Sándor Veress

Venti Pezzi per Pianoforte

With his Venti pezzi per pianoforte (1938), the Hungarian composer Sándor Veress (1907-92) wanted to create a collection of piano miniatures on folk melodies destined for use in the concert hall as well as for teaching purposes. Each piece is based on one or more songs and dances from different Hungarian speaking areas, which are re-elaborated and presented in a carefully conceived alternation of character, musical writing and technical difficulty. The result is a multi-colored overview of Hungarian folk music: songs of a pathetic or even dramatic nature are contrasted with lighter and high-spirited pieces, interspersed with dances of varying types, among which a homogeneousblock stands out formed by the group of Csárdás, a typical tavern dance also used by Liszt. The Venti pezzi per pianoforte represent the culmination of the extensive ethnomusicological research made by Veress in the '30s and '40s, while working as assistant to László Lajtha and to Béla Bartók, and at the same time carrying out field work in Hungary and neighboring countries. The composer intended that this collection should play a fundamental role of mediation between folklore and western 'art' music, by revitalizing the language from within, without resorting to the abstractions of the experimentation being developed in Europe at the time. During his lifetime Veress never succeeded in publishing the complete version of the Venti pezzi per pianoforte, but issued various selections of the pieces, two of which remained totally unpublished. The present critical edition prepared by Giada Viviani reconstructs the complete text of the Venti pezzi per pianoforte on the basis of manuscript sources kept at the Paul Sacher Foundation in Basel: the musical scores, with fingering by Jakub Tchorzewski, are accompanied by an introductory essay on the context in which the collection was created, including a description of the state of the sources and a detailed apparatus criticus of the textual variants.