Rudolf Maros

Rudolf Maros (b Stachy, Bohemia, 19 Jan 1917; d Budapest, 3 Aug 1982). Hungarian composer and teacher.

He graduated from the teachers’ training college, in Győr in 1937 and studied with Kodály (composition) and Temesváry (viola) at the Budapest Academy of Music (1939–42), playing the viola during this period in a Budapest orchestra. In 1942 he took a teaching appointment at the secondary music school in Pécs, and in summer 1949 he studied composition in Alois Hába’s master class in Prague. That year he was appointed to the staff of the Budapest Academy, where he teaches wind chamber music, theory and orchestration. He attended several Darmstadt summer courses from 1959, and in 1971 he went to West Berlin on a fellowship.

The characteristic features of Maros’s early music, which was strongly influenced by Kodály, are simple formal patterns, diatonic harmonized melody and a folkloristic style. In the second half of the 1950s his music underwent a gradual change until in the orchestral Ricercare (1959) he produced his first 12-note serial piece. He soon moved away from strict serialism, building such works as the Cinque studi for orchestra (1960) on the manipulation of small motivic units defined by interval. From this he moved on to the sensitive exploitation of shifting and opposed colours, notably in the Eufonia series for orchestra (1963–5), in which 12-note clusters undergo subtle changes of timbre and octave placement. Rhythm here is quite fluid and there is almost no isolated melody; these aspects became subjects of interest again in Gemma (1968) and Monumentum (1969), the latter a powerful impression of the year 1945, with hope emerging from turmoil. Subsequent works reveal some integration of traditional elements into the style developed in the compositions of the 1960s; many of Maros’s works from all periods show a Bartókian delight in arch forms.