1 - Transcultural Modernism

Summary

The term “Hungarian-Gypsy tradition” in art music implies many things, including folklorism, nationalism, exoticism, or a special virtuoso style of playing that alludes to Gypsy-band performance practices. Modernism would not be the first association that comes to mind, not even in relation to a composer such as Franz Liszt. The idea of modernism—or, in its more militant conceptualization, the avant-garde—suggests an extreme form of artistic elitism, perhaps even an alienation from the masses, and involves a rejection of any artistic or cultural thinking that relies on instant recognition, reproducibility, and commodification. If Liszt's Hungarian-Gypsy style (or rather his verbunkos idiom, as we shall refer to it in this study) has modernist aspects to it, then these are aspects that obviously have not drawn much critical or analytical attention. Works such as Hungaria, S. 103 (1854) suggest that for Liszt there were no barriers between the Hungarian-Gypsy tradition and modernism: that work is, after all, a symphonic poem, located at the forefront of what was known as Zukunftsmusik (music of the future) and later (from 1859) as the New German School. Ironically, for this very reason it is very easy to refer to all modernist features in such works in technical and aesthetic terms that ignore the verbunkos idiom and thus, if only implicitly, deny its role in shaping Liszt's innovative style. By extension, the same logic could even be applied to works such as the Hungarian Rhapsodies: their obvious verbunkos style is one matter, while their innovative compositional construction and harmonic language quite another.

Modernism and Modernist Rehabilitations

We could well examine and eventually unpick such truisms by considering the idea of modernism itself. Such a sprawling term is amenable to several definitions and even to conflicting aesthetic and historical agendas. In the first instance, if modernism is treated as a cultural era, then its periodization can be endlessly debated. For Liszt, the year 1848 is powerfully symbolic, as it is the year in which social and national utopianism erupted and was crushed throughout Western and Central Europe, resulting in a surge of subjectivity and alienation in the arts; and it also marks the beginning of his Weimar period, the idea of Zukunftsmusik, and his alliance with Wagner, Berlioz, and other progressives. Nevertheless, we should not lose sight of the fact that Liszt's progressivism stretches back to the early 1830s.