Sándor Veress

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Sándor Veress in Baltimore (1966)

Sándor Veress [ ˈʃaːndor ˈvɛrɛʃ ] (born February 1, 1907 in Kolozsvár , then Austria-Hungary , now Romania ( Cluj-Napoca ); †  March 4, 1992 in Bern ) was a Hungarian - Swiss composer of the 20th century . He is considered to be one of the most important representatives of the generation of composers between Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály on the one hand and György Kurtág and György Ligeti on the other.

Life

Sándor Veress was born as the oldest child of the historian Endre Veress (1868-1953) and the contralto Mária Méhely (1880-1957). In 1915 the von Kolozsvár family moved to Budapest , where Endre Veress had been appointed to the post of Ministerial Counselor for Romanian National Affairs. Sándor received his first piano lessons at the age of 10.

From 1923 he studied piano at the Franz Liszt Music Academy in Budapest with Emánuel Hegyi and later with Béla Bartók. From 1925 to 1930 he was a composition student of Zoltán Kodály. In 1929 he started a traineeship with László Lajtha at the folk music department of the Budapest Ethnographic Museum and was trained in the methods of music ethnology . In 1930 he made his first collecting trip to the Csángó Magyars of the Romanian Moldova.

In 1933 the New Hungarian String Quartet took on the premiere of its 1st String Quartet . In 1935 the work was performed at the Prague ISCM -Fest, 1937, the premiere was followed by the second string quartet at the Paris ISCM -Tagen. The music publishers Rózsavölgyi and Magyar Kórus printed their first works - v. a. Pedagogical piano literature and folksong arrangements for various choirs.

From 1935 Veress worked - initially as Bartók's assistant, after his emigration to the USA (1940) under the direction of Kodály - at the complete edition of Hungarian folk song melodies, which was supervised by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and later (1951 ff.) Published as Corpus Musicae Popularis Hungaricae . At the end of 1938 he went to London for a year with the pianist Enid Mary Blake (1912-94), his future wife, whom he had met as a postgraduate student in Budapest in 1937, where he dealt with new methods of music education and Constant Lambert performed his divertimento .

Between spring 1941 and the end of 1942 he worked in Rome at the Teatro dell'Opera together with the dancer and choreographer Aurel von Milloss on his second ballet Térszili Katicza . Here he came into direct, formative contact for the first time with a key work of the Second Viennese School , Bergs Wozzeck , whose first Italian production under the musical direction of Tullio Serafin took place at this time. He also made his first connections with Edizioni Suvini Zerboni, his later Milan publisher .

At the end of 1943 Veress succeeded Kodály as professor of composition at the Franz Liszt Academy in Budapest . After the war there were u. a. György Kurtág , György Ligeti and Lajos Vass are his students.

In the spring of 1945 he joined the Hungarian Communist Party . The initially optimistic assessment of the party's contribution to the political new beginning of the early coalition period soon gave way to increasing skepticism. At the latest since a long stay in London in 1947, he actively pursued the plan of emigration to the West. In 1948 he was a member of the jury for the first time at the International Eisteddfod choir competition in Llangollen / Wales (last time: 1984). He also took part as an official delegate at the congress of the International Folk Music Council in Basel, where he was able to establish initial contacts with Paul Sacher . Two of the most important works of the first Swiss decade were later commissioned by Sacher: the piano concerto (1952), premiered in 1954 with Veress as soloist, and the concerto for string quartet (1961).

At the beginning of February 1949 Veress traveled to Stockholm to attend the world premiere of Térszili Katicza at the Royal Opera there , which was choreographed by Milloss . Meanwhile, the official Hungary awarded him the Kossuth Prize in absentia (March 1949). After the Stockholm premiere, he went to Rome for further performances of the ballet. Here, after months of persevering in the dark, during which the Stalinization of Hungarian domestic politics was heading towards its preliminary climax ( Rajk Trial: September 1949), the offer of a music ethnology guest semester at the institute's vacant Kurth chair, mediated by the musicologist Otto Gombosi for musicology from the University of Bern . Acceptance of this enabled him and his wife to move to Switzerland at the end of November 1949, where they received political asylum. On the other hand, he had not been able to take up a promised professorship in the United States because McCarthyism resented his former CP membership. However, Veress was not supposed to become a Swiss citizen until three months before his death, in December 1991, after an initial application in 1977 failed due to the restrictive legal situation at the time. Regardless, Veress was grateful to Switzerland in retrospect. Shortly before his 80th birthday, he noted: "What would have been impossible for me in Hungary, the humane personal freedom and the opportunities to develop my art, was given to me by Swiss soil." (Traub (1986): p. 54)

After completing his university guest semester, Veress was appointed to teach general music education, theoretical subjects and composition at the Bern Conservatory in the spring of 1950 (resignation: 1981). Over the years, Theo Hirsbrunner , Heinz Marti , Jürg Wyttenbach , János Tamás , Daniel Andres , Urs Peter Schneider , Heinz Holliger , Roland Moser and Jürg Hanselmann became his students here.

In the 1960s and early 1970s, Veress worked as a visiting professor at various US universities, including the Peabody Institute at Johns Hopkins University and Goucher College in Baltimore / Maryland (1965-1967) and the University of Portland / Oregon (1972 ). He also taught for one semester at the University of Adelaide / Australia (1967).

From 1968 Veress held a teaching post at the Institute for Musicology at the University of Bern - initially as an associate professor, from 1971 until his retirement in 1977 as a professor. His teaching assignment covered the systematic subjects including music education , music ethnology and music of the 20th century .

plant

The main influences that Veress received during his student days at Kodály are - in addition to the reference to the folk song that is generally characteristic of the Hungarian dawn of musical modernity - by the names Palestrina and Bach as well as those of the Italian and English madrigalists of the 17th century . What could be learned from these historical models: the good structure of a melody and the techniques of counterpoint, Veress considered exemplary throughout her life. Accordingly, this canon also determined his procedures as a processor of folk music material for educational purposes ( piano sonatins for children, children's choirs ) as well as his own later composition lessons at the Budapest Academy and the Bern Conservatory.

Apart from this continuous element in Veress' creative biography, the turning point that emigration set is unmistakable. In the advanced works of the 1930s - including the early piano sonata (1929), the sonatinas for different ensembles (1931-33), and in particular the two string quartets from 1931 and 1937 - Veress had already worked in places with a quasi-sequential sound material , so after 1950 there was an explicitly reflected turn to the twelve-tone, the theoretical basis of which he seems to have got to know , as far as can be reconstructed, through Fritz Büchtger in Munich (Traub (2006): Sp. 1491).

In keeping with the basic compositional approach outlined above, the dodecaphonic debuts of the early 1950s - the Piano Concerto (1952), the Sinfonia Minneapolitana (1953) and the eminently important string trio from 1954 - document a thoroughly undogmatic use of twelve-tone, which A. Traub aptly wrote characterized as “composing with the series despite the series” (Traub (1986): p. 99). There was space here for the modal "coloring" of series figures, for the incorporation of improvisational episodes in otherwise strict sentence forms and for an often almost physically concrete treatment of the rhythmic. In this sense, Veress went his own way, which of course also brought him increasingly distant from both Darmstadt serialism and later non-serialist tendencies in New Music and left him artistically lonely to a certain extent.

Regardless of this, the 1960s show Veress at the height of a mature willingness to experiment, which did not shy away from incorporating noisy sharpening, cluster-like condensation and aleatoric deliveries into the composition: The concerto for string quartet (1961) and the highly virtuosic Musica concertante for are representative of this 12 strings (1966) and the diptych for wind quintet (1968).

After a lengthy creative break between 1968 and 1977, not least due to his academic teaching activities, the Glasklängespiel (first performed in 1987 on the initiative of Daniel Glaus ) based on texts by Hermann Hesse ushered in a phase of new productivity that reveals retrospective and summarizing features of a late work . This applies in particular to the last three completed works for larger ensembles, the clarinet concerto (1982), the Orbis tonorum (1986) and the closely related tromboniad (1990). In the Orbis Veress draws a historical and at the same time autobiographical arc from the Tempi passati of the beginning to the Tempi da venire ...? the end, under which the suspended experiences of his composing appear again sentence by sentence in more or less pure expression: the ancient melody, the pentatonic, the humorous, the catastrophic break-in, tonal standstill / sounding silence, the developed plurality of free tone orders, the parody of the blind mechanical, the virtuoso concerto - in the end the precarious and questionable melody.

Awards

  • 1976: Music Prize of the Canton of Bern
  • 1985: Bartók Pásztory Prize
  • 1986: Composers Prize of the Swiss Tonkünstlerverein
  • 1987: Music Prize of the City of Bern
  • 1990: Honorary professor at the Franz Liszt Music Academy in Budapest
  • 1991: Order of the Banner of the Republic of Hungary

Works (selection)

(Note: The dates refer to the time of creation. Original Hungarian titles are only given where the work has either been unpublished or existed in a Hungarian first edition before its publication in the West or was reissued in Hungary)

Piano music

  • Sonata for piano (1929)
  • Sonatina for piano (1932)
  • Szonatina gyermekeknek [Sonatina for children] (1932)
  • Szonatina kezdö zongorázóknak [Sonatina for Young Pianists] (1933)
  • Húsz zongoradarab [Twenty Piano Pieces] (1938) - from it: Kis szvit [Small Suite]; Has Csárdás [Six Csárdás']; Seven Hungarian dances
  • Billegetőmuzsika / Fingerlarks . 88 pianistic exercises (1946/69)
  • Homage to Wales (1948)
  • 5 piano pieces (approx. 1950)

Chamber music

  • Trio for piano, violin and violoncello, B flat minor (1924)
  • Sonatina for violin and violoncello (ca.1928)
  • String Quartet I (1931)
  • Sonatina for violin and piano (1932)
  • Sonatina for violoncello and piano (1933)
  • Sonatina for oboe, clarinet and bassoon (1933)
  • Sonata for violin solo (1935)
  • String Quartet II (1937)
  • Second sonata for violin and piano (1939)
  • Hungarian commercial dance for violin and piano (1940)
  • Trio for violin, viola and violoncello (1954)
  • Trio (Tre quadri) for piano, violin and violoncello (1963)
  • Musica concertante per 12 archi , for twelve solo strings (1966)
  • Sonata for violoncello solo (1967)
  • Diptych for wind quintet (1968)
  • Introduzione e Coda for violin, clarinet and violoncello (1972)
  • Memento for viola and double bass (1983)
  • Baryton-Trio for baryton, viola and violoncello (1985)
  • Orbis tonorum for chamber ensemble (1986)

Orchestral works

  • Divertimento for chamber orchestra (1935)
  • Musica ungaresca for large orchestra (1938)
  • Szimfónia I for large orchestra (1940)
  • Four Transylvanian Dances for String Orchestra (1944/49)
  • Threnos in memoriam Béla Bartók for large orchestra (1945)
  • A csodafurulya [the miraculous shawl ]. Ballet Suite for Chamber Orchestra (1947)
  • Respublica nyitány [Respublica Ouverture] for large orchestra (1948)
  • Sonata per orchestra for large orchestra (1953)
  • Sinfonia II, Minneapolitana for large orchestra (1953)
  • Expovare for small orchestra (1964)

Concerts

  • Concerto for violin and orchestra (1939/48)
  • Hommage à Paul Klee for 2 pianos and string orchestra (1951)
  • Concerto for piano , strings and percussion (1952)
  • Passacaglia concertante for oboe and strings (1961)
  • Concerto for string quartet and orchestra (1961)
  • Concerto for clarinet , harp, percussion and strings (1982)
  • Tromboniade for 2 trombones and orchestra (1990)
  • Concertotilinkó for flute and strings (concert piece) (1991)

Vocal music

Song with piano accompaniment

  • Cheremiss songs (1945)
  • József Attila dalok [Songs based on texts by Attila József ] (1945)

Orchestral song

A cappella choir

  • Tizennégy Férfikar magyar népi dallamokra [Fourteen male choirs on Hungarian folk melodies] (1934)
  • A Transylvanian cantata for mixed choir (1936)
  • Tizenöt Gyermekkar [Fifteen Children's Choirs] (1936)
  • Két virágének [Two Flower Songs ] for three-part female or male choir (1936)
  • Rábaközi nóták [Songs from Rábaköz] for male choir (1940)
  • Ode to Europe after Gyula Illyés for mixed choir (1962)
  • Songs of the Seasons based on texts by Christopher Brennan for mixed choir (1967)

Cantata and choir song

  • Sancti Augustini Psalmus contra partem Donati after Augustine for bass, mixed choir and orchestra (1944)
  • Laudation musicae. An "ear-pleasing and mind-delighting Tafelconfect" after Valentin Rathgeber for soprano, mixed choir and chamber orchestra (1958)
  • Das Glasklängespiel on texts by Hermann Hesse for mixed choir and chamber orchestra (1978)

Ballets

  • A csodafurulya [the miraculous shawl ]. Ballet in one act (1937)
  • Térszili Katicza . Ballet in one act.Libretto: Aurel von Milloss (1943)

Film music

  • with Ferenc Farkas : Talpalatnyi föld [To a foot's breadth of land] based on the novel trilogy of the same title by Pál Szabó. Directed by Frigyes Bán (1948)

literature

  • Melinda Berlász, János Demény, Ede Terényi (eds.): Veress Sándor. Tanulmányok. Zenemükiadó, Budapest 1982.
  • Andreas Traub (Ed.): Sándor Veress. Festschrift for the 80th birthday. Haseloff, Berlin 1986.
  • Ferenc Bónis: Three Days with Sándor Veress, the Composer. Part I. In: The New Hungarian Quarterly. ( NHQ ) 28, No. 108, 1987, pp. 201-210; Part II. In: NHQ. 29, No. 109, 1988, pp. 217-225; Part III. In: NHQ. 29, No. 111, 1988, pp. 208-214. Pallas Lap- és Könyvkiadó, Budapest 1987/88.
  • Andreas Traub : Sándor Veress. In: Hanns-Werner Heister, Walter-Wolfgang Sparrer (ed.): Contemporary composers . ( KDG ). Edition text + kritik , Munich 1992 ff. 21. Subsequent delivery 2001.
  • Andreas Traub (Ed.): Sándor Veress. Articles, lectures, letters. Cloud, Hofheim 1998.
  • Thomas Gerlich: A new beginning in the "adopted home"? To Sándor Veress' “Hommage à Paul Klee”. In: "Entre Denges et Denezy ...": Documents on Swiss music history 1900–2000. Edited by Ulrich Mosch in collaboration with Matthias Kassel. Schott, Mainz 2000, pp. 399-406.
  • Andreas Traub: Sándor Veress and Exile: From the “Transylvanian Cantata” (1936) to “Elegy” (1964). In: Péter Csobádi et al. (Ed.): The (music) theater in exile and dictatorship. Lectures and discussions at the Salzburg Symposium 2003. Anif, Salzburg 2005, pp. 533-540.
  • Hanspeter Renggli: Sándor Veress . In: Andreas Kotte (Ed.): Theater Lexikon der Schweiz . Volume 3, Chronos, Zurich 2005, ISBN 3-0340-0715-9 , p. 1999.
  • Andreas Traub: Veress, Sándor. In: Ludwig Finscher (Hrsg.): The music in past and present . ( MGG ). 2nd Edition. Person part, band. 16. Bärenreiter, Kassel, Stuttgart 2006, Sp. 1487-1492.
  • Rachel Beckles Willson: Ligeti, Kurtág, and Hungarian Music during the Cold War. Cambridge University Press, New York 2007.
  • Doris Lanz, Anselm Gerhard (ed.): Sándor Veress. Composer - teacher - researcher. Bärenreiter, Kassel 2008. - With contributions by: Rachel Beckles Willson, Melinda Berlász, Bodo Bischoff , Simone Hohmaier, Heinz Holliger, Michael Kunkel, Péter Laki, Doris Lanz, Friedemann Sallis, Andreas Traub, Claudio Veress.
  • Bodo Bischoff: "Corale" - end of the game - close or stop? On cyclical aspects of the endings of sentences in Sándor Veress' "Glasklängespiel" . In: Doris Lanz, Anselm Gerhard (Ed.): Sándor Veress. Composer - teacher - researcher. Bärenreiter, Kassel 2008, pp. 107–122.
  • Bodo Bischoff: "Canzonetta" - small singing or the human voice. On compositional "perspectives" in the 3rd movement of Veress' "Glasklängespiel" . In: Doris Lanz, Anselm Gerhard (Ed.): Sándor Veress. Composer - teacher - researcher. Bärenreiter, Kassel 2008, pp. 123–141.
  • Rachel Beckles Willson: Letters to America. In: Friedemann Sallis (Ed.): Center and Periphery, Roots and Exile. Wilfrid Laurier University Press, Waterloo 2009, pp. 129-173.
  • Friedemann Sallis: "We play with the music and the music plays with us": Sándor Veress and his student György Ligeti. In: Louise Duchesneau & Wolfgang Marx (eds.): György Ligeti. Of Foreign Lands and Strange Sounds. The Boydell Press. Woodbridge / Rochester 2011, pp. 1-16.
  • About Veress performances by the Dresden Kreuzchor, in: Matthias Herrmann (ed.): Dresdner Kreuzchor and contemporary choral music. World premieres between Richter and Kreile , Marburg 2017, pp. 119–121, 320 (Schriften des Dresdner Kreuzchor, Vol. 2)

Web links

Commons : Sándor Veress  - collection of images, videos and audio files
personal data
SURNAME Veress, Sándor
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Hungarian composer
DATE OF BIRTH February 1, 1907
PLACE OF BIRTH Kolozsvár (German Cluj)
DATE OF DEATH March 4th 1992
Place of death Bern