If you want to understand why this is one of the most underrated pieces of music ever written, just listen for exactly four minutes....
So there was Bartok, then there was Kodaly, and then.... there was Dohnanyi...
Erno Dohnanyi, also known as Ernst von Dohnanyi, was known as the #3 composer in Hungary. A shame, because next to Bartok, every composer pales in comparison.
The reason I mention Dohnanyi today was that on a Jewish website I frequent, somebody mentioned the great hero of World War II, Hans von Dohnanyi, son of Erno, father of Christoph, two of the great musicians of the 20th century - and Erno's grandson, now in his early 90s, is returning to conducting and all things proceeding according to plan, will be conducting in Boston in late April.
Hans von Dohnanyi, son of Erno, was both a famous legal jurist and brother-in-law to the great liberal Protestant theologian, Dietrich Boenhoffer, both of them heroes of the German resistance. Hans von Dohnanyi made precise private records of all the Nazi crimes he could possibly document. In addition to keeping true records, he was also responsible for making forgeries that allowed high-level German-Jewish lawyers and their families to escape to Switzerland in disguise as members of the Abwehr (the Nazi intelligence agency), and when Henning von Tresckow initiated the second plot to kill Hitler and mount a coup d'erat, it was Hans von Dohnanyi who personally smuggled the bomb aboard Hitler's plane which, unfortunately, failed to go off. Three weeks before Hitler's death, Hans von Dohnanyi was hanged in Sachsenhausen concentration camp by piano wire.
His father, Erno Dohnanyi, or Ernst von Dohnanyi when addressed by Germans, was of a very different disposition than either his son or his grandchildren, one of whom - Christoph's brother Klaus - was a longtime Social Democrat mayor of Hamburg. Erno was, unfortunately, a fascist collaborator for almost the entirety of the 20's and 30's. At the beginning of Hungary's quarter-century of right-wing dictatorship, Erno Dohnanyi made exactly one show of resistance and refused to fire Zoltan Kodaly from the once very famous Budapest Academy of Music; Kodaly was a committed leftist whose politics very much informed the folk-brined music he composed. Dohnanyi was immediately sacked, but in place of being director of the Academy, made director of the Budapest Philharmonic Orchestra, where he could promote all the modern composers he wanted, so long as he publicly made no more show of resistance to Admiral Horthy's regime. By 1934, the Horthy regime trusted him enough to reinstate him as director of the Academy of Music.
By the 40s, perhaps under the influence of his son, Dohnanyi seemed to finally understand the impossible moral compromises into which he entangled himself, and in 1941 resigned as director of the Academy rather than force the academy to submit to anti-Jewish legislation. All through the Horthy regime, he managed to protect all of the Jewish members of his orchestra, and managed to do so until early 1944, when Germany finally occupied Hungary, fearing that Horthy would forge a separate peace treaty with the Allied Powers.
Dohnanyi was a towering all-around musician, not just a brilliant composer, but also Hungary's most important conductor in the generation between Arthur Nikisch on the one hand and Fritz Reiner/George Szell on the other, he was a touring pianist whose recordings are legendary to this day, and a teacher who taught both piano and composition to many of the most important performers of the 20th century, and a few of the most important composers too....
Morally, Dohnanyi is a complicated figure, perhaps like Wilhelm Furtwangler, an aristocratic conservative by upbringing who was privileged to be naive about the forces with which he was collaborating, and once he realized the damage wrought, did his best to repair what was already too broken to fix.
His music has neither Bartok's revolutionary musical experiments, nor Bartok's far-reaching spiritual vision, nor Bartok's encyclopedic knowledge of folk music. But Bartok is the kind of musical genius that comes around perhaps half-a-dozen times in a century. What Dohnanyi's music does have is magnificent virtuosity and facility. It's possible that this composer had just as much talent as Bartok, but the greatest artists are not necessarily the most talented, they are the artists with the greatest vision, and there are so many brilliantly talented artists of every form who never quite figure out in what service their talent belongs. My friend Steve Schwartz, himself probably the internet's best champion of underrated classical music, writes that Dohnanyi's music is almost reactionary, music the vein of Brahms and Saint-Saens, but I think that does Dohnanyi both too little and too much credit. This is the music of a completely individual voice who is quite distinct from the voice of any other composer. Unfortunately, this is also the music of a man who lived until 1960, and still does not understand the 19th century ended. Perhaps the music of a composer still writing witty music based on nursery tunes as the world around him grew serious indeed.
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