A Gentleman from Budapest: Ferenc Farkas and the Novecento

Ferenc Farkas, born in 1905, studied composition at the Budapest Music Academy from 1922 to 1927. Although he was not a pupil of Zoltán Kodály, Farkas, like most Hungarian composers of his generation, was strongly influenced by the national folkloristic avant-garde ideas of Bartók and Kodály, who had by then reached the zenith of their careers. Therefore the two-year scholarship to Ottorino Respighi's master class at the Accademia di Santa Cecilia offered Farkas a welcome opportunity to broaden his stylistic horizons. In Rome Farkas got to know the specific Italian variant of post-World War I neoclassicism which taught him "how to avoid writing unnecessarily complicated music, and how to express himself fluently, simply and clearly." In his memoirs Farkas referred to the neoclassicist music of Alfredo Casella and Virgilio Mortari (but not that of his teacher Respighi) as "the so-called Novecento," a term denoting stylistic developments in Italian art and literature of the Mussolini era but as a rule not used for music. The source of Farkas's terminology may have been his close association with Hungarian painters and sculptors then staying at the Accademia d'Ungheria in Rome, who followed the new Italian artistic trends and are known in Hungarian art history as the Roman School. Following his return to Budapest Farkas strove to "re-Hungarianize" his style without ever sacrificing Italianate formal clarity and transparency. "Guest Performance in Bolzano", an opera composed in 1980 to words by Sándor Márai and premiered in 1991, can be considered as a monument to Farkas's lifelong intimate relationship with Italy and Italian art. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]