Music Research Seminar: Shay Loya (City, University of London)

Event introduction

Liszt’s particular cosmopolitan mix consisted of a German-ethnic West-Hungarian Catholic background, strong Parisian enculturation in his teens (when French replaced German as his first language), and deep ties with Weimar, Hungary and the Catholic Church for most of his adult life. From 1838 until his death, Liszt publicly insisted he was Hungarian, and engaged continuously in musical-cultural nation building, as a composer, pianist, conductor, teacher and high-profile public figure in official events. His politics and particular brand of patriotism and internationalism were equally complex, as was the sense of national identity in his music. Such intriguing complexity has resulted in much thinking, speculation and research from Liszt’s time to our own.

While Herderian linguistic nationalism continues to dominate a popular, and still rather ill-informed discourse on Liszt’s identity (what kind of Hungarian doesn’t speak Hungarian?), academic research has moved on in this century to question the constructedness of Liszt’s various identities, in the wake of late twentieth-century critical approaches to nationalism. Examining this scholarship, and a few examples from Liszt’s music, I will argue that we are only at the beginning of analysing the way the construction and negotiation of national identity is encoded in music; and as music scholars, we have yet to avail ourselves of, and test, the full range of critical theories on nationalism.

About Shay Loya

Shay Loya is a Senior Lecturer and BMus Programme Director at City, University of London. He is a Liszt scholar working within the disciplines of historical musicology, music analysis and critical theory, and the author of Liszt's Transcultural Modernism and the Hungarian-Gypsy Tradition (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2011), which has won the Alan Walker Prize (2014). He is currently working on a new monograph entitled Liszt’s Late Styles, and has recently published a book chapter associated with that project entitled ‘Virtuosity in Liszt's Late Piano Works’ (University of Rochester Press, 2020). Today’s talk is based on a chapter forthcoming in the edited volume Liszt in Context (CUP, ed. Joanne Cormac).