Ferenc Farkas (1905–2000), Hungarian composer, was granted an exceptionally long and successful life, his multifaceted career spanning almost the entirety of the 20th century. Thanks to his unparalleled craftsmanship, intuition, and wisdom, he came to be regarded as the most influential composition teacher of the second half of the century. A broad-minded personality of European culture, he was, in the noblest sense of the word, a true “artist of life.” His oeuvre is marked by rare stylistic and generic diversity, coupled with an extraordinary abundance of works. The richness of his invention is evidenced by hundreds of songs and choral works, numerous cantatas, orchestral and concerto compositions, and more than a hundred solo and chamber pieces. He approached each work with the same depth of professional commitment, whether it was a folksong arrangement, an opera, operetta, mass, or film score. He often compared himself to the old guild masters, and his contemporaries justly called him “obsessed with craftsmanship.” At the same time, his principal creative aim was always that listeners should feel the imprint of his personality in his most diverse works, no matter what “mask” he happened to adopt.
The principal focus of his interest was the shared European past, Latin and Mediterranean culture. His works were characterized by clarity of form, an extraordinary sense of proportion and colour. He did not seek loud effects, tension, or dramatic contrasts – for him the representation of beauty and harmony was more important. The aspiration to monumentality was far from his nature; he could rather be called a master of miniature forms. It is no coincidence that instead of sonatas and concertos, he preferred to write sonatinas and concertinos. He strove for comprehensibility, preserving melodic line and tonal ideals in the traditional sense, even in the most modern of contexts. He did not sympathize with speculative experimentation, yet he remained open to all that was new, even as he grew older. The three fundamental components of his distinctive, individual style were Italian neoclassicism, Hungarian folk music, and dodecaphony (the latter applied not according to Schoenberg’s principles, but in the freer, Latin form associated with Frank Martin and Luigi Dallapiccola). In his works, sometimes one, sometimes another of these elements came to the fore.
Childhood and early years
Ferenc Farkas was born on 15 December 1905 in Nagykanizsa, as the only child of Aladár Farkas and Blanka Saly. His parents were amateur musicians: his father, an army officer, played the cimbalom, while his mother played the piano. He began his schooling in Budapest at the elementary school on Bakáts Square, then attended the Lónyay Street Reformed Gymnasium, while also studying piano at the National Music School. His first compositions were songs and folksong arrangements, the latter written for a small choir made up of his classmates. He began his studies at the Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music while still at secondary school: from the autumn of 1921 he was a preparatory student of Leó Weiner, but in the following year he postponed his studies because of his graduation exams and illness. He completed the four academic classes under the guidance of Albert Siklós, receiving his diploma in composition in 1927.
After finishing his studies, he worked at the Municipal Theatre as a répétiteur. Besides coaching singers, accompanying dancers, and playing orchestral piano, he was soon entrusted with conducting operettas as well. Encounters with many outstanding conductors and singers left him with lifelong memories, as did the guest appearances of the Paris Opéra Comique and the Milan Scala ensembles – and, above all, two weeks of work with the Ballets Russes. The Prokofiev, Auric, and Poulenc works in the ballet repertoire broadened his musical horizons and had a decisive influence on the development of his style. After the largely lost songs, piano pieces, and chamber works of his student years, his first appearance before the wider public came with his Comic Overture, performed on 24 March 1928 at the Vigadó by the Municipal Orchestra of Budapest.
The scholarship of the Hungarian Academy in Rome offered an escape from the “treadmill” of daily work: in the autumn of 1929 Farkas became a student of Ottorino Respighi’s master class at the Accademia di Santa Cecilia, where he also spent the second semester of the following academic year. He was captivated by the Italian master’s impressive personality and broad culture, his refinement, professional exactitude, and passion for the sister arts and for the past – all of which exerted a decisive influence on Farkas and became a lifelong guiding program for him. The Roman environment directed his attention to ancient culture, and with the help of his painter friends – among them Pál Pátzay, Vilmos Aba-Novák, György Kákay-Szabó, Ferenc Deéd, C. Pál Molnár, and Béla Kontuly – he further enriched his knowledge in this field. He also successfully continued his earlier experiments in painting, and with great diligence began composing in the spirit of Italian neoclassicism and Novecento. While Respighi had a strong impact on his outlook and choice of genres, in musical style he followed more closely the models of Casella and Malipiero.
After his first year in Rome, on 16 December 1930, Farkas organized a composer’s evening in Budapest where his newest works were performed (Notturno for string trio, Piano Sonata, Sonatina for violin and piano, Fantasia for piano and orchestra in a two-piano version, songs, piano pieces). Also dating from that year was his orchestral Divertimento, followed the next year by the song cycle Pastorali, the Római hangjegyfüzet (Roman Notebook), and the piano suite Canephorae. These works clearly show that the main features of Farkas’s compositional style were established early on: his clear sense of form, diatonically conceived flexible melodies, rhythms alive with countless ideas, his fondness for metric play and displaced accents are all present in these youthful compositions.
After completing his studies in Rome, in the autumn of 1931 Farkas took a position as pianist in the orchestra of the Fővárosi Operettszínház (Operetta Theatre Budapest), and in the following years this activity became one of his main sources of livelihood. There was hardly a theatre in the capital whose orchestra he did not play in. A significant milestone in his career as a composer came when his Divertimento won a prize in the Liszt Ferenc Competition. The three prize-winning works were conducted by Ernő Dohnányi on 11 February 1933 in the Kunsthalle at the opening of the exhibition dedicated to the memory of Minister of Culture Kunó Klebelsberg. The following year he received the Ferenc József Prize, and the financial support it provided enabled him to travel to Somogy County in the spring to collect folksongs. Fieldwork gave him the opportunity to encounter folk music in its original environment and in live performance. From these experiences grew more than a hundred folksong arrangements. His conscious intention to synthesize folklorism and neoclassicism is shown by the fact that instead of simple harmonization or stringing together of melodies, even in his smaller pieces he strove to build classical sonata, rondo, and trio forms.
In the 1930s, composing incidental music and film scores became the main field of Farkas’s creative activity. In 1932 he struck up a friendship with film director Pál Fejős. Their collaboration began in Hungary (Ítél a Balaton – Judgment at Lake Balaton), continued in Vienna (Sonnenstrahl – Sunbeam; Frühlingsstimmen – Voices of Spring), and then from autumn 1934 to spring 1935, and again in 1936, they worked together in Copenhagen. Meanwhile, from 1935 Farkas taught solfège, music history, and theory at the Higher Music School of the Capital. The heyday of his incidental music came in the mid-1930s, when Antal Németh became director of the National Theatre and, by inviting him repeatedly, virtually made the young composer the theatre’s “house composer” (Timon of Athens, As You Like It, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, The Tragedy of Man).
All this left Farkas little time for independent compositions. The outstanding work of the first half of the decade is the song cycle Fagyöngy (Mistletoe, 1932) to poems by Lőrinc Szabó, followed five years later by Szerelmek madarai (The Birds of Love) to texts by Kazinczy and Csokonai. At concerts of the Capital City Orchestra, Jenő Kenessey introduced the Athéni Timon (Timon of Athens) suite and the Három csavargó (Three Vagabonds) ballet suite, both drawn from his incidental music, and then in March 1937 the Concertino for harp and orchestra marked a breakthrough in his career. It was successfully performed in Brussels, Rome, and again in Budapest.
The end of the travelling years: the 1940s
The early 1940s brought the promise of both a domestic and international career for Farkas. In 1941, at the invitation of Viktor Vaszy, he moved to Kolozsvár, where he became professor of composition at the Conservatory, and from January 1943 its director. At the same time, he served as chorus director of the Kolozsvár National Theatre, and in 1944 as its music director. Performances in Hungary, Germany, and Switzerland of his incidental music to Csongor és Tünde (Csongor and Tünde) and Az ember tragédiája (The Tragedy of Man) made his name widely known. The work that summed up the first period of his career, the opera A bűvös szekrény (The Magic Cupboard), premiered in 1942 and created a sensation in Budapest, Erfurt, and Kolozsvár, conquering audiences at once with its effective dramaturgy and singable, natural melodies. His works were taken on by Universal Edition, and he also won significant acclaim for his film music (Emberek a havason – Men on the Mountain, Rákóczi nótája – Rákóczi’s Song).
The events of the Second World War broke Farkas’s creative momentum at the end of 1944, and in the following years his energy was once again consumed by everyday tasks. From April 1945 he was deputy chorus director at the Budapest Opera House, and in the autumn of 1946 he was entrusted with founding and directing the State Conservatory of Music in Székesfehérvár. In Székesfehérvár he also organised concerts, directed the MÁV Male Choir, and took part in reviving the city’s musical life. From 1948, an appointment as répétiteur at the Academy of Drama offered him a livelihood once again in the capital. By then he also had a family to support: in 1939 he had married Margit Kummer, and in 1945 their only child, András, was born, who later became a conductor. One of the most significant turning points in Farkas’s life came in 1949, when he took over the chair of composition at the Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music from Sándor Veress, who had emigrated abroad.
From his Székesfehérvár period two settings of poems by Sándor Weöres must be highlighted – two miniature masterpieces: the mixed-chorus Rózsamadrigál (Rose Madrigal) and the song cycle Gyümölcskosár (Fruit Basket). Meanwhile, in 1947–48 major premieres of Farkas’s works again took place in Budapest: the string-orchestra piece Musica pentatonica, conducted by János Ferencsik; the outstanding work of his oeuvre, the cantata Szent János kútja (The Well of St John, Cantata lirica to the poems by Jenő Dsida), conducted by László Somogyi; and the Zongora-concertino (Piano Concertino), performed with Péter Solymos as soloist. Thanks to these successes, in 1949 the Opera House commissioned Farkas to compose the ballet Furfangos diákok (The Crafty Students), choreographed by Gyula Harangozó. In 1963 it was performed at the Edinburgh Festival, and in suite form it was presented many times as a concert piece.
Works and genres in the middle period
In Ferenc Farkas’s output, works belonging to the realm of applied music occupy a strikingly large proportion. In roughly one hundred and fifty radio, film, and stage incidental scores, as well as in his pedagogical works, lighter choral pieces intended for amateurs, and arrangements composed at the request of folk ensembles, the composer also had to take into account considerations beyond the purely musical. Yet for Farkas these genres did not play a secondary role – their impact and radiance permeate almost his entire oeuvre. Dozens of incidental scores took on an independent life in other forms, for example in the Ahogy tetszik-dalok (As You Like It Songs), the chamber-orchestra Lavotta-szvit (Lavotta Suite), the Lavottiana wind quintet, and the orchestral work Bükki vázlatok (Sketches from the Bükk), derived from the film Simon Menyhért születése (The Birth of Menyhért Simon).
While working on incidental music, Farkas collected valuable source material, from which he also created various arrangements and orchestrations: the 17th–18th-century melodies he encountered during the filming of Rákóczi nótája (Rákóczi’s Song) were in fact reused in his world-famous series Régi magyar táncok (Early Hungarian Dances). He himself described this endeavour as “art of duty” (feladatművészet), his attempt to revive musical eras through the aid of historical relics, and in this respect he regarded Respighi as his chief model. He felt it his responsibility to revive early Hungarian music, and with over one hundred songs and choral works to commemorate the poets of the nation.
The loosening of genre boundaries also marked Farkas’s stage works. Certain sections later took on independent life as orchestral suites, songs, and choral pieces, while in some cases entire compositions were transfigured into a different genre context. Among the stage works, Csínom Palkó (My Fair Palkó), Zeng az erdő (The Forest Resounds), and Vidróczki were originally conceived as radio plays, and the operetta A vők iskolája (The School for Sons-in-Law) also exists in a significantly different chamber version (performed under the title Anyósgenerális – The Mother-in-Law General). Nationwide fame came to the composer with the broadcast of Csínom Palkó on 22 January 1950 – for which he received the Kossuth Prize – and, following its success, he was invited to compose a whole series of radio plays. In 1951 Csínom Palkó, expanded with seventeen musical numbers, was staged as a musical play at the Városi Színház (Metropolitan Theatre), and after numerous foreign performances (Magdeburg, Moscow, Leningrad, Vienna, Sofia, Plauen, Kassa), in 1960 it was presented in a revised version at the Szeged Open-Air Festival. Unlike other works, here the film was made last: in 1973 Márton Keleti and Gyula Mészáros directed a popular musical adventure film based on Farkas’s piece.
The work Vidróczki, recounting the story of the Mátra outlaw, already stood closer to opera as a “musical radio ballad” than Csínom Palkó. Its arias and ensembles mean more than mere insert numbers, for it is largely within them that the turning points of the plot and the dramatic confrontations unfold. Because of the highly demanding vocal parts and prose dialogues, the piece originally required dual casting – a solution abandoned in the stage version performed in Szeged in 1964.
Unique in genre is the three-act Panegyricus, created with choreographer Imre Eck, in which dances accompanied by orchestra and chorus are interwoven with prose dialogues and vocal numbers, while the actors also appear silently as participants in the dance scenes. This “stage play” presents the life of Janus Pannonius and his relationship with King Matthias and was premiered in Pécs in 1972. Later the composer assembled the choruses into the cantata Vita poetae and reworked the instrumental sections into an octet titled Mátyás király udvara (The Court of King Matthias).
Ferenc Farkas had a multifaceted relationship with poetry and with his creative contemporaries. As a young man Cs. László Szabó and Lőrinck Szabó, during his time in Kolozvár with Áron Tamási, László Szabédi and Zoltán Jékely, and later with Sándor Weöres and Milán Füst. With never-ending interest, he explored the gems of poetry and became an expert on two thousand years of literature. His songs and choruses were inspired by some one hundred and thirty writers and poets, who include half a hundred Hungarians. He has composed music in seventeen languages: in addition to Hungarian, he has composed several pieces in German, Italian, French, Latin and Spanish, but he has also enriched the musical literature with works in Portuguese, Danish, Greek, English, Dutch, Basque, Slovak, Romanian, Croatian, Ukrainian and Malgas (his works include translations of Belarusian, Chinese, Icelandic, Udmurt and Persian poems in Hungarian and English).
The impact of dodecaphony from the second half of the 1950s
In the second half of the 1950s, Farkas once again had the opportunity to look toward Western Europe. He visited Vienna annually and also travelled to France and England. The gradual dissolution of isolation invigorated his compositional activity, and under the influence of new directions he boldly turned toward dodecaphony. He had experimented with twelve-tone technique – among the very first in Hungary – as early as 1943 in a fugue, which he later incorporated into the incidental music for Angalit és a remeték (Angalit and the Hermits) and into the Prelude and Fugue for Orchestra completed in 1947. In his Radnóti Song Cycle (Calendar, 1955) and in his Füst Milán Songs (A vándor dalai - Songs of the Wanderer, 1956) he likewise came close to dodecaphony. A consistent adoption of the technique was realized in two piano cycles from 1957: Correspondances and Hybrides. Yet this new method caused not the slightest rupture in the composer’s career. His works retained not only their clear structure and balanced, human-scale proportions, but also his ideal of sound, his vocal-inspired melodiousness. The freer, Latin-inflected world of Frank Martin and Luigi Dallapiccola provided the path through which he approached the new technique – one whose tools he continued to employ in precisely the same spirit as before. The freer application of twelve-tone writing appears in the Drei Lieder (1958) on the poems of Anneliese Eulau-Felsenstein, and lives on in the song cycles Hommage à Alpbach (1968) and Autumnalia (1969). Yet dodecaphonic technique also surfaces fleetingly in places where one would not suspect it from the sound, for instance in the Jelky András Suite (1973–1974) and in a work beloved by youth orchestras worldwide, the Piccola musica di concerto (1961).
In the abstract world of modern chamber music, Farkas ventured furthest with the String Quartet (1972), dedicated to the Tátrai Quartet. A similar depth of intellectual lyricism had been reached a decade earlier with the Sonata a due (1961), composed at the request of György Janzer, whose profound viola–cello dialogue was continued in the relationship between solo instrument and orchestra in the Trittico concertato (1964). The latter was premiered at the 1965 Venice Biennale by the cellist Gaspar Cassadó, who had commissioned it, and with whom Farkas had struck up a friendship in 1963 while serving together on the jury of the Casals Competition in Budapest. Another fruit of this personal connection was the Trois chansons de Guillevic (1960): in 1959 Farkas had represented Hungary in Paris at a meeting of the Confédération Internationale des Sociétés des Auteurs et Compositeurs, where he became acquainted with the French poet.
Farkas dedicated his most significant orchestral work, Planctus et consolationes (1965), to the memory of his friend, the film director Pál Fejős, who had died in 1963. The piece condenses into a single movement the alternation of two emotional states: grief and consolation. Through several stages it journeys from rebellion against fate to resignation before the Creator’s will and to the attainment of peace. Precisely at this time, the voice of prayer gradually came to the fore in Farkas’s creative world. In 1962, at the request of Lajos Maklári, choirmaster of a Piarist high school, he set to music Zsigmond Móricz’s psalm translation for a mixed choir (Psalm 131) and composed the St. Andrew Mass, bearing his son’s name, which became a major achievement in modern Hungarian sacred music. Two years later he composed the Missa in honorem Sanctae Margaritae, dedicated to his wife, and in 1968 the Missa Hungarica, written for performance by a parish community. After numerous psalm settings and other liturgical texts, his fourth mass (Missa brevis in honorem Sancti Stephani, 1994–1995) was again dedicated to a family member, his grandson István.
One of the most important strands of Farkas’s oeuvre is represented by the cantatas, which in many respects connect to the aforementioned sacred and secular choral works. This imposing series, following The Well of Saint John, continues with works such as Cantus Pannonicus (1959), Laudatio Szigetiana (1966), Tavaszvárás (Awaiting Spring, 1966–1967), Bontott zászlók (Tattered Banners, 1972–1973), and Aspirationes principis (1974–1975), extending into his later years with Omaggio a Pessoa (1985) and Kölcsey’s Szózat (1992–1993). In Cantus Pannonicus, Farkas set to music the Latin verses of the Renaissance Hungarian poet Janus Pannonius. His characteristic “tonal dodecaphony,” first tried out in piano works and songs, was here applied within the larger framework of a five-movement cantata.
In tone and style, another facet of the composer is represented by Aspirationes principis, composed for the 300th anniversary of the birth of Prince Ferenc II Rákóczi. The texts of the central movements were chosen from the prince’s Latin autobiography and confessions, framed by three contemporary documents: Pál Ráday’s manifesto, a letter of Kelemen Mikes, and Rákóczi’s Latin epitaph.
The last creative period (1975-2000)
In 1975, at the age of seventy, Ferenc Farkas retired from the Liszt Academy of Music, where over a quarter of a century he had established a true school of Hungarian composition pedagogy. He taught with unparalleled professional knowledge and wisdom, had a sharp eye for recognizing talent, and possessed a rare gift for bringing out the individuality of his students. Among the most famous were György Ligeti (who had already studied in Farkas’s class in Kolozsvár), György Kurtág, Lajos Vass, Emil Petrovics, Sándor Szokolay, Miklós Kocsár, Zsolt Durkó, Árpád Balázs, Attila Bozay, Zoltán Jeney, and László Vidovszky. Miklós Kocsár recalled the Farkas lessons in these words:
“He judged everyone relative to themselves, with gentle patience. […] There were times when someone could not cope with a task; then he would improvise several possible continuations for the piece, always in line with the composer’s style. […] We could admire his fantastic gift for combination, his adaptability, his inventiveness. It was a celebration when he analyzed masterpieces. He would move from the whole to the details, dismantling the composition down to its tiniest elements, only to rebuild it again and now consciously illuminate the life of the work in its entirety.”
With retirement, Farkas had more time to travel and became more active in musical life; already from the early 1970s he often served on the juries of music competitions (in Paris, Arezzo, Debrecen, Montreux, and Tours). His son András, after conducting studies in Vienna, settled in Switzerland, and the ensembles he led became important interpreters of Farkas’s works in the decades to come. From 1973 onward the composer was a frequent guest at the International Guitar Festival in Esztergom, and at the request of László Szendrey-Karper and later Ferenc Fodor he wrote and adapted numerous works for guitar. Special mention must be made of the dodecaphonic Sonata (1979), the Guitar Songs (to poems by Jenő Dsida, 1983), Estampas españolas (four songs, 1988), and the Exercitium tonale (1982), a cycle of twenty-four character pieces. From the late 1970s onwards, Farkas’s wide recognition was marked by a series of prestigious national and international awards: among them the Herder Prize (1979), the Bartók–Pásztory Prize (1985), the Knight of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic (1986), and a second Kossuth Prize (1991).
The summative work of the Farkas oeuvre is the opera Egy úr Velencéből (A Gentleman from Venice), composed in 1979, based on the verse-drama adaptation of Sándor Márai’s novel Guest Performance in Bolzano. Its premiere, however, only took place on June 4, 1991, as the émigré writer had not permitted his works to be performed in Hungary. With minor abridgements, Farkas set the original text by Márai, whose beautiful verses are declaimed by the singers with sensitive adaptation, often amplifying the poet’s words in their emotional impact. Yet the vocal lines merely bear the dramatic text; the music, centered on melody and balancing Márai’s poetry, speaks through the orchestra in Farkas’s opera.
In the last decades of his life, the composer’s style became simplified, his means of expression more concise. Although he remained open to new solutions, he did not experiment with aleatoricism or minimalism. His primary concern was the human voice and inspired by his favourite poems he composed numerous songs for solo voice and choir. As he often confessed, he felt that with advancing age, beauty affected him ever more directly and powerfully. The death of his wife in 1992 left an indelible mark on him: he commemorated her not only in sacred works – the Requiem (1992), Beati mortui (1994), and Laus Beatae Margaritae (1994) – but also gave voice to his grief over her loss in the song cycle Orpheus respiciens (1993), in the songs Október végi este (Evening at the End of October, 1995) and Souvenir de Malmaison (1996), as well as in the mixed-choral 333rd Petrarch Sonnet (1992) and in Epitaph (1994).
Ferenc Farkas’s creative energy remained unbroken until the very last moment of his life. Death came to him in the night of October 10, 2000, at the age of ninety-five, while he was setting a poem by Lorca to music. He formulated his artistic credo – one that highlights a universally valid trait of his multifaceted oeuvre – in these words:
“Composing is joy for me; therefore I would like, through my works, to bring joy to my listeners as well.”
[2017]