TEFTA AND HER CONTEMPORARIES IN ALBANIAN PRESS REVIEWS OF 1930S AND 40S

Abstract

This article comprises critical articles of recitals given by Tefta Tashko Koço and her colleagues, reflections and debates of intellectuals of the 1930s on musical and wider issues, and announcements of events published predominantly in newspapers and magazines during a 20 year period of 1927‒1947. Thanks to the favourable opinion of these critics’ comments, she was granted a scholarship by the Albanian government that same year to study in Montpellier, France. Little documented information concerning the period of studies in France (1927‒1936) has survived. Most of these critical writings were published in 1935‒1940. Albanian intellectual thinking it is presented here in all its scope and characteristics: the level of education, the degree of absorption of democratic ideas, the range of social and religious tolerance, the culture of the foreign country where the authors studied, the moral predisposition of the individual related to objectivity and subjectivity of their judgement, local affiliation in Albania and other attributes that revealed the stage of development of this intellectual layer of society.The result offers an impressive insight into Tefta’s professional career and reception. What was inherited in the second half of the 20th century, that is, during totalitarianism, from that open thinking of the 1930s, part of which is included in these writings, let’s leave it to the reader to consider.