The Notion of Central Europe and Transnational Relations in Cold War Musicology

Bence Szabolcsi and The New Oxford History of Music

Lecture with Lóránt Péteri (Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music, Budapest)

Receiving his doctorate from Leipzig University in 1923, appointed professor of the Liszt Academy of Music (Budapest) in 1945, and elected member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 1948, Bence Szabolcsi was one of the founders of modern Hungarian musicology. As head of the Musicology Department of the Liszt Academy, director of the Budapest Bartók Archives and president of the Committee of Musicology at the Hungarian Academy of Music, Szabolcsi became the single most influential figure of the professional field by the late1960s. In his paper, Lóránt Péteri will address two questions that he believes to be closely related. On the one hand, Péteri examines the role that references to European regions played in the musicological oeuvre of Szabolcsi; on the other hand, he examines the extent to which regional categories can promote the understanding of Szabolcsi’s biography and career. The main focus of Péteri’s lecture is a single text by Szabolcsi, which had been commissioned, but was finally rejected by the editorial board of The New Oxford History of Music (‘The dissolution of romanticism: fin de siècle and the turn of the century in Central Europe’, 1968). By outlining the historiographical, cultural political, and biographical context of Szabolcsi’s chapter, Péteri seeks to identify some broader phenomena of ‘transsystemic’ relations between East and West during the Cold War on the one hand, and of the post-Stalinist cultural politics of Hungary, on the other.

Lóránt Péteri is University Professor, Head of the Musicology Department, and Head of the Central European Music Research Group at the Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music (State University), Budapest. He received his PhD degree from the University of Bristol, UK, in 2008, and his habilitation from the Liszt Academy, in 2015. He is a member of the Advisory Board of the Gustav Mahler Research Centre, Toblach. He is the author of two books, numerous book chapters and journal articles, and also co-editor of three edited volumes and a special issue.