»DAS RHEINGOLD«

DIE 7 PROGRAMMHEFTE DER BAYREUTHER FESTSPIELE 1988

"Writers on the »Ring«": (A Survey; Translation)

Baka István
Budapest
Hungary
  

  
I have yet to see the Ring on a proper stage – there has as yet been no possibility of doing so in the town where I live – but I have often performed it in the "theatre of my soul” through radio broadcasts and sound recordings. This mental stage is both more and less than the real one, which is why the Nibelung tetralogy is above all a kind of absolute music for me, and only secondarily theatre musik. As absolute musik I consider it one of the highest achievements of the human spirit, worthy of standing alongside Bach's St Matthew Passion, Liszt's oratorio Christus, and Mahler's Eighth Symphony.
Until very recently Hungarian culture had to struggle to maintain its indenpendence in the face of the lowering presence of German culture, and it needed Bartók's act of liberation before we could observe our enthusiasm objectively. And the time for that objective reassessment came about through the triumph of Béla Bartók, a man who – in many respects – was anti-Wagnerian. My enthusiasm for the mythically German Wagner or for the popular and intellectual Austrian Mahler is in no way opposed to that idea of Hungarian nationalism wich is embodied for me by Bartók and the later Liszt, a composer no longer understood by his brillant son-in-law. But the Nibelungenlied is just as important and dear to me as the Finnish Kalevala or the cycle of Hungarian legends that has grown up around the figure of the Hunnish ruler King Attila – or Etzel as he is known and honoured in the Nibelungenlied – a cycle in wich an age-old Europe is immortalised from before the time of classical antiquity and Christianity. In Wagner 's tetralogy this barbaric primeval state is brought to life with elemental force and revived, moreover, in a way that anticipates similar attempts in the twentieth century on the part of composers like Stravinsky and Bartók.
What I find problematical about this music is that it is not content with merely pleasing me: it also stirves to suborn and assimilate me, so that, in order to preserve my identity, I often have to turn away from it, or else seek an "antidote” by listening to the puritanical works of the older Liszt, works which pursue a wholly different course.

(page 106)