The Return of András Schiff and the Collapse of Illiberal Aesthetics

In 2011, András Schiff declared in the pages of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung that he would not set foot in his native Hungary so long as the Fidesz government maintained its assault on pluralism. The return of the pianist to the Budapest stage this season is the terminal point of that exile. It represents a victory for the cosmopolitanism of the Central European tradition over the narrow, ethno-nationalist provincialism that has sought to sequester Hungarian culture within the borders of the Trianon Treaty. Schiff follows in the footsteps of Béla Bartók, who in 1940 chose the isolation of New York over the complicity of Budapest, yet Schiff’s return signals that the state’s attempt to enforce a parochial loyalty test upon its artists has failed. The institutional capture of the Liszt Academy and the Hungarian State Opera by party loyalists has not produced a viable alternative to the intellectual rigour of the internationalist school. Schiff’s interpretations of the Score on IMSLP have always been an exercise in structural clarity over nationalist sentiment. His presence in Budapest once again forces a confrontation between the universalist claims of the Austro-German canon and the exclusionary rhetoric of the current political administration. The audience at the Müpa Budapest did not hear a prodigal son returning to the fold, but a sovereign artist reclaiming his rightful territory. Whether the state-aligned press chooses to acknowledge this reclamation is irrelevant; the silence of the strongman is the only possible response to the eloquence of the Fugue.