ZOLTÁN KODÁLY
When Western European music emerged from the so-called Dark Ages, it spoke with an international voice. No doubt, there were numerous pockets of folk-song, each with its own local vocabulary. But at the level of high art, carefully crafted and quite soon written down, there was only the music of the Church; and its language, with a few minor variations of dialect, was everywhere the same, in style and form and content. That music, early systematized as Gregorian chant, was in standard use from Aachen to Zyrardow.
After several centuries of purely monodic chant, polyphony evolved, and dominated music from then on. But for several centuries, embracing the Renaissance and the Baroque and the Classical periods, the language of composition remained essentially an international language. To be sure, there were always individual traits that distinguished one composer from another: Bach and Handel can never be mistaken for twins. But the technical processes of harmony and counterpoint, the language’s grammar and syntax, were widely agreed on and consistently employed.
Throughout those times, folk songs and folk dances, always anonymous and not in the ordinary sense composed, remained largely a thing apart. There were occasional connections, of course: during the Renaissance many composers, like Josquin and Taverner, composed masses and motets structured around the use of a popular song, such as “L’homme armé” or “Western Wind”, as a cantus firmus; in the Baroque period Bach wrote a beautiful harmonization of the traditional Christmas song, “O Jesulein süss”; and among the Classical composers, both Haydn and Mozart made elegant orchestral arrangements of German dance-tunes. In all these cases, however, the folk element was entirely subsumed into the apparatus of a sophisticated system of composition.
With the Romantic Revolution already under way, and with increasing public attachment to the ethos of the nation-state and to its local characteristics, there arose in many educated people during the nineteenth century a fascination with folklore; it stemmed partly from the urge to assert their own particular cultural identity, and partly from a sense that peasant life had preserved a whole heritage of social and aesthetic values which merited study and respect. Nor did composers confine themselves to studying only the folk-music of their native territory. Beethoven, for instance, arranged Scottish folk-songs for voice and piano, apparently unaware, or uncaring, that there was something anomalous in the pairing of a genteel instrument like the piano, which properly belonged in a parlour, with airs that were of the earth earthy, having almost the quality of plant-life. Similarly Brahms, rather taken with the tunes of Hungarian dances, which in their natural state belonged in a village dance-hall, translated them to city concert-halls for listeners, not dancers, and set them for full-scale symphony orchestra. None of this had anything to do with scholarly research or authentic performance.
Late in the nineteenth century, though, and throughout the twentieth, musical anthropologists, armed with notebooks and recording-machines, set about rescuing and preserving the residual tunes and lyrics and rhythms of a folk-culture that was rapidly taking on the colour of an endangered species. In the English-speaking world, this mission was undertaken and carried out by many dedicated enthusiasts, among them Marius Barbeau and Edith Fowke in Canada, Cecil Sharp and Ralph Vaughan Williams in England, and Alan Lomax in the United States. Similar missions rescued much that was valuable in the countries of continental Europe. In Hungary, for example, scrupulously edited collections of folk-music were made by Bela Bartók and Zoltán Kodály.
Both men were distinguished composers, as was Vaughan Williams. In Bartók’s case, his composing, which was avant-garde in its time, was uninfluenced by his researches in folk-music: the two activities were entirely separate. But that was not so with Vaughan Williams or Kodály. All of Vaughan Williams’ compositions were quintessentially English: some of them actually quoted folk-music; and even in those that did not, there was a flavour and idiom redolent of the countryside in which the last generation of folk-artists had lived and sung. With Kodály, there was not the same kind of cross-pollination: his compositions, unlike Bartók’s, had a national idiom derived from the folk-tradition he had so conscientiously helped to preserve: they were all written, though, in what amounted to an international language of contemporary music, original, experimental, and sometimes dissonant — a typical example is his sonata for unaccompanied ‘cello. However, in the course of his career, Kodály was by no means a priest of the esoteric musical religion which scorns the hearts and minds of the uninitiated, and prides itself on the exclusive liturgies of its temple. He always had a fruitful bond with the Hungarian people; he did much for musical education in the schools; and his patriotism came through in the subject-matter, if not the idiom, of works like “Háry János”, his operatic version of a national legend.
Kodály, then, can stand as template of the artist who straddles the gulf between two worlds, that of the sophisticated town-dweller, and that of the simple villager. He was truly a man of the people and never looked on the two kinds of citizen as separate species: they were, to him, just two threads in the Magyar tapestry; and if there was a common ground where they could meet, it was in the nurture and future of the children.
Those children, the young to whom he gave so much, grew up loyal to the humane vision he inculcated. They had to endure the inhuman barbarities of life in a police-state, successively of the right and of the left. Through it all, they persisted in devotion to what they believed Hungary was, fundamentally, and could be. And they emerged, finally, in music and in all things else, speaking freely a language that was at once their own and that of the larger world to which Kodály had so eminently belonged.
