Ernst von Dohnányi: A Song of Life

Editor's Preface

EDITOR’S PREFACE Ernst von Dohnányi (1877–1960) was one of the most highly regarded musicians of his time. From a young age Dohnányi enjoyed an international prestige that brought him into contact with such nineteenth-century masters as Eugène d’Albert and Johannes Brahms. Dohnányi’s technique and interpretive skills as a pianist and a conductor are legendary. He is also remembered as the composer of numerous masterpieces for piano, chamber ensembles, and orchestra. As a teacher and administrator, Dohnányi was responsible for the training of an entire generation of musicians in Hungary, including Géza Anda, Béla Bartók, György Cziffra, Annie Fischer , Andor Foldes, Boris Goldovsky, Edward Kilenyi, Jr., and Georg Solti. Dohnányi’s most significant contribution, however, may have been the integral role he played in developing the musical culture of Hungary. Despite this, his homeland turned its back on him in 1945 when he was falsely accused of being a Nazi sympathizer. Dohnányi was eventually able to disprove the allegations, but rumors would follow him for the rest of his life, causing irreparable damage to his reputation. It was not until 1968, twenty-three years after Dohnányi’s expatriation and eight years after his death, that his name was finally removed from the blacklist in Eastern Europe. Since then, the Hungarian government has gradually increased its recognition of Dohnányi’s contributions. In 1990 Dohnányi was posthumously awarded the Kossuth Prize, the highest award a Hungarian citizen can receive. Hungary has also named a music school and a street adjacent to the Franz Liszt Academy of Music after Dohnányi. The Hungarian Ministry of Culture is currently working toward establishing an International Dohnányi Research Center in Budapest. As a result of both Dohnányi’s damaged political reputation and his rejection of avant-garde techniques, his recordings and compositions were largely ignored in the latter half of the twentieth century. In recent years, however, musicians have begun to revise their interpretations of twentiethcentury music history to include brilliant compositional and performance styles that, like Dohnányi’s, adhered more closely to nineteenth-century Editor’s Preface | vii aesthetics, and performers and audiences all over the world have begun to rediscover Dohnányi’s musical legacy. Nevertheless, the effects of Dohnányi’s blacklisting are still evident in the lack of information available on him. Until now, the only biography of Dohnányi has been Bálint Vázsonyi’s distinguished work, Dohnányi Erno = (Budapest: Zenemu=kiadó, 1971), which is in Hungarian. In addition to filling a conspicuous void as the first English-language biography of Dohnányi, Ernst von Dohnányi: A Song of Life presents a unique perspective in that it was written by Ilona von Dohnányi (1909–88), Dohnányi’s third wife. Consequently, parts of this biography are also somewhat autobiographical. As a writer, Mrs. Dohnányi contributed to newspaper columns, edited magazines, and authored historical novels in Hungarian, Spanish, and English. She also wrote biographies in Hungarian of composers Vincenzo Bellini, Gaetano Donizetti, Gioacchino Rossini, and Robert and Clara Schumann. Mrs. Dohnányi’s published books on her husband include From Death to Life (Tallahassee: Rose Printing Co., 1960), in which she chronicled her struggle to come to terms with her husband’s death, and Message to Posterity from Ernst von Dohnányi (Jacksonville: H. and W. B. Drew, 1960), which she described as a collection of Dohnányi’s meditations. The subtitle “A Song of Life” is derived from the translation of the title of Dohnányi’s symphonic cantata Cantus vitae, op. 38. In addition to being his largest-scale composition, Cantus vitae was the work that Dohnányi felt best reflected his own philosophies. Although Mrs. Dohnányi gave the title Cantus vitae to a German version of this biography and entitled the English version simply “The Life of Ernst von Dohnányi,” there is no better way to characterize Dohnányi’s life than by invoking his most personal work. Furthermore, this biography is indeed a “Song of Life.” The book can be divided roughly in half: the first half, which comprises Dohnányi’s life through 1937, is the story of a great Hungarian musician who brought international prominence to Hungarian music through his own unparalleled success as a virtuoso pianist, composer, conductor, and pedagogue; the second half, which Ilona von Dohnányi personally witnessed, is the tragic story of a man...