A László Ferenc-hagyaték, és ami mögötte van
The Ferenc László Legacy and What Lies Behind It

Summary/Abstract: Musicologist (or as he liked to call himself: music publicist) Ferenc László studied in Cluj/Kolozsvár and was Professor of chamber music at the Music Academies of Bucharest and Cluj. From the late 1950s, he published mainly in Hungarian newspapers and reviews released in Romania an impressive amount of articles on various musical issues. His research carried out from the 1970s on Mozart and, especially, Bartók led to a series of individual volumes as well as collected studies edited by him both in Hungarian and Romanian, and earned him recognition from Bucharest to Budapest as an expert on the topic of “Bartók and Transylvania.” Following his death, in 2014, a digitization agreement was concluded by members of his family and the Archives for 20th–21st Century Hungarian Music, a department of the Institute for Musicology, Research Centre for the Humanities, Hungarian Academy of Sciences (MTA BTK ZTI), according to which the documents from his study, located in Kolozsvár’s Voltaire street, were temporarily deposited in Budapest. Thus, the professional study of his legacy could begin. This paper discusses the types of primary sources found in the legacy (his correspondence with a wide network of personal acquaintances, both musicians and non-musicians; the documents related to his publications and his activity in a number of musical associations). The sources are contextualized through a survey of the biographical background (containing a series of oral history statements preserved in the memory of this article’s author who knew Ferenc László personally from 1996 until 2009) and the historical and political circumstances that determined the genesis of this remarkable scholarly output.

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