Struck by Apollo
Remem bering György Ligeti
by György Kurtág

"We met and became friends sixty-two years ago. In the first days of September in 1945, the entrance exam for composition at the Budapest Music Academy changed my life forever. We waited to be called. At the same time I flipped through his scores and saw how far above me his knowledge, maturity and musical fantasy put him.
I had the privilege of witnessing the creation of his works, and participating in his life. I was there when he met Vera, and best man at their wedding."

György Kurtág remembers his life-long friend and his work in a commemorative address he gave in 2006, which is accompanied by several "appendices" he added on the Ligeti oeuvre for the Neue Zürcher Zeitung in 2007.

"From Heinrich von Kleist to Gyula Krúdy, Proust to Weöres, Hölderlin and Kafka, Shakespeare and Lewis Carroll, the Joyce of Finnegan's Wake, from Beckett and Ionesco to the Borges of Labyrinths, from Bosch to Piranesi, from Cézanne to Miro and Escher-so much is reflected in this music!"

 

From Christian Shield to EU Member
by Ignác Romsics

The history of the Magyar people in the Carpathian Basin falls into four distinct periods. For each of these, Ignác Romsics characterizes the political thinking, along with the place and role that the country's political and cultural elites envisioned for the Hungarians among the nations of Europe.
In the first historical epoch, from the establishment of the medieval kingdom in 1000 to its fall in 1526, the image of Hungary as the bulwark of Christendom and the Hungarians as valorous warriors, descendants of the Huns was formulated.
The second period saw the country dismembered, much of it under Turkish rule. Hemmed in by, and deeply suspicious of, both the Austrian and Turkish empires, the notion of country and nation began to gain ground.
With the expulsion of the Turks, Hungary fell under Habsburg rule in the third of the periods here discussed. The question that exercised the elites was: "should they strive to bolster Hungarian separatism (...) or assimilate into a Habsburg empire?" Not immune to the notions of nationalism and imperial mission prevalent in Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century, Hungary produced several responses of its own.
Finally, the period from the the First World War to today is examined. Professor Romsics considers the reactions to the truncation of the country after 1920. Some of these proved illusory with the advent of Soviet hegemony over the region. Membership of the European Union changes the perspectives Hungary now faces.

 

The life and work of two photographers are touched on in illustrated articles.
One, Pál Rosti, has been almost forgotten (though not in Mexico and Venezuela, where his photographs are noted as the earliest that record landscapes, cityscapes and aspects of life there).
The second, Brassaï, is one of the great names in twentieth-century photography. His correspondence with his family in Transylvania and with various Hungarian friends provides a fascinating documentation of his work: his books, cinema, tapestry, stage design and, of course, photographs.

 

Pál Rosti (1830-1874) Traveller and Photographer
by Júlia Papp

Photography arrived in Hungary in 1840, the year after Louis Daguerre announced his invention to the French Academy.
Scion of a family prominent among the mid-nineteenth-century liberal nobility, Pál Rosti deemed it prudent to absent himself from the country after the suppression of the 1848-49 Revolution. After attending university in Munich, he went to Paris to study photography in 1854 in order "to record as precisely and effectively as possible the regions to which he journeyed." He then followed in the footsteps of the great German natural scientist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt( to whom he personally presented a copy of the album documenting this journey).
Júlia Papp sets her account of Rosti in Cuba, Venezuela and Mexico in the context of the photography of the time and quotes extensively from the vivid account of his travels Rosti published in 1861. Many of the photographs discussed are reproduced here.

 

Brassaï: The Hungarian Documents
A Chronology in Letters 1940-1980
by Károly Kincses

"As in a fairy tale, a man arrived in Budapest from Braşov, after a 12-hour train journey, carrying two enormous, musty-smelling folders. Opening the folders, we found 221 original Brassaï letters, along with postcards, early drawings, signed photos, newspaper clippings ..."

Károly Kincses of the Museum of Hungarian Photography introduces these previously unpublished excerpts and documents covering the last forty years of Brassaï's life, his years of great success.
Brassaï, born as Gyula Halász in Braşov in Transylvania (Brassó in Hungarian, hence his adopted name), spent some of his earliest years and most of his adult life in Paris, the city he is most associated with.
Many of his letters here are to his father, a teacher of French (who at the age of 86 demanded the lyrics of the Ça ira from his son). They refer to his plans, projects and successes, as well as his friends (including Picasso and Henry Miller) and acquaintances in the Parisian art world.
The documents are accompanied by 8 pages of photographs by and of Brassaï.

 

These concluding excerpts from Tamás Blum's memoir are introduced by the journalist Iván Bächer, who has some wry comments to make on "privileged" travel to the West during the Sixties and Seventies:
"Hungarian citizens may have been bound by strict regulations, but the rules were there to be broken; indeed one was obliged to break them. Typically for that merriest barracks in the socialist camp, such transgressions did not usually have serious consequences. Tamás Blum quite regularly prolonged his visits by making sure to miss his plane or train."

 

Itinerary
Part 2
by Tamás Blum

These extracts concern the years 1962 to 1972, when the conductor finally decided to remove himself and his family from Hungary.
"All of a sudden, (...) we thought we must have gone crazy. Among the elegant hotels emerged a group of about thirty people-caftanned Jews with side-curls, talking or arguing in what seemed to be Yiddish (Flemish it transpired). Their hotel was on that street, too, the kosher Edelweiss, where diamond cutters from Antwerp and wealthy Orthodox Jews from elsewhere came on vacation. They had come to an understanding with the local authorities that they would only go about the streets during the hours of darkness, thereby tacitly endorsing an unspoken presumption that by daylight they would spoil the overall picture.(...)
Anikó just laughed when I recounted this to her the next day, because for her they were just as much a part of the townscape as American millionaires, Arab or Greek nouveaux riches, poules de luxe, the Karajans and Greta Garbos of this world."
Thus, Tamás Blum on his first visit to St Moritz at the invitation of a childhood friend who, it turned out, had married the proprietor of the town's most elegant hotel. (The Blums stayed there subsequently as house guests, as they couldn't afford even the cheapest of the local hotels.) Further escapades and encounters in Scandinavia, Italy and Poland are described in his engaging anecdotal style.

 

Animated film-making flourished from the Sixties until the end of the Eighties in Hungary, exploiting the native wealth of folk tales and a captive cinema and television market. Generous state subsidies and commissioning effectively came to an end after 1990.
Two articles consider the then and now of Hungarian animation.

 

Suspended Animation
by Klára Muhi

"€1.0-1.2 million out of the Ministry of Culture's annual budget.(...) [This is] at best one fifth of the support that was set aside before 1989 (as a rough guide, one minute of animation costs approximately €4,000)."
Klára Muhi describes the successes scored before 1989, "when Pannónia was one of the best-known animation production companies in the world, ranking alongside the likes of Disney..."
She sees hope in the successes, both domestic (The District was a hit movie in cinemas in 2006) and foreign (with several films by young directors currently scoring on the international festival circuit).

Absolutely Animated
Áron Gauder, Géza M. Tóth and György Szemadám in Conversation
with László Kolozsi

Two acclaimed young directors: Áron Gauder, whose The District took the 2005 award for best feature-length animation film at Annecy, Géza M. Tóth (whose recent Maestro was Oscar-nominated) and another key figure in the animation world, György Szemadám, discuss their own work and that of another young talent, Tibor Bánóczky .

 

We offer "Four Stories" from Ervin Lázár's collection Csillagmajor, in a translation Judith Sollosy is preparing for U.S. publication. Csaba Károlyi reviews the collection in this issue.

György Dragomán's "Prince" is accompanied by a Lenke Szilágyi photograph, which the story was written in response to. In Paul Olchváry's translation.

 

Part of the palette of reviews through which The Hungarian Quarterly looks at books, theatre, music, cinema and the arts in each and every issue:

 

Unfixed City
by Anna T. Szabó

George Szirtes and Clarissa Upchurch: Budapest: Image, Poem, Film. Budapest, Corvina Press, 2006, 64 pp.

"These two, a painter turned poet and a painter of poetic intensity, are helping each other to interpret the mystery of the world by showing one single place, Budapest."
Anna T. Szabó examines "the quest for narrative" in this dual-language book, an investigation into the nature of the city and the relation between painting and film that the painter and her poet-husband have combined to produce around his long poem "The Reel" and her own response as a painter to Budapest.

 

Ferenc Molnár: The Plays and the Wives
by Mátyás Sárközi

...or not to be. Molnár Ferenc levelei Darvas Lilihez
(... or not to be: Ferenc Molnár's Letters to Lili Darvas) Budapest, Argumentum/Petőfi Irodalmi Múzeum, 2003, 145 pp.

"The distillation of theatre is illusion made real for the duration of two hours. Molnár felt much the same thing about marriage, which he regarded as an artificial institution depending for its success on the degree of skills in role-playing shown by the protagonists."
The grandson of the only Hungarian playwright to make a name internationally citest his comment on the convolutions of Molnár's marital ties, as he responds to Molnár's letters to the third and last of his wives, the actress Lili Darvas.

 

Comic Morals (György Spiró, Kornél Hamvai)
by Tamás Koltai

György Spiró: Prah • Kornél Hamvai: Szigliget (Writer's Retreat)

Our theatre reviewer looks at two plays attempting to reflect Hungary as it sees itself.
In Prah, Spiró uses a middle-aged couple who have just had a major win on the lottery to acidly comment on the years since the advent of democracy.
The eponymous Szigliget is an old country house, turned into a guest home for writers during the Communist years (and still so used). Hamvai takes Michael Frayn's Balmoral, in which the royal summer residence functions as such in a Communist-run Britain, to make his comments on the years before the advent of democracy.