Musical Life in Budapest during World War II: Music Reviews by Dénes Bartha in Pester Lloyd (1939–1944)

Abstract

Dénes Bartha (1908–1993), the internationally renowned Hungarian music historian, worked as a music critic for Pester Lloyd, the German-language Budapest daily newspaper between 1939 and 1944. Within the five concert seasons, I found a total of four hundred and sixty-five writings by Bartha in the columns of the newspaper, mostly reviews of concerts and opera performances but also some interviews and theoretical articles. The importance of the articles is enhanced by the fact that they commemorate the performances of such distinguished Hungarian musicians as Béla Bartók, Ernst von Dohnányi, Emil Telmányi, Ede Zathureczky, the Waldbauer–Kerpely String Quartet and the Végh Quartet among others, and they also document guest performances in Budapest by such renowned foreign performers as Herbert von Karajan, Wilhelm Furtwängler, Willem Mengelberg, Hans Knappertsbusch, Clemens Krauss, Edwin Fischer and Walter Gieseking. In 2022, one hundred and twenty articles were published in my Hungarian translation from this extremely valuable and diverse material. In this study, I present the main features of Dénes Bartha's perspective as a music critic, taking examples from the articles included in the volume.