Ede Terényi is a Hungarian composer from Romania, a master, teacher and friend to many contemporary composers. Among twentieth-century Hungarian composers from Transylvania, several have pursued highly significant international careers – for instance György Ligeti, György Kurtág and Péter Vermesy. Others, such as János Viski, György Orbán and György Selmeczi, have enjoyed distinguished careers primarily in Hungary. By contrast, composers who lived and worked mainly in Romania – including Aladár Zoltán, Boldizsár Csíky Sr., Csaba Szabó and Ede Terényi – remain comparatively little known in Hungary.
“There Is No Time!”
Ede Terényi was born on 12 March 1935, on a Tuesday, in Marosvásárhely (Târgu Mureș). The composer has remarked that, as a “spring person”, he has on many occasions been able to restart his life and career with remarkable ease. Looking back on his oeuvre, one can discern clearly defined creative periods, and in the transitions between them the composer’s spiritual and intellectual freshness is consistently perceptible.
His ars poetica also encapsulates a broad horizon from another perspective: “There is no time!” On the occasion of his eightieth birthday, he reformulated the same assertion by stating: “Eighty years – that is nothing.” He went on to explain that he does not feel either eighty years old, nor sixteen. In his view, humanity has not changed at all over the course of millennia; it remains exactly where it originally was. This reflection may also be read as suggesting that nothing changes precisely because there is no time.
Since Ede Terényi became not only a composer but also one of – if not the most – significant music theorists in Romania, his conception of time is presumably traceable not only in his own works but also in those of others.
“Bartók is my father!”
In his native city, Bolyai Lyceum, Terényi completed his secondary education at an institution with a strong emphasis on the natural sciences. It was during these years that he began writing literary texts, as well as painting, drawing, producing woodcuts, and working with clay on the potter’s wheel. Alongside his lyceum studies, he completed the piano programme of the Music School of Târgu Mureș, which at the time functioned as a higher-level music institution. In the year of his final school examinations, he also obtained a concert pianist’s diploma in the second academic piano class. Recalling his outstanding music teacher and the beginnings of his compositional career, he later wrote:
“It was my teacher József Trózner who opened my eyes, ears, and heart to European music – to its historical and developmental contexts, to the magnificent spectrum of genres, styles, and musical languages. […] In 1952, armed with my certificate from the second academic piano class, my mathematics-focused secondary school diploma, and a few very modern compositions, I knocked on the door of the secretariat of the Gheorghe Dima National Music Academy to apply for admission – specifically, and by then very consciously, to the composition programme. At that moment, all memories of a career as a concert pianist faded away at once, and the dawn of a lifelong vocation as a composer broke.”
His deeper vocation for music was profoundly shaped by the funeral of Béla Bartók in the United States. Terényi followed the procession via a radio broadcast of Voice of America, during which a passage from the Funeral March of Four Orchestral Pieces was played. It was at this moment that a deep spiritual and intellectual awakening began – and, for a time, a powerful musical identification – which would later culminate in the statement: “Bartók is my father!”
Although he had already encountered the opera Duke Bluebeard’s Castle in childhood, the decisive Bartók experience of his life occurred at the age of twelve, when he overheard an older acquaintance playing a Bartók piece through an open window – the fourth movement of Romanian Folk Dances. The music affected him so intensely that he not only wished to play the piece himself, but longed to compose something comparable to it. It was thus, at the age of twelve, that he arrived at the decision to become a composer.
The permeable walls of Cluj
From 1952 onwards, the young aspiring composer studied composition at the Gheorghe Dima Academy of Music. Both the musical milieu and the “treasure city” itself represented a profound turning point in his life. From the age of seventeen, Cluj-Napoca became his home. Reflecting on the city on the banks of the Someș River, Terényi emphasised that its intellectual walls are permeable – permeable over great distances. At the same time, these cultural fortifications also serve to protect the distinctive spirit of Cluj. Through the city’s vibrant cultural life, Terényi was able to become actively involved in Romania’s musical scene, to engage with the world of concert life in Hungary, and to extend his outlook towards the German and French cultural spheres as well.
He studied composition and harmony under Gábor Jodál, attended lectures on music history and ethnomusicology given by János Jagamas, and learned counterpoint from Miksa Eisikovits, the teacher who had discovered György Kurtág. He was also significantly influenced by the choral conducting classes of István Nagy, while his pianistic skills were further developed under Géza Szabó. In most respects, he assembled the elements of his musical thinking in a manner comparable to composer training in Hungary. There was, however, one crucial point of divergence: the theoretical foundations of the school of music theory represented by Gábor Jodál. Jodál had originally been a student of Zoltán Kodály, and thus shared many common starting points with figures such as Bence Szabolcsi, who taught in Budapest. Yet, as their later work demonstrates, they ultimately pursued markedly different paths in their analytical approaches to music. In subsequent years, Terényi integrated what he had learned from Jodál with a wide range of international trends, local traditions, and his own original insights. Through this synthesis, he developed an autonomous and distinctive Transylvanian Hungarian school of music theory.
“I was born to be a teacher!”
Terényi taught for fifty-four years at the Gheorghe Dima National Music Academy (1958–2012). Initially, he taught counterpoint, later harmony. By his own account, teaching harmony was the most natural vocation for him, as he had always regarded himself as a seeker and explorer of harmony. His extensive theoretical output likewise focused primarily on the study of harmonic systems and on the vertical dimension of modern music. His doctoral dissertation, A XX. századi zene 1900–1950-ig terjedő első felének összhangzattan-elmélete (lit. The Theory of Harmony in the First Half of Twentieth-Century Music, 1900–1950), represents a comprehensive synthesis of his research in this field. Another major area of his scholarly interest was the history and stylistic analysis of Transylvanian Hungarian composition.
A characteristic feature of his creative and pedagogical attitude is that, in many of his articles, reviews, and essays, he consistently drew attention to elements extending beyond music itself – to cultural, psychological, and social phenomena. Among the better-known volumes of his writings are Zene marad a zene? (lit. Does Music Remain Music?, Bucharest, 1978) and Zene Tegnap. Ma. Holnap (lit. Music Yesterday. Today. Tomorrow, Bucharest, 2004). A different line of inquiry is represented by Paramuzikológia (lit. Paramusicology, Cluj, 2001), a volume in which he recorded innovative attitudes, ideas, and observations concerning music, composition, and musical reception.
As it has already become clear, Terényi continually sought opportunities to engage with audiences, readers, and listeners alike. Through his research, writings, and lectures, he educated, taught, and formed minds – in a manner reminiscent of Attila József. In the course of his formal teaching activity alone, he influenced countless students, guiding nearly two thousand musicians and doctoral candidates towards a more reflective and mature mode of musical thinking. As he himself put it: “I was born to be a teacher – I was predestined for it even by the fact that I was born on the name day of Pope Saint Gregory, the patron saint of teachers.” Whether one examines a study devoted specifically to Terényi or any work addressing Transylvanian musical matters more broadly, references to him by his former students appear with striking frequency. He is generally regarded as a precise, demanding master of immense knowledge – someone from whom receiving criticism was as much an experience as working alongside him. His pedagogical ethos has become legendary, and his mentoring presence shines through even in television interviews.
Bartók reception
Terényi’s childhood and adolescent encounters with Bartók’s music deepened substantially during his years at the academy, particularly in the classes of Jodál and Jagamas. His understanding of Bartók was further facilitated by the contemporary vogue of Debussy, as well as by Terényi’s own deepening engagement with folk music. At the same time, the study of Bartók’s musical language rendered both folk music and impressionism more immediately accessible and experientially tangible to him. In Transylvania, Bartók reception in the 1950s and 1960s unfolded almost simultaneously with Hungary, allowing for a process of reciprocal Bartókian influence. Among the best-known works of this period are Széki és székelyföldi lakodalmasok - lit. Wedding Music from Szek and Szeklerland (suite, 1959), Erdélyi lakodalom – lit. Transylvanian Wedding (1959), Szerelmes dalok – lit. Love Songs (to folk texts, 1962), and Népdalok Magyarlapádról - lit. Folk Songs from Magyarlapád (suite, 1962).
Alongside the more explicit folk-music rewritings and transformations, there are also several outstanding, enduring, and more abstract compositions, such as Hét dal (lit. Seven songs) to poems by Attila József and Árpád Tóth (1956), the Sonatina for Violin and Piano (1955, revised 1965), or the Concertino for string orchestra and electronic organ (1958, revised 1965), a work that probes the very boundaries of musicality. References to Bartók persisted throughout the oeuvre well into later periods: following Un poco alla Bartók (1957) and Sonata aforistica (in memoriam Bartók, 1961), Bartók was still explicitly invoked in 1980 in the Violin–Piano Sonata on Bartók Themes.
At the same time, already in the 1960s Terényi articulated an inner imperative not merely to continue Bartókian musical thinking, but to rewrite and surpass it. Along this path, he became increasingly attentive to the expanded expressive possibilities of percussion instruments, as well as to one of the prominent stylistic currents of the period: serialism.
The madness of construction
The Webernian principles of the Darmstadt School were adopted and applied, for shorter or longer periods, by almost every composer of the time. They proved particularly congenial to Terényi, insofar as they offered a theoretical framework that interpreted music within a quasi-mathematical register. During this period, he composed several large-scale works: for piano (Három zongoradarab preparált zongorára – lit. Three Piano Pieces for Prepared Piano, 1963), for orchestra (Varázsmadár – Szimfonikus variációk Brancusi emlékére – lit. Magic Bird: Symphonic Variations in Memory of Brancusi, 1965), and for vocal–symphonic ensemble (such as Párosjáték – lit. Paired Play, 1967, and In memoriam Attila József – cantata, 1967).
Looking back on this phase, the composer recalled that he constructed every detail meticulously, reshaping his music on the basis of theoretical constructs. Today, the most enduring work of this period is generally regarded as the organ piece B.A.C.H. Mass. On the one hand, this composition anticipates – in its provocative stance – M. Kagel’s Sankt-Bach-Passion; on the other, it also encapsulates Terényi’s reflections on the German Baroque and on German serialism. It represents an intriguing attempt to read the balance-based musicality of the German Baroque through the constructive logic of serialism. At the same time, it constitutes a public confession that, for Terényi, Johann Sebastian Bach was not, despite all homage, a genuine source of inspiration.
The encounter with constructivism (serialism) undoubtedly shaped a lasting interpretative mode in Terényi’s thinking (as evidenced, for instance, by the septet Fehér út – lit. White Road, 1993). Perhaps even more significantly, however, it proved particularly fruitful for his teaching of counterpoint and, by the end of the decade, for the harmony classes he was entrusted with.
The madness of graphics
In the 1970s, György Ligeti, followed by the composers associated with the Darmstadt School, turned their attention to graphic modes of musical notation. For Terényi, the growing prominence of this notational practice proved revelatory, as he had lived since childhood in the immediate proximity of word, song, and image. The impulses that inspired him often appeared in the form of images or graphic shapes, which he at times preserved as coloured wall prints, while at other times translated them directly into musical form.
As a teacher of harmony, he immersed himself in the study of polyvalent harmonisation, and as a composer he was able to put the results of this research to creative use. He sought to bring newly emerging sonic harmonies into alignment with visual harmonies. Formally, this took shape in the use of non-figurative coloured lines in his visual works, and in musical scores that echoed these graphic principles: he wrote them in black ink, rendering them visually analogous to his drawings. This new mode of notation did not merely function as a visual embellishment; rather, the music itself became visual and graphic in nature. The pictorial quality of the score suggested musical motion. In this way, Terényi approached the original Baroque ideals more closely than ever before – albeit by entirely novel means.
Among the many works of this period, several stand out in particular: the String Quartet No. 1 (1974), In memoriam Valentin Bakfark – a symphony for string orchestra (1978), and the already mentioned Sonata for Violin and Piano on Bartók Motifs (1980).
The madness of beauty
According to Terényi Ede’s research, compositional life paths follow a general inner rhythm, whereby the oeuvres of composers who reach a fortunate longevity may be divided into three major phases. The first three decades constitute the period of assimilation: a time of gathering material and processing influences. In Terényi’s case, as we have seen, this involved his engagement with Bartók, Debussy and Webern. The second phase is characterised by attempts to develop an autonomous musical language, typically spanning the period between a composer’s thirtieth and fiftieth years. For Terényi, this manifested on the one hand in a radically new perspective on folk songs, and on the other in his engagement with graphic notation. The period following the age of fifty marks the onset of a process of clarification and distillation. While this phase may at times involve dead ends or moments of stagnation, it may also culminate in a form of classicising crystallisation.
Terényi described the first decade of his own period of distillation as “the madness of beauty.” Drawing on his music-historical research, shifts in musical language, and contemporary approaches to historically informed performance, the composer created a series of neo-Baroque works during this phase. This stylistic orientation finds its most characteristic expression in Vivaldiana, a cycle of twelve concertos. In this series, solo instruments engage in concertante dialogue with strings and percussion. In this period, percussion instruments assume a particularly prominent role: Terényi composed chamber works written exclusively for percussion, such as Swinging Suite – Tahiti (1985), For Four – Hommage to America (1986), and Hommage à Satie (1988).
In this phase, the composer once again enters into dialogue with international trends, responding to the artistic directions associated with Steve Reich, John Cage, and Nikolaus Harnoncourt. Elements of repetitive and minimalist style are discernible, for example, in Swing Suite. The historicist movement gaining ground across Europe through Harnoncourt’s work, in turn, opened the path towards Terényi’s neo-Baroque concertos. In these works, harmonisation becomes consonant once again – though not in a strictly Baroque sense. Another significant change is the composer’s return to unified metres, through which he creates large, coherent musical surfaces, more homogeneous than in his earlier works. An example of this approach is the cello concerto Baroque rapsody – Hommage à Bach (1984), which is also accessible online.
“I wish to serve my dear homeland”
From the 1990s onwards, Terényi Ede consciously turned towards the traditions of old Transylvania. Folk music once again came to the fore, alongside early musical notations and sources. Among the historical composer-scribes, special prominence is given to the Wallachian-born János Kájoni, who, in the monastery at Gyergyószárhegy, recorded Hungarian songs, dances, and melodies of his time in his codex. One of Pál Péter Domokos’s significant periods of research is also connected to Kájoni; Domokos organised his findings into a volume under a quotation taken from Kájoni: “I wish to serve my dear homeland.” A similar inward-looking attitude can be observed in Terényi’s work. Although he had earlier made meaningful gestures towards figures such as Bakfark and Tinódi, here he goes further, classically reimagining Transylvanian heroes, epics – and everyday life itself.
One of the peaks of his oeuvre is the five-movement symphony Erdélyi várak legendája (lit. The Legend of Transylvanian Castles, 1994), composed at the commission of the Hungarian Radio Symphony Orchestra. Already in the 1980s he had produced symphonies of an experimental tone combined with formal classicising tendencies (Tér és fény [lit. Space and Light], 1988; Hegyek, Erdők, Álmok [lit. Mountains, Forests, Dreams], 1988; Hofgreff-szimfónia [lit. Hofgreff Symphony], 1989). The 1994 symphony represents an essential synthesis of all his previous experiences and achievements. In it, Terényi rewrote Bartók’s Concerto in the most contemporary large-orchestral language. Neo-Baroque tendencies converge with an intensified focus on percussion; Transylvanian written traditions find a voice alongside Bartókian and folk-music roots. This thematic line was followed by a twin symphony for string orchestra: Erdélyi kódex (lit. Transylvanian Codex, 1998) and Cantus hungaricus (1998), both composed in response to commissions from Budapest. Two large-scale symphonic organ concertos also belong to this group: Requiem (in memory of the victims of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, 2000) and Fadrusz (in memory of János Fadrusz, 2001).
Kájoni also stands behind the church-music cycle that reached its culmination in the 1990s, including works such as Te Deum (1990), Missa in A (1991), Stabat Mater (1999), and the sacred masterpiece Krisztus hét szava a keresztfán (lit. The Seven Last Words of Christ on the Cross, 1991). The Miseparafrázisok a XVII. századi Erdélyből (lit. Mass Paraphrases from Seventeenth-Century Transylvania, 1993) constitutes an explicit homage to Kájoni, as it organises themes collected by him into five movements of the Mass. In these works, Terényi’s most mature and fully developed compositional style becomes clearly perceptible. One of the most thorough analysts of his oeuvre, Gabriella Coca, has demonstrated that Terényi presents melodies through both horizontal and vertical transformations, and frequently employs the devices of key scordatura, rhythmic scordatura, and harmonic fusion. For the non-specialist listener, however, what is most immediately striking is the frequent combination of organ and percussion, shaped by the legacy of early sacred melodies.
In the final two decades of his oeuvre, vocal expression once again assumes a prominent role. In 1995, he composed his first mono-opera for a single singer with minimal accompaniment. By now, he has created nine mono-operas, setting to music some of the most significant works of world literature, including the Mahābhārata, The Divine Comedy, The Adventures of Odysseus, the Kalevala, and Faust. The density and intense emotional charge of this new genre allow for a particularly concentrated mode of expression. In connection with these works, the presence of graphic art – running parallel to the entire oeuvre – also becomes more pronounced. A standalone volume of his graphic works has likewise been published under the title Dantesca.
Conclusion
Among Transylvanian composers, Ede Terényi is one of the most frequently performed masters. By 2015, thirty-nine composer recordings of his works had been released; of these, only one appeared on the Hungaroton label, while the others were issued by publishers in Romania. His scores were likewise published by houses based in Bucharest and Cluj. Beyond his professional achievements, however, personal relationships – with fellow composers and former students – have been of even greater importance to him. Particularly outstanding among these is the legendary friendship between Ede Terényi and Sándor Balassa, beautifully exemplified by the series of violin duos entitled Balassa-duók (lit. Balassa Duos).
It is therefore no coincidence that Terényi chose to summarise his theoretical oeuvre in two monographs devoted to his friend Sándor Balassa. Reflecting on the act of creation, Terényi formulated it as follows: “In the strictest sense of the word, I write down the signs that appear in my consciousness – these may be sounds, most often they are, but they may also be letters or drawings through which I express myself, my thoughts, and my music. When I am writing something, the external world ceases to exist for me entirely.”
Engaging in dialogue with countless masters and stylistic traditions, Terényi had, by the 1990s at the latest, developed a distinctive and autonomous musical language of his own. Speaking of his role models, he remarked: “Among my relatives … there are figures such as Vivaldi, Bartók, Mussorgsky, Debussy, and perhaps two or three collateral relatives, such as Domenico Scarlatti or Stravinsky…” In this statement, he implicitly distances himself not only from Mozart but also from Johann Sebastian Bach. Within his own oeuvre, Terényi recognised the elemental reception of Italian Baroque music, Russian Romanticism and its continuation in Russian Expressionism, as well as French Impressionism – alongside the unavoidable legacy of Bartók. To this list, one may also add jazz and folk music.
In sum, Terényi has accumulated a vast and weighty body of work. Musically independent of the schools of Hungary, he nevertheless remained in constant dialogue with both local and international trends.
[2015]