Lóránt Péteri: Mahler Reception, Jewish Experience, and Cinema during the Hungarian Sixties

Vienna Mahler Lecture #8

The lecture’s main focus is Father [Apa], a 1966 Hungarian feature film directed by István Szabó. Szabó’s international recognition had already been established with his first feature film, The Age of Daydreaming (1965), for which he had received Silver Sail at the Locarno Film Festival, and the first Hungarian movie receiving Academy Award (Oscar) for Best Foreign-Language Film was his Mephisto (1981). Szabó’s affinity with music and his fascination with music making as a topic are manifest in his early short film Concert (1962), his collaboration with Péter Eötvös in The Age of Daydreaming, his movies portraying the world of leading opera houses (Meeting Venus, 1991), or dealing with the complexity of Wilhelm Furtwängler’s personal and political situation at Germany’s Zero Hour (Taking Sides, 2001).

The music of Father is based on extended quotations from and allusions to the third movement of Mahler’s First Symphony, and is composed by musicologist, pianist, composer, and jazz musician János Gonda. Spanning the historical period from World War II and the Holocaust till the aftermath of the supressed Hungarian revolution of 1956, the film’s screenplay embraces such topics as childhood, loss, trauma, nostalgia, the interconnectivity of memory and subjectivity, and the fragile construction of identity. Father raises questions of a specific Jewish experience both explicitly and implicitly. I wish to explore the ways in which Mahler’s music generates signification in the film, and also the dialogue that Szabó’s motion picture conducts with the First Symphony. The Mahlerian element of Father seems to be a complex Leitmotiv rather than a mere cinematic reminiscence motif.

I also attempt to contextualise Father with a broader panorama of Mahler reception in the reform period of Hungarian state socialism. While a contemporary music critic witnessed Mahler’s ‘rehabilitation’ in the Hungarian concert halls of the 1960s, István Szabó’s experiment with the First Symphony can be regarded even as a pioneering act of appropriating Mahler’s music in the cinema – a phenomenon which became soon robust and global.