Military Bands as Symbols in Pest-Buda in the 1850s (original) (raw)

The years of 1848/49 had decisive eff ect both on Europe and on East-Central-European musical life. 2 A tense atmosphere and the experience of defeat pervaded cultural life, too, and determined its communication. After the suppression of the Hungarian revolution in 1849, the national language press employed a stronger nationalistic rhetoric in order to protect what they understood as a culture facing oblivion. That att itude even shaped later analyses of 1850s Hungary and its place in the Habsburg Monarchy, which until quite recently had a problematic reputation among historians. The period was defi nitely seen as a political »dead end«. 3 It can be observed that the primary sources drawn upon in these analyses, above all the national language press, dealt mainly with national music. Accordingly, the basic researches also focused on what was called national and neglected those which were not perceived as such; 4 the former phenomenon therefore became a reference of reality. 5 Perhaps that is one reason why only a few scholars have dealt in detail with the regional operation of multinational military orchestras; 6 however, these orches-1 The paper is an edited and extended version of the presentation given in Zagreb, October 2019. The paper was supported by the Zoltán Kodály Scholarship, Budapest, 2019. 2 See e.g. Barbara BOISITS (ed.