Art is not a police state — Sandor Veress’s sentence, quoted by his son Claudio, refers first of all to the composer’s free handling of the twelve-note row. But it fits just as well the political circumstances that forced Veress into exile. Born in 1907, brought up and trained in Budapest, he went as a young man to Berlin, London and Rome; at the end of the 1940s, as a political emigrant, he found a new home in Bern.
The theme of roots occupied him all his life. At the age of 23 he carried out field research in the villages of Romanian Moldavia, documenting Hungarian song in writing and in sound with an Edison phonograph. From 1935 he worked as Bela Bartok’s assistant at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. His compositions reflect this: they balance between folk song, a contrapuntal tradition carried forward into modernity and, from 1950, twelve-note technique. The two string quartets of 1931 and 1937 and the string trio of 1954 trace that path.
How much the preservation of Hungarian folk song mattered to Veress — a repertoire passed on solely by word of mouth from one generation to the next — is shown by the radio programme he devoted to the subject on Swiss Radio DRS in 1975. In it he recounts his early collecting journeys, above all those to Moldavia, and the findings of Hungarian musical ethnography. The sound documents he draws on come from a large shellac record project initiated by Bartok at the end of the 1930s. Veress comments on and analyses them and explores the musical heart of his homeland, bound up with its archaic customs — from the folk music tradition of the villagers and the laments for the dead to his observation that in our time art and music have been separated from every organic connection with the whole.
In conversation with Mirjam Wiesemann, Claudio Veress tells of his childhood and youth, of his relationship with his father and of his father’s eventful professional and private life, shaped by travel. He sheds light on the family’s Hungarian roots as well as on the influence of folk music tradition and twelve-note music on his father’s work — and tells of his father’s love of Märklin model railways and of letter writing.
The DoelenKwartet recorded the chamber music in March 2012 in the chamber music hall of Deutschlandfunk in Cologne, a co-production with the station. The 1975 broadcast is used by kind permission of SRF and was restored at the Cybele Studios in 2017. The edition comprises three hybrid SACDs with a total playing time of 222 minutes; the chamber music is heard in stereo and 5.1 surround, the historical broadcast in mono.