Orchestrating Freedom: The Philharmonia Hungarica and the Transatlantic Cold War State-Private Network

• In Event: The Imprints of Philanthropy: American Foundations in Eastern Europe during Communism

Abstract

One of the remarkable fruits of Cold War cultural politics was the Philharmonia Hungarica, an orchestra of Hungarian exile and refugee musicians hastily founded near Vienna in the wake of the Soviet crackdown of the November 1956 uprising in Budapest. In the following two decades, the orchestra alternated ambitious tours of the ‘Free World’ with ambitious recording projects, thereby securing the continuance of numerous broken musical careers and serving the interests of Western self-representation as the beacon of freedom in the face of Communist repression. Using hereto untapped archival sources, this paper starts with reconstructing the intricate interplay of governmental, non-governmental and private actors from which the orchestra emanated, involving (among others) the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the CIA-sponsored Congress for Cultural Freedom. Subsequently, by way of reception analysis and grant evaluations, the paper assesses the successes and limits of the Philharmonia’s efforts to serve as the powerful symbol of a Europe without (ideological) boundaries that its (c)overt sponsors aspired it to be. Finally, the orchestra’s historical remembrance in post-Cold War Hungary and the former Western alliance will be considered, contrasting the Philharmonia’s central place in the 2006 commemoration of the 1956 events in Hungary with the near oblivion into which it has sunk in the West after the dissolution of the state-private sponsorship on which it had depended throughout its existence forced its disbandment in 2001.

Author

• Harm Langenkamp, Utrecht U (Netherlands)