Professor Szabolcsi

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The author, György Kroó, heads the Academy's musicological department that Szabolcsi founded. Kroó was one of Szabolcsi's first students at the department, set up in 1951 at the suggestion of Zoltán Kodály. Thus he is one of the few who is really familiar with Szabolcsi's ambitious dreams (I use the expression deliberately) for musicology, his guiding principles and his role in the movement aimed at reviving 20th-century Hungarian music.

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While opening up the motifs of Szabolcsi's scholarly inclinations and attempting to follow the path Szabolcsi followed to reach a thesis or hypothesis, Kroó's book presents the history of 20th-century Hungarian music, and the as yet unwritten history of attitudes towards music; here the approach is sociological, an examination of aesthetical, critical and scholarly manifestations. What may well be most interesting here are the students who orbited Kodály like satellites; in the 1920s and 1930s these students unconditionally transmitted the light that radiated from their sun before, in the 1950s and 1960s, going their own way.

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András Batta