“Goldmark was a real Hungarian artist.”
– Az Est (Budapest), 4 January 1915“Goldmark was not really a Hungarian despite his Hungarian descent. At least not in his music, to say nothing of the fact that he never understood a word of Hungarian.”
– David Josef Bach, Arbeiter-Zeitung (Vienna), 5 January 1915On 2 January 1915, during the first winter of the First World War, the celebrated composer Carl Goldmark died in Vienna at the ripe old age of eighty-four. The Viennese press gave the story of his passing the kind of coverage that one would expect for a figure who was described as the “rector of Austrian music,” even its “epicenter.”Footnote 1 The notice in the Neue Freie Presse was particularly striking in its imagery: “We, musical Vienna and the entire musical world, stand shaken around the funeral bier of the great composer and Austrian Carl Goldmark.” As the report goes on, the writer makes a clear reference to the growing war effort: “Many of our best and brightest must now die on the battlefield for the fatherland. Goldmark lived for his fatherland, and by creating art touched by the breadth of eternity, he honored the fatherland in his own way and greatly increased the cultural heritage of humanity.”Footnote 2 Meanwhile, in the other great capital of the Dual Monarchy, the composer's death was covered very differently. To read the obituaries that appeared in Budapest is to be told that Hungary, not Austria, was Goldmark's fatherland. Here, in effect, both halves of the monarchy were fighting over the same man's legacy—the one, primarily on the basis of his Hungarian birth and childhood; the other, on the basis of his long residency in Austria and the central role he played in the musical culture of late Habsburg Vienna.
Since my concern in what follows is with what might be called the Hungarian Question, let us turn to the obituaries that appeared in Budapest. The Pester Lloyd, the city's most important German-language newspaper, began the biographical portion of its story with an implicit acknowledgment that the deceased composer had followed the traditional path of Hungarian-born Jews of the pre-1848 generation to assimilate into German rather than Magyar culture. Yet the writer closed by emphasizing that Goldmark had always spoken warmly and with an open heart about the land of his birth and proclaimed him “a powerful pillar in the building of Hungary's artistic fame.”Footnote 3 The obituaries that appeared in the city's Hungarian-language press likewise took note of Goldmark's Jewish descent but only in passing and without placing any particular emphasis on it. It was the composer's relation to his Hungarian homeland (and vice versa), not his religious heritage (and German acculturation) that seemed to matter.Footnote 4 No less important was to distance Goldmark from Austria and the German high culture associated with it. In the Pesti Hírlap [Pest daily], for example, the composer was likened to Edvard Grieg, Peter Illych Tchaikovsky, and Antónin Dvořák in that he too liberated music from the grip of the “Triple Alliance” of the French, German, and Italian styles, although in this writer's opinion it was the exotic East, as heard most clearly in the overture Sakuntala (1865) and the opera Die Königin von Saba (1875), not anything specifically Hungarian, that was Goldmark's métier.Footnote 5
Most of the Budapest obituaries describe the importance to the composer's career of Die Königin von Saba, and several credit prominent Hungarians with making this success possible. These include József Eötvös, whose Ministry of Religion and Public Education awarded Goldmark a grant to aid in completing the work, as well as Franz Liszt, the great pianist and composer, and Gyula Andrássy, the Austro-Hungarian Minister of Foreign Affairs during the 1870s, who together are credited with playing important roles in bringing the opera to its first production.Footnote 6 Yet, as the Pesti Napló [Pest news] asserted, in what is perhaps the most telling of the Budapest obituaries, Goldmark had not always been seen in influential Hungarian circles as being sufficiently Hungarian.Footnote 7 This writer himself had no doubt about the composer's patriotic credentials; he acknowledges that Goldmark chose to make his life and career in Vienna but insists that he had loved his native country and would have remained there if only circumstances had been more favorable toward him. He goes on to report that proper recognition in Hungary came only after Goldmark had become famous, and that even then the state “neglected” him and the “leading figures in the music world … failed to appreciate that he was a genius.” The obituary nevertheless ends on a hopeful note: “All this belongs to the past. We musicians do not want to use this time of mourning for reproaches. We express our hope that the master will at least be appropriately honored after his death and his earthly remains will find a final resting place in national soil.”
In the event, Goldmark was laid to rest a few days later, not in Budapest or anywhere else in Hungary, but in a memorial grave in the Jewish section of Vienna's Central Cemetery. A representative of the Royal Hungarian Opera was in attendance at the burial ceremony. Pointedly speaking in Hungarian among all the German speakers, the tenor Franz von Székelyhidy eulogized Goldmark as Hungary's greatest composer.Footnote 8 The singer might just as well have said, “This great man's mortal remains may be coming to rest here in Austria, but he will always be one of us, a Hungarian.” By the time of his death, Goldmark's supposed magyarság (Hungarianness) had become a matter of national pride.
In what follows I will consider how and why Goldmark, a Germanized Jew who emigrated from Hungary at an early age, came to be seen as an essentially Hungarian composer and whether this description is one that he might in any way have embraced. This will involve exploring two related questions. One is Goldmark's social identity as a category of belonging imposed from the outside by writers for the Budapest press and other Hungarian elites; the other, his identity as he perceived it himself, what we might think of as his self-perception or subjectivity.Footnote 9 First, however, we must briefly consider the composer's life and career up to the time of his breakthrough with the public in the 1860s, when the question of his social identity first became a matter of public concern.
Becoming a German
Goldmark was born on 18 May 1830 in the Hungarian town of Keszthely at the western end of Lake Balaton. Four years later the family moved to Deutschkreuz/Németkeresztúr, one of the most pious of the Siebengemeinden created along the border with Austria as a refuge for the Jews following their expulsion from Vienna in 1670.Footnote 10 It seems likely that Carl, whose father was the local cantor and notary, would have had a traditional religious upbringing. In any case, he received little formal schooling of the secular sort and probably spoke Western Yiddish as his first language (although we know that his mother enjoyed reading books in German, a practice frowned upon by the most traditional members of the community). Goldmark never learned to speak Hungarian, and he evidently did not learn to read or write German until he was twelve, around the time he began taking violin lessons in nearby Ödenburg/Sopron, or begin to speak proper German until after arriving in Vienna two years later to begin violin studies with Leopold Jansa.Footnote 11
In Vienna Carl lived with his older half brother Joseph, a medical student who, together with a circle of his university friends, seems to have taken it upon himself to introduce the boy to the ideals of Bildung.Footnote 12 Here were planted the seeds for what would grow into a lifelong devotion to German high culture. Apart from a few months spent at home in Deutschkreuz in the summer of 1847, where he prepared for exams that would gain him entrance into the Imperial-Royal Polytechnic Institute later that year, Carl remained in Vienna until revolution broke out in March 1848. With brother Joseph serving as one of the student revolutionary leaders, and with the city's educational institutions closed in the midst of civil turmoil, he was sent home once more, only a few short months after beginning the only formal education he was ever to enjoy, not only at the Polytechnic Institute, but also at the Vienna Conservatory, where he studied violin with Joseph Böhm and music theory with Gottfried Preyer.
After brief conscripted service in the Landsturm near the beginning of Hungary's War of Independence, Goldmark struck out on his own by playing in theater orchestras, first in Ödenburg and then in Ofen/Buda. Given his recent experiences in Vienna he would surely have shared the “Hungaro-Germanism” that prevailed in the social circles in which he now moved, with its insistence on maintaining an important place for German cultural distinctiveness within the multilingual and multinational Hungarian kingdom.Footnote 13 In 1851 he returned to Vienna to live, part of the wave of Hungarian-born Jews who emigrated to the Imperial City in the decades after 1848.Footnote 14 Many within this large migrant group were reluctant to give up their traditional modes of living, but Goldmark was not numbered among them. What he did share with the group was economic privation, and for the next several years he struggled to eke out a subsistence living as a theater musician and piano teacher while undertaking self-tuition in musical composition. Toward the end of the decade he was persuaded to move back to Hungary once more to help his brother-in-law Moritz Friedmann, the newly named chief cantor of the Jewish community in Pest, revise the local liturgical music. This renovation was presumably undertaken in connection with the anticipated inauguration of the Dohány Street Synagogue. When the magnificent neo-Moorish building opened its doors, on 6 September 1859, Goldmark was free to return once more to Vienna to live, this time for good.
Vienna not only offered the composer a better chance than Pest to earn a living. It was just then beginning to reclaim from Leipzig its former distinction as the leading musical center in the German cultural sphere—and that is where Goldmark wanted to be. He soon began to draw notice as a composer while earning a modest living as a conductor with a local Jewish men's choir, music critic for a liberal newspaper, and piano teacher. In 1862 the Hellmesberger Quartet began to champion his chamber music, and in 1865 the Vienna Philharmonic included his Sakuntala overture on one of its subscription concerts. At the same time, in competitions held by the Austrian Ministry of Religion and Public Education, he was awarded two state stipends in support of the composition of Die Königin von Saba, first in May 1863 and again in January 1867. Clearly, Goldmark was a composer on the rise by this point.Footnote 15
Magyar Opposition
He was also a composer who would soon find himself in an awkward situation with respect to the politics of nationality. The multinational composition of Hungary included Magyars, that is, Hungarians in the ethnic sense, who formed a plurality of the population, along with sizable numbers of Slovaks, Germans, Romanians, Croats, Serbs, and Ruthenes. For much of its history, Latin served as Hungary's official language, used by the large nobility that composed the so-called Natio Hungarica. Not until 1844 did Hungarian fully replace Latin as the official language. Although many nobles, even some of those with Magyar roots, could not in fact speak Hungarian fluently, they saw its adoption as the official language as the best strategy for minimizing ties with the German-speaking Habsburg monarchy. In this way, as Barbara Törnquist-Plewa has argued, “the birth and history of the Hungarian state [was linked] to a Magyar identity.”Footnote 16
With Francis Joseph's ratification of the Austro-Hungarian Compromise in May 1867, the ethnonationalists’ long-cherished ideal of a magyar nemzet—the Hungarian nation—saw effective realization. This was envisioned to unite everyone who resided within historic Hungary, irrespective not only of nationality but also of social class or religion, through a common Hungarian culture and language. To be sure, the Law of Equal Rights of the Nationalities, adopted in 1868 at the behest of the moderate liberal Eötvös, conceded to all national groups the right to maintain their own cultures and languages as long as they did so within the overall framework of the Magyar state. But the more hard-minded ethnonationalists, whose views ultimately carried the day in the post-Compromise era, rejected this “supra-ethnic,” state-nation approach. They aimed instead to build a linguistically and ethnically singular nation-state.Footnote 17
Toward this end they were abetted by a linguistic ambiguity. In Hungarian, the word magyar is used to express two very different conceptions of belonging—both the broad category based on territorial boundaries (what in German is called Ungar; in English, Hungarian) and the narrow one that referred to members of Hungary's largest but by no means majority ethnic group (called Magyars in both German and English as well as in Hungarian). This semantic imprecision made it easy for the ethnonationalists to conflate Magyar ethnicity with membership in the united Hungarian nation. Thus they continued to deal with the country's non-Hungarian peoples as they had done in the past, by attempting to make Hungarians of them, that is, encouraging them to assimilate or acculturate as Magyars.
It did not take long for Goldmark to experience the consequences of this political development. Despite his longtime Viennese residency, he was no longer eligible for support from the Austrian Ministry of Religion and Public Education, since he was now a Hungarian citizen living abroad in the Austrian half of the monarchy. (It mattered not that he identified with German rather than Magyar culture.) When the new Hungarian Ministry of Religion and Public Education announced that it too would offer state stipends for needy native artists, on the model of its older counterpart in Vienna, Goldmark turned to Budapest for support and in 1869, the first year of competition, won a stipend to facilitate completion of his still-unfinished Die Königin von Saba.Footnote 18
It may well have been to Goldmark's advantage that the minister of religion and public education was Eötvös, who, as we have seen, was open to the idea of viewing the Magyar nation, to some degree at least, as a “supra-ethnic” community. In any case, the announcement of Goldmark's stipend did not go over well with the ethnonationalists. Consider this report of the first year's competition, which appeared in the illustrated family weekly Vasárnapi Ujság [Sunday paper] on 27 June 1869: “That the Minister of Education is championing the young cause of our artistic production has met with general approval. Only the assistance given to Mr. Goldmark has been censured. He is said to be a talented composer, but not exactly Hungarian; the circumstance that he happens to have been born here does not make him Hungarian, and one doesn't understand how a Viennese German composer may receive Hungarian state support.”Footnote 19 The ethnonationalists had good reason to look askance at Goldmark's success in this competition. Making Magyars of the country's large Jewish population was an important means of bolstering the relative size of the Magyar population within the multinational kingdom. Yet Goldmark, now approaching the age of forty, had long since seemingly been lost to Vienna and the Germans. Perhaps even worse, he was a popular favorite with the still disproportionately German-speaking Budapest audiences, as suggested by the Philharmonic Society's performances of Sakuntala in each of the two previous seasons, and so he might even have been considered a small threat to the ethnonationalists’ cultural hopes. Unlike Liszt, who also left Hungary at a young age and never learned to speak the language properly, Goldmark showed no sign of choosing a Magyar identity. It must therefore have been clear that he would not become the Hungarian equivalent of his contemporary Bedřich Smetana, the German-speaking, Bohemian-born composer who, after living abroad, returned home to Prague in the early 1860s, learned to speak Czech, and assumed the mantle of a Czech nationalist. That Goldmark continued to be popular with the Budapest public over the years to come ensured that he would continue to be a controversial figure within a nationally minded establishment that was determined to consolidate a purely Magyar, centralist state.Footnote 20
Claiming the Composer
Nationalist attitudes toward Goldmark finally began to soften at the fin de siècle. By that point the city of Budapest, which only a few decades earlier had counted more German speakers among its inhabitants than Hungarian speakers, was a distinctly Hungarian place and the proud, confident capital of a multinational state in which Magyars were inevitably achieving majority status.Footnote 21 This process gained a considerable boost on 1 October 1895, when Francis Joseph ratified the much-debated Law of Reception, passed a few months earlier after a long parliamentary battle. Long championed by the liberals, this law not only accorded Judaism status as an accepted religion benefitting from protection of the state, but also made it possible for the country's growing population of self-identified “Hungarians of the Israelite confession” to be shown in national statistics as Magyars and no longer as members of a separate ethnic group.Footnote 22
Goldmark still evinced no outward signs of a Magyar identity, and yet in February of this decisive year he was honored in “Magyar Budapest” with a three-day festival devoted to his music. An opening concert of his chamber music performed by the Hubay-Popper Quartet was followed first by a performance of Die Königin von Saba at the Royal Opera and then by an all-Goldmark program given by the Philharmonic Society.Footnote 23 The festival was capped by a large banquet held in Goldmark's honor at the conclusion of the Philharmonic's concert. Readers of the Pester Lloyd were provided with a detailed description of this final event.Footnote 24 Goldmark began his dinner remarks by assuring those in attendance that, although he could not speak Hungarian, he was a “true son of the fatherland.” After all, as the newspaper reported, “here is found the grave of his parents, here he spent his childhood, here as a mature man he has been appreciated, and these many bonds can never be severed.” The composer concluded by noting with great joy the enthusiasm for music in evidence at the Opera, the Music Academy, the chamber music societies, and especially the Philharmonic, and gave his best wishes for the continued strength and health of the city's musical life in the future. The minister of religion and public education, Gyula Wlassics, did not attend the banquet, but he sent a letter to be read aloud in which he “[paid] homage to the genius of the great master and to the highest flight of fancy of the Hungarian composer [whose] eternal works bring adornment to our fatherland and the entire world.” Count Albert Apponyi, a respected conservative member of Parliament who had actively supported the Law of Recognition, then stood to speak approvingly of Wlassics's support of these “Goldmark Days,” which he saw as entirely fitting and in keeping with the ministry's calling to underwrite the nation's arts. He praised the Philharmonic players for the part they had played in this enhancement of Hungary's “musical, cultural, and national life” (emphasis added). Switching to German in order to address Goldmark directly, Apponyi offered the composer his thanks and deep admiration. He described the festival as a time in which the public had enjoyed the “purest elevation,” and on behalf of that public—implicitly on behalf of a magyar nemzet—he concluded with the hope that the composer “might long live in our hearts and minds.”
If August Beer's feuilleton that week in the Pester Lloyd is any indication, Apponyi had little to worry about:
“It is good everywhere, but it is best at home.” The age-old saying must pass through the mind of Maestro Goldmark as soon as he arrives in the Hungarian capital and encounters a roar of enthusiasm wherever he appears in public, whether at the opera, a concert, or the banquet hall. This enthusiasm has nothing artificial or deliberate about it, nothing of that formality present with those other famous guests who pass through Budapest. This time the mood is sincerer, with patriotic feeling mixed in, pride in the illustrious compatriot who has made it so far in life and in art. From every salvo of applause, from every toast, he hears: “You are with us, are at home, are a son of our fatherland. Your residence [Heim] is in Vienna, but your home is the Hungarian land [Deine Heimath ist das Ungarland], and your cradle stood on a patch of earth to which the mighty Balaton sent its green waves with rushing salutation.”Footnote 25
At this point Beer turns his attention from the attitudes of the Budapest public to what he claims to be those of the composer himself: “Maestro Goldmark feels at home whenever he crosses the Hungarian border. Like a Liszt, like a Munkácsy, Goldmark too was taken by fate at a young age to a foreign land; they all laid claim to cosmopolitanism in [their] art; each in his own way has become a citizen of the world in the artistic sense, but they have not forgotten their Hungarian thinking and feeling and even under foreign skies have felt like children of their Magyar homeland [Kinder ihrer magyarischen Heimath].”Footnote 26 Finally, Beer adds his own thoughts about the composer's musical style:
Goldmark's music is no stranger to the national element…. It is not rare in [his] compositions for there to be an audible greeting of the homeland, a twinkling of a Hungarian motive … [But the] Hungarian heritage is seen less in … details of rhythm, harmony, and melodic setting than in large, general outlines. What is genuinely “Goldmarkian” in his music is an entirely characteristic, interesting mixing of Orientalism and Hungarianness, of Orientalism with its rich, blazing colors and luxuriantly swelling sensuousness, and of the specific Hungarian disposition … with its easily enflamed, slowly building passion and the tendency toward strong, full-throated, beautifully oscillated pathos.Footnote 27
It was probably not by chance that Goldmark's reputation in the estimation of the nationalists began to improve just as the country was entering “the ‘Golden Age’ of [its] Millennium.”Footnote 28 The reference here is to the year of commemoration that took place in 1896 to mark the 1,000th anniversary of the Magyars’ arrival into the Carpathian Valley. Signs of Hungarian self-confidence were evident everywhere in Budapest, which celebrated by hosting the Millennium Exhibition in the City Park. Monumental structures were inaugurated throughout the city. Across from the park's entrance was the new Heroes’ Square, constructed at the end of the recently completed Andrássy ut (the “Champs-Élysées of Budapest,” as it has been called), under which was opened Continental Europe's first underground railroad. Located nearby was the new Hall of Arts. And along the Danube, the central section of the parliament building was completed, and there were new bridges spanning the river as well.Footnote 29
In this dynamic environment Goldmark was presented to the world as a kind of living monument of the Hungarian nation (“a powerful pillar in the building of Hungary's artistic fame,” as the Pester Lloyd would later put it). His international celebrity trumped his lack of genuine Magyar credentials. August Beer, as noted, even saw fit to connect Goldmark, not only to his Heimat im Ungarland but also to his supposed magyarische Heimat, a telling linguistic leap to make in the German language. And even if the ethnonationalists knew that Goldmark was no real Magyar, they could reap the benefits of association with his considerable cultural prestige at no risk to their now fully secure national project, on proud display at the end of the century for the entire world to see.
In the years that followed, Goldmark was increasingly embraced in Hungary as Hungarian. On 27 May 1900, on the occasion of the composer's seventieth birthday, the Vasárnapi Ujság, sounding very different from the newspaper of thirty years earlier, began a generous biographical sketch with an account that very much recalls Beer's recent feuilleton in both its explanation of Goldmark's cosmopolitanism and its suggestion that he shared Liszt's deep Hungarian patriotism:
This world-famous musical poet is Hungarian by birth and sentiment. In his works, however, he represents internationalism…. This tendency is mainly the result of the hardships that Hungarian artists had to endure in the past. In the beginning and middle of the century important musical and visual artists were unable to become educated and successful in their homeland. Many great Hungarian-born composers such as [Johann Nepomuk] Hummel, Liszt, and [Joseph] Joachim are examples of this sad, although much improved situation. Károly Goldmark differed from many of his predecessors. He shared a characteristic with the great Liszt, namely, that his feelings drew him toward his birthplace despite his international fame and presence. The proof of this is the fact that he always renewed his right to Hungarian citizenship every time it expired even though he had been living in Austria for decades. The life of Goldmark is an example of many struggles and slow recognition.Footnote 30
Before long, perceptions of internationalism in the music of this “honorary Magyar” would begin to give way to pronouncements of its national nature.
A key moment in this transformation came three years later, on 4 May 1903, with the first performance of Zrinyi, written for a gala celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Budapest Philharmonic Society.Footnote 31 The title of this one-movement symphonic work alludes to Miklós Zrínyi, a Croat nobleman in service to the Habsburg monarchy, who in 1566 died heroically during a battle against the Ottoman Turks in the southern Hungarian town of Szigetvár. Goldmark provided no poetic program for the music, but that would have made little difference to the Budapest public, since Zrínyi's exploits had already been engraved in the annals of the Hungarian nation in the “The Peril of Sziget” (1647), an epic poem by the hero's identically named great-grandson that became a touchstone in the Hungarian national movement during the nineteenth century.Footnote 32 It is not surprising, then, that critics would look for the presence of Hungarian signifiers in Goldmark's musical take on the story. The Vasárnapi Ujság praised the “Hungarian style” of the work, which it judged the highlight in a program that also included a Hungarian Rhapsody by Liszt.Footnote 33 Others described it as “an interesting attempt … in the realm of symphonic music in the Hungarian style” that seemed to include some echoes of “popular themes of a Hungarian imprint.”Footnote 34 Writing in the Budapesti Napló, one fanciful critic even put words into the aging Goldmark's mouth that expressed his supposed determination before breathing his last to be recognized as a true and authentic Magyar composer: “Yes, right now, at the twilight of my life, I would like to make a confession to the world, to give a testimonial of my flaming, unbreakable patriotism; my composition Zrínyi will be Hungarian and national in all senses. What do you think, will my fellow citizens understand my intention that, in this work, as with a last confession closing my life, I would like to write my name in the history of Hungarian music, to bind myself to the Magyar spirit? Because—perhaps—it will be my swan song!”Footnote 35
This is surely nothing more than nationalist mythmaking. Goldmark undoubtedly had some sense of the historical Zrínyi's importance to the Hungarian nation. Yet irony here abounds. Because he did not read Hungarian and “The Siege of Sziget” had not yet been published in German translation, Goldmark's firsthand knowledge of the story probably came from Theodor Körner's famous German-language tragedy Zrinyi (1812), which was given its first performance in Vienna's Burgtheater on 23 September 1891 in honor of the centenary of the writer's birth.Footnote 36 The message that Körner's version of the story delivered was profoundly different from that told in the Hungarian epic poem. It was rooted instead in the early nineteenth-century German political context in which the play was written. When one of Körner's characters thundered: “A free Hungarian bows only to his God or his king,” the audience at the play's première, given at Vienna's Theater an der Wien on 30 December 1812, seems to have ignored what this said about the courage of the sixteenth-century Hungarians and their loyalty to their ruler, and instead, as evidenced by the cheers with which they responded to the line, heard in it resonances with their own contemporary patriotic fight against Napoleon.Footnote 37 In John Neubauer's view, Körner “washed out the Hungarian colors of the heroic story and infused [the] play with an anti-Napoleonic hatred that fed German and Austrian nationalism through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.”Footnote 38 This is not to say that Goldmark responded to the story in German-nationalist terms. (One cannot properly speak of Austrian nationalism at that time.) But we would do well to remember that before he ever became a Hungarian national hero, Zrínyi was a Habsburg imperial hero, one who, in the words of a Viennese reviewer of Körner's play, had “happily sacrificed his life for Kaiser und Reich.”Footnote 39 In other words, we cannot simply assume that what the Budapest public and critics heard in Goldmark's musical composition was indicative of any personal identification on his part with a magyar nemzet.
Soon, however, even the most unlikely of Goldmark's works, including the operas Merlin (1886, on Arthurian legend), Das Heimchem am Herd (1896, adapted from Dickens's Christmas story “The Cricket on the Hearth”), Götz von Berlichingen (1902, after Goethe's play about the eponymous historical figure), and Wintermärchen (1907, adapted from Shakespeare's Winter's Tale), were said to embody “latent” or “unconscious” Hungarian influence.Footnote 40 This growing crescendo of Goldmark enthusiasm in Hungary reached its peak, during the composer's lifetime, in May 1910, when his eightieth birthday was celebrated with a festival in his honor in his birthplace of Keszthely, the Royal Hungarian Opera paid him tribute, and the University of Budapest awarded him a doctoral degree honoris causa.Footnote 41 And with that the stage was set for the many claims made in the Budapest obituaries five years later that Goldmark was above all else a Hungarian composer.
A “Nationally Indifferent” Identity
There can be no question that in a handful of works—not nearly as many as the Budapest critics would have it—Goldmark did make use of some themes with a distinctly Hungarian-sounding character. These are based in the style of verbunkos, a familiar musical idiom that had been born in the eighteenth century of a marriage between Hungarian male village dances and Western march music. Verbunkos originated as a recruitment dance. (The name derives from the German Werbung.) Although its original function was lost after 1848, the genre lived on and encompassed a range of subgenres, from the slow and ornamental hallgató to the fast-tempo friss and csárdás. It eventually became most closely associated with performance by Romani musicians and in the nineteenth century was known variously as Hungarian, Magyar, or “Gypsy” music (Zigeunermusik).Footnote 42
Goldmark's most notable and thoroughgoing exploration of the idiom is found in the beautiful Magyar Ábránd [Hungarian fantasy]. This short work was written for solo piano, but from its opening bars, with their expressive, slowly descending theme played in high octaves, it brings to mind the sound of the “primas,” the violinist-leader of a typical gypsy orchestra. The composer's employment of the style here is appropriate and understandable, since the Magyar Ábránd was commissioned for inclusion in a volume of short pieces by twenty-four Hungarian-born composers released in connection with the Budapest National Exhibition of 1885.Footnote 43 Goldmark evoked verbunkos also in certain passages of Zrinyi. As noted, this work was composed in honor of the golden jubilee of the founding of the Budapest Philharmonic. Its use of various Hungarian signifiers may well be seen as both a strategic gesture—the composer was familiar with the title character's revered status in the eyes of the Budapest public—and a gesture of respect for the Philharmonic players, who had always treated him well and indeed had made him an honorary member of their society ten years earlier.Footnote 44 That Goldmark left Zrinyi unpublished, even after revising its ending for a second performance by the same orchestra, on 6 November 1907, is suggestive of its status as merely an occasional work, one closely tied in the composer's mind to the limited ambit of the Budapest concert sphere.Footnote 45
Indeed, these musical elicitations of Hungary must be framed within a larger context that recognizes Goldmark as a Viennese composer. They are best understood, not as musical inscriptions of his “Magyar spirit,” but as examples of the style hongrois, to use the now familiar term adopted by Jonathan Bellman in his study of how composers from Vienna and elsewhere from outside Hungary evoked Hungarian or Gypsy music in their concert works.Footnote 46 Whatever he may have learned of the verbunkos idiom in his native Hungary, Goldmark would have developed his close familiarity with the style in the cafés of Vienna, where its colorful sound was ubiquitous and much beloved by the local clientele. The occasional Hungarian-sounding passages to be found in his works, then, can all be fairly described in terms of musical exoticism. They follow in a well-established Viennese tradition and constitute a collective gaze eastward from Goldmark's home in the Habsburg metropole.
This is but one sign that the composer should not be understood as a Magyar Jew, with all that this characterization implies with respect to national allegiance in the Hungarian half of the Dual Monarchy.Footnote 47 Goldmark was instead the very model of the late Habsburg Viennese Jewish cosmopolitan—loyal to the dynasty and the supranational state, devoted to “universal” German high culture, and nationally indifferent.Footnote 48 As we have seen, in the public remarks he made at the nationalist-infused banquet held in his honor in Budapest in 1895, he said nothing to suggest an identification with the Hungarian nation; the connections he described were limited to the realms of the familial and personal. The same can be said about the comments attributed to Goldmark in connection with the festivities held in Keszthely fifteen years later on the occasion of his eightieth birthday.Footnote 49 The day began with a journey by train from Budapest and continued upon the party's arrival in Keszthely with a banquet followed by the unveiling of a commemorative plaque on the composer's birth house, a short concert by the local choral society, and finally a festive concert by the Budapest Philharmonic. Among those offering toasts at the afternoon banquet was the violinist Jenő Hubay, who brought the good wishes of the minister of religion and public education, János Zichy, and spoke of how his friend's talent had spread bright luster on the nation, which could proudly number him among her sons. And just as Francis Joseph had long ago recognized the composer's accomplishments—the reference here was presumably to Goldmark's receipt of the Knight's Cross of the Order of St. Leopold—so now, Hubay continued, the nation embraced him with a wreath of thankful appreciation. This event, no less than the banquet held in Budapest in 1895, was awash in nationalist sentiment.
Once again, however, Goldmark sidestepped the national question when it came his turn to speak. He began by sharing memories of the hometown he had not visited since leaving as a boy of four—the house of his birth, the street on which it was located, the banks of the Plattensee (as Lake Balaton is known in German), and then, of all things, the terrifying day when he was sent to the doctor to be vaccinated against smallpox. After commenting that only a man with a heart of stone would not hold dear the spot where his cradle had stood, and that this homecoming day after seventy-six years counted among the most joyous and beautiful in his long life, he concluded with a toast to the health of his hometown and its people (auf das Wohl der Heimat und ihrer Bevölkerung).
Goldmark's use of the word Heimat, a particularly German concept that we encountered earlier, has no direct semantic equivalent in other languages. The word can sometimes refer to one's native country. That is clearly how August Beer had used it in 1895, when, as suggested, he effectively turned the non-Hungarian-speaking Goldmark into a Magyar. But Heimat is typically used more narrowly to refer to one's native region (a village or town, for example), often together with its associated landscape, customs, traditions, and so forth, and it was in this narrower sense, I believe, that Goldmark made use of the term in Keszthely.Footnote 50 Yet, and this will become important for us, Heimat can also be any place where one has planted deep roots or feels at home for whatever reason. However it is used, the word tends to express an emotional bond and has little or nothing to do with national identity.Footnote 51 Thus despite Beer's linguistic sleight-of-hand, Goldmark's notion of Heimat surely did not imply a magyar nemzet.
Around the time of his Keszthely toast, Goldmark set to work on his memoirs, and at one point in that text he again invoked the idea of Heimat, albeit this time with a wider range of meanings than before. The passage in question was prompted by Goldmark's retelling of the day in the early 1860s when, for the first time in many years, he paid a visit to his boyhood home in Deutschkreuz. The recollection of this episode some fifty years later prompted the composer to reflect in a telling way on the matter of his self-perception:
The Hungarian newspapers have frequently denied me, not only my right of residence [Heimatrecht], but also my patriotism [Heimatgefühl] because I do not speak Hungarian and have lived for so long outside the country. Indeed, I have lived sixty-seven years in Vienna, have educated myself from German sources in science and art, and in this sense count myself among the Germans. I love this, my second home, where I came of age [zweite Heimat des Wachsens und Werdens], to which I owe everything that I am and stand for. But all that has not extinguished my strong deeply rooted patriotism [Heimatgefühl]. Only a man with a heart of stone would fail to hold dear the soil on which his cradle stood and all the sweet recollections of childhood. In this sense, I have remained true to the place of my birth [Geburtsheimat].Footnote 52
Of this passage's many references to Heimat, the first stands apart from all the others, in that it refers to a concrete legal principle. In citizenship law in both halves of the Dual Monarchy, Heimatrecht (also known as Zuständigkeit) denoted the right to reside in a particular municipality—this was often but not always the place of birth—and to be entitled to poor relief by its public authorities in case of need. As it happens, official documents give conflicting evidence on the question of where Goldmark was heimisch (or zuständig), whether in Keszthely or Deutschkreuz/Németkeresztúr. Whatever the explanation for this discrepancy, Goldmark felt a similar emotional bond—warm Heimatgefühl—for both the Hungarian town of his birth and the Hungarian town in which he had spent most of his childhood.Footnote 53
Nevertheless, in the same passage from his memoirs the composer made no secret that his cultural work sprang from the “German soil” of Vienna. He was even more explicit in a long essay he drafted in 1896 but left unpublished until 1911: “I wrote … German music. That is proved by all my chamber and orchestral works, as well as by all my operas.” He then goes on to add that he not only had lived among Germans in Vienna since childhood but also owed “his entire artistic Bildung to German art,” claiming Bach and Beethoven as his teachers.Footnote 54 Although the original draft of this essay had been prompted by personal and music-critical attacks made against Goldmark in Vienna's antisemitic press, the revised published version does more than go on offense against the racial antisemites; it also serves to correct the misleading suggestions made by the more kindly disposed critics in Budapest that he was a true Hungarian composer. The Austrian capital may not have been Goldmark's Geburtsheimat. That lay to the east in Hungary, and Goldmark had a deep emotional attachment to it in a non-national sense—as an Ungar, not a Magyar. But from an early age “German Vienna” had become his “zweite Heimat,” his second home, the one to which, as a gebildet man and composer, he owed everything that he was and stood for.
The Neo-Nationalists’ Goldmark
By the time Goldmark's memoirs appeared in print, in 1922, Central European geopolitics had been transformed in ways the composer could never have imagined. In October 1918, the Austro-Hungarian military collapsed during the final weeks of fighting in the Great War, and with that came the effective dissolution of the Dual Monarchy, the last manifestation of the historic realm in which Goldmark felt himself to be at home on both sides of the Leitha River. The harsh terms of the ensuing Treaty of Trianon (effective 31 July 1920) reduced Hungary from its former status as a significant part of a multinational great power to that of a small and impoverished nation-state. Thirteen months later most of German West Hungary was awarded to Austria by the terms of the earlier Treaty of St. Germain. A half century earlier, during the very different historical turn that came with the approval of the Austro-Hungarian Compromise, Goldmark was dismissed by the Hungarian ethnonationalist elites as a “Viennese German composer” unworthy of support by the proud new Magyar state. But in the postwar era, as we shall see, the late composer could be exploited by the now humiliated Hungarian state to begin to recover, if only symbolically, from its many forfeitures.
Of interest here is the neo-nationalist project of Count Kunó von Klebelsberg, minister of religion and public education during the 1920s. More than many other leading governmental and intellectual conservatives of the time, Klebelsberg saw that something good might come from the tragic postwar situation. In 1925 he argued that in the face of the harsh realities of national dismemberment and military disarmament only culture offered the possibility of preserving “the Hungarian motherland [and] again mak[ing] it great.”Footnote 55 What Klebelsberg was effectively calling for was the assertion of Magyar cultural superiority, not, as in the past, over the kingdom's other peoples—these hardly existed anymore in the present rump country—but over its neighbors, who had gained so much from Hungary's great losses as a result of Trianon and St. Germain.
A few months later Jenő Hubay, a longtime Goldmark champion who was by then the director of the Franz Liszt Academy of Music, approached Klebelsberg to suggest that the assertion of cultural ownership of Goldmark, whose boyhood hometown of Deutschkreuz/Németkeresztúr now lay in the state of Burgenland in the Austrian Republic, could be seen as a matter of compelling national interest. In doing so, Hubay picked up the national claims made in the Hungarian press at the time of the composer's death thirteen years earlier and reframed them for the starker new geopolitical realities. Writing to the minister on 31 May 1928, Hubay began by seeking to establish the composer's unbreakable Hungarian patriotism:
Károly Goldmark, the Hungarian-born (Keszthely, 1830), world-famous composer, retained his Hungarian citizenship throughout his life. As a result of his unselfish and noble patriotism, he made moral and monetary sacrifices for being Hungarian [magyar], unlike Imre Kálmán, Ferenc Lehár, and others who became citizens of other countries for practical reasons. Goldmark constantly refused very tempting invitations by the Austrian government for important and well-paying musical appointments because one of the criteria of getting those positions would require having Austrian citizenship. Despite the fact that he chose to live in Vienna, during his lifetime the Master himself held on to keeping his Hungarian citizenship almost defiantly.Footnote 56
Whether knowingly or not, Hubay stretched the truth here in order to make his case. Although Goldmark was eligible to apply for Austrian naturalization, he may well not have done so simply because the process was cumbersome and expensive and in his case entirely unnecessary.Footnote 57 Because he was not likely to require communal charity in his old age, Goldmark could be confident that he would not need to acquire Heimatrecht in Austria in order to live out his life there. Moreover, he did not seek employment in any of the many professions that were limited to Austrian nationals, and, far from being denied musical appointments by the Austrian government, Goldmark was made a member of the official musical establishment when, in 1879, he joined Eduard Hanslick and Johannes Brahms (another non-Austrian citizen) on the jury charged by the Austrian Ministry of Religion and Public Education with awarding state grants in support of worthy but needy musicians.
It is important, therefore, not to read too much into Goldmark's retention of his Hungarian citizenship. During the period of the Dual Monarchy and beyond, Vienna was a city full of Hungarian citizens of Jewish heritage who, like Goldmark, came to think of themselves as Austrians and Viennese. This could be true even of younger Hungarian-born Jews who, unlike Goldmark, became ostensibly Magyarized to some extent. Consider the case of Goldmark's nephew Ludwig Karpath, the only son of the cantor Moritz Friedmann. Upon his birth on 27 April 1866, the boy was registered in the records of the Pest Jewish community under the name Lajos Friedmann. On 5 June 1884, Lajos changed his family name to the Magyar-sounding Kárpát and on 22 June 1906 changed it again to Kárpáth.Footnote 58 As Ludwig Karpath (i.e., with a German given name and a Magyar family name) he became an important music critic in Vienna. He eventually was named a Hofrat, and, shortly before his death in 1936, was awarded the prestigious Ehrenring der Stadt Wien. A similar pattern can be seen in the life of Emmerich Kalman, the popular Hungarian-born composer of Viennese operettas whom Hubay misidentified as a naturalized Austrian citizen.Footnote 59 Born Emmerich Koppstein, the composer took the Magyar name Imre Kálmán during his teens, but later, after becoming well-established in Vienna, was known as Emmerich Kalman (i.e., like Karpath, by a German given name and a Magyar family name). In the transnational lives of these men, the question of citizenship simply did not matter very much.
By contrast, the question of citizenship mattered quite a lot to Jenő Hubay (né Eugen Hubay), a committed Magyar of German heritage. After arguing in his letter for what he sees to be the national significance of Goldmark's retained Hungarian citizenship, Hubay makes a concrete proposal for Klebelsberg's consideration, namely, the purchase of Goldmark's musical legacy from the composer's Viennese daughter and son-in-law and the establishment of a dedicated space within the Academy of Music in which to make the acquired materials accessible to the public: “After his death, it should be the responsibility of the Hungarian state to ensure at all costs that Goldmark's Hungarianness [magyarság] is powerfully documented for the cultural world at large, vis-à-vis foreign efforts to claim him, like Liszt, for Germandom [németség]. The most appropriate and long-lasting testimony for this appreciation would be a museum-like Goldmark Room, which would also enrich the capital by becoming a sought-after tourist sight for people with cultural interests.”Footnote 60 In requesting Klebelsberg's support of the proposed purchase, Hubay seems to have counted on Goldmark's neo-national (that is, cultural) trade value to trump his status as a Jew at a time when Hungary's controversial numerus clausus of 1920—what has been called Europe's first anti-Judaic law in the twentieth century— remained in effect.Footnote 61 The hunch paid off, and in late 1928 the state purchased the composer's music manuscripts, along with various relics, documents, photographs, and even his piano.Footnote 62
On 18 May 1930, Klebelsberg inaugurated the Goldmark Room on the first floor of the Academy of Music.Footnote 63 This occasion formed one notable part of what was a widespread celebration in Hungary of the centenary of the composer's birth. Another took place that evening a little further down the Andrássy ut, where the Royal Hungarian Opera celebrated with a gala production of Die Königin von Saba, the composer's most famous work, along with a performance of his unpublished Zrinyi, the composition that, regardless of Goldmark's intentions, could most easily be heard as reflective of his allegiance to a magyar nemzet. Footnote 64 Goldmark's music featured in several earlier celebratory concerts in Budapest that year by, among others, Hubay and Ernő (Ernst von) Dohnányi. A number of smaller Hungarian municipalities took note of the anniversary with similar tributes of their own. And in another demonstration of neo-nationalism at work, Klebelsberg even made sure that celebrations in Vienna were given a suitably Hungarian touch by providing state support for the decorating of Goldmark's grave in the Central Cemetery and of the marking of one of his Viennese apartments with a commemorative plaque.Footnote 65
That same year saw the publication of two important works of Hungarian scholarship devoted to the composer: Lajos Koch's bibliography of Goldmarkiana and Mária Kálmán's biographical account, the first to be written in Hungarian.Footnote 66 Both authors relied on Goldmark's recently published memoirs for much of their biographical information, but they chose selectively and somewhat disingenuously, emphasizing the importance in Goldmark's life of the land of his birth and downplaying the composer's long-standing close attachment to Vienna. Kálmán is particularly clear in articulating the romantic nationalism that had come to characterize Goldmark's posthumous reception in Hungary: “The national identity of great people is determined not only by their birthplace but by many other hidden factors that create the foundation of the spirit's belonging. Moreover, national identity is affected by those first intensive, almost subconscious impressions that influence the development of the fragile and absorbent childhood. Finally, we have those relationships that tie one to a specific nation by the intellectual products of a fully developed, creative mind. Based on the above factors, we Hungarians can safely call Károly Goldmark our own, even though he spent most of his life in Vienna, or rather in Austria.”Footnote 67 This is not only an essay in romantic nationalism. It can also be seen to be doing the work of Hungarian neo-nationalism, helping to establish in scholarship an image of the composer that for better or worse endures.
Epilogue: A Germanized Jew in Jewish Budapest
In 1931 the Pest Jewish community opened a cultural center on the third floor of a newly constructed building located immediately behind the Dohány Street Synagogue at 7 Wesselényi Street. This new facility, given the name Goldmark Hall in memory of the recently celebrated composer, soon became a locus of Jewish cultural life.Footnote 68 Among the groups that made regular use of it was the Israelite Hungarian Literary Society, which held its annual public lecture series there. Beginning in 1929 the society also published a yearbook, many of whose articles grew out of those lectures. Both initiatives were designed to serve as popular forums of modern Hungarian Jewish scholarship.Footnote 69 In the second yearbook, published in 1930, we find an extraordinary essay by Gyula Fodor in which Goldmark's music is presented as the perfect embodiment of the so-called Hungarian-Jewish symbiosis in music.Footnote 70 Fodor, a well-known Budapest architect, asserted that it was Goldmark alone who, among the many outstanding Jewish musicians of the previous century, wrote a specifically “Jewish music,” something that could be perceived through “instincts and feelings,” if not exactly established through scholarly means. Going further, he claimed that when Jews heard the composer's works it was as though they were experiencing something they had known for thousands of years. Fodor thus not only claimed, however improbably, that Goldmark's music was essentially Jewish; he also held that it was essentially Hungarian, since “the flowers of gratefulness and loyalty [to Hungary] do not blossom anywhere else in the same splendid way as in the Jewish soul.”Footnote 71
Fodor's identification of Goldmark as a Hungarian-Jewish artist is no less problematic than the efforts of others to brand him as a Hungarian nationalist. Consider, by way of conclusion, this anecdote from the memoirs of the Viennese author, composer, and cultural philosopher Richard Kralik. While looking for a new operatic subject one day, Goldmark came across Kralik's Das Mysterium von Leben und Leiden des Heilands (1895), an Easter trilogy published with supplementary music for voices. Taken by the work, Goldmark asked Kralik to consider providing him with a libretto. The latter understandably had doubts about his suitability for this task; his project, after all, has been described as the promotion of “the concept of a greater Germany under the hegemony of Austria and a revival of the Catholicism of the Baroque.”Footnote 72 But Kralik did not want to offend the composer, and so he offered him some ideas. “Mostly,” as he later recalled, “I recommended to him as a Jew subjects from the Hebrew Bible in the manner of Handel. Strange to say, he greatly abhorred this. With respect to culture, [Goldmark] longed to leave his Jewishness behind and to enter into German heritage, into Classical Antiquity. I found that detrimental to his nature.”Footnote 73 In the striking judgment rendered in this final sentence, Kralik essentializes Goldmark as a Jewish artist (albeit without Fodor's Hungarian adjunct). Yet as I have suggested, the composer cannot be reduced so neatly. His profound identification with German culture did not require him to renounce his Jewish heritage or to give up his Hungarian patriotism. Still, as an artist, it was always clear to him which identity really mattered.
Acknowledgement
Research for this article was aided by the kind assistance of Hannelore Burger, Klara Detrano, Peter Laki, Balázs Mikusi, and Ferenc János Szabó.
