Pastorale on a Hungarian Christmas carol (1920)

Rhapsody in C major Op.11 No.3 (1902-3)

Although he was one of the greatest – as well as the most influential – of 20th-century Hungarian musicians Dohnányi’s reputation has suffered all kinds of setbacks, all of them undeserved, both in his lifetime and after it. Even now, when accusations about undesirable political alliegances and racial attitudes have been well and truly refuted, there remains a feeling that, because it was not progressive in its time, his music is not worthy of serious consideration. Bartók’s comments on his colleague, who was a great help to him between the two world wars, are significant in this context: “As pianist, he is undoubtedly among the three greatest of our epoch… As conductor, he has proved also to be of superior standing… And as a composer, Dohnányi’s works have an unquestionable value; there is nothing really new in his music and his style is nothing but an epigone of the great Germans… which makes him less important from the national Hungarian point of view, but their solid form and always noble taste have made them popular not only in Budapest but also abroad.”

Bartók’s somewhat one-sided assessment of Dohnányi’s music was written from the point of view of a composer whose mission it was to create a new musical language out of true Hungarian folk song. Dohnányi, though dedicated in every other way to Hungarian music, had no such ambition. As it happened, however, in 1920, just a year before Bartók uttered his faint praise, he had written a Pastorale on the Hungarian Christmas carol Mennyböl az angyal (The Angel from Heaven), a tune he used to quote in his greetings cards.

So the Pastorale is one Dohnányi work – and there are a few others – based on Hungarian material, even though it is not treated as it would be in a Bartók composition. An interesting feature is that, while the tune itself is in 4/4 time, most of the piece is in 6/8, the metre in which Dohnányi introduces a pastoral tune in dotted rhythms high in the right hand in the opening barts. The result is that when the carol makes its first entry, in the left hand under the pastoral tune continuing in the right, there is an intriguing rhythmic contradiction. In the quicker middle section the metre changes to 2/2 with the carol reshaped but clearly defined in jingling bell-like sonorities in the upper half of the kebyboard. The opening tempo and the material that goes with it are restored before the end of what is an altogether attractive piece.

The Four Rhapsodies, completed 17 years earlier, betray nothing of the composer’s Hungarian origins – apart, that is, from the echoes of Liszt to be found in the music of many pianist-composers of the period. In fact, they sound at times not entirely unlike the work of Dohnányi’s great Russian contemporary, Rachmaninov, with whom he had much in common. Rhapsody No.3 in C has more individuality about it, however. If the four works have the same relation to each other as the four movements of a sonata – and the thematic allusions that pass between them suggest that the composer had something like that in mind – it is the scherzo of the set. With no knowledge of the date one might conclude that Dohnányi had been listening to Prokofiev. In fact, bearing in mind that Prokofiev was only 12 when the Rhapsody was written, any influence would have been in the opposite direction. As well as its brilliant, sometimes wittily grotesque scherzando material, it has a big lyrical tune that has made it the most popular of the Four Rhapsodies.