László Vidovszky Retrospective Recital/2

“All the world’s a stage” says Jacques in Act II of Shakespeare’s As You Like It, and it is difficult to dispute his assertion. Since music is also part of the world, we can agree with Shakespeare that music is also theatre, not just opera, operetta and musical, but all music. The three iconic works of Kossuth Prize laureate László Vidovszky that feature on the festival programmes reveal the theatrical nature of music from different perspectives. Autoconcert (1972) is akin to the closing act of a Beckett drama: instruments fixed to scaffolding on stage, not a single person anywhere, two ‘players’ behind the scenes directing the instruments dropping and the music that thus emerges from them. “I was deeply shaken by the tragedy and poetry of the objects that kept falling and emitting sounds every thirty seconds on the empty stage, and the extreme economy by which all that acquired strict musical form,” György Kurtág said of this work. The piece raises the question of the end of Western music culture, and in a certain sense so does the 1981 opera Narcissus and Echo. The story of the self-obsessed young man, reworked by Vidovszky on the 19th century drama of László Tóth Ungvárnémeti, receives an extremely polychromatic (as some analysts term it, ‘postmodern’) operatic attire, in which there is room for the waltz, the czardas, ragtime, operetta and piano music of the great Romantics, coming together in a sort of style that transcends music history.