Mahler's Music in Hungary, 1920–1956: Performance, Reception, Politics

Abstract The music of Gustav Mahler was almost completely excluded from Budapest's concert halls between 1938 and 1945, and again between 1952 and 1957. Its position within the Hungarian public sphere was, however, definitely strengthened in the period from the early 1920s to the mid-1930s, and stabilized again from 1958. Chronological correlations between performance and political history highlight the destructive influence of anti-Semitic discrimination elevated to the level of government policy and of the Stalinist political course on the presence of Mahler's music. From 1921 until 1937, Gustav Mahler's music was performed on a regular basis in the concert halls of the Hungarian capital. During that decade and a half, the majority of Mahler's works were present in Budapest, and, in 1935, even the unfinished Symphony no. 10 was premiered in the city. In the interwar period, the framework of Hungarian social and political life was a conservative parliamentary system with authoritarian elements. However, the public sphere under that regime was, at least until the late thirties, multipolar both in cultural and ideological sense, and it had a pluralistic structure. Mahler's music had conservative as well as left-wing and modernist adherents, while his art was rejected by representatives of folkloristic neo-classicism, by Zoltán Kodály and musicologists belonging to his inner circle. Mahler's music was performed in Budapest owing to the efforts of Hungarian and German-Austrian conductors, who formed a heterogeneous group in terms of socio-cultural background and political orientation. Following the war, the Holocaust and the wave of emigration, Mahler's works were performed again by a largely different group of musicians. But the relative boom of a few years was soon interrupted, and Mahler interpretation in Hungary withered away. The Mahler Renaissance, which took off in 1960, arrived from the Western centers to Hungary, where it produced not insignificant, but typically peripherial results. In my paper, I would like to position the situation of Mahler's music in Budapest within the context of the global reception of the composer. Furthermore, I will also attempt to answer the question to what extent Mahler's personal relationship with Hungarian musical institutions and with the musical elite in Budapest determined the posthumous reception of his music in Hungary.