1–2)—I had to rely almost wholly on primary materials (manuscript and printed scores, composer’s analyses, sound recordings, press reception, and biographical sources). In conducting the analyses, I intentionally avoided applying one set of methods or one concept to all the pieces. I strove instead to start from the traits of each piece and seize on one or two main features, to bring readers as near as possible to these neglected works and to their author’s compositional thinking. That meant concentrating on the motivic development in Stabat Mater, the intertextual references in American Rhapsody, the unusual elements of Dohnányi’s typical musical language in the Flute Passacaglia, and the context of form and orchestration in the concertos. And although the first two chapters have an expressly biographical character (the first, introductory chapter sketches his career before emigration; the second, his life in America), I have tried to bind Dohnányi’s thinking, creative dilemmas, and practical problems into the analytical sections (chapters 3–5) as well. Likewise the musical chapters have come to include my guesses as to the elderly composer’s psychological reactions to his tragic experiences (in religious, nostalgic, or assimilative terms, for example), and my examinations of his position as performer and composer, his reception in America as a performer, and of course his novelty-cum-modernity and his stance toward this issue. I aimed expressly, in presenting certain phenomena, to draw pieces from his earlier life’s work into the comparison—not merely because it would hardly be possible to discuss his late style without its antecedents, but to draw the attention of readers to other works, alongside those of the American period. I hope this study can fill a gap and help Dohnányi’s exciting output gain the attention of musicians, musicologists, students, and music lovers beyond the frontiers of his native country. Today, as a researcher with a deeper knowledge, my feelings about Dohnányi’s music are as strong as they were, on the basis of a single composition, when I was a high school student. Dohnányi’s work deserves full recognition.

ABBREVIATIONS

1

From the Ramparts of Hungarian Music to Emigration

Dohnányi’s Career

DOHNÁNYI’S CAREER UP TO WORLD WAR II

Amid the postwar chaos, at the beginning of 1946, the Hungarian newspaper Szabad Szó (Free word) published a lengthy article about Ernst von Dohnányi. Here is how its author summarized the conditions for Dohnányi prevailing in his home country, which he had left for Austria a year earlier, in November 1944:

We have deliberately remained silent until today. We did not want the tempestuous atmosphere prevailing in the months after the collapse of the German and Arrow Cross¹ world to push [Dohnányi] further away than necessary. But now we must write about him. Rumor has it he will soon be coming back home. So before he returns, and before the debate around him breaks, we would like to make our voice heard.

Ernst von Dohnányi’s name is of a great importance in musical life in Hungary and also abroad. One could dispute about the extent and proportions of his talent as a composer, a conductor and a pianist, but it would certainly be foolish to deny this talent. . . . However, we have a far lesser opinion of Dohnányi as a politician of music. For decades he kept all the ramparts of music life to himself: the [Liszt] Academy of Music, the [Hungarian] Radio, and the [Budapest] Philharmonic Orchestra. This accumulation of positions is not the main reason why we place blame on him: we do so because of his negligent conduct in those posts. Dohnányi plays music with amazing confidence and ease: playing music is barely work to him. He treated his positions in a similar way. . . .

The superficiality of Dohnányi, the music politician, was not without consequence; the Academy of Music was struggling with a bad and outdated curriculum and teachers . . . , and even though some contemporary compositions did sometimes appear in the concerts of the Philharmonic Orchestra, they did not achieve the required effect, because Dohnányi did not make an effort to analyze thoroughly and become engrossed in the complexities of an unknown piece of music. . . .

We agree with those who removed Ernst von Dohnányi’s name from the list of war criminals. Indeed, Dohnányi was neither a Nazi nor a Germanophile. And Hungarian democracy should be generous enough in forgiving him his Szálasi handshake² and his departure for the West . . . Dohnányi, known as a liberal in his way of thinking, is largely at fault on these issues.³

The author was Pál Járdányi, a composer and folk-music researcher who followed in the footsteps of Bartók and Kodály. He was only twenty-six at the time. How could it come about that a beginner could produce such a stern and disapproving text about Dohnányi, the world-famous musician, who just a couple of years previously had held all the ramparts of music life and been treated with unconditional respect, even flattery, in the Hungarian press? Indeed, Járdányi’s article is one of the more favorable views. Famous for humanity and political clear-sightedness, Járdányi was probably targeting Dohnányi’s critics, too. It would be more apposite to ask how it was that the best thing a newspaper could write about Dohnányi in 1946 was by way of a warning: if he returned home, he should be careful not to wander from the piano to music politics again.⁴

To answer the question involves looking three decades back to when Dohnányi, in 1915, then a professor of the Academy of Music in Berlin, decided to return to Hungary. (At this point it should be noted that despite what was written in Szabad Szó, it never occurred to Dohnányi to return to Hungary after World War II.) Dohnányi, born in 1877, had lived the life of a globetrotting virtuoso pianist and composer before 1915. Virtuoso refers here merely to the elementary force of his piano playing, because his sophisticated repertoire and the high musical standard of his own compositions kept him from cheap success. Indeed, he had plenty of other successes. Although he did not break through with his 1897 international debut concerts in Berlin at the age of twenty, playing Beethoven and Schumann sonatas, Brahms’s Handel Variations, and Liszt’s Sonata in B Minor,⁵ his debut in England a year later brought him immense popularity and material success.⁶ His debut in the United States⁷ came a year later, in March 1900, and as in London, his enormous popularity persuaded his agents to extend his concert tour. In following years he gave fifty to sixty concerts annually in English, Scottish, German, Czech, Polish, Dutch, Danish, and Norwegian cities, with Vienna and London as his headquarters.⁸ His composing career gained similar momentum as he won composition competitions as a Budapest Academy of Music student⁹ and the Bösendorfer prize in Vienna with his First Piano Concerto (op. 5b). Further successful pieces followed, among them his first adult String Quartet (op. 7) and his still-popular Trio-Serenade (op. 10), which was praised by Kodály as beautiful, wonderful, sometimes painfully fading in Springtime, a little bit decadent, very modern, sometimes healthily dry, sometimes too sensible.¹⁰ And he had the approval of a more distinguished authority than the young Kodály: as an anecdote has it, Brahms himself commented on the Quintet in C Minor (op. 1) that he wouldn’t have written it better myself.¹¹ Brahms’s support should be seen as an important moment in the young Dohnányi’s career, yet the anecdote is probably not quite true, similar to other amazing stories about his unparalleled musical memory.¹² Nevertheless,