Liszt's Transcultural Modernism and the Hungarian-Gypsy Tradition (review)

Was Franz Liszt Hungarian? This is arguably one of the most divisive questions to pose because it remains one of the most vexing to answer. After all, he was awarded the sabre of honor by a group of Hungarian nationalists in 1840, but he refrained from wielding it against their oppressors when revolution broke out eight years later. While he ostensibly disseminated Hungarian culture abroad via the symphonic poem Hungaria and the ubiquitous Hungarian Rhapsodies, he exposed his ignorance of authentic Hungarian music by privileging the "Gypsy" tradition in his Des Bohémiens et de leur musique en Hongrie of 1859—a decision which enraged more Hungarians than non-Hungarians. He could not even pass Herder's simple national litmus test, it seems, for although born on (Austro-)Hungarian soil, he never spoke the language. Answering the question in a form of pastiche, scholars have increasingly become comfortable with the label "cosmopolitan," citing Liszt's various, and at times contradictory, allegiances to France, Germany, Hungary, and Italy, among other national entities. (In this sense, Liszt's cosmopolitan modernism provides an interesting foil to Johannes Brahms's historicist modernism.) But such scholarly efforts to characterize Liszt's career and style as best represented by an aesthetic of unity in diversity often miss the real priority that Liszt gave to certain cultural projects at various points in his life: French and Italian opera in the 1830s and 1840s, the German symphonic and literary tradition during the 1850s, and church music from the 1860s.

One of the most misunderstood of these projects, as Shay Loya persuasively argues, is Liszt's complex relationship with the Hungarian-Gypsy musical tradition of verbunkos, to which Liszt was attached "both as a patriot and for more complex musical, aesthetic, and political reasons, which is why he tried out so many compositional possibilities and generic combinations that were well beyond the call of duty and the nationalist narrative" (p. 90). Over the course of an introduction and seven wide-ranging chapters, Loya shapes a provocative image of Liszt that is not so much cosmopolitan—that is, ambivalently yet still hierarchically assimilative—as it is transcultural, a concept which resists "the dichotomies (and implicitly Eurocentric) terms 'acculturation' (culture acquisition on the dominant culture's terms) and 'deculturation' (loss of culture)" (p. 5). Transcultural perspectives illuminate how material haphazardly flows back and forth between center and periphery; Loya, in charting this "dual directionality" (p. 26), seeks to flatten many of the stark dichotomies that persist in characterizing— and inevitably denigrating as inartistic, inauthentic, or anti-modern—Liszt's so-called Hungarian music. Taking aim squarely at musicological and music-theoretical practices that have shaped such entrenched attitudes, he argues that "[i]n this way, it is possible to balance a formal perspective on compositional craft with a more nuanced understanding of cultural context and then to force a confrontation between these modes of knowledge and perchance arrive at a synthesis of them" (p. 154).

Chapters 1 and 2 introduce and develop the fundamental concepts of transcultural modernism and verbunkos, respectively. Verbunkos is an important element in chapter 1, however. A useful table on pages 22-23 pithily demonstrates how a historical bias toward modernism has debased the style as conservative, generic, exotic, familiar, and naïve. The surprising appearance of critiques by Arnold Schoenberg and Steve Reich midway through chapter 1 convincingly demonstrates that verbunkos— when presented as unoriginal material, as clichéd style—has failed to gain much traction among composers and critics into the present day. Thus Loya devotes the remainder of chapter 1, and all of chapter 2, to a consideration of verbunkos's structural principles, harmonic practices, modal and scalar designs, and historical milestones— elements which generally have not factored into any previous consideration of a phenomenon whose documentation begins in the late eighteenth century. Chapter 2 concludes with an analysis of Liszt's two Werbungstänze...