László Eősze, musicologist, pianist, music writer, and one of the key figures in the 20th-century history of Hungarian music publishing, was born on November 17, 1923, in Rákoshegy. His father, Rezső Eősze (1882–1927), was a postal supervisor, and his mother, Janka Kovács (1886–1983), a postal inspector. He lost his father at the age of three and a half; his mother, living under modest circumstances, supported and educated her son from her widow’s pension. He spent his childhood in Budapest, in the vicinity of Városliget (City Park). He attended elementary school on Aréna Street, close to their home, and began piano lessons in 1931. He pursued his secondary studies at the Saint Stephen Gymnasium, where he graduated with honors in 1941. From the age of 14, for a full decade, he studied with Zoltán Horusitzky (1903–1985), one of the most outstanding teachers of the Székesfővárosi Felsőbb Zeneiskola (Budapest Municipal Higher School of Music) and a former pupil of Zoltán Kodály. At the legendary school of music, located at the corner of Ráday Street and including four academic classes, piano instruction was held twice a week, while music theory was taught daily. The talented piano student was given performance opportunities by his teachers at an early age. In 1936, following his performance of Tibor Kazacsay’s piano piece Katonásdi (Playing Soldiers), he received a memorable prize book: Antal Molnár’s newly published Popular Music Booklet on Zoltán Kodály. At the same time, he worked his way up every step of the musical ladder in his gymnasium’s orchestra: first merely turning pages at a concert by Ernő Dániel, a pupil of Dohnányi; then becoming the music librarian of the Saint Stephen Gymnasium; and finally being “promoted” to the position of pianist of the school orchestra.
In 1941, parallel with his musical studies, László Eősze enrolled at Pázmány Péter University to study German and Italian literature and aesthetics. During the difficult war years, the university not only gave him the chance to master German and Italian languages at a high level, but also allowed him, as a student of Professors Gyula Kornis, Béla Brandenstein, Tivadar Thienemann-Tass, Elemér Schwarz, and Alajos Zambra, to become part of the foremost Hungarian centers of German and Italian literary and linguistic workshops. During his university years, in the summer of 1943 he attended Walter Gieseking’s piano masterclass in Wiesbaden, and in the summer of 1944 Elly Ney’s in Salzburg. On September 5, 1943, in Wiesbaden, Otto Schmitgen, the town’s music director – skirting the ban on student appearances – programmed Liszt’s Dante Sonata and Liebesträume, thus giving the 20-year-old László Eősze the opportunity to perform as a pianist. The hall was full, and among the audience sat Professor Leimer, Gieseking’s own teacher, who, impressed by the great success, predicted a promising concert career for the young pianist.
On November 25, 1944, in Budapest, in the presence of Sergio Failoni, he made his Hungarian debut at the Károlyi Palace, again with a program of Liszt’s works. Then history intervened harshly.
“The fascist dictatorship, in its last hours, still had time to deport some of its university students to Germany. This is the only explanation for the fact that while 6,054 students enrolled for the first semester of the 1944–45 academic year, the number for the second semester […] fell to 3,941.” [1] – states a history of the university with cold objectivity.
On 1 December 1944, László Eősze, like his peers, received a military draft that could, in an instant, have put an end to his artistic and academic ambitions. Only through his keen presence of mind, courage, and ingenuity did he manage to escape without immediately being caught, surviving the worst months of the siege of Budapest as a supposedly wounded man, hidden in a shelter in Pest with his leg in plaster.
The second university semester of the 1944–45 academic year could be completed by the remaining students between May and the end of June. László Eősze submitted his doctoral dissertation in musicology under the title Liszt und die deutsche Romantik, and after its defense he was awarded the doctorate summa cum laude. He took on private pupils in piano, and in 1946, with the help of his uncle, Dr. László Cseh-Szombathy – Secretary of State and member of the Smallholders’ Party – he became cultural commissioner at the Ministry of Welfare. At the same time, in 1947, as a student of Zoltán Horusitzky, Lajos Hernádi, Zoltán Kodály, and Bence Szabolcsi, he also obtained his piano teaching diploma from the Academy of Music.
But soon he had to face the truth: alongside the demands of office work and the responsibilities of starting a family, he had less time to devote to practice for a career as a pianist. (In October 1948 he married Katalin Kerényi, a teacher of German and Latin and the daughter of Professor Károly Kerényi, the eminent Hungarian scholar of antiquity. Their children were soon born: son László in 1951, and daughter Anna Katalin in 1955.) In 1950 he still appeared as a pianist at a cultural competition with a performance of Kodály’s Marosszéki táncok (Marosszék Dances), but after this appearance – his last – only one further public piano performance followed, in 1951 in Székesfehérvár.
In 1953, thanks to a successful folk music exam at the Academy of Music and an outstanding study on Kodály’s children’s choruses published in Zenetudományi Tanulmányok (Studies in Musicology), Zoltán Kodály himself agreed that the young László Eősze should be his biographer. His first monograph on Kodály, based on personal consultations, two years of book and archival research, and the recollections of contemporaries, appeared in March 1956 during Kodály’s lifetime (Kodály Zoltán élete és munkássága – The Life and Work of Zoltán Kodály). At this point, it seemed that his life was on track. After nine and a half years of service in the Ministry – which he himself always regarded as being on the sideline – from 1 January 1956 he was finally able to enter a meaningful musical post, joining the staff of Editio Musica Budapest. Under director Béla Tardos, a disciple of Kodály, he worked his way through every professional and administrative level of music publishing. For another eleven years, until the Master’s death, his fruitful creative collaboration with Kodály continued. In his private life, however, the tragedy of the 1956 autumn uprising caused a severe trauma: it split his family in two. In the summer of 1957, at the invitation of his father-in-law living in Zurich, his wife and two children travelled to Switzerland for two months. The “vacation,” however, was unfortunately extended, and for his family it became a lifelong emigration.
At the monopoly-holding Editio Musica Budapest, Eősze served as reviewer, editor, and editor-in-chief, and from 1961 he was already head of the publisher’s music literature department. In 1966, after the death of director Béla Tardos, chief director Szilárd Újhelyi asked László Eősze directly to take over the directorship of Editio Musica. After a year in the post, however, he himself recommended László Sarlós, the London resident representative of Kultúra Foreign Trade Company, for the position. Sarlós, an excellent marketing expert with a keen eye for selecting collaborators, became a driving force and active leader of one of the most successful periods in Hungarian music publishing.
As artistic director, it was in fact László Eősze who led Editio Musica, where – following Western models but within the framework of socialist bookselling, and with the involvement of publishing copyright interests – he developed a unique model for the live performance of musical works, including the international dissemination of Hungarian contemporary music. Editio Musica had local representatives in every important country.
It was also László Eősze’s merit and initiative to establish the New Complete Edition of Liszt as both a publishing and scholarly workshop, which began in 1970 with the scientific-critical publication of Franz Liszt’s piano works, in collaboration with Bärenreiter Verlag of Kassel.[2] Under his leadership, thanks to the contributions of the two principal collaborators, composers and musicologists Imre Mező and Imre Sulyok, 18 volumes containing 322 of Liszt’s solo piano works were published.
As head of the publisher’s literary department, he initiated the publication of more than five hundred books in musicology, music pedagogy, and musical popularization. Among his greatest editorial achievements was securing the publishing rights to the German Brockhaus–Riemann music encyclopedia, assembling the Hungarian editorial team, and – through the work of editor-in-chief Antal Boronkay – contributing, with this epoch-making undertaking, to the international standing of Hungarian music and to providing the country’s musical community with the most up-to-date professional literature.
He pursued his musicological work as an independent researcher throughout, until his retirement from the publishing house in 1987. His private life finally found stability when, after a long period of solitude, he married again in 1983; in his second wife, Margit Szilléri, he found an excellent person and an inspiring, cheerful intellectual companion. In 1988 he obtained his Candidate’s degree with the dissertation The Influence of the Intellectual Currents at the Turn of the Century on the Formation of Kodály’s Compositional Personality.
The backbone of his scholarly oeuvre consists of seven source-critical Hungarian books on Zoltán Kodály – twenty-five volumes in total, including multiple editions and translations – along with some seventy-five studies. Closely connected to these is his important public activity in societies and foundations dedicated to promoting the national and international reputation of Zoltán Kodály. From 1975 to 1995 he served as Executive Secretary of the International Kodály Society, which unites members from thirty-five countries, and as editor-in-chief of the Society’s journal, the Bulletin.
It may be said that throughout his devoted musicological and public work for Kodály, extending to the present day, László Eősze consistently perceived and presented Kodály’s legacy – as composer, music pedagogue, and nation-builder – as a synthesis, with a message adaptable for the entire world.
His major undertaking was the first Hungarian-language universal handbook on the history of opera (Az opera útja - The Way of the Opera, 1960), on which generations of musicians grew up, and which was also published in Bratislava in Slovak.
The Liszt heritage of his student years was rekindled by research grants from the Italian state. By examining thirty-four Italian private and public collections from a Lisztian perspective, László Eősze contributed a significant opus to the history of Hungarian Liszt scholarship with his fundamental book 119 római Liszt-dokumentum (119 Liszt Documents from Rome), published in 1980. But just as in the case of Kodály’s oeuvre, he complemented his scholarly work with significant public engagement. From 1973 he was a founding member of the Hungarian Liszt Society, then, together with Béla Bartók Jr., he served as co-president of the Society from 1991 to 2006, and as a board member until 2008.
Alongside his work on Kodály, his international standing as a musicologist was further established by his books and studies on Wagner and especially on Verdi, published also in German and Russian translations.
László Eősze writes brilliantly – he is one of the finest Hungarian masters of the essay on music. It is no coincidence that throughout his life he was also a popular contributor to art and literary journals. His first breakthrough success in Hungarian intellectual life, extending beyond the musical world, came with his outstanding essay Verdi, Bartók és Kodály ars poeticájának közös vonásai (The Common Features of the Ars Poetica of Verdi, Bartók, and Kodály), published in the literary journal Nagyvilág. On its appearance in 1966, Albert Gyergyai congratulated him with these words: “Nyugat [lit: ‘West’, the most important Hungarian literary journal in the first half of the 20th century] would have licked all ten of its fingers if it had ever received such a musical essay.”
In the summer of 1966, he travelled to the International Verdi Conference in Venice as Zoltán Kodály’s representative. His article written for Nagyvilág soon appeared in Italian as well, and in the musicological journal of the Parma Verdi Institute it achieved broad international success. Following this, the circle of Italian Verdi scholars commissioned him to write further studies on Verdi’s Don Carlos and later Otello, which grew out of his highly acclaimed lectures at the international Verdi congresses of 1971 and 1974.
László Eősze’s nearly seven decades long continuous and high-level musicological work were recognized with numerous awards. In 1976 he received a Grammy Award in Los Angeles in the category of Best Album Notes; in 1979 he was honoured with the Ferenc Erkel Prize, and in 1998 with the Zoltán Kodály Prize. His further distinctions include: the Commander’s Cross of the Hungarian Order of Merit (1998), the Medal of Merit of the President of the Republic (2003), the Grand Prize of the National Association of Hungarian Creative Artists (2003), the Bence Szabolcsi Prize (2009), the Széchenyi Prize (2013), and the Hungarian Heritage Prize (2013).
László Eősze is still an active member of the musical community. He participates in the work of the public bodies of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and the Hungarian Academy of Arts and is occasionally present at the board meetings of the Hungarian Musicological Society, the Circle of Opera Lovers, the International Verdi Society and the Kodály Zoltán Foundation of the Pro Renovanda Cultura Hungariae Foundation.
[2012]
[1] C.f. A 325 éves Budapesti Eötvös Loránd Tudományegyetem rövid története (A Brief History of the 325-year-old Eötvös Loránd University of Budapest), Budapest, 1960, 25.
[2] Today the New Liszt Complete Edition, which is quoted as one of the most important and also internationally acknowledged projects of Hungarian musicology, counts over 740 scientific-critical publications of Liszt piano works in 52 volumes.