Attila Bozay (1939-1999) is a distinguished Hungarian composer and the youngest member of the generation born in the 1930s, the so-called “harmincasok” (‘those of the thirties’). He came into prominence already in the mid-1960s with his orchestral compositions and, in terms of recognition, quickly caught up with his older contemporaries. Among his contemporaries, he was the most committed to experimentation and the search for new paths, and in his middle period he perhaps ventured furthest from the Hungarian tradition marked by the names of Bartók and Kodály. Not belonging to any 'school', he pursued his own path with stubborn consistency and found compositional solutions that suited his individuality, using a sound system of his own creation. In his forty-two opuses (together with his other, unnumbered pieces), he left a legacy of around one hundred independent works. His works have been presented at numerous international festivals, including the Tribune Internationale des Compositeurs in Paris, the Warsaw Autumn Festival, the Zagreb Biennale, the International Society for Modern Music (ISCM) festivals in London, Brussels, Grenoble and many other European and American events. He has also performed extensively as a cither and csőrfuvola (flute) artist throughout the world, and has performed his own works in almost every country in Europe as well as in Canada. His achievements have been recognised by numerous awards: the Erkel Prize (1968, 1979), the title of Merited Artist (1984), the Bartók-Pásztory Prize (1988), the Kossuth Prize (1990), the Grand Prize of the Millennium Opera Competition (1999), the Artisjus Music Prize (2001), the Hungarian Heritage Prize (2009).
Childhood and school years
Attila Bozay was born on 11 August 1939 in Balatonfűzfő. His father, Gyula Bozalyi, came from a family of intellectuals and travelled to many countries as a design engineer before settling near Lake Balaton. The love of music was important in the family, and the mother, Anna Moder, sang beautifully. Attila learned to play the piano and violin, and also tried his hand at composing at an early age. He began his regular musical studies in 1953 in Békéstarhos, at the State Music School and Music Gymnasium, headed by György Gulyás, where he learned the basics of composition from Zoltán Pongrácz. When the state closed down this excellent institution – which had been a practical realization of Kodály’s pedagogical principles – the following year, Bozay continued his studies in Budapest at the Bartók Béla Secondary School of Music under the guidance of István Szelényi. Of his works from his secondary school years, which incorporate folklorism and neo-classicism with a strong chromaticism, the one-act ballet Séta meseországban (A Walk in Fairyland) (1956) stands out, which he orchestrated from the piano suite decades later, in 1994. In the piano cycle Medáliák (Medallias), composed the same year, he had already experimented with the use of dodecaphony. He reflected on these youthful efforts in a 1984 interview with Bálint András Varga: ‘At that time, it is understandable that I had not yet developed my own style. I wrote little pieces in the styles of others, with varying success, but I always struggled with the idiom I had inherited – or rather, absorbed – from the previous generation. In my adolescence, I wrote many pieces that were formally conventional, following certain neoclassical or neo-folkloristic patterns in a schoolish way, but their harmonic world already looked in a different direction. I was looking for more chromatic melodic turns, more chromatic, more altered harmonies. But I put them together rather sloppily, sometimes with better, sometimes with worse taste. I used Debussy’s ninth chords, some of their slightly jazzy variants, augmented chords, and here and there a sharper dissonance. So I had the desire for a sound-world diverging from tonality, but I could not yet organize it.’
After graduating from high school in 1957, Bozay was admitted to the Liszt Academy of Music (Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music), where he studied composition in the class of Ferenc Farkas. His slightly older contemporary, Sándor Szokolay, later recalled the legendary master and the atmosphere surrounding his students:
‘Ferenc Farkas guided me not with strictness but with inspiring experiences. He had an unparalleled pedagogical instinct for his pupils. György Ligeti, György Kurtág, Emil Petrovics, Attila Bozay, Zsolt Durkó, Miklós Kocsár and others: each of us set out in a different direction, and none of us became “the same” kind of composer. Our talents blossomed because Ferenc Farkas allowed us to follow our own paths. He watched over these paths with care and mastery, and even today, when I compose, I feel as though the Professor were sitting beside my piano.’
Bozay graduated from the Academy of Music in 1962 with a degree in composition and music theory, then taught composition, music theory, music literature and compulsory piano at the State Conservatory of Music in Szeged, and from 1963 to 1966 he worked as an editor of chamber music at Hungarian Radio.
The influence of neoclassicism and dodecaphony in the early works (1958-1968)
During his years at the Academy of Music, following his youthful experiments, Bozay found a liberating force in his encounter with the masters of the Second Viennese School (Schönberg, Berg, Webern) and in the adoption of dodecaphony. This provided the ‘organizing force’ he needed in order to harness excessive freedom and unfold his creativity within the framework of self-imposed constraints. As he remarked: ‘The twelve-tone technique gave me a compositional method for many years, which allowed for greater stylistic unity. […] I think it is extremely important for me to feel both a high degree of constraint and of freedom. Total constraint paralyzes me, but freedom perhaps even more so: it makes me unruly and undisciplined.’ In this creative period (1958–1968), alongside the primacy of dodecaphony, the earlier influences of folklorism and neoclassicism also continued to live on, resulting in what the composer himself described as a kind of dodecaphonic neoclassicism. He had no intention of moving towards total serialism; he used the Reihe technique solely for organizing the succession and simultaneity of pitches – that is, melodies and harmonies. In the shaping of rhythm and form, he remained tied to Hungarian tradition. This duality of new and older elements would continue to characterize his style in later years as well.
Many of the works of the period were later revised or withdrawn by the composer, leaving only the more significant ones to posterity. These include the String Trio (Op. 3, 1960), whose revised version (1966) was premiered the following year in Hanover, New Hampshire, USA. In 1962, the song cycle Papírszeletek (Papyrus Slices, op. 5) was composed for soprano solo, clarinet and cello to poems by Miklós Radnóti and as the most successful Hungarian work it was performed at the Tribune Intenationale des Compositeurs radio festival in Paris. The Wind Quintet (op. 6) and the song cycle Kiáltások (Cries, op. 8), based on poems by Attila József, were premiered on Hungarian Radio in 1963 and 1965 respectively, followed four years later by the cantata Trapéz és korlát (Trapeze and Parallel Bars, op. 12), based on poems by János Pilinszky. Of the latter work, composed in 1966, the composer said. The first (Trapeze and Parallel Bars) is a freely interpreted variation form, in the second, Tilos csillagon (On a Star Forbidden) slow ritornello intersperse two fast interludes, and after an orchestral transition recalling the material of the first movement, the final movement (A tengerpartra, To the Seashore) follows. It is only a four-line stanza with a homophonic structure, and it bears the marks of both the new-style Hungarian folksong and the chorale. In the brief coda, the two most characteristic motifs of the first and second movements meet and close the piece. The first movement features a soprano solo, the second a tenor solo, and the mixed choir is used only in the third movement, together with the two soloists.’
(In Endre Olsvay: Attila Bozay, pp. 8–9).
The most notable international success for the composer came with String Quartet No.1 (Op.9, 1964): within a few years of its premiere in May 1965, it had been performed dozens of times abroad, broadcast on two dozen radio stations, and attracted much attention at the 1967 Tribune Intenationale des Compositeurs in Paris and the ISCM Festival in Prague. Two orchestral works from the period – the Pezzo concertato No. 1 (Op. 11, 1965), commissioned by Hungarian Radio and featuring a viola soloist, and the Pezzo sinfonico No. 1 (Op. 13, 1967) – were both premiered by the leading Hungarian conductor of the day, János Ferencsik, in 1966 and 1968 respectively. Personal connections played an important role in the genesis of Bozay’s works: certain performers – often the dedicatees – not only inspired him but, through close collaboration, virtually became participants in the act of creation. Alongside Ferencsik, these included the pianists Lóránt Szűcs and Klára Körmendi (the latter the composer’s first wife, his muse for a decade and a half, and a devoted interpreter of his music), the violinist János Négyesy, the Bartók Quartet and its violist Géza Németh, and, among singers, Erika Sziklay and Sándor Palcsó.
Among those of special importance to Bozay were his poet friend András Fodor and his fellow composer Zsolt Durkó. Despite their different temperaments and fundamentally different musical styles, Bozay's name was and still is often mentioned together with the latter, thanks to their close personal relationship and their similar artistic goals. It is no mere coincidence that their youthful public debut took place at a joint composers’ concert on 7 May 1965 in the Chamber Hall of the National Philharmonic.
Attila Bozay travelled to Paris on a UNESCO scholarship in 1967, where he had a life-changing experience over the course of six months. He was confronted with such an intense flood of impressions that, by his own admission, it took him several years to absorb and process them. At the Conservatoire, he regularly attended André Jolivet's composition classes – not so much in the traditional master–pupil relationship, but rather as a seeker of new sources of inspiration. He also immersed himself in the rich modern music scene in the French capital, where the works of Boulez, Lutosławski, Berio, Stockhausen, Xenakis and the late Stravinsky exerted a particularly strong influence on him. After returning to Budapest, he worked as a freelance composer until 1979.
A period of experimentation in the 1970s
The impact of the Parisian experience brought about a turnaround in Bozay's compositional career around 1969, about two years after his stay. In preparation for this, already in the second half of the 1960s a gradual move away from dodecaphony has begun (as can be seen in the Trapeze and Parallel Bar Cantata) accompanied by the limited use of clusters and aleatoric forms (Variations for piano, op. 10). Endre Olsvay described the new compositional tools as follows: ‘In this period, the Reihe technique disappears, and the neoclassical attitude recedes – indeed, one could say it loses its essence. We cannot talk about melody formation as before either - in fact, themes are often replaced by combinations of chords or sounds, and sometimes 'merely' by initial ideas. The basis of sound and structure is typically a basic musical element, or a component smaller than a building block. For example, an interval – as in the case of Intervalli op. 15 - or a performance style – see the solo cello piece Formazioni (op. 16)."
Bozay now turned with great interest to experimentation, in which he set himself two main directions. In the first, he explored the possibilities of further developing dodecaphony, often using mathematical principles, combinatorial and permutation solutions to create structures that are predetermined in almost all their elements. These works include the Sorozat (Suite, op. 19, 1970) and the Malom (Mill, op. 23, 1972-1973) for chamber ensemble, the String Quartet No. II (op. 21, 1971) and the Pezzo sinfonico no. 2 (op. 25), composed in 1975-1976 for double orchestra, percussion and two pianos.
The other direction of experimentation led Bozay towards aleatoricism, the extensive use of randomness and improvisational techniques. In the process, he used micro-intervals, indeterminate pitch effects and noises to create sounds that are reminiscent of electronic music, although he himself never composed electronic or computer-generated works. Examples of this can be heard in the three works with different apparatuses entitled Improvisations. The first (op. 22, 1971-1972) is a solo piece for zither, the second (op. 27, 1976), premiered in Toronto, Canada, employs four types of recorders (referred to by the composer as csőrfuvola) and a string trio, and the third (op. 30c, 1978, rev. 1987) is for prepared piano and string orchestra. These two directions are simultaneously present in the piece Tükör (Mirror, op. 28, 1977), written for zither and cimbalom.
In the early 1970s, while exploring new sound effects, Bozay began to work intensively with the zither, and a few years later with the flute. He consistently called the latter a csőrfuvola (‘beak flute’) to distinguish it from both folk instrument (furulya, flute) and medieval music (recorder) associations. His interest in the zither was sparked by the playing of folk musician Mátyás Pribojszky, and through Sándor Budai he acquired his own instrument. From 1973 onwards he regularly appeared as performer of his own works employing zither and later the flute. In 1974-1975 he also composed a concerto for zither and orchestra, Pezzo concertato no.2 (op. 24), and performed it with the Budapest, Brno and Leipzig Radio Orchestras, as well as with the Suisse Romande Orchestra in Geneva.
Developing an individual sound system in the 1980s
By 1979, Bozay felt that he had exhausted the possibilities that could be described by oppositional pairs such as mathematical and improvisational, constructivist and aleatoric, or strictly determined and indeterminate, and he sought new paths. For more than a decade, he had wrestled with setting Mihály Vörösmarty's play Csongor und Tünde to music, but he did not consider his style of the time suitable for solving the problem. So, to make progress, he first took a step back and gradually arrived at a nine- and then a ten-note modal system, which he intended as a further development of Bartók’s eight-note 1:2 model. The ten-note system (the decatonia) is in fact related to the twelve-tone system in the same way that the hemitone pentatonic scale of Hungarian music is related to the diatonic system: in the latter case, the two semitones (fa and ti) are missing in the five-tone system compared to the seven-tone system, just as they are missing in the ten-tone decatonic system, which has two fewer than twelve tone system. The resulting scale is formed by five consecutive semitones, followed by a skipped pitch, with the same pattern repeated in the second half of the scale. Subsets of the remaining ten notes allow for a combination of folkloristic (use of pentatonic), romantic (limited chromaticism with individual colouring), impressionistic (whole-tone) and various 20th century (acoustic scale, 1:2 and 1:5 model scales) styles. What it does not allow for is the traditional seven-note major–minor tonal system, meaning that music composed within the framework of decatonia is immediately distinct from classical tonality to the ear.
Bozay thus channeled the excessive variety of possibilities of the twelve-tone technique into a narrower, more defined field with increasing consistency in his works. In 1984 he completed his opera from Vörösmarty’s poetry, for which he himself prepared the libretto by condensing Csongor és Tünde. The premiere took place on January 20, 1985, at the Budapest Opera House under the baton of András Mihály. As a kind of “by-product” of his opera writing, in 1983 Bozay began composing unison choruses, also to poems by Vörösmarty, in memory of Béla Bartók. After completing the six choral works and following the opera’s premiere, he became so absorbed in the genre that within the same year he wrote three further cycles, each consisting of six pieces, to texts by Sándor Petőfi, János Arany, and János Vajda – bringing the total number of works in the series to twenty-four.
In the following years, a new genre emerged and took center stage in Bozay’s output: decades after his abandoned youthful attempts, he composed within just four years four splendid, meticulously constructed sonatas – two for piano (op. 33a–b), one for violin and piano (op. 34), and finally one for cello and piano (op. 35). In parallel with the latter, in 1988–1989 he wrote a Concertino for horn and string orchestra (op. 36), followed by another concerto-like work, Pezzo concertato no. 3 for flute and orchestra (op. 37, 1990). Immediately afterward he began work on the third Pezzo sinfonico (op. 38), expanded with vocal parts – baritone solo, two children’s voices, mixed choir, and orchestra – to texts by Dániel Berzsenyi and Mrs. Elemérné Papp-Váry, but the composition was not completed until 1995. Among the new vocal works were two song cycles: Meggyfa (The Cherry Tree, op. 39a, 1992) to poems by András Fodor, and Szegény Yorick (Poor Yorick, op. 39b, 1992–1993) to texts by István Kormos; as well as two choral cycles: Four Choruses for Mixed Choir (op. 41a, 1997) to poems by Bálint Balassi, and another Four Choruses for Mixed Choir (op. 41b, 1997) to poems by István Gyöngyösi.
Teaching at the Liszt Academy, public engagement and the last great composition
In 1979, Attila Bozay was invited to join the faculty of the Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music, where he taught orchestration for two years and composition until his death. Among his students were several outstanding composers, including Árpád Barabás, Gyula Bánkövi, Béla Faragó, Gyula Fekete, Barnabás Horváth, Zsolt Dávid Király, Endre Olsvay, Bánk Sáry, and Zsófia Tallér. His later biographer, Endre Olsvay, recalled his teacher as follows: ‘One cannot fail to mention his tact and respect for his students and for their efforts and ideas. He suggested only the most necessary modifications, yet those usually proved decisive. In the part of the studies dealing with obligatory exercises in style and form he was “more relentless”: like a good diagnostician he would illuminate the mistakes, and then – taking on the role of therapist as well – he would often set about correcting them himself. Further insights were offered by Gyula Fekete in a 2002 interview: ‘There exists a certain common minimum, on the basis of which we not only may, but indeed must, engage with “everyone.” If we cannot accept a colleague’s musical style, that cannot be a reason to – almost instinctively – dislike the person as a human being. I believe Attila Bozay was the last great representative of this [...] integrative attitude. [...] At the Academy I attended Bozay’s class, so I learned the profession, the “craft,” the “guild,” from him. At the same time, I also attended Emil Petrovics’s classes, where I absorbed a whole outlook. With him I came to understand a great deal about musical dramaturgy: how to “behave” in music, what a given musical material is for, how to handle musical time. For me, the two teachers complemented each other ideally, for while Bozay loved to delve thoroughly into detail, Petrovics’s attention was directed toward larger scales.’
In addition to teaching at the Liszt Academy, Bozay became increasingly involved in the organisation of Hungarian musical life. In 1987, he was a founding and for a time a board member of the Hungarian Music Society, founding president of the Hungarian Composers' Association, vice-president and then president of the Hungarian Chamber of Music, founding member of the Hungarian Academy of Arts and first president of the Friends of Békéstarhos. From 1990 to 1993, he was the director of the National Philharmonic Orchestra, which took the name National under his direction.
With teaching and countless commitments, Bozay had little time left for composition. Yet in his workshop an opera based on The Tragedy of Man had been maturing for decades, gradually moving from planning to realization by the mid-1990s. The Hungarian Millennium Opera Competition, announced in November 1997, offered a splendid opportunity for its completion, and Bozay set almost everything else aside to finish on time. Since Madách’s 15-scene work was too complex for operatic adaptation, Bozay chose to set the final five scenes – hence the opera’s title The Last Five Scenes (op. 42). The first act depicts London, the second the Phalanstery and the Space Scene, and the last act the Ice World and the closing scene outside Paradise.
Amid serious illness, Bozay completed the piano score with heroic determination and, upon submission, won the competition’s Grand Prize. He did not live to hear the announcement of the results, however, as he passed away on 14 September 1999. The orchestration was prepared according to his intentions by three of his students: Zoltán Kovács (first act), Zsófia Tallér (second), and Gyula Fekete (third). The Last Five Scenes was premiered at the Hungarian State Opera on 21 October 2000, effectively crowning the unbroken arc of his life’s work.
[2017]