Introduction
This article explores the relationships between utopianism, activism, and networks in the early career of the Hungarian musicologist János Maróthy (1925–2001). A prolific author of pioneering work on the social history of European peasant and urban folk song from the antiquity to the modern era, Maróthy is noteworthy for establishing academic research of popular music in Hungary, preceding and contributing to the emergence of new musicology and popular music studies in Western academia at the turn of the 1980s. Nonetheless, owing to the fall from favour of Marxism in East Central Europe, his name and work are barely known to younger generations of music scholars either at home or abroad. While not a specialist of popular music, Maróthy studied a range of musical forms and styles, both art and popular, relevant to the concerns and daily life of working people across centuries and cultures. He was an activist scholar mediating between various grassroots movements and the party state's institutions as well as a participant observer of various off-the-mainstream music scenes formed in Romani workers’ hostels and jazz clubs. His Department of Music Sociology (1969–1996) within the Institute for Musicology of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences conducted and commissioned research on the local history of workers’ songs, urban folklore, the social life and institutions of youth music. He sponsored one of the first large-scale empirical surveys of musical taste.Footnote 1 Besides collaborating with colleagues within the Soviet Bloc, Maróthy became a recognised member of a wider circle of left-wing scholars and artists concerned with folk and political music and the ‘popular’ avantgarde (Nueva Canción, Musica Realtà, etc.).
As part of a larger project, the present article offers a critical overview of Maróthy's career from its onset in 1948 – coinciding with the communist takeover in Hungary – to the anti-Soviet revolution of 1956, to the years up to the early 1960s. This turbulent period of less than 20 years witnessed the most repressive years of Stalinism, the uprising and its defeat followed by the more liberal Kádár era.Footnote 2
Maróthy's accomplishments have, primarily, been interwoven with the history of state socialism – its utopian promises, crises and eventual collapse. Yet in his work and thought, he sought to transcend this reality as evidenced by his frequent reference to his beloved poet Attila József's lines: ‘I will step past our times’ carouse/to understanding and beyond!’Footnote 3 Not merely an intellectual orientation, Maróthy's distinctive utopianism, whose content and meaning shifted over the decades, was shaped by history, geopolitics and his personal vision and temperament.
During state socialism Maróthy participated in an art world (Becker Reference Becker1982) divided into two realms, each organised along different principles, ideas, discourses and conventions. The traditional musical art world Hungarians were about to revive after 1945 emphasised continuity with the past (except for the fascist and antisemitic intrusions into its workings between 1938 and 1944); national and European reference points, an exclusive respect for classical, folk and religious music; and from the 1960s onward, incorporating contemporary Western currents. Musical performance and loyalty between masters and students served as the basis for recruitment. The other realm of the musical art world sprang into life with the communist takeover, and in suppressing the conservative realm of the art world, implemented a sharp break with the past, demanding strict adherence to the Communist Party's ideologies and policies with reference to the contemporary Soviet model. The latter marked a highly selective approach to European and domestic history of music and a compositional approach based on it. In addition, the communist model initially subverted the value-laden distinction between classical and popular music and redefined folk music. It also produced, like in other scientific communities, a new type of social actor, ‘the party-soldier intellectual’ recruited and promoted by a cadres administration (G. Péteri Reference Péteri1997). Throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, the period covered in this article, the struggle between these two realms defined professional music life in Hungary. Maróthy was a creative and, in many ways, a maverick in the communist-led realm, who, partly through his scholarly erudition and his respect for diversity in musicological and compositional perspectives, built rare and fragile bridges between all sides.
A young historian's breakthrough in Hungary's postwar musical establishment
After World War II and under Soviet occupation, Hungary's relatively sophisticated institutions of classical music, music education and amateur choir movement lay in ruins. Jewish and/or left-wing music professionals had become victims or survivors of the Holocaust and Hungary's fascist dictatorship (1944–1945). While some returned from temporary emigration, others left the country. The postwar sociopolitical space in which the rebuilding occurred was extremely unstable and subject to dramatic shifts. The actors shaping the postwar scene – composers, academics, critics and performers – had largely preserved their collegial and master–student networks. The years from 1945 to 1948 were filled with reformist fervour about building a democratic and broad-based system of musical creativity, practice and education. This was also a highly competitive space with a number of actors vying for dominance (L. Péteri Reference Péteri, Gyarmati and Péteri2019). Many would-be reformers including Maróthy (Reference Maróthy1975) remembered this brief era as a golden age. However, by 1947 it became clear that within the multiparty democratic arrangement the Hungarian Communist Party backed by the Soviet occupying forces would become the dominant agent of macropolitical change.
In the wake of the communist takeover, every top institution of music life, similarly to those of literary and art production, became subordinated to control by the Party. This entailed the removal of well-known and respectable professionals from their leadership positions including from the cultural ministry, university professorships, music directorial posts of major symphony orchestras or jobs as music critics. The period between 1948 and 1951 may be regarded as the harshest years of Stalinist rearrangement when, according to Lóránt Péteri's social history of music institutions, no one could count on staying atop or afloat, whether communist, social democrat or religious conservative, high ranking or rank-and-file party members. Young communist cadres could be about as vulnerable to displacement as prewar-era intellectuals of the profession (L. Péteri Reference Péteri2003). The Stalinist–Zhdanovist ideology played an inordinate role in shaping these relations. To expand its hegemony in 1949, the Union of Hungarian Musicians (Magyar Zeneművészek Szövetsége, further referred to as UHM) was established, modelled after its Soviet counterpart. Its stated goal was to integrate those Hungarian musical artists who ‘wish to create and spread among the broadest ranks of the people art of the highest quality that serves […] the cause of the working classes by portraying their life, struggles and victory’. It monopolised the commission of new works and subjected them to collective criticism. Yet, importantly, it only represented the professional elite such as composers of predominantly classical music, musicologists and critics, and a significantly smaller percentage of the country's performers and music educators (L. Péteri Reference Péteri, Gyarmati and Péteri2019, p. 80). The UHM's role was to implement Soviet music policies while eroding the supremacy of the prevailing art world with its folk-music based classicism and (Western) European orientation represented primarily by the internationally known composer, educator, and folk music researcher Zoltán Kodály.Footnote 4 Before delving into the discussion of how effective the UHM's quest of Sovietisation was, let us see how the young Maróthy established himself in this terrain of constant flux.
As soon as obtaining his diploma in the Humanities Faculty of Pázmány Péter University (later renamed Eötvös Loránd University) of Budapest in 1948, Maróthy assumed many different roles such as public educator, researcher, journal editor, music critic and choir activist, dabbling in composing mass songs as well. Barely aged 23, he published theoretical writings and travelled across the country to deliver lectures, some of which were broadcast on national radio. Before long, he enrolled in the Franz Liszt Academy of Music, the country's most prestigious institution for higher music education, to study composition from János Viski and music history from Bence Szabolcsi.Footnote 5 Still a student, he addressed a wide array of musical topics including individual compositions and composers, contemporary Hungarian and Soviet trends in art music or the problems with the domestic choir movement; in addition, he explored the historical evolution of the relationship in music between individual and community, while finding time to chronicle working class people's commemoration of the recently deceased composer Béla Bartók.
Free-spirited thoughts on jazz, Bartók and millions’ musical vernacular
Maróthy's earliest writings portray a forward-looking and open-minded musicologist. His essay ‘Improvisation and Romanticism’ (Improvizáció és romantika) was published in the last moment preceding the domestic implementation of the 1948 musical resolution of the Soviet Communist Party, authored by Andrei Zhdanov. Unaffected, Maróthy was still contemplating a progressive music culture ‘closely interlinked with society’, simultaneously inspired by ‘steel-powered [acélos erejű] American boogie-woogie’ and Bartók's energetic rhythms (1948b). In this unorthodox musical vision, African American improvisatory music converged with Béla Bartók's modernism; the (European) ‘East’ met with the ‘West’ as did ‘Europe’ with ‘America’, as well as the long-separated realms of popular and art musics. In Maróthy's evocative prose the ‘pickaxe blows of the solitary genius’ refer to the romantically conceived composer, while the ‘cacophony of the cheery crowds’ stands as a metaphor of the world of popular music (Maróthy Reference Maróthy1948b). The posited creative confluence of the genius with the crowds reveals Maróthy's optimism, shared by many young intellectuals at the time, regarding the prospect of rebuilding a war-torn society. These ideas moreover echo the overlapping cultural policies of postwar coalition parties concerned with a broad-based democratic system of public education (Ignácz Reference Ignácz2020, p. 90).
In this brief era preceding Cold War paranoia, Maróthy penned ‘Music of Millions’ (Milliók zenéje), another essay full of vivid metaphors, inviting his readers to think about complex cultural issues (Reference Maróthy1948a). Digressing from the established elitist mental tracks onto uncharted territories, this piece may be regarded as a precursor of what was to become popular music studies, raising the key musicological, sociological and aesthetic problems of the field: what is the nature of popular music and how best to study it?Footnote 6 How is ‘popular’ different from ‘folk’ music? When and through what historical processes did ‘popular’ genres become the poor relative of ‘classical’ music? And, finally, why cannot musicologists avoid popular music as an object of inquiry? Instead of treating popular music's research as a specialised area, the author elevates it to the centre of a genuinely democratic aesthetics of music. Popular music, Maróthy observes, represents a cluster of genres ‘that practically is closest, while theoretically is furthest from us; whose existence is not even acknowledged by many. Yet, like it or not, this music filters in through our windows, blasts in our ears in the street; its rhythms pulse on radio, amplified by loudspeakers; idle people whistle it in the apartments next to ours; in brief, it seeps into our life with our every step, movement and breath’ (Maróthy Reference Maróthy1948a, p. 255). Despite this, he readily admits to being repelled by ‘jazz and dance music [being] consumed as the only kind of music available to a vast social stratum to fulfill their musical needs’. He deplores fellow humans jumping around to ‘swampy’ sounds ‘with a mindless stupid grin on their faces’. Nonetheless, he is quick to warn that the musically uneducated cannot be dismissed, since their music – like the compositions of Mozart, Schubert or Bartók for the educated – resonates with their fundamental emotional and psychological needs; indeed, ‘they seek to communicate what is inexpressible through their words’ with these rhythms and tunes (Maróthy Reference Maróthy1948a, p. 255).
Maróthy stopped short of legitimising popular music in the Bourdieusian (Reference Bourdieu2010) sense. However, similarly to the theorists of Frankfurt School, notably T.W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer (Reference Adorno and Horkheimer1972),Footnote 7 he conceptualised it as a historical product of modernisation processes including industrialisation, technological progress, urbanisation and colonisation.Footnote 8 Unlike Lukács and himself, once immersed in Marxism, the young Maróthy does not view modernisation through an anticapitalist prism yet. Instead, he states that ‘[w]e have no reason to assume that business has a deleterious effect on culture, since artists, by and large, have never enjoyed creative freedom. What a monarch or some other patron demanded from them is in our times expressed as a demand from a substantially broader circle of patrons, the public, in the form of market demand and pricing’ (Reference Maróthy1948a, p. 256). Neither does Maróthy think in social class categories; unlike the terms ‘people’ or ‘mass’ widely used after the communist takeover, the ‘millions’ in the title simply refers to multitudes.
What, one may ask, is the conundrum of modern popular music? Maróthy, influenced by Szabolcsi's theory of vernacular music, contends that ‘the song-producing capacity of the people’, which had nourished the art music of earlier centuries, ‘gradually dried up’, and ‘folk music's place was being occupied by a newly popular kind of music no longer produced by folkloric-communal activity. Instead, it was the work of individual, musically somewhat trained, composers deriving their material predominantly by diluting the expressive vocabulary of Viennese classicism’ (Maróthy Reference Maróthy1948a, p. 256). The author construes this as a process of diffusion whereby members of formerly isolated communities, having shifted their locations and lifestyles, became exposed to professional composed music. Drawing on Romantic folklorism, Maróthy scorns this process as the adulteration of ‘the people's pristine creative imagination’. And what modernisation produced in the shifting relationship between the music of the masses and that of the ‘great masters’ is inferred to have transpired on a global scale via colonisation. In Maróthy's words, ‘The civilised West has become one metropolis radiating its influence towards the big village, the […] primitive peoples’. Modernisation and colonisation, in his still malleable narrative, brought about the mixing of the ‘ancient’ and ‘pure’ indigenous musics with (European) classical music, giving rise to an allegedly ‘horrible’ vernacular (konyhanyelv). Nonetheless, he held out the belief that, over time, variants of this vernacular would forge a broad yet artistically valuable musical language.
Utopia as lived experience
What in Hungarian parlance is called ‘the fifties’, referring to the country's Stalinist era ending in 1956, started in 1948. A year later, the domestic implementation of Zhdanov's notion of socialist realism put a drastic end to the marketplace of ideas and bold visions concerning the resuscitation of Hungary's music culture. Composers were expected to produce party-conforming and aesthetically correct works accessible to ordinary people generally termed as ‘the masses’ or the ‘people’. To bolster the fight against cosmopolitanism, they had to adhere to national folk-based music traditions and, in keeping with the anti-West tenor of the Cold War, most styles following the Romantic period in Western (European) music history were labelled as decadent, hence the wholesale prohibition of 20th century avantgarde rejected for its ‘formalism’, that is, assumedly excessive focus on the musical language at the expense of its ‘content’. Popular styles influenced by jazz (swing, boogie-woogie, improvisation) echoed European elitist and racist contempt for American, especially Black American sounds and rhythms as perverse or animalistic. Stalin's socialist realist formula was deceptively simple: socialist ideological ‘content’ was to be articulated in each country's national-folkloric musical language or ‘form’ conceived as an empty vessel. If postwar Stalinism represented the ‘largest deliberately designed experiment in globalisation in modern history’ (G. Péteri Reference Péteri2008, p. 6), socialist realism must be seen as its artistic–ideological facet, a means to further it.
It was in this spirit that in 1948, under Soviet auspices, the Syndicate of Czech Composers convened an international congress for ‘progressive composers and music critics’ in Prague to remedy the alleged crisis of global music culture (Blüml and Ignácz Reference Blüml and Ignácz2022). The resolution of the congress featured the perceived gulf between art and popular music, the former's content criticised as ‘increasingly individualistic and subjective’, while deemed ‘complex and mechanically organised’ regarding its form. Popular music, on the contrary, became dismissed as ‘exceedingly superficial and […] formulaic’. Participants set as their goal to bridge the gap between ‘high’ and ‘low’ musical genres, stave off ‘falsely international [read: Western] musical currents’ and replace them with mass musical genres capable of expressing ‘more salient musical contents’ (A zeneszerzők és zenekritikusok 1948).
By then, Maróthy was a staunch supporter of Sovietisation with allies like the composer and former high-ranking officer of the Red Army, Ferenc Szabó and other communist musical artists such as András Mihály, Endre Székely and Tibor Sárai. Among their opponents were composers like Kodály's student Pál Járdányi, Jenő Ádám, Gyula Dávid and others. It was in this swiftly transforming and austere cultural political context that Maróthy gained prominence in Hungary's musical establishment. His professional and activist work was covered in surprising detail by the press, evidencing the party-state's investment in the creation of socialist realist music, even to the extent of privileging composers in political representation and remuneration – especially those in classical music – in comparison with concert musicians and educators.
Maróthy served as editor of Éneklő Nép (Singing People), the bulletin of the short-lived Béla Bartók Federation (1948–1951) coordinating amateur musical movements. Soon he became managing editor of Új Zenei Szemle (New Musical Review), published by the UHM. He also worked in UHM's Section of Musicology, heading its Section of Mass Music, while contributing to the debates of the Section of Entertainment Music, for breaking down the generic boundaries between mass music (movement songs) and dance music was central to Maróthy's approach to popular music at the time. With the Zhdanovist–Stalinist version of Marxism enjoying the status of a state religion, Maróthy portrayed Soviet choral music as an example to follow. He laid out the path of the development of socialist music culture and spelled out the idea of party conformity for his fellow musicians. He argued that ‘musicology cannot fulfill its […] mission unless it completely follows the [Communist] Party's dictates’, adding that ‘like in every other area, we should turn to Soviet musicology for […] guidance’ (Reference Maróthy1950b, p. 97), and he decried the Hungarian schlagers of both past and present along with the Western musical fads indiscriminately termed as ‘jazz’ (Reference Maróthy1950c). He urged his colleagues to compose a new kind of music for the masses with artistic merit.
The period between 1948 and 1951 may have been an inspiring and intoxicating time for Maróthy. He engineered but also engaged in grassroots work in what for a short time seemed a grand historical experiment. He was even to head the UHM's Section Musicology and the newly formed Musicology Department at the Academy of Music, replacing his more traditional-minded professor, Szabolcsi (L. Péteri Reference Péteri, Gyarmati and Péteri2019, p. 15). However, a shift in top-level cultural policy deemed this move injudicious, given Szabolcsi's revered status in the professional community. Later, looking back, Maróthy remembered these years as comprising fervent planning and organising, sprouting new intellectual working groups debating pivotal issues such as the communal aspects of folk and art musics or possible modes of addressing ‘the masses.’ In his account, Tibor Tallián describes post-World War II effervescence thus:
Under the heading ‘open educational movement’ the system of people's education resumed operating in the highest gear. Kodály's youth music movement reached its zenith, and this was the heyday of the labour movement's musical and educational philosophy. (Reference Tallián2014, p. 143)
However, by 1949 the effervescence was all but over. Having unseated the rival Social Democratic Party, the Communist Party shut down the self-governed educational organisations of the labour movement, alongside the newly flourishing musical activities within the churches (Tallián Reference Tallián2014, pp. 143–147). In contrast, the official discourse painted a fully paved road bridging the present with the communist utopia; in other words, the imagined future was projected onto the present (see also Fitzpatrick Reference Fitzpatrick1992) and the dictates of socialist realism demanded that artists represent the world through such a prism. ‘After all, what else could be the mission of the arts’, Tallián comments with irony, ‘than what Potemkin achieved so successfully by constructing a bright second reality, which, while did not exist, was visible nonetheless?’ (Tallián Reference Tallián2014, p. 271). People's faith in a fundamentally different and infinitely more just social order being just around the corner, merely requiring the coordinated effort of ordinary working people, may have offered an immediately empowering and invigorating experience as well. (Even though, as we pointed out earlier, the new regime produced striking injustices even within the musicians’ communities.) Maróthy, like many other young intellectuals and workers at the time, partook in this utopianistic experience supported by his soaring career. He remained captive to this enthusiasm even when, to cite Svetlana Boym, mass songs served as soundtracks to daily life in internment camps, mass incarcerations and show trials (Reference Boym, Lahusen and Dobrenko1997, p. 123).
In his writings, Maróthy depicted a social world rife with utopian moments. In welcoming a new compilation of ‘folk songs’, he remarks that it was ‘virtually the only book to meet the enormous demand for folksongs that has arisen among our people since the country's liberation’.Footnote 9 ‘Growing masses of people […] have recognised in folk songs the kind of art that holds a mirror to their own thoughts and feelings, evokes their own history, and forms the basis of the musical expression of their own present and future.’ Taking for granted rather than exploring whether the people (nép) had indeed identified deeply with the world of folk songs, Maróthy noticed a ‘massive demand’ not only for traditional peasant songs but ‘songs whose lyrics were written by our poets about our present reality’ (Reference Maróthy1952, p. 4). He bemoans, however, that these works were omitted from the compilation. Their omission was hardly coincidental since the more conservative segment of the musical establishment resisted the redefinition of folk as contemporary songs composed by professionals for and on behalf of the working classes.
Utopia seeps into reality in Maróthy's early pieces of music criticism as well, designed to offer a textbook example of how to appreciate socialist realism in music. The following passage is taken from his review of Endre Szervánszky's Hungarian Soldier Cantata (Honvéd kantáta):
The socialist realist artist's task is to exhibit reality in its richness, beauty, and truth. The extent to which the composer has succeeded in presenting the richness of our lives in a realist manner and draw general conclusions from it is perhaps best exemplified by the third movement of the piece […] we feel that never before had we enjoyed such a beautiful evening rest; that [the composer] presents us with the most beautiful and most essential features of the way we experience our evening rests. Having listened to this work, we will see more clearly the beauty of our own lives and continue our work with more enthusiasm. (Reference Maróthy1950a, p. 31)
A close reading of this passage reveals that socialist realist art reflects reality but perhaps not in its fullness. Instead, it presents us with a sanitised, more perfect version of it, which the critic identifies with reality's true essence. This mirror image, then, helps the listeners to not so much recognise but endure reality with energies replenished by the beautified image. Not infrequently, however, mundane reality resisted idealisation. Following Stalin's death in 1953 and the ensuing political realignments in the upper echelons of the Hungarian party-state,Footnote 10 discrepancies between party rhetoric and everyday experience increasingly surfaced in public life and became subject, albeit within limits, to discussion. In his comprehensive two-part study ‘Some essential tasks for the development of our dance music’ (Tánczenénk fejlesztésének néhány sürgető feladata) Maróthy begins his account by expressing marked discontent with the current state of affairs:
A most acute problem of our musical life is the unsatisfactory development of Hungarian entertainment music. Given that this music is closely related to the everyday life of the broadest masses, this deficiency is of particular concern […] Many would just stand by, arms crossed and apathetic, watching that the increasingly rich private life of Hungarian workers and Hungarian youth – ‘the flower, strength and future of our country's future’ – is accompanied by harmful, tasteless or downright twisted and poisonous dance music. (Reference Maróthy1953b, p. 12)
The musicologist draws attention to the accomplishments and outstanding personalities of amateur choirs and folk-dance art. He suggests that, through the power of Soviet mass art, the long-awaited musical golden age has returned in the Soviet Union where the historically estranged realms of music come together:
In the Soviet Union, there is no ‘light music’ in the true sense of the word as a single genre of mass music as opposed to some kind of ‘heavy’ music for the privileged. The everyday life of the Soviet people is accompanied by an infinitely diverse range of musical genres, from simple dance and love songs, mass songs to various forms of folk choir and orchestral art, to the grandest forms of classical and Soviet music. Within this spectrum, dance and entertainment music is also considered fully valued art. (Reference Maróthy1953b, p. 13)
Maróthy did not see the reality of Soviet mass music through rose-coloured glasses because he simply wanted to believe in the Communist Party. Some Soviet songs did enjoy massive popularity in Hungary (Ignácz Reference Ignácz, Barna and Patakfalvy2024); adaptations of songs like ‘Polyushka Polye’, ‘Katyusha’, ‘Yerevan’ or ‘Moonlight Waltz’ were still played in various arrangements in the 1960s and 1970s. Also, alongside lesser-known composers in Soviet high culture, there existed masters like Shostakovich, Khachaturian, Prokofiev and others who, despite periodic reprovals by party apparatchiks, produced works that, in Maróthy's eyes, compellingly married communist ideology with artistic inspiration and mastery of the craft.
Musicology as activism
Efforts to tear down the walls between music's producers and users, art and popular music, academic musicology and public education, professional and amateur music activities formed the foundation of the music culture Maróthy envisaged. Even as his musical and aesthetic outlook changed over the decades, he never lost sight of these ideals. This transformative endeavour called cultural revolution in official discourse can be broken down into a range of questions: how can the music consuming masses become the creators and active shapers of their own music? How can music become integrated into everyday life? How can a dynamic collaboration be established between modern, largely classically trained composers and the amateur ensembles of the masses? Not only the gulf between art and popular music needed to be addressed but also the one between folk and modern popular music. Can modern music culture be erected on folk music pillars? How could Bartók and Kodály‘s concept of premodern village-based folk music be expanded to the songs of industrial workers in Hungary where the first wave of mass industrialisation and urbanisation only occurred in the 1950s? And, finally, how should music theory, reinterpreted on Marxist foundations, serve this utopian plan?
Maróthy‘s utopianism did not exclusively originate in Marxist theory.Footnote 11 Already in his earliest writings he outlined a future-oriented aesthetics primarily relying on the theory of vernacular music (a zenei köznyelv elmélete) proposed by Szabolcsi (Ignácz Reference Ignácz2020, pp. 203–36). Szabolcsi viewed those periods in music history as golden ages when art and popular music directly influenced one another. Rather than lonely albatrosses in the Baudelairean sense, he saw pre-Romantic-era composers as representatives of a larger community, creating works inspired by popular idioms. Even though, as discussed earlier, the realms of art and popular music diverged, in the mid-20th century many musicians hoped for a new golden age bridging the gap between the ivory tower and the music halls. As Marxism was imposed on the postwar regime of Hungarian music, Maróthy intertwined its doctrines with the theory of a vernacular music. In his construct not only would art and entertainment music find a common language but so would composers, critics, musicologists, and the broader audience of music listeners and users. He believed that music critics and musicologists should, first, guide composers in their search for inspiration from the ‘right’ kind of source materials, and second, promote their encounter with the music's potential users through various work, amateur music and entertainment occasions. The proposal for composers, critics and audience to engage in daily dialogues to build a new music culture may sound more than odd to contemporary readers but this was far from implausible in a society where no marketplace mediated between creators and audiences, and furthermore, groups of people, even masses, interacted at party meetings, professional debates, brigade events and mandatory public festive events of all kinds, on a daily basis. Private life, by and large, dissolved into the workplace and the broader – albeit directed and highly ritualised – public life.
Maróthy, however, was not a bureaucrat-scholar dictating from his desk. He invariably positioned himself as an active participant outlining the desired changes in domestic music culture. His sharp, often witty critical remarks and proposals relied on his personal observations at live music and dance events. In his study urging the development of dance music, for instance, he bemoaned that ‘recently in our social dance culture, especially in urban areas, two main features prevailed: simplistic shuffling and swinging’ (Reference Maróthy1953b, p. 13). Maróthy viewed simplistic shuffling as reflecting the impoverishment of bourgeois social dances (foxtrot, slowfox, etc.), ‘a particular form of togetherness between man and woman regulated by specific postures and steps’ (Maróthy Reference Maróthy1953b, p. 14). As an even graver concern, he was displeased to see that ‘part of our youth, especially the young workforce, has taken to swinging’ (Maróthy Reference Maróthy1953b, p. 14). Yet he eschewed the discourse of moral panic rampant at the times on both sides of the Iron Curtain, which criminalised young people embracing Black American music (Horváth Reference Horváth2009; Poiger Reference Poiger2000; Starr Reference Starr1983). Instead, Maróthy anticipated the understanding attitude typical of the 1960s when stating, ‘the “swinging” problem cannot be resolved by exposing this dance style's hostile, pathological, and corrupting nature’ (1953b, p. 14). He calls attention to the emotional and physical needs of youth and the deficiencies in domestic dance music production: ‘swinging has roots in the fact that youth yearned for activity and liveliness in dance, which our ‘new’ dance music failed to provide, in fact, it offered the opposite’ (Maróthy Reference Maróthy1953b, p. 14).
Eastern Europe's aggressive Cold War campaign against Americanism as well as Maróthy's own aesthetic views at the time did not allow him to be receptive to ‘jazz’. Before making room for jazz in the socialist music culture, de-Stalinisation had to occur and Maróthy embarked on a more serious reassessment of his cultural politics only after the revolution of 1956. In the early 1950s, he had sought signs of the incipient renewal of mass music: first, in the amateur choir and folk-dance movements, which, while imitating the Soviet model, also hailed from Kodályian principles and traditions; and, second, in the spontaneous forms of entertainment accompanying political and cultural gatherings.
‘Sterility in mass music, flourishing kitsch in popular music’
As stated earlier, the period between Stalin's death and the 20th congress of the Soviet Communist Party in 1956 marked the crisis of Stalinist leadership in Hungary. Relaxing the ideological control over people's entertainment and leisure brought back prewar era schlagers, Viennese-style operetta and magyarnóta to the soundscape of ‘the fifties’. With this wave some potentially worthwhile institutional and activist efforts to bring closer the musical worlds of folk, popular and movement songs were cast aside. We will take a closer look at this shift through Maróthy's keynote (‘Our Music and the Masses’ (Zenénk és a tömegek)) delivered at the Third Week of Hungarian Music, held by UHM where the showcasing of new musical pieces was combined with discussions of current problems.
In the focus of his talk Maróthy addresses the perceived absence of a connection between professional musicians and ‘the masses’, even though, arguably, it was the Communist Party that had lost touch with society as a whole, of which the UHM formed a part. Maróthy lists the symptoms: composers no longer write mass songs or even folk song adaptations following the enthusiasm of the initial years; the created works are boring, schematic, with too many designed for stage performances instead of mass music events. From this, he concludes that the mass music movement, which not long ago had fresh, vibrant shoots, has now become ‘bureaucratic-smelling’. This explains why after the June 1953 party resolution, when the life support was removed from these rigid, bureaucratically nurtured mass music forms, they suddenly disappeared underwater. Maróthy perceives that alongside promising, vibrant initiatives, the desire for renewal has also submerged. He summarises it as ‘sterility on the side of mass music, unrestrictedly flourishing kitsch on the side of light music’, urging the dismantling of the wall between the two spheres. At this time, he assesses the path towards the resurrection of a musical golden age as far choppier than a couple of years earlier. In hindsight he refers to this period as an ‘iron age’, the years of struggle. His conviction remains unwavering that if music is not in direct connection with the everyday musical practices of ordinary people, it is doomed to decline. His reference continues to be the pre-capitalist European music history and the massive popularity of Soviet songs – within the Soviet Union. However, it is obvious that this perspective is no longer convincing for the majority, and there are those who voice their doubts, at least in informal conversations. Maróthy also points out that some young composers who attempt to combine ‘mass genres with artistic music, are subjected to the angry frowns of the classical musicians and the smug mockery of the light musicians’ (Reference Maróthy1956, pp. 5–6).
At the end of his speech, Maróthy offers practical suggestions for remedying the predicament of music culture. He urges the ‘direct implementation of the results of the cultural revolution into spontaneous forms of entertainment’, the creation of a new body of songs and choral works, more effective dissemination of artistic music to ‘the masses’, as well as the improvement of publishing and distribution apparatus. However, his incitement of composers to ‘penetrate’ into the lives of ‘the masses’, to understand and shape their entertainment needs, occasions and content, may have been more memorable for listeners and readers. Maróthy's text revisits the imperative of ‘penetration’ into the masses’ lives no less than nine times. Although this metaphor is not uncommon in his rhetoric, its mantra-like repetition in the given historical moment points to real maladies in the fabric of socialist music culture and the frailty of socialist realist principles. This assumption is further reinforced by the debates following the presentation, to which we will soon proceed.
Before that, it is worth briefly unpacking the complex power relations presumed and reinforced by the metaphor of ‘penetration’ between the ‘masses’, the professional artist and the party-state. In Marxist–Leninist theory, ‘penetration’ often appears as a discursive topos – a revealing marker of the masculinism of communist ideology. Typically, it is utilised in the context of raising the class consciousness of the ‘masses’ thus feminised. Frequently, as in visual iconography, too, the peasantry is coded feminine for lacking the male industrial worker's alleged muscular class consciousness. The ‘penetrator’ can be the Party itself or just its propaganda. To return to the arts, in this case, music, Maróthy encourages ‘our composers’ to penetrate the masses, which raises interesting questions owing to the possessive structure: does the Communist Party claim the musicians’ community to be its own? Or does the party claim the ‘ownership’ of the musicians on behalf of the masses? Furthermore, when Maróthy, the music policy maker urges musicians to establish a lively, direct relationship with the ‘masses’, he essentially shifts the party's responsibility to the composers, suggesting that it would be the latter's task to restore the deteriorated relationship between the elite and the ‘masses’. However, half a year before the national uprising, this elite could no longer maintain even the façade of unity: noticeable and dramatically widening rifts were emerging between the party elite, the nomenklatura and a significant portion of the (musical) intelligentsia.
Mostly the representatives of cultural institutions commented on Maróthy's speech, confirming or supplementing his criticism of mass music life. The director of the Rákosi MátyásFootnote 12 Works Cultural Centre rang the alarm as he asked the composers to visit the cultural centre more frequently, since many turned to foreign (read: Western) radio stations for entertainment. A member of the central choir of the Local Industry Workers Union reported on the decline of the choir movement, attributing it to a lack of sufficient quantity and quality of music. A colleague at the Institute of Folk Art also found the decline of the amateur choir movement concerning. Abandoning the Stalinist rhetoric revolving around abstract, homogeneous ‘masses’, he pointed to social groups with differing demographic characteristics whose ‘taste development’ required corresponding strategies. The young Hungarian composer of Serbian descent, Tihamér Vujicsics, also spoke up, proposing to teach popular music and jazz in schools, which was about a decade ahead of his time; therefore, his idea was received with dismissive laughter. Of the prominent members of the Union, the musicologist József Ujfalussy proposed that music rather than musical mass movement should be considered a public matter. Ferenc Szabó and Endre Székely – both prominent members of the UHM's communist party cell – raised unexpectedly uncomfortable questions. Szabó shared anecdotes about composer–choir meetings gone awry, suggesting that underlying the organisational and technical deficiencies deeper social and communication issues could be detected. Yet not everything was in order on the production side either! According to Szabó, ‘there are very few [contemporary] poets whose verses are suitable for setting to music. Our truly good poets’ poetry cannot be turned into mass songs or mass music’ (Az előadás vitája 1956, p. 17). Székely, the composer of the prototypical Hungarian socialist realist operetta entitled Aranycsillag (Golden Star, 1950), reflected disarmingly honestly on the drastically changed social–political climate, his personal restlessness and creative uncertainty:
today different problems occupy me than at the time of composing mass songs […] When I wrote mass songs, I felt that what I was doing then – and that's how we felt all over the country – aroused enthusiasm in the overwhelming majority of the people […] and drew confidence from what I saw in them; I was sure that what we were doing then was worth singing about […] But today […] we have an extreme amount of problems, and it's not certain that tomorrow will look the way as we see it today. (Az előadás vitája 1956, p. 17)
Only to Székely's thoughts did Maróthy react with noticeable impatience, perhaps sensing that he was losing an important ally in the struggle for the meeting of music and ‘the masses’:
Comrade Székely is one of those whom I must argue with. Comrade Székely said that in the current situation, he does not see the writing of mass songs as timely because today the problem for composers is much more complicated than what can be expressed in simple songs. I think this is a standpoint that is not supported at all by the course of music history. (Az előadás vitája 1956, p. 18)
He continued by arguing that it is possible to compose popular music even in tumultuous social situations, using the example of Johann Sebastian Bach's era and art. Maróthy may also have been disgruntled by Szabó's well-placed arrows, claiming it was an inopportune time for composers to write mass songs of aesthetic merit or establish relationships with the masses. Szabó in Maróthy's eyes was more than a high-ranking musician-bureaucrat with whom debating posed some risk; as an expression of his respect, he would dedicate a voluminous monograph to Szabó's oeuvre 19 years later, long after that Szabó's socialist realist music and politics lost favour with both the profession and the party's cultural leadership (Maróthy Reference Maróthy1975). However, let us return to the Week of Hungarian Music's debates to mention the composer and folk music researcher Pál Járdányi's comment that went even further to overtly challenge Maróthy's entire concept of mass music:
[János Maróthy] presented an idea [in his lecture] that he has been advocating for a long time: the masses have a demand for a new type of entertainment music. Please do not take offense, Maróthy, when I say this: I am afraid that this is his demand, not the demand of the masses. What he imagines as new music for entertainment, no one can imagine what it could actually be. (Az előadás vitája 1956, p. 43)
His words that follow sound prophetic in the Hungary of the mid-1950s, anticipating the global revolution centred around rock and pop:
There is undoubtedly a strong demand for popular music among the masses today, and it is my feeling that no matter how hard we try to come up with some new, artificially constructed form of popular music, it will not be able to stop the flood of international popular music that will inevitably engulf and inundate the whole world. (Az előadás vitája 1956, p. 43)
However, the remedy this conservative critic suggests reveals him no less naive in fetishising ‘serious music’ than Maróthy's utopian concept of mass music:
Trying to fight against this [i.e. Western music] by constructing another, so-called ‘noble’ form of popular music is, in my opinion, a completely futile task. The only way to fight against this is by instilling a demand for serious, truly good music, truly noble music in people's souls. (Az előadás vitája 1956, p. 43)
Maróthy, the scholar
Few were able to wear as many hats as Maróthy did: populariser, researcher, critic and participant observer. No clear line can be drawn between his journalism, lectures and scholarly prose; any of his thoughts can be accurately quoted from almost any of his works. His scientific writings stand out from his other work by their rich musico-historical analyses and extensive bibliography. Yet even in his academic prose, he sought to speak not only to professionals but to anyone – the blacksmith next-door or the usher in the theatre.
The basis of Maróthy's early research was built on a music-historical and aesthetic model that remained largely unchanged for decades to come. However, in response to the turbulent sociopolitical events, with shrinking or expanding intellectual space from the late 1940s to the early 1960s, he elaborated this model. Fundamentally, the core and most forward-looking feature of this theory consists of the critique of traditional (bourgeois) musicology and the outlines of a new one as can be traced from his earliest writings through his first serious studies on popular music (Reference Maróthy, Szabolcsi and Bartha1953a, Reference Maróthy and Juhász1955b), all of which were further developed in his popular essay ‘Music and Reality’ (Reference Maróthy and Juhász1955a). His desire to re-theorise music stemmed from a discontent with hegemonic musicology for, first, ignoring music's groundedness in the social world and treating it as an art form of the ‘spiritual realm’ transcending everyday reality. Second, concentrating on the musical form, it neglects art music's roots traceable to communal or collective occasions of music making. Third, the young Maróthy criticised bourgeois musicology for its failure to recognise industrial workers’ songs and urban folklore owing to its exclusive concern with canonised composers’ works and traditional folk musics.
In contrast to Hans Naumann's (Reference Naumann1922) theory of ‘gesunkenes Kulturgut’, Maróthy believed the social direction of musical influences in the ‘golden ages’ of music could be traced from the less outstanding artists and the broad masses of people, who create ‘the forms and means of expression for the great masters’ of (European) music history (Reference Maróthy1948a, cf. Reference Maróthy and Juhász1955a). This perspective on music history corresponded to the aesthetics of socialist realism as it viewed all music as an inherent part of everyday life. As such, it challenged the hierarchy between the artistic and the popular, emphasising the permeability of the two spheres. Maróthy illustrates this with a quote from a contemporary chronicle depicting the 1783 fair and folk festival in Entritsch, Germany: ‘The orchestra is working diligently; starting with Bach's sonatas and ending with Gassenhauer songs (i.e. street songs)’. Also switching between the sublime and the profane in his scholarly pursuits, Maróthy maintained that in a music culture untainted by the corrupting influence of the capitalist music business, any style and genre of music, irrespective of its complexity, holds aesthetic value and is worthy of scholarly analysis. Two main references served to support his thesis. Szabolcsi's theory of vernacular music, developed from the 1930s, was one of its pillars, stating that ‘the most noteworthy personalities and masterpieces are but the purest expressions of what is shapeless or unconscious among the masses, ‘and masterpieces stand out precisely because many grasp and feel them as their own’ (Reference Szabolcsi1952, Reference Szabolcsi1954). In expanding on this idea, Maróthy claimed that ‘classical music's greatness lies precisely in conveying profound truths about life, and this truth becomes validated in the everyday practices of masses of people’ (Reference Szabolcsi1956, p. 2). Another significant source of inspiration for Maróthy came from the Soviet realist school. Boris Asafyev's (1884–1949) theory of intonation most fully developed in his multi-volume work ‘Musical Form as a Process’ (Reference Asafyev1930/1971) had a particularly fruitful impact on Maróthy's thinking. This influence can be seen in the following quotation from his keynote speech of 1956:
The relationship between classical music and the masses did not come about by some lucky coincidence but rather because the foundation of music itself is the everyday music that exists among the masses – the music of people living within historically defined smaller or larger formations. This ‘everyday music’ has, over the centuries, developed its own characteristic genres – such as the various types of song and dance in European music – and has given rise to typical melodic and rhythmic patterns within these genres called intonations. The work of a composer was to actively or passively use these genres and the intonations contained within them. The greatness of a composer depended on their ability to sharpen or condense the typical intonations of their time in accordance with historical needs, or to transform and reshape them to express the changing behaviours of people in various social groups; and how well they were able to use these typical genres and incorporate the typical intonations into them, shedding light on them from all angles; in short, to make use of the unique ‘dramaturgy’ of music. (Reference Szabolcsi1956, p. 2)
In our time period, Maróthy conducted research in two directions: on the history of folk and popular music and on classical music composers who heavily relied on the folk and popular music idioms of their time such as Ferenc Erkel (1810–1893). (The latter points are beyond the scope of our study.) The aesthetic examination of plebeian, folk or mass music had no significant precedents in Hungary. Therefore, Maróthy's first major works on this topic were utterly new and alien to the prevailing musico-historical discourse. From a theoretical and methodological perspective, these works anticipate Maróthy's best known monograph, Music and the Bourgeois, Music and the Proletarian (Zene és polgár, zene és proletár, Maróthy Reference Maróthy and Rona1966). József Ujfalussy noted in a radio programme memorialising his life and work that his colleague was ‘particularly interested in things that he believed others were less interested in […] the history of music from below, that is, the genres and occasions of collective music-making’. In the same programme Dénes Zoltai, the art philosopher and also a student of Lukács, addressed the aesthetic significance of Maróthy's concept of mass music. In agreement with Ujfalussy, Zoltai contended that from the beginning of his career, Maróthy had inquired into the ‘mass-like quality’ that lies within art; into ‘the extent to which an individual musical work is based on the musical vernacular, from which the artist takes and to which they give back’. In his interpretation Maróthy elaborated on Szabolcsi's vernacular theory by tracing ‘the history of forms back to the history of potentialities for formation’. In this way, Maróthy sought the deeper meaning of what is folklike in music, with which he completed his fundamental concept of music history.Footnote 13
Looking ahead: Maróthy's work after 1956
After the crushing of the 1956 uprising, radical changes were introduced in the Hungarian music scene. Having gradually dissolved the revolution's autonomous organisations and temporary managing committees, the UHM was suspended for almost three years. The main musical institutions resumed their activities with partially replaced leaderships. Retaliations, overall, were less severe than in other artistic fields such as literature. Merely a few musicians directly involved in the revolutionary events were removed, along with the sidelining of a few Stalinists. The most dramatic fallout of the revolution was emigration. A number of composers (including György Ligeti) and hundreds of performing artists left the country.
The new regime gave up the ambition to subordinate the arts to handmaidens of ideology. Social sciences and the humanities instead gained more prominence (Kalmár Reference Kalmár1998). The party-state relied on committed cadres and intellectuals while it also needed the moral and intellectual support of non-communist ‘fellow travellers’, like, in the music profession, Zoltán Kodály and Bence Szabolcsi. Maróthy helped to rebuild the frozen system of institutions where several previously dedicated musician artists, including his former allies, were reluctant to return. His position, however, was not without complications. As a communist who did not participate in the uprising, he enjoyed the trust of the party state but, evidently, less that of his peers. Yet his commitment and ties to the apparatus rarely if ever was directed against colleagues of competing intellectual or political persuasions.
Maróthy helped to elect the new presidency of the resuscitated UHM. He added a conciliatory voice to the poisonous debates surrounding UHM's new journal Hungarian Music (Magyar Zene), taking the place of the discredited New Musical Review. He encouraged his colleagues to talk freely, while cautioning the apparatchiks against censoring the debates (L. Péteri Reference Péteri2011). He also joined Hungarian Music's editorial board. Most consequentially, he was among the founders of the Bartók Archives of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 1961, which, alongside the Folk Music Research Group headed by Kodály, was to gain national and international stature. Within the Bartók Archives (to expand into the Institute for Musicology in 1969) Maróthy, as discussed earlier in the paper, conducted and commissioned research on workers’ songs, urban folk and, eventually, pop and rock music.
New avenues of collaboration presented themselves for Maróthy with composers and musicologists in Eastern Europe and beyond. During the Stalinist era, professional contacts between ‘East’ and ‘West’ or the Global South had been sparse, and even within the Eastern Bloc were severely limited. Official and formal links and ceremonial events dominated musical diplomacy. From the second half of the 1950s onward, however, the conditions for establishing international networks improved considerably. New spaces could be carved out for individual informal networking. Some intellectuals, benefiting from the opportunities of freer travel and communication, realised that their new relations and personal research interests could be brought to bear on official cultural policies, and that they can even ‘export’ their professional knowledge to other countries (Takács Reference Takács2016). Music scholarship at the time was typically represented abroad by only a handful scholars enjoying the trust of the party-state. In many cases, they expanded their horizons and proposed new working relationships with other socialist music institutions, while this activity was typically looked upon with suspicion in the domestic music community. Maróthy appeared at the first negotiations between the Union of German Composers and Musicologists of the GDR and the Hungarian music scholars in 1957. With his continued interest in Soviet music, he represented Hungary at a plenary session of the Union of Soviet Composers in 1959. From 1960, he was a regular delegate of the UHM at the events of the socialist countries’ musicians’ unions (see Ujfalussy Reference Ujfalussy1963, Maróthy et al. Reference Maróthy, Ujfalussy and Zoltai1965) and collaborated, primarily, with Marxist researchers of workers’ song and urban folklore across the East–West border, including Georg Knepler, Jaroslav Jiránek, Vladimir Karbusický, Václav Pletka, Albert Lancaster Lloyd and Sergio Liberovici (Maróthy Reference Maróthy1965, Reference Maróthy and Rona1966). Besides offering Maróthy a more solid sense of belonging to a community of like-minded scholars, which he may have missed in Hungary, these connections opened new vistas for his future research into the history and contemporary world of popular music.
Conclusion
The years from the communist takeover of 1948 to the early Kádár era was the most productive yet controversial period of János Maróthy's career as he served in various capacities with the explicit goal to transform the culture and structure of Hungarian musical life in line with socialist ideals. He was one of the few who did not lose faith in the potential of Sovietisation to bring about a new ‘golden age of music’ where popular and art music would inspire and enrich each other, and the musical world would thus overcome its century-long fragmentation. Still a young scholar, he naively trusted that Zhdanov's musical resolution, the socialist music institutions and the debates within the music community would build a more inclusive musical culture. He argued that these new efforts and institutions would break down the bourgeois monopoly of culture, bring together separate artistic and intellectual groups, and in effect, help develop a language shared not only by ‘serious’ musicians and entertainers but also composers, researchers, critics and audiences.
Yet Maróthy grew increasingly isolated as a spokesperson for a novel kind of popular music stripped of its ties to the past or modern Western influences. Ironically, when he deplored the difficulties surrounding mass music in his lecture ‘Our Music and the Masses’ on UHM's Third Week of Hungarian Music, mass music was no longer showcased at all! This was a dramatic change from the previous Weeks of Hungarian Music prominently featuring dance songs, mass (movement) songs and folk music arrangements. When the composers Székely and Járdányi expressed their doubts about Maróthy's perception of a massive need for socialist realist popular music, they spoke on behalf of a community whose members had held hopes of the viability of that kind of music and had abandoned them, or had never been adherents. The elitism of Hungarian musicology and the distinguished status of Kodály's folklore-based choral movement and education certainly played a part in Maróthy's isolation. Yet given that his advocacy of popular music was intertwined with Stalinist aesthetics also mattered, as the Soviet and Hungarian mass songs he promoted became the symbols of the regime and tools of political oppression. Maróthy's credibility was further diminished by his relative insensitivity towards the actual cultural processes and the deteriorating political climate of the country.
What opportunities, resources, limitations and contradictions did the Stalinist era present for one of the country's most promising young music researchers? We argue that the ideological and institutional environment, initially striving to democratise musical life and develop a music policy based on a utopian vision, provided favourable creative and critical opportunities, a good tailwind and an open field for Maróthy's multifaceted activities. His passionate and energetic personality was in line with the spirit of the era, especially early on. His creativity, broad, transdisciplinary orientation and critical acuity, however, were inevitably limited by the narrow horizons of scientific life and, ultimately, by Maróthy's commitment to the regime's ideology. It was during the later decades of the Kádár era when Maróthy, having selectively – but enthusiastically – embraced jazz along with modernist and postmodernist musical currents, while adopting fresh approaches to the academic study of all music, that he matured into the complex and vibrant scholar admired and respected by many in Hungary and abroad. (As a sign of his stature, Maróthy was invited to contribute to the first issue of Popular Music and served on its first International Advisory Board.) Central to his aesthetic philosophy remained a persistent effort to challenge musical hierarchies and construe them as inextricably bound up with the desire and demand for social change. This may be seen as the lasting legacy of his utopianism.
