Armed with freshly earned diplomas in choral conducting and music teaching from the Liszt Academy, Mihály Ittzés began his career in 1963 at the Zeneművészeti Szakiskola in Győr (Győr Secondary School of Music), where he taught solfège, music theory, music history, and folk music. He later also served as conductor of the student orchestra and of a chamber ensemble he himself founded. With his school ensemble he premiered new compositions by contemporary Hungarian composers Erzsébet Szőnyi and József Sári.
In 1970 he was invited to Kecskemét, the birthplace of József Katona (dramatist, author of Bánk bán / The Viceroy Bánk) and Zoltán Kodály (composer and music educator), where he first taught as conductor-teacher at the Kodály Zoltán Primary and Secondary School of Music. Here, together with the pupils, he became involved in the work of the Ifjú Zenebarátok Magyarországi Szervezete (the Hungarian section of Jeunesses Musicales International). Alongside his regular teaching duties, he carried out this work with notable success for many years, giving numerous lectures and organising concerts. He served on the organisation’s executive board for an extended period.
In Kecskemét he soon devoted himself not only to his general school duties but also to the organisation of the 1st International Kodály Seminar, an initiative regarded as one of the forerunners of what would later become the Kecskeméti Kodály Zoltán Zenepedagógiai Intézet (Kodály Institute of the Liszt Academy in Kecskemét). He was also a regular lecturer at the Kecskemét Folk Music Meetings. From 1973 onwards he served as a teacher of solfège, music theory, music literature, folk music, and choral conducting at the Kodály Institute, and as head librarian he contributed to planning the institutional framework and academic structure of the Institute. From 1980 he was deputy director for more than twenty years. In 2005 the Institute, as an autonomous organisational unit, was integrated into the Liszt Academy. Ittzés continues to contribute to the Institute’s work as a lecturer (music literature, research consultation, the Kodály oeuvre) and as a researcher.
He has taught on numerous courses and delivered lectures at conferences and Kodály Symposia in the following countries: Australia (1979), Austria (1990), Denmark (2007), Finland (1991, 2004), Greece (1989), Ireland (1983, 1985), China (2004), Korea (2003), Italy (1988), and Poland (from 1976 until 2007 at intervals of two to three years).
In his professional work he has consistently kept in view the motto of Kodály’s article written in 1947 (Százéves terv, Visszatekintés I [lit. A Hundred-Year Plan, Retrospection], p. 207): “The goal is a Hungarian musical culture.” His own Ars Poetica reads: “Even if I can articulate the ideas that may serve as guiding principles in life and that I aspire to follow, I must know the level at which I am capable of serving them in practice: as a master or an apprentice, as an innovator or as a teacher, or even merely as a ‘manual’ worker. What is the important incentive and at the same time the chief aim of my activity: self-realisation or service? Fortunate is the person who, by virtue of inner endowments and outward circumstances, is able to harmonise the two. Fortunate, too, is the person who discovers at the right time the goal that grants him a vocation for life.”
II.
Alongside his work in music pedagogy, Mihály Ittzés was drawn from the outset of his career to music-historical research, with a particular focus on the oeuvre of Zoltán Kodály. He dates his publication activity to 1965, when his first articles and studies appeared. Since then, his research has become an important component of Hungarian musicological and music-pedagogical literature, in which practice and theory consistently form a harmonious whole. His principal field of inquiry is the life and work of Kodály, though he also addresses other questions in the history of Hungarian music. His induction speech for the Hungarian Academy of Arts in 2014 bore the title Bukovinától Svájcig, Árgírus nótájától a Duóig: Kodály, 1914 (lit. From Bukovina to Switzerland, from the Song of Árgírus to the Duo: Kodály, 1914). In 2002 he defended his musicological doctoral dissertation, Zoltán Kodály, In Retrospect, at the University of Jyväskylä (Finland).
Among his scholarly writings, particular significance attaches to those studies that explore the connections between Kodály’s work and that of his predecessors. In Kodály és Liszt (lit. Kodály and Liszt), for example, he demonstrates that in relation to the path first charted by Franz Liszt – a path defined by the fulfilment of both national and universal artistic missions – “in almost every area of his activity Kodály gave numerous indications that the oeuvre of his nineteenth-century colleague stood before him as a rich source of insight and as an exemplar.” In his study Erkel és Kodály (lit. Erkel and Kodály), he considers whether the young Kodály might have thought that he would “one day become heir to, continuer of, indeed fulfiller of those aspirations and tasks to which that great generation of European musicians born around 1810 had devoted their lives and which, in the Hungarian context, were embodied above all in the figure of Ferenc Erkel [composer, creator of the Hungarian national opera tradition]. And yet this is precisely what happened: over the course of his long life Kodály preserved, or rather revived and continued – and at the same time surpassed, in collaboration with Bartók – that which Erkel and his contemporaries, Liszt and Mihály Mosonyi had begun.”
Equally compelling is his study Kodály és Itália (lit. Kodály and Italy), in which he surveys “the Hungarian master’s connection to Italy, one of the birthplaces of European music.” In Zeneszerző kortársak – ahogy Kodály látta őket (lit. Composer Contemporaries – As Kodály Saw Them), Ittzés proceeds from the premise that “throughout his long life Zoltán Kodály observed the world with interest, with an open heart and mind, yet without ever relinquishing his own convictions. Even as a very young man he formed the firm ideas and principles to which he remained faithful all his life. These principles also determined how he judged his composer-contemporaries. It is personal conviction that lends credibility to all these pronouncements.”
In his study A népzenekutatás és a nyelvészet eredményeinek hatása Kodály pedagógiai életművében (lit. The Influence of Folk-Music Research and Linguistics on Kodály’s Pedagogical Oeuvre), he elucidates Kodály’s pedagogy, grounded as it was in both scholarship and artistic insight, and his aspiration “to explain why folk music is needed as the basis and point of departure for musical education.”
In keeping with the creative workshop ethos of the Kodály Institute, several significant music-pedagogical volumes of recent decades have appeared under the responsible editorship of Mihály Ittzés. These include Kodály Zoltán nevelési eszméi a harmadik évezred küszöbén (lit. Zoltán Kodály’s Educational Ideas on the Threshold of the Third Millennium, ed. Erzsébet Szőnyi, 1999) and László Dobszay’s Kodály után: Tűnődések a zenepedagógiáról (lit. After Kodály: Reflections on Music Pedagogy, 1991/2007).
III.
During his studies at the vocational music school in Győr and later at the Liszt Academy in Budapest, he was especially influenced by Miklós Szabó [music theorist], Ernő Lendvai [music theorist, known for analytical work on Bartók], and by Erzsébet Szőnyi, Lajos Bárdos [composer, choral conductor, and music educator], and Zoltán Vásárhelyi [music pedagogue and key figure in the early Kodály movement]. Several of his writings attest to his fidelity as a pupil. Among these are Szőnyi Erzsébet 75 éves. Beszélgetés az ünnepelttel (lit. Erzsébet Szőnyi at 75. Conversation with the Celebrant), Poeta doctus in musica. Bárdos Lajos centenáriumára (lit. Poeta doctus in musica. For the Centenary of Lajos Bárdos), and Adatok Vásárhelyi Zoltán és a Zeneakadémia kapcsolatához. In memoriam Vásárhelyi Zoltán (lit. Data Concerning the Relationship between Zoltán Vásárhelyi and the Academy of Music. In Memoriam Zoltán Vásárhelyi; ed. Mihály Ittzés, Kecskemét, Kodály Institute, 1997, pp. 172–179), as well as his volume Emlékek és találkozások: Vásárhelyi Zoltán (1900–1977) (lit. Memories and Encounters: Zoltán Vásárhelyi, 1900–1977).
His extensive bibliography shows, however, that he gladly turns to other important figures in Hungarian music history and pedagogy. Among those closely linked to Kecskemét, he has also recalled the life and career of Pál M. Bodon [conductor and music educator, long associated with the Kodály Institute].
It is along this path that the volume 22 zenei írás (Kodály és… elődök, kortársak, utódok) (22 Musical Writings [Kodály and… Predecessors, Contemporaries, Successors]) moves – a collection of essays written up to the turn of the millennium, many of which are akin to a personal ‘ars poetica’. Alongside the large number of texts devoted to Zoltán Kodály – as the subtitle suggests – the reader also gains insights into the work of Franz Liszt, Béla Bartók, Lajos Bárdos, and Emil Petrovics [composer]. The author aptly describes the genre of the volume as “applied music-theory scholarship”, while its title “rhymes” with Kodály’s 22 kétszólamú énekgyakorlat (22 Two-Part Exercises).
This volume, too, exemplifies Mihály Ittzés’s wide-ranging interests, his engaging and accessible prose, and the care and stylistic clarity that characterise his work.
The opening study in the aforementioned selection, Kodály országa? (Egy magyar rapszódia, avagy a magyar zenepedagógia keservei és örömei) (Kodály’s Country? [A Hungarian Rhapsody, or the Sorrows and Joys of Hungarian Music Pedagogy]), stands at the head of 22 Musical Writings for good reason. In this essay Mihály Ittzés, with his characteristic passion, poses the question of whether we are worthy of the epitheton ornans “Kodály’s country”. “The answer could of course be formulated very simply in a single word: no!, we are not worthy! Naturally, like every hastily uttered answer, this is exaggerated and therefore somewhat unjust. Were we to reply the opposite – yes!, we are worthy! – we would likewise, and indeed even more so, fall into the sin of exaggeration. Instead of bias pro or contra, let us search for a realistic picture.” And in the coda of this study, written in 1999, he concludes: “...have we drawn nearer to the fulfilment of the hundred-year plan [Kodály, 1947], or rather drifted farther from it? I am inclined toward the latter view. Yet I do not wish, indeed I cannot, forget hope: perhaps there will always be those who do not abandon the struggle and who at least in their own sphere work as people who cling to dreams – in the hope that one day they may become reality...”.
When seeking ways out of the protracted crisis of Hungary’s music-education system, whether in domestic or international courses or in lectures delivered at music-pedagogical and musicological conferences, Mihály Ittzés readily undertakes to rethink Kodály’s principles for the twenty-first century:
“1. Every child should receive a musical education.
2. The basis of musical education should be the human voice, singing.
3. Encounters with music should be guided by the principle of value-centredness, for which the musical mother tongue provides the guarantee.
4. The precondition for educating musically literate listeners is the acquisition of musical reading and writing, for which (and for the development of appropriate aural images and perceptions) relative solmisation is indispensable.”
The twentieth and twenty-first studies in 22 Musical Writings pay homage to another major exemplar, Lajos Bárdos, to whose oeuvre Ittzés also devoted a short monograph (Bárdos Lajos. Magyar zeneszerzők 36 [Lajos Bárdos. Hungarian composers 36], Budapest, Mágus, 2009; English edition: Budapest, BMC, 2015). Here too biographical details and music-historical strands intertwine to felicitous effect, while the author, with great sensitivity, shows how Bárdos was able to retain his integrity in the Hungarian reality after the Second World War [a period of early communist cultural restructuring] and to serve the musical reconstruction of the country, all the while adhering strictly to his principle that he would “not sing the praises of any party or political potentates.”
IV.
One of Mihály Ittzés’s most widely appreciated public-education projects was a mobile exhibition created for the 125th anniversary of Zoltán Kodály’s birth in 2007. Displayed on Budapest’s Metro lines 2 and 3, it presented the life of the Master and introduced his work as composer, musicologist, teacher, and folk-music researcher to the daily travelling public. That same year, as both editor and jury member, he played a major role in the success of a Carpathian-Basin music-literacy competition centred on Kodály’s legacy, in which 107 teams of young music enthusiasts participated from Transylvania (Romania), Felvidék (southern Slovakia), Subcarpathia (western Ukraine), Burgenland (Austria), the Southern Region (Vojvodina, Serbia), and Hungary.
He was also the originator and advocate of the Hungaroton project that issued the complete Bicinia Hungarica and Tricinia on a double CD, realised with the participation of leading ensembles of the Hungarian choral movement.
V.
Since the beginning of his career, Mihály Ittzés has been a respected and active member of several distinguished professional and scholarly bodies in Hungary’s musical life. Although in public forums he is referred to as a music pedagogue and arts writer, perhaps the most fitting designation for his overall activity is that of ‘musical cultural-policy advocate’, for Ittzés has always thought in terms of national cultural policy in the moral sense of the word and has dedicated his life to Kodály’s cause, to Hungarian music pedagogy, and to musicology. He is a personality whose principal weapons are knowledge and creative thought. His humanism and readiness to help others may be traced above all to the influence of his father, who served as a pastor in Győr and died young, from whom he inherited not only his name but his community-oriented spirit.
[2016]