András Szöllősy

When he came to Budapest from Cluj-Napoca in 1939, after finishing his secondary school studies, he had not yet decided on a career as a composer. He enrolled in the Hungarian-French department of Péter Pázmány University (where he received his doctorate in 1943) and studied composition at the Academy of Music. Zoltán Kodály, who retired in 1940, was Szőllősy’s teacher for only one year, and Albert Siklós was his teacher from the second year. Siklós died the following year, however, and Szőllősy completed his last year at the Academy of Music as a student of János Viski. Immediately after the war, he was awarded a scholarship to Rome, where he attended Petrassi’s master class at the Santa Cecilia Academy in the academic year 1947/48.

Three important places had the greatest influence on his thinking and artistic beliefs, namely Cluj Napoca, the Eötvös Collegium and Rome. His circle of friends included Rudolf Maros, György Ligeti, Gábor Darvas and Kálmán Halász, who also sought new paths in composition.

As a musicologist, he published texts and bibliographies to promote the cult of the two great masters of Hungarian music, Kodály and Bartók. Szőllősy’s greatest contribution was in the field of Bartók philology. He created an easy-to-use catalogue of Bartók’s works, translated into many languages, which is still used worldwide on concert programmes and CDs, with the letter “Sz”.