Ferenc Szabó was a Hungarian

Hungary

Hungary , officially the Republic of Hungary , is a landlocked country in Central Europe. It is situated in the Carpathian Basin and is bordered by Slovakia to the north, Ukraine and Romania to the east, Serbia and Croatia to the south, Slovenia to the southwest and Austria to the west. The...

 composer

Composer

A composer is a person who creates music, either by musical notation or oral tradition, for interpretation and performance, or through direct manipulation of sonic material through electronic media...

. As a communist, Szabó was obliged to emigrate through Berlin

Berlin

Berlin is the capital city of Germany and is one of the 16 states of Germany. With a population of 3.45 million people, Berlin is Germany's largest city. It is the second most populous city proper and the seventh most populous urban area in the European Union...

 (1931) to the USSR (1932). He became a respected figure in Soviet musical life, and found the opportunities to explore common ground between the concert hall and mass music-making on a far higher level. Besides composing a number of mass songs and film scores (notably for Erwin Piscator

Erwin Piscator

Erwin Friedrich Maximilian Piscator was a German theatre director and producer and, with Bertolt Brecht, the foremost exponent of epic theatre, a form that emphasizes the socio-political content of drama, rather than its emotional manipulation of the audience or on the production's formal...

's Revolt of the Fishermen, 1934), he transcribed the Sinfonietta, originally for chamber orchestra, for an orchestra of domrï (plucked folk instruments). He wrote numerous orchestral works as well and one opera

Opera

Opera is an art form in which singers and musicians perform a dramatic work combining text and musical score, usually in a theatrical setting. Opera incorporates many of the elements of spoken theatre, such as acting, scenery, and costumes and sometimes includes dance...

, Légy jó mindhalálig (1969).

He was and remained a committed and staunch Stalinist till the end of his life. Testimony to this is a significant number of works which he composed lauding Stalin and his accomplishments. Eventually he fell out of favor with the Hungarian Communist Party after his accusations as an informer during the show trials in Moscow in the 1930s became better known. As a result of his accusations a number of fellow Communist Party members had been executed by Stalin's secret police. He was stripped unceremoniously of all his public posts and died in obscurity; no doubt a better fate than befell the earlier victims of the "Great Purge

Great Purge

The Great Purge was a series of campaigns of political repression and persecution in the Soviet Union orchestrated by Joseph Stalin from 1936 to 1938...

".

Sources

• János Maróthy. The New Grove Dictionary of Opera
  New Grove Dictionary of Opera
  The New Grove Dictionary of Opera is an encyclopedia of opera, considered to be one of the best general reference sources on the subject. It is the largest work on opera in English, and in its printed form, amounts to 5,448 pages in four volumes....
  
  , edited by Stanley Sadie (1992), ISBN 0-333-73432-7 and ISBN 1-56159-228-5