Miklos Radnai
Miklos Radnai was born on 1 January 1892 in Budapest (at that time Austria-Hungary, today Hungary). As a child he learned the piano and violin. After school he enrolled at the Budapest Academy of Music under Janos Koessler and Viktor Herzfeld and completed his studies in 1911. Miklos Radnai then taught music theory at the Fodor Conservatory in Budapest. In 1916 he won a Franz Josef scholarship which allowed him to study under Felix Mottl in Munich and to continue further studies in Belgium, France and the Netherlands. After his return in 1919 Miklos Radnai taught at the Budapest Music Academy. And he also earned a living from writing music critics for the newspapers "Szosat" (1919-1923) and "Nemzeti ujsag" (1923-1925).
In 1925 Miklos Radnai was appointed director of the Budapest opera (the youngest since Gustav Mahler). The opera, then the only permanent company in Hungary, had deteriorated during and after World War I and Miklos Radnai restored its artistic reputation within short time. As the director he revitalised the design and production side, established discipline during rehearsals and performances and educated a young and gifted generation of singers that led to one of the most successful eras of the Hungarian opera. Miklos Radnai produced operas of early Hungarian masters (Erkel, Liszt, Mosonyi), the leading Hungarian composers of the time (Bartok, Kodaly, Dohnanyi, Hubay) and foreign contemporaries like Stravinsky, Debussy, Falla, Milhaud, Hindemith, Ravel or Strauss.
Miklos Radnai died unexpectedly on 4 November 1935. The newspaper "Pester Lloyd" reports a day after his death that Miklos Radnai had a coughing fit that first caused a bleeding in and in the end a paralysis of his lungs.
Due to the fact that German was official language in Austria-Hungary in newspapers of the time Miklos Radnai is often named Nikolaus Radnai.
During his lifetime Miklos Radnai was not only a noted opera director but also a successful and distinguished composer. He composed 2 opera, the well-known ballet "The birthday of the Infanta", the "Symphony of the Magyars", a violin concerto, several orchestral pieces, sonatas for violin, viola and cello, a piano trio, piano music and several songs.
Orkán vitéz
In my possession is the autograph piano reduction of the composition "Orkán vitéz" (Knight Orkan) for tenor and orchestra op.19 by Miklos Radnai. The work was composed in 1917 and premiered on 24 February 1919 by Ferenc Szekelyhidy (tenor), the Orchestra of the Budapest Philharmonic Society conducted by Egisto Tango at the Vigado in Budapest. It consists of 5 movements of which the first and last one are without text and count as prelude and postlude. The 5 movements are titled as follows:
- Találkozás Százszorszéppel (Meeting daisy)
- A szerelmes vitéz (The knight in love)
- A sárkányölő (The dragon slayer)
- A győzelmes vitéz (The winning knight)
- Hősi nászinduló (Hero wedding march)
The manuscript itself is a fair copy for the music but still a working manuscript for the text. For example Miklos Radnai first wanted to name the singer "Vihar vitéz". That is crossed out and "Orkán vitéz" is written above. "Vihar" and "Orkán" both mean "storm" in Hungarian. The word "vitéz" means hero, fighter, warrior or similar meanings. So the title "Orkán vitéz" could be translated as "heroic storm", but Miklos Radnai also provides his German title and that is "Ritter Orkán". And there "Orkán" is used as a name of a person and he chooses the meaning "knight" for "vitéz". And the libretto of the work is about a knight who frees his beautiful beloved from the clutches of an evil dragon.
The used text came from an unfinished opera about Snow White that had begun earlier by Miklos Radnai on an own libretto. Parts of this libretto were taken for this composition. It seems that Mikloa Radnai was clear about the use of the text in movement two because there are no corrections. But in movement three and four the text used at first is crossed out completely and a new text was written below. Both texts very likely came from the unfinished opera as well, but Miklos Radnai decided to use different parts for these movements.
The manuscript is also of special interest because it contains a German translation of the text. That is strange because the autograph full score - preserved at the Hungarian National Library - contains no German text. And no German version of the composition was ever created by Miklos Radnai. Curiously the syllables of the German text do not match with the singing melody, and so the German version only provides another information of the meaning of the text.
In my score below I provide the final Hungarian text and the additional German text. For those interested in the original text of movement three and four, please send me a message.
