The Middle Generation

Extract

Gábor Darvas (b. 1911) emigrated to Chile soon after completing his composition studies under Kodály, where he worked with Erich Kleiber. He returned to Hungary in 1958, and has since held numerous administrative positions. His development as a composer came unusually late. After his early pieces in the manner of Kodály and Bartók he was unproductive for many years, occupying himself with writing musical textbooks, and orchestration of piano works by Liszt and others. The continuation of his own creative work, after much preparatory thought, experiment, and study of many major contemporary works, came only in the 1960s. His ‘Improvisations symphoniques’ for piano and orchestra (1963), performed in 1966 at the Stockholm ISCM Festival, is virtually his Op. 1, an attribute that shows in the extremely varied and sometimes conflicting means it employs. But it has one distinctive feature which seems to be characteristic of the modern musical movement in Hungary generally: musical continuity. This does not necessarily mean thematicism, indeed it is perfectly reconcilable with post-Webernian abandonment of theme and development in the classical sense. It is more a matter of contrast. One of the weaknesses of much music today is the absence of contrasts of tempo, and the abandonment of the principle of construction by movements or sections of opposed character. What Darvas has sought in this work is to use contrast again as one of the means of sustaining continuity.