Mária Eckhardt (*1943) is a musicologist, conductor, museologist, and journal editor, honoured with the Erkel, Szabolcsi, Kroó, and Széchenyi prizes. Her scholarly and research-organisational contributions are of outstanding significance in the history of both Hungarian and international Liszt studies. Her principal research areas include the life and works of Franz Liszt, Liszt’s contemporaries and pupils, nineteenth-century Hungarian music history, and the history of musical institutions. In parallel, she conducted the choir of the National Széchényi Library for fifty-two years.
Her academic career, which began in the autumn of 1966, is associated with three institutions. She served for seven years as a research fellow at the Music Collection of the National Széchényi Library, followed by fourteen years at the Department for Hungarian Music History of the Institute for Musicology of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences [MTA ZTI]. From 1986, she was the founding director of the Liszt Ferenc Memorial Museum and Research Centre, which she organised, and following her retirement, she continued as its scientific director until 2013. She currently performs voluntary work as co-president of the Liszt Ferenc Society and editor of its journal.
Armed with a freshly obtained degree – and as a consummate musician, fluent in three foreign languages, and possessing a cultivated intellect – she embarked on a career that demands the whole person even in a single aspect. Her work was characterised from the outset by unwavering readiness to uncover and study documents awaiting discovery, meticulous attention to detail focused on the task, deep insight into newly emerging connections, and the aptitude to inspire, encourage, and collaborate effectively within both small and large communities.
In the music collection, which was rich with priceless treasures, Mária Eckhardt received substantial responsibilities in her early years, encouraged and guided by István Kecskeméti. Beyond the routine mechanical tasks of library work, he entrusted her with musicological assignments, involving her in source research and ongoing publications. Two significant events marked the end of 1967 in her life: in November, her child was born, and in December, her first scholarly publication appeared – a selection of letters addressed to Dohnányi preserved in the legacy collection of the National Széchényi Library. In the same year, at the invitation of Dénes Bartha, she began work on the complete edition of Joseph Haydn’s comic opera Le pescatrici (Munich: Henle, 1972). Thereafter, until the autumn of 1970 (while balancing maternity leave and teaching), she prepared full scores from manuscript parts held in the music collection – primarily compositions by classical Viennese minor masters – readying them for their first publication by the Zeneműkiadó [now: Editio Musica Budapest Zeneműkiadó]. Her first edition, Vanhal Te Deuma vegyeskarra és zenekarra (lit. Vanhal’s Te Deum for mixed choir and orchestra) appeared in 1970, followed by editions of works by Albrechtsberger, Michael Haydn, Dittersdorf, Süssmayr, and Druschetzky. In the autumn of 1970, she and her colleagues founded a choir, providing an opportunity to perform these new editions and to revive long-neglected manuscript and early printed materials held in the music collection. Initially a small chamber choir of sixteen members, it gradually expanded into a mixed choir of 35–40 singers, giving unforgettable performances in concert halls and churches across Hungary, at prestigious festivals, and on international stages. Their repertoire included Bárdos Lajos’s Jeremiás próféta könyörgése (lit. Prayer of the Prophet Jeremiah), a masterpiece long neglected for political reasons, whose manuscript also resided in the library; under the composer’s personal guidance, the choir performed it from the manuscript and restored it to the national choral repertoire during his lifetime. In addition to core choral works, their programmes featured a Donizetti one-act opera and oratorio performances with orchestral accompaniment, including works by J. S. Bach, J. Haydn, Mozart, Liszt, and Kodály. Although the choir operated on a voluntary, self-funded basis, its quality, repertoire, and organisational structure were undeniably professional. In its fifty-second and final year, the choir was awarded the KÓTA 2022 prize [of the Association of Hungarian Choirs, Orchestras and Folk Music Ensembles (KÓTA)] in the “Choir” category.
During the final three years she spent at the Music Collection – while singing in the Liszt Ferenc Chamber Choir under István Párkai and participating in the ensemble’s numerous domestic and international concerts, competition victories, and recordings – Mária Eckhardt was entrusted with the reorganisation of one of the richest and most challenging segments of the collection: the manuscripts and contemporary copies of Franz Liszt. She worked on their recataloguing, as the previous manuscript catalogue contained incomplete descriptions, unidentified or misidentified pages, previously unknown fragments, and album leaves. In the course of this work, she immersed herself thoroughly in Liszt’s oeuvre and delved deeply into the scholarly literature. For particularly intractable manuscript identifications, she benefited from the brilliant insights of her former Academy teacher, Zoltán Gárdonyi, who was one of the chief editors of the then newly launched complete edition of Liszt’s works. Over time, she herself became increasingly adept at determining the provenance of individual items. Engagement with this material gradually drew her into the fascination of Liszt’s art and personality. In a later interview, she recalled: “I became increasingly interested in the subject and quickly realised what a fantastic person Liszt was, and how many masterpieces are hidden among his lesser-known works. Through Liszt’s colourful, open personality, one can come to understand an entire era. Finally, a composer who does not revolve exclusively around himself, but is capable of opening up to any value! (…) This generous openness was very appealing to me.”
This marked the beginning of a pioneering scholarly career, stemming from the source research of the most precious elements of the Liszt legacy – the autograph manuscripts – and concurrently expanding into an extensive understanding of the composer’s life, works, era, and contemporaries. It culminated in the conceptualisation, realisation, and operation of the Liszt Ferenc Memorial Museum and Research Centre, the foremost institution for Liszt scholarship in Hungary, safeguarding both the composer’s intellectual and material heritage.
As it is impossible to present her entire scholarly oeuvre in full, I will attempt here to provide a concise overview of Mária Eckhardt’s research and related activities spanning nearly sixty years – work that progressively built upon itself and grew ever deeper and broader. This summary highlights major milestones across a wide spectrum of her contributions: publications (six books; numerous articles and studies in Hungarian, German, English, and French; letter editions; exhibition catalogues; reviews; record commentaries; encyclopaedia entries; translations; editions), radio lectures, institutional founding and leadership, archival curation, exhibition organisation, concert planning and direction, conference organisation, and collaboration with domestic and international Liszt scholars and institutions. Supplementary notes and the appended bibliography aim to aid the formation of a more complete picture of her achievements.
During her systematic examination of Liszt’s music manuscripts, Eckhardt found particular interest in tracing the provenance, history, and interrelationships of autograph sources. These studies initially led to publications in Hungarian and foreign languages, radio lectures, and live concert performances. Later, drawing on her experience processing Liszt manuscripts and letters at the Institute for Musicology, as well as the Major estate, and informed by annual research conducted from the summer of 1976 at the Goethe-Schiller Archive in Weimar – the world’s largest repository of Liszt manuscripts – she produced an English-language overview of the Liszt manuscripts held at the National Széchényi Library (Franz Liszt's Music Manuscripts in the National Széchényi Library, Budapest, 1986). This work, serving as a fundamental reference for international Liszt scholarship, provided a clear and methodically organised guide, listing seventy-eight documents with detailed descriptions, comparisons, and evaluations. Professor László Somfai advised on methodology. In the year of its publication, Eckhardt also produced a detailed article on manuscripts held in the Liszt Collection at the Academy of Music (see: Zenetudományi dolgozatok [publication of the MTA ZTI]), and subsequently continued to report on newly acquired works, manuscripts, and letters entering the museum (Magyar Zene, 1990).
Another major focus of Mária Eckhardt’s research and scholarly interests has been the publication of letters. In this field, she has produced a significant body of meticulously annotated work, uncovering extensive information and previously hidden connections, which continues to be regularly cited by scholars today. Among the most important publications, in chronological order, are the following. In 1977 she published A Zeneakadémia Liszt Ferenc leveleiben (lit. The Academy of Music in the Letters of Franz Liszt) (In: A Liszt Ferenc Zeneművészeti Főiskola 100 éve, Budapest, pp. 18–68), in which 87 selected excerpts from Liszt’s letters trace the establishment of the Academy of Music and shed light on the complications surrounding its foundation as well as the decisive role of its namesake. In collaboration with Cornelia Knotik of the Eisenstadt Museum, she published a comprehensive documentary volume in 1983: Franz Liszt und sein Kreis in Briefen und Dokumenten aus den Beständen des Burgenländischen Landesmuseums (Eisenstadt, 160 pp.). In 1989 Liszt Ferenc válogatott levelei, ifjúság, virtuóz évek, Weimar (1824–1861) (lit. Selected Letters of Franz Liszt, Youth, Virtuoso Years, Weimar (1824-1861)) (Budapest, 302 pp.) was published, a selection of 160 letters drawn from approximately ten thousand, offering insight into the composer’s life, accompanied by extensive commentary and indexes. Alongside these major editions, she regularly published previously unedited or contextually significant letters from various Liszt-related archives and collections, such as the Liszt letters in the Major Collection, the Domahidy deposit of the Ráday Collection, and the Utassy deposit.
Her first publications that attracted international attention were closely linked to the research she began at the Music Collection and continued at the Institute for Musicology. She reviewed the first international Liszt symposium in Eisenstadt (1975) and contributed her study Zur Frage der Liszt’schen Briefkonzeptbücher to the second conference in 1978. At the subsequent international symposium in 1991, she outlined a long-term, internationally coordinated programme for a new thematic catalogue of Liszt’s works. The undertaking of such a catalogue requires immense material and human resources and international collaboration, as the necessary documentation is dispersed worldwide. Although a full thematic catalogue of Liszt’s works has yet to be completed, the efforts of Eckhardt and Rena Charnin Mueller resulted in the publication of the most up-to-date and comprehensive list of Liszt’s works in the Grove Dictionary Liszt entry in 2001. Following the 1994 Eisenstadt conference – during which she studied the Scandinavian materials in the Liszt estate’s score collection – she conducted in-depth research on the oeuvre of the Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg. This work resulted in several publications (2009, 2016, 2018) and a 2007 exhibition highlighting Grieg’s respectful friendship with Liszt and the reception of his music in Hungary. For eight years, she also served as an active board member of the International Grieg Society.
In addition to her international study trips and lectures (France, Italy, Austria, Germany, Poland, the USA, Canada, etc.), from 1982 onwards she published in the journal of the American Liszt Society, and later also in the journal of the German Liszt Society. She delivered significant papers at numerous international conferences (see bibliography) and edited the Studia Musicologica volumes for the Liszt conferences of 1986, 1991, 2000, and 2011. Key milestones in her scholarly work include important discoveries, research, and projects undertaken at the Goethe-Schiller Archive in Weimar. In 1986, she published the study Von ‘Les quatre éléments’ bis zu ‘Les Préludes’, examining an unpublished choral work discovered in the Weimar collection, which represents an early precursor to Liszt’s symphonic poem Les Préludes. The work, later reconstructed from multiple manuscripts, received its world premiere in September 1996 and was also recorded by the Hungarian Honvéd Choir. In 1996, she produced a substantial twenty-page study on the extraordinarily complex genesis of Liszt’s settings of Psalms 23 and 137, based on the most important sources held in the GSA manuscript collection. In 1999, she reconstructed Liszt’s Weimar library from a 1298-item antiquarian catalogue published in Erfurt in 1887, an achievement made possible by her remarkable diligence in identifying the materials within the Liszt special collection (co-authored with Evelyn Liepsch; see bibliography for details). In 2000, by monitoring the international manuscript market, she drew attention to an album compiled by Liszt’s foster daughter, Princess Marie von Sayn-Wittgenstein, containing small works composed by Liszt and his circle. This led to a detailed, annotated source study (Berlin, 48 pp.), a music edition (Budapest, 23 pp., 2000), and a contextual study (in Liszt magyar szemmel, No. 26, 2016). Furthermore, through intensive scholarly collaboration among institutions, materials from the Goethe-Schiller Archive in Weimar, the Beethoven-Haus in Bonn, and the Liszt Ferenc Memorial Museum in Budapest were brought together in 2002–2003 to create a major travelling exhibition entitled Liszt and Beethoven, accompanied by a collaboratively produced catalogue now regarded as a foundational work in musicology.
This exhibition was preceded and followed by numerous other temporary exhibitions, approximately twenty-five in total, curated by Mária Eckhardt between 1986 and 2013. These were organised either independently, with the involvement of colleagues, or in collaboration with domestic and international partner institutions. Detailed descriptions of these exhibitions are available. While each exhibition sheds profound light on a particular aspect of Liszt’s life, work, or relationships with his contemporaries, it is perhaps most appropriate to draw attention to the major commemorative exhibitions: Liszt Ferenc a magyar zene útján (lit. Franz Liszt on the Path of Hungarian Music)(2001), Liszt Ferenc – Magyar és európai (lit. Franz Liszt – Hungarian and European) (2011; a poster exhibition with multilingual versions), and Liszt és a társművészetek (lit. Liszt and the Allied Arts) (2011/2012), the latter a large-scale exhibition accompanied by an international conference, for which she served as chief curator. In parallel with these exhibitions, the Memorial Museum, opened in September 1986 in the reconstructed Old Academy building, has provided continuous public access to a permanent exhibition that authentically presents Liszt Ferenc’s former apartment, complete with the master’s instruments, furniture, and personal memorabilia. The museum’s mission is the preservation, scholarly processing, and multifaceted presentation of the Liszt Archive at the Academy of Music. Catalogues of the permanent exhibition have been continuously updated and made available in multiple languages. In its inaugural year, an annotated Hungarian-English catalogue of the books preserved in the Liszt Archive was published, followed in 1993 by the catalogue of the archival music collection. The museum completed the restoration of its music manuscript collection, comprising over 2,500 items, and maintained Liszt’s instruments to the greatest extent possible. A particularly valuable LP was also produced in 1988, featuring Jenő Jandó performing on the museum’s Liszt instruments. Scholarly publications and music editions drawn from the Liszt manuscripts in the archive have appeared continuously. Notable examples include the bilingual edition of the Christus oratorio and The Academy of Music’s facsimile of the four-hand piano version of Hirtengesang an der Krippe, awarded the ‘Beautiful Hungarian Book’ prize in 2011. Another rarity is the version of the song Jeanne d’Arc au Bûcher, arranged for the pianino-harmonium preserved in the museum, using Liszt’s original accompaniment, published in 2013 by BHKZ publishing house, with an extensive, source-based study by Eckhardt Mária. Equally noteworthy are two facsimile editions accompanied by her deep scholarly commentary: the first, the original manuscript edition of the Hungarian Rhapsody No. 19 for piano (Budapest: Zeneműkiadó, 1985, 39 pp.), and the second, the Piano Sonata in B minor, based on the original manuscript held in New York, published by Henle in 2015, including restored pasted-over sections. The invitation from Henle was a great honour and represented a highlight in her long-standing, high-quality collaboration spanning more than fifty years, encompassing nearly twenty volumes of Liszt piano works, a partnership that continues to this day.
[2024]