Ernest Zavarský

Ernest Zavarský was a Slovak musicologist, organizer of musical life and organologist. He was one of the founders of modern Slovak music historiography. Zavarský studied philosophy in Munich and Innsbruck, where he also studied composition with F. Weidlich and W. Senna. He also studied composition in Cracow with prof. Peters and in Brno. He studied with prof. Ján Racek at the JAMU and prof. Bohumír Štědroň at the Faculty of Philosophy of the Jan Evangelista Purkyně University in Brno. He studied psychology and art history at the Faculty of Arts of Comenius University in Bratislava. His musicological work culminated in a nearly five-hundred-page monograph on Ján Levoslav Bell (1955) and another on Johann Sebastian Bach (1970), for which he received the Slovak Music Fund Prize in 1971. His domain was mainly Slovak music (both present and past).

He is an author of notes and entries about Slovak music for encyclopedias – German Encyclopedy Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart (MGG), Muzička Enciklopedija / Encyclopedy of Music (Croatia), and he was their most prolific contributor. He devoted an extensive study to the history of music in Kremnica (Contribution to the History of Music in Kremnica from the Earliest to 1800, published first in German, in three volumes of Musik des Ostens, and in a Slovak version in the proceedings of the Slovak Matica Slovenská hudobný archív in 1977 and 1981) and wrote the first comprehensive analytical and evaluative view of the compositional work of the Slovak music modern generation (Contemporary Slovak Music, 1947). He also worked on the life and work of Eugen Suchoň (1955), who was a leading figure of the aforementioned generation emerging in the interwar period, and Maurice Ravel (1963). "Zavarský has a rare gift of personal identification with the object of his research, the ability to empathise with the sources, to get in touch with the period he is thinking about [...] he is a good psychologist, he knows the finesse and intricacies of his craft, but above all he seems to be a master of historical synthesis and a builder of philosophical conceptions." (Rybarič, Hudobný život, 1983, no. 18, p. 5)

Zavarský was also active in the field of dramaturgy (the Slovak Folk Theatre in Nitra), editorial work (in the music broadcasting of the Bratislava radio) and organizational work. At the end of the 1960s he initiated the establishment of the Music Information Centre, in which he was also actively involved. Through numerous articles in magazines, he promoted the promotion of our music abroad and its integration into European contexts. He lectured at universities in Leipzig, Berlin, Warsaw, Dresden, Cologne and others.

As a renowned organologist, he designed several dozen organ designs (both sound and artistic) and was the author of an extensive organ reform in Slovakia.