Introduction

Summary

Liszt's enthusiasm for and lifetime investment in the Hungarian-Gypsy tradition, often known by scholars today as verbunkos, cannot easily be reconciled with his image as a modernist. His patriotic motivation is well understood: he wanted to help create distinctive Hungarian art music. But less certain is the relationship of the Hungarian-Gypsy tradition to his modernism. Was this traditional music helpful to or counterproductive for his progressive ideas and techniques? An even more basic problem is that even when a piece of music communicates both Hungarian nationalism and modernism, those may well be judged to be coincidental categories: nationalism relates to musical representation and to reception, modernism to an aesthetic ideology potentially resulting in many different styles. In technical terms, Liszt's modernist approach to composition invites a discussion and analysis of his radical approach to tonality, genre, form, and media (blurring the lines between music and other art forms), and in some way instrumental technique and sound as well. Such an analysis can be undertaken irrespective of the putative cultural origins or associations of the musical material. So, for example, to understand the modernism of a piece like Totentanz (where verbunkos elements appear sporadically), or even certain passages in the Hungarian Rhapsodies, one need only analyze abstract musical parameters or refer to the (not specifically Hungarian) aesthetics of modernism, without any further cultural knowledge of verbunkos. Moreover, an examination of Liszt's ideological commitments to ideas of musical progress would reveal him to be a cosmopolitan composer, whose role as a “musician of the future” on a European scale certainly has the effect of diminishing the importance of Hungary.

One does not have to dispute the importance of verbunkos to Liszt as a man and as an artist in order to question its relevance to his modernism. On the face of it, the relevance seems minimal, or rather unidirectional: Liszt's modernism is occasionally superimposed on verbunkos material but not derived from it. Ergo, if elements of verbunkos can also be found in, for example, the harmonically extreme late works of the 1880s, they are there for poetic and personal reasons, but in themselves contribute nothing to the modernity of the work.