Zoltán Kodály (1882 - 1967)
Music for Cello
Three Chorale Preludes
Sonata for Solo Cello, Op. 8
Sonata for Cello and Piano, Op. 4
Kodály's unhappy lot in life and history was to play second fiddle to Béla
Bartók. For years he was accused of plagiarism, he was critically hounded
("organised persecution", Bartók called it), and his inherent
gentleness and selfless personal demeanour (remembered so well by the present
author) was mistaken for weakness or lack of fibre. Given his lyric temperament,
his nationalism, the premium he placed on expressive nuance and harmony, his
misfortune perhaps (like the nordic Vaughan Williams/Sibelius/Roy Harris
generation) was to have been born into an age progressively more interested in
cancelling than renewing old values. He may have spanned the generations from
old Liszt to young Ligeti, he may have lived through two world wars, Hitler, the
Soviets and 1956, but comparatively little of such transition or trauma found
reflection in his work. "For some time past," Bartók felt impelled to
write in February 1921, "certain musical circles have made it their special
concern to play me off against Zoltán Kodály. They would like to make it
appear that the friendship between us is being used by Kodály for his own
profit. This is a most stupid lie. Kodály is one of the most outstanding
composers of our day. His art, like mine, has twin roots: it has sprung from
Hungarian peasant soil and modern French music [Debussy]. But though our art has
grown from this common soil, our works from the very beginning have been
completely different ...It is possible that Kodály's music is not so
'aggressive' [as mine]; it is possible that in form it is closer to certain
traditions; it is also possible that it expresses calm meditation rather than
'unbridled orgies'. But it is precisely this essential difference, reaching
expression in his music as a completely new and original way of thinking, that
makes his musical message so valuable ...This man, to whom Hungarian culture
owes so much, is attacked at every turn, sometimes by official circles,
sometimes by 'critics'. They are determined to prevent him from being able to
work in peace for the good of our culture, and they do so while they, the
incompetent, the idle and the nobodies, are proclaiming at the top of their
voices the importance of maintaining the superiority of Hungarian culture".
Eventually Kodály was to be feted and honoured by the world - but it needed
Bartók's defence, a contract from Universal in Vienna (the publishers of
Mahler, Strauss and Schoenberg), the international success of Psalmus
Hungaricus (1926 Zurich ISCM Festival) and Háry János, and the
weighty independent support of men like Toscanini, Furtwängler and Ansermet to
stem the once oceanic flood of ill feeling against him.
Kodály shared Beethoven's birthday - 16th December. As an old man (in 1966)
he remembered himself as a village lowlander: "the Galánta district, where
I began to find myself, is just as open as the Great Plain itself... [But] there
was always a longing for mountains in me. From Galánta I cou1d see the
Carpathians looming blue in the distance, from Nagyszombat they were a little
nearer, but it was years later before I could actually set foot on them".
"The shaping of my life," he wrote in 1950, "was as natural as
breathing itself. I sang before I could speak, and I sang more than I spoke... I
made my first instrument myself. I was hardly four years old when I took
mother's draining-ladle, threaded strings into its holes and fastened them to
the end of the ladle. On these strings I played the guitar and sang improvised
songs to this accompaniment". In 1900 he went to Budapest, to read German
and Hungarian at the University and to study at the Academy of Music with
Reger's cousin, Hans Koessler, the teacher of Bartók and Dohnányi. His
passions, composition apart, were collecting folk music (from 1905) and teaching
(from 1907). With Bartók he was one of the great early ethnomusicologists of
the century, notating, recording, documenting and publishing the living folk
literature of his people fresh from the field. "Like their language, the
music of the Hungarians is ... terse and lapidary, forming ...masterpieces that
are small but weighty. Some tunes of a few notes have withstood the tempests of
centuries", "there is no fertile soil without traditions [but]
traditions in themselves do not create higher forms of art" (1939), were
two among his many aphoristic perceptions. He was elected president of the
International Folk Music Council in 1961.
Originally in three movements, the Op. 4 Sonata (December 1909 -
February 1910) was premičred by Jenö Kerpely and Bartók in Budapest, 17th
March 1910. Growing out of the same elemental "old Hungarian"
intervals that a few years later were to lend wing to Sibelius's Fifth
symphony, the opening F sharp minor Fantasia - an artful blend of
rubato recitative, folk innuendo (the piano references, alla Liszt, to undamped
cimbalon sound) and Debussyian harmonies - epitomises Bartók's view of Kodály
as a composer of "rich melodic invention, [and] a perfect sense of form,
[with] a certain predilection for melancholy and uncertainty ... [striving] for
inner contemplation" July 1921). Kodály claimed Beethoven to have inspired
the stamping main theme of the second movement, but in its short-winded modal
phrases, drone inflections and Háry János - like allusions it's nearer
perhaps to peasant dance. The return of the Fantasia at the end (the
final cello F sharp cutting through the piano's distinctive G major triadic
spacing) establishes a neat cyclic unity.
Dedicated to Kerpely and first played by him in Budapest on 7th May 1918, the
Op. 8 Sonata (1915), admired by Bartók for its "unusual and
original style ...[and] suprising vocal effects", is an extraordinary tour
de force, not so much a reply to unaccompanied Bach as a visionary credo in
pursuit of the ultimate, regardless of medium or technical limitation. In
seeking his (B minor/major) goal, Kodály even has the lower two strings tuned
down a semitone from normal (giving the configuration B-F sharp-D-A), notating
them further as a transposing part. Inwardly, the three movements are tightly
linked by recurring motifs and intervals. Outwardly, however, the impression is
more random, a pageant of rhapsody and change, of sudden contrasts and pensive
reflections, all exquisitely detailed in rhythm, phrasing, inflection and
dynamics. Epic counterpoint and arresting gesture, recitatives, songs and
dances, drones, shepherd pipes, zithers and cimbalons, veritably a whole gypsy
orchestra, make up Kodály's vibrant dreamland. As monumental for cellists as
the Liszt Sonata is for pianists, no more challenging a work exists. Kodály was
never again to tackle the form.
The Three Chorale Preludes (1924) are arrangements of organ settings
formerly attributed to Bach (BWV 743,762,747) but in fact spurious.
© 1996 Ateş Orga
Maria Kliegel
Maria Kliegel achieved significant success in 1981, when she was awarded the
Grand Prix in the Rostropovich Competition. Born in Dillenburg, Germany, she
began learning the cello at the age of ten and first came to public attention
five years later, when, as a student at the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt, she
twice won first prize in the Jugend Musiziert competition. She later studied in
America with János Starker, serving as his assistant, and subsequently appeared
in a phenomenal series of concerts in America, Switzerland and France, with
Rostropovich as conductor. She has since then enjoyed an international career of
growing distinction as a soloist and recitalist, offering an amazingly wide
repertoire, ranging from Bach and Vieuxtemps to the contemporary.
Jenő Jandó
The Hungarian pianist Jenő Jandó has won a number of piano competitions
in Hungary and abroad, including first prize in the 1973 Hungarian Piano
Concours and a first prize in the chamber music category at the Sydney International
Piano Competition in 1977. He has recorded for Naxos all the piano concertos and
sonatas of Mozart. Other recordings for the Naxos label include the concertos of
Grieg and Schumann as well as Rachmaninov's Second Concerto and Paganini
Rhapsody and Beethoven's complete piano sonatas.