Hungarian music course: songs of lamentation

Last Thursday I'd spent all morning in a mood of heartsick distractedness, following the latest developments in Ukraine. The plan in our seventh class was to move on to Kodály's Háry János. But I was in no mood for light-heartedness, and at the risk of depriving students of their 'safe space', I turned explicitly to music that somehow reflected the grief and fury we all feel about Putler's senseless invasion.

The biggest work to fit the bill was Kodály's Psalmus Hungaricus, a work I've never heard in the concert hall. And why on earth not? It's a masterpiece, setting a gloss on King David's Psalm 55, "Hear my prayer" (that same text which inspired Purcell's radically chromatic anthem and Mendelssohn's famous anthem for treble and choir, in which I was lucky enough to sing the solo part before my voice broke). The image above is of King David painted on an egg by my dear but long since unheard-from St Petersburg friend Natasha Romashova, who moved to Sacramento some years ago as the wife of a Russian dentist; her wonderful mother Sima joined her later.

The Hungarian version is by the 16th century poet, preacher, and translator Mihály Vég, written at a time when Hungary was under Turkish occupation. The 1923 Budapest concert in which Kodály's work had its premiere was supposed to be a 50th anniversary celebration of the unification of Buda, Pest and Óbuda, so this Biblically derived, plaintive offering must have seemed odd, even though it moves finally to thanksgiving. The wails, the powerful climaxes and above all the transcendent moment when Kodály anticipates Martinů in an extraordinarily levitational passage are all perfectly placed. 

I listened first of all to István Kertész's splendid Decca recording with an excellent soloist, Lajos Kozma, and a not quite incisive enough Brighton Festival Chorus. On YouTube there's a film of Péter Eötvös conducting the International Chorakademie Lübeck and the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra with tenor István Kovácsházi (not as expressive as Kozma, but the choir is better). but that performance also features in one of those labours of love in which the poster has added the score. Especially useful since you can also read the text in English translation.

Leading up to this, what I'd already planned made sense last Thursday. First. the three soldiers' songs Bartók added in 1918 to an earlier set. Finding these evocative 1928 performances on YouTube was a revelation. I'm delighted to have got hold of a copy of the long-deleted Pearl CD. That's Bartók and his only close friend Kodály' in 1912 on the cover.

The Hungarian-Greek contralto Mária Basilides is so fine-tuned to Bartók's piano-playing in the first four (one of the original eight is omitted); then at 5m05s comes the tenor Ferenc Székelyhidy - a great voice, a fine artist, one of so many Hungarian musicians of whom I knew nothing until I started this course (and there's not a lot out there). I'll preface it with the texts of the soldiers' songs: 

 

Recruiting Song 

They are filling the great forest road

Taking away the Transylvanian soldiers,

Taking the unfortunate ones,

Poor Székler young men.

They take them away to that place

Where the road is red with blood,

From the men whom the bullet, the lance,

The sharp sword have cut.

 

Soldier's Farewell

My work has always been the spring plowing,

Cutting grasses in fields and gardens;

Now my ox is in his place, my horse is saddled,

My whip ready, the halter in my hands.

The day has come when I must leave,

To depart from my home, my country, with a heavy heart,

To take leave of my parents in tears,

To leave my dear wife alone.

  

Soldier's Spring Song

Snow is melting, oh my pretty little angel, spring is coming.

How I wish to be a rosebud in your garden!

But I can’t be a rose; Franz Josef wilts me.

In the big three-storey Viennese barracks. 

 

A reminder again that the Soldiers' Songs begin at 5m05s, though it's worthing hearing the full seven. 

From the same recording sessions I took Székelyhidy and Bartók in Kodály's powerful arrangement of 'Rákóczi's Lament', a memorialisation of that early 18th century Hungarian warrior's unsuccessful cause. No translation here, I'm afraid; and translations generally have been a problem. So has English-language study of Hungarian music - I guess few musicologists ever get to grips with the language.

Who'd have thought we would actually comprehend the heroism of taking a stand against an overpowering enemy? But in President Zelenskyy we have it as I've never experienced in my own lifetime. Tomorrow I'm putting up a piece on The Arts Desk celebrating Russian musicians around the world in solidarity with Ukraine, and I'm doing what I can with constant posting on LinkedIn, much as I detest the site's inaction on disinformation. But I'll leave you with this speech for the ages. Zelenskyy has just made another one today to the European Parliament which was even more emotional. Slava Ukraini!

Erratic heroism in Hungary's troubled history

The heroism can apply to women, too, of course, and among the brief flourishings of wholehearted effort, Empress Elisabeth ('Sissi') of Austria's was not the least impressive. That's her above at the coffin of one of the few sober, balanced leaders of Hungarian history, Ferenc Deák (portrait below by Bertalan Székely), briefly Minister of Justice and then the pioneering reformist who even in semi-retirement steered the capricious Hungarian cause through choppy waters. His line was essentially that of passive resistance from 1849 through to the compromise which gave semi-independence in the form of the Magyar wing of the Dual Monarchy, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in 1867.

What a contrast Deák made to the headstrong, all-or-nothing nationalist Laos Kossuth, who went into exile after the disastrous defeat of the Hungarians when Emperor Franz Joseph called in the Russians in 1849. I'll come back to Kossuth anon, but it's worth briefly paralleling that glorious but doomed venture with the equally celebrated campaign against Habsburg rule organised by Prince Ferenc Rákóczi II (pictured below by Ádám Mányoki). 

This, too, despite its brave premise of a 'people's army', was doomed. It lasted eight years and, lacking as so often in Hungarian history proper help from international allies, came to an end in 1711. But it resonated down the centuries, first with ballads in the 1730s and then the march known in Hungarian as the Rákóczi-induló, published by Nicolaus Scholl in 1819-20. For the Hungarian music Zoom course, which has now reached its fifth class/door with Bartók's Bluebeard's Castle, I found diverse versions on traditional instruments. This track, from a Jánosi Ensemble collection, has various treatments: with the second, you might start to recognise the theme familiar from Berlioz and Liszt.

Berlioz wrote his first dazzling orchestral version, famous to us in its incarnation as part of La Damnation de Faust, for a visit to Pesth in 1846, vividly described in his memoirs. Always good to have a Hungarian at the helm; in class I used a Berlin performance from the great Ferenc Fricsay, but this is quite a YouTube treasure, with that fine composer and human being Ernst von (Ernő) Dohnányi conducting the Budapest Philharmonic Orchestra.

Lizzt's Hungarian-Rhapsody treatment of the march is predictaby wacky, and though I'm not a fan of much of Liszt's piano music, the great Cziffra can persuade me in the fireworks.

The erratic fight for freedom in the 19th century did at least see the talented, pioneering but flawed hero Kossuth offset by two much more stable figures - in the earlier half of the 19th century, Count István Széchenyi, who made so many beautiful improvements to the conglomeration of towns soon to be known as the city of Budapest, and later the aforemtioned Deák. Kossuth's legend spread fast; he had not been long dead when in 1904 the young Béla Bartók composed his first major orchestral work, with the defeated hero as its subject and the symphonic poems of Richard Strauss - whose Also sprach Zarathustra at its Budapest premiere had just turned the young Hungarian back to composing - as its style model. 

It's an impressive work, with a parody of the Austrian national anthem in the vein of the critics/adversaries sequence in Strauss's Ein Heldenleben and a theme very close to the heroic pride of Liszt's Second Hungarian Rhapsody near the end. We listened to it in full as part of the second class, with the benefit of a generous YouTuber's score co-ordination.

Without Elisabeth as passionate advocate of the Hungarian cause, though, matters might not have moved so quickly after Kossuth's hasty departure to avoid execution. Partly in opposition to her powerful mother-in-law the Archduchess Sophie, who preferred Czech, Sissi learnt Hungarian in the face of all advice. In 1866 the 28-year-old Sisi met 42-year-old Count Gyula Andrássy, sentenced to death in absentia after the defeat of 1849 but soon to become Prime Minister. If it was a romance, it had to be one conducted in the public eye - and Andrássy would have been very careful indeed. Hungary's cause was also greatly advanced when Bismarck's Prussians crushed the Austrian army at Königgrätz that same year = the Emperor now needed to look east. 

And so on 8 Jun 1867 Franz Joseph became King of Hungary as well as Emperor of Austria in a ceremony of great, flashy, almost oriental pomp, though most eyes were turned towards the coronation of the Queen-Empress. Liszt composed a remarkably concise and - for him - chaste Coronation Mass. It runs quite a gamut in its 45-minute span - eastern, Rákóczi-song echoes for the 'Qui tollis' of the Gloria, returning in the 'Agnus Dei', straightforward brass pomp for the big blazes, though not overdone, and a chaste harmonisation of Gregorian chant in the 'Credo' with ony organ accompaniment, The students were charmed by the Wagnerian Lohenginesque purity of the 'Benedictus', its violin solo tinged with native fiddle inflections.

I'd always steered clear of finding out more about the celebrated Empress-Queen destined for such a tragic fate, rather repelled by the Sissi 'cult' in Vienna. And of Crown Prince Rudolf all I know is about the scandal of Mayerling, mainly from Kenneth MacMillan's stunning ballet. But Rudolf, too, was a highly intelligent supporter of the Hungarian cause. A friend to Hungarian and Austrian Jews, he had an articulate take on the Hungarians' nationalistic errors, Under a pseudonym, he wrote, for example, this:

The sad thing for Hungary is the Magyars' lack of consideration and inability to understand that nothing can be achieved by bad treatment and contempt and momentary vehemenent regulations with the nationalities, who are numerically superior, and of whom one has absolute need in order to preserve the Hungarian state in the same size, which today it still possesses...In many, in fact most parts of the territories of the Crown of St Stephen, only the nobility, the officials and the Jews are Hungarian - the people belong to other tribes.

What Rudolf writes there is prophetic of trouble to come, especially in the 20th century. Even when there was such hope and growth in the later years of the 19th century, very largely due to the emancipation laws of 1849 and the major presence of Jews in industry and commerce which helped to make Budapest so prosperous a fin de siecle city, the anti-semitic backlash of the 1880s provoked him to write, this time anonymously, in the Neue Wiener Tagblatt, that 'an abyss is opening up in Hungary, and much that still appears viable today can easily fall into it'.

I am indebted for clarity on all this to Paul Lendvai's The Hungarians: A Thousand Years of Victory in Defeat (Hurst). It's been as essential a companion through the Hungarian music course so far as the culturally wider ranging The Czech Reader was in the previous term. Lendvai's chronicle constantly throws up fascinating personalities like the above, and the thriller-nature of the read only increases from 1919 to the present day. You can tell that Lendvai doesn't mince his words by the fact that the final chapter, updated for the 2021 edition, is called 'Viktor Orbán's "Führerdemocracy" ', Perhaps I'll return to later developments in another blog entry. There's a reasonable hope that Orbán might not do so well in the April elections. Meanwhile, onward to 2014-19 this coming Thursday with Bartók's and Kodály's Second String Quartets and Bartók's The Miraculous Mandarin, plus sideways glances at lesser works like The Wooden Prince.

Europe Day Concert 2019: past midnight, still alive

And kicking, or rather dancing and riffing, in the most electrifying official finale we've had at St John's Smith Square in the past 11 years, a fine way to celebrate the fact that the UK didn't leave the European Union on 29 March. When Jonathan Bloxham, our superlative conductor, announced a Norwegian soloist for the wacky arrangement by Cristian Lolea (violin and strings) of Enescu's First Romanian Rhapsody, I ummed about the nation - not exactly EU. Then he told me it was Eldbjørg Hemsing, who wowed both live (in Bodø) and on her CD championing a concerto by compatriot Borgstrøm (the coupling on the disc is a first-rate performance of Shostakovich's First Concerto). Top notch, pure class, with a poignant unaccompanied encore of Grieg's 'The Last Spring'. The fact that she was playing with young equals, the pan-Europeans of Jonathan's Northern Chords Festival Orchestra, led to improvisatory fireworks with leader Agata Darashkaite and cellist Sébastien van Kujik.

The theme was '25 and under: young European composers', because youth seemed like a timely theme for celebration. No shortage of great examples here: Jonathan opened with the Rossini-esque first movement of Schubert's delicious Third Symphony, one of the six he completed in his teens, and as mid-point we had Mendelssohn's Legend of the Fair Melusine, the water-music of which indisputably influenced Wagner when he started his Ring in the depths of the Rhine. Both catered for a brilliant regular, first clarinettist Joe Shiner, whose first solo CD is due out soon. The wind as a whole were superb, as they have been for the past three years; flautist Sarah Miller, oboist James Hulme, bassoonist Carys Ambrose Evans and horn-player Stephen Craigen joined Joe for the best performance I've heard of Estonian Erkki-Sven Tüür's Architectonics I. Erkki-Sven had been dubious about unearthing this relatively early piece of his, describing it as 'naive', but the response of so many in the audience proved its durability.

The interpretation of Lili Boulanger's D'un matin de printemps also left others I'd come across way behind; I heard this delicate fantasy in a completely different light. Sure, it sounds like filtered Debussy, but also has more of an identity of its own than I'd thought. The other favourite choice of people I spoke to - musicians and not - was soprano Valentina Farcas's exquisite delivery of the aria 'Dopo l'oscuro nembo' from Bellini's first opera Adelson e Salvini, later reworked for Giulietta in I Capuleti e i Montecchi. Valentina was representing her native Romania, which currently holds the EU Presidency. I heard her float a gorgeous line in 'Ihr habt nun Traurigkeit', for me the highlight of the 150th anniversary performance of Brahms's Ein Deutsches Requiem in its original location, Bremen Cathedral, with Paavo Järvi conducting the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie (Matthias Goerne was at his most committed, too).

That gave plenty of promise for true bel canto style, and the way emotion informed what was sung brought tears to my eyes in a way that rarely happens for me with Bellini or Donizetti. Rossini is in a league apart, though, and Valentina returned to treat us to Amenaide's big scena 'Giusto Dio' from Tancredi. She was very sincere in her praise for the way that Jonathan provided perfect stylistic support in this repertoire, in a way - she said - that many top names on the podium have not. In fact his adaptability never ceases to amaze me. This time I didn't attend the afternoon rehearsal, so each performance gave fresh cause for wonder. A personal favourite, Elgar's 'Fairy Pipers' from the first Wand of Youth Suite, brought more period-conscious yet breathing portamento then I've heard before. So exquisite, and counterbalanced by the rugged string sound for Bartók's Romanian Dances and the Enescu.

And finally, the European Anthem, this time more truly an Ode to Joy after last year's unanticipated minute's silence at the end. The Romanian Ambassador's speech came at the end, rather than at the beginning as is customary, and gifts were distributed.

A few post-show party shots (like all the rest, with the exception of the first singer-orchestra-conductor photo, by Jamie Smith). Two Estonians, cellist and agent Maarit Kangron and violinist in the orchestra Marike Kruup, with Jonathan's girlfriend Jess Wadey;

two Bulgarians, composer Dobrinka Tabakova whose work Bell Tower in the Clouds gave such zest to last year's programme and assistant conductor Dorian Todorov;

and Jonathan - who was at his happiest this year, having hand-picked all the players he wanted and feeling more relaxed about his relationship to the music - with Eldbjørg, whom I'll see next in Svalbard.

Only sorry I didn't take a photo of my 88-year-old mum, who gamely arranged to be driven up from Banstead and back to attend her first Europe Day Concert, lovingly cared for by her goddaughter Sara while I flitted about. It was, unlike last year which had an elegiac tone, the jolliest of occasions. We're not out yet, the European Commission Representation in London lives to fight another day, and we're feeling more optimistic. Please get out and VOTE for a pro-Remain party today, those of you who can. I'm popping round to the local polling station before I depart for Sweden - alas not, like admirable Greta Thunberg, on the train. Transport around Europe is going to need some serious rethinking over the next year.

Paths to Bluebeard's Castle

The performance was the thing, of course, though the paths in question are those I pursued in a Southbank talk preparing for it a couple of Saturdays back. Because of the link, and the fact that I could get tickets that way, I passed the concert review on to my Arts Desk colleague Sebastian Scotney, and I agree with everything there. More on the talk anon; certainly last night vindicated Bartók's chef d'oeuvre as one of the 20th century's towering masterpieces, indeed one of the greatest operas (no need to preface that with 'one-act') in the most nuanced performance I ever hope to hear from the electrifying Iván Fischer and his Budapest Festival Orchestra, and - it should go without saying - the most idiomatic, too.

The Bluebeard, Krisztián Cser, was literally jaw-dropping - when he did that, cavernous sounds came from within the genuine bass. He and Ildikó Komlósi - an old hand at Judith, but still one of the classiest - performed out front from memory, no special lighting, no gimmicks. Fischer recited Béla Bálazs' Prologue so beautifully that I decided I want to learn it just to please my Hungarian friends; the orchestra did the castle-sighing. We felt the beauty, the jarring pain, the supernatural flickers in the garden and on the lake of tears. It was yet another of those performances where you could only wonder at what an astounding work it is, how on earth Bartók keeps pulling idea after idea out of the conjurer's hat in such perfect music-drama sequence.

My guest was none other than our Sophie Sarin, on her last evening in the UK for a while - she's off to Sweden now and back to Mali for what may be the last time at her hotel. Never having experienced the opera before - she was shocked by the ending - she managed to slip in rather belatedly that she had 'played' the corpse of one of Bluebeard's wives in a seemingly unobtainable 1982 film based on Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber and starring Terence Stamp. Oh, that Sophie! We have, of course, seen her big-hair, shake-it-all-about appearance in the (actually rather good) movie of Jesus Christ Superstar (she happened to be travelling in Israel, where it was filmed, at the time).

But back to the concert. The first half was typical Fischer enterprise, preceding Bartók's Hungarian Peasant Songs, all flaming strings and authentic Magyar clarinet, with some of the original versions performed, in relaxed and witty fashion, by the ineffable Márta Sebestyén (pictured above by László Perger) and three players from the orchestra who like to jam in folk idiom; the violinist, István Kádár, is as compelling as his folk singer, and in the encore you feared Zsolt Fejervári would snap his double-bass in two. Only a couple of small snags: I always like to know what the texts mean - there were no supertitles in this half, no introduction of the meaning despite Fischer's splendid commentary with examples of Bartok's phonograph folk recordings - and we really needed to be able to dance.

The dance I led the audience at the 'What You Need to Know' study day on Bartók and Bluebeard's Castle was very much around the heart of darkness. Of course I wanted to tackle the juicy subject head-on, but that was to fall to the excellent Jonathan Cross in the afternoon (I couldn't stay because of a deferred weekend in Lacock, but I have the soundfiles so I shall certainly listen). I had the impossible task of summing up 64 years of life in 50 minutes. As the punters didn't get copies of my track list, I'm happy to refer to it here. And I'm punctuating this sequence with installations as part of Müpa's Ludwig Museum Bartók homage, which I never got round to writing about when I came back from Budapest last November.

At the top of the piece is Ádám Csábi's Bartók, based on his idea that the composer's face hardly changed throughout the years - hence multiple plywood-and-acrylic heads carefully lit. Here's a different angle.

The start for the talk was obvious to me - two C major blazes, since the first work at its 1902 performance in Budapest inspired the young Bartók to devote his life properly to composing: Strauss's Also sprach Zarathustra opening and the opening of the Fifth Door in Bluebeard's Castle (both conducted by Boulez, a curious candidate for the first).

I then did a rewind to trace Bartók's steps up to his Budapest training, noting how each of the places the family lived when he was growing up tends to be in another country now - Romania, Ukraine, Slovakia (important to the mix of folk idioms he was later to study). I thought we could look at the divide between his early late-romanticism and the steps towards modernism in the Two Portraits of 1908 - the end of 'Idealised' and the opening of 'Distorted', very much à la Berlioz in the Symphonie Fantastique (recording courtesy of the incredible Ferenc Fricsay and the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra).

The new modernism took us via the Allegro barbaro of 1911, Bluebeard year, in a 1929 performance by the composer-pianist, to his interest in folk music (cue further archive recordings in an excerpt from the Three Rondos on Slovak Folk Songs and 'New Hungarian Folk Song' from Mikrokosmos Book 5 arranged for piano duo, Bartók and his second wife Ditta Pásztory, recorded in New York in 1941). Pictured below from the exhibition: Dénes Farkas's Microcosm and Gábor Palotai's Makrokosmos 1-16.

Then did a sideways leap to a folk arrangement by his fellow collector from 1905 onwards, Zoltan Kodály: the song collected in the Tolná area 'This side of the Tiszá' ('Tiszán innen, Dunán túl'), as given to Háry János and his beloved Őrzse in the 1926 folk opera which, shamefully, I've never heard performed complete in the UK (I caught it in Vienna from Ádám Fischer and the Hungarian Radio Symphony Orchestra - piquantly, since the tall tale is about the adventures of the lying soldier in the Austrian capital. Our performers on the excerpt were László Palócz, Erzsébet Komlóssy and István Kertész conducting the London Symphony Orchestra, prefaced by Peter Ustinov). Had it confirmed by a Hungarian speaker in the audience that what we know as the 'Scots snap' rhythm comes from the language's stress on the first syllable. Gave a purely orchestral song equivalent in the context of the Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta's third-movement 'melody' (Chicago Symphony Orchestra/Fritz Reiner). Pictured below: Adrienn Dorszanki's Bartók, turning text from the Cantata Profana into morse code.

Like Fischer in the concert talk, I thought I ought to illustrate a couple of folksongs as recorded by Bartók on his phonograph - mine were later, from his trip to Turkey in 1936 - 'My darling is following' sung by Emine Muktat and  'One can feel that the summer is coming' delivered by Zekeriye Culha.

The question of melismatic ornaments in folksong allowed me to cue the opening of the First Piano Concerto's finale. Moving from 1926 to 1930, I let the chord clusters in the middle of the Second Concerto's central movement stand for his extreme dissonances of that time. And then a leap forward to America and the straightening-out of the Adagio religioso; stuck with Stephen Kovacevich and Colin Davis for all three. The biography inevitably got a bit squeezed, and in ending with a miserable Time obituary which remembered Bartók only as 'prolific Hungarian composer of piquant, sometimes cacophonous orchestral and chamber music', citing only one work - 'Contrasts for Benny Goodman', I didn't have time to play the final extract - Bartók, Goodman and Joseph Szigeti in their celebrated 1940 recording.

Still, we had a lot of sound-clips, and it worked well in tandem with Sarah Lenton's ensuing talk on the plot and literary precedents of Bluebeard's Castle, which stuck to the visuals (so the audience got to see this famous photo of Bartók recording in the countryside).

Fischer, of course, was absolutely charming in his presentation of the recorded folksongs; how wonderful it would have been to have him there for the study day too. I do want to meet him. And it strikes me that, of the world's great 'orchestras with voices', the Budapest Festival Orchestra will never let you down so long as he's in charge, while with the Berlin and Vienna Phils, it very much depends on the conductor; you can hear boring performances in their hands. With Fischer, never. His concerts are always true events. Long may he continue to bend the standard format to his own vibrant will. Anyway, the next time I hear Hungarians perform live it will be in the hall announced below.