László Dubrovay: Concerto romantico

In today’s analysis I’d like to present László Dubrovay’s second piano concerto, entitled Concerto romantico. The piece was composed in 1984, at a time when most composers were facing the dilemma outlined in the previous chapter: that the twelve-tone system, which had appeared to be the new musical language of the twentieth century, and the serial compositional technique1 based on it, could not be continued. The twentieth century’s compulsion and hope—that notes deemed equal in status would be able to become the building blocks of musical processes as accessible and evocative as the languages of previous centuries—had vanished. Dubrovay calls this work a romantic concerto, a ‘concerto romantico’, and, in his own words, his intention is a kind of return to the world of melodic music.

The first movement follows the sonata form of classical concertos; its main theme is a distinctly Hungarian melody, with drawn-out rhythms reminiscent of the verbunkos dance, which, with its emotional intensity, justifies the work’s subtitle. This melody is also—as is common in Romantic music—a central idea, of which we meet several facets in the work. In the first movement we hear its lyrical, gentle side as a quasi-secondary theme, which then returns in the interlude of the third movement. It is also a typically Romantic gesture that, in the recapitulation of the first movement, the theme is heard across the whole orchestra in an almost apotheotic, glorified manner, accompanied by the piano with simple chords, reminiscent of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto in B flat minor.

In the coda, the upward-striving melodic lines falter; the relentless ostinato of the timpani halts the music’s soaring momentum, and the piano seems to vanish into the heavens with the final scale. Let’s look at the opening of the piece right away: