Notes for: July 12, 2005
The Hungarian Zoltán Kodály had a many-sided career. In addition to his composing, he was a leading ethno-musicologist, working with Béla Bartók in compiling and editing more than 3,000 Hungarian folk songs. He was an educator, serving as professor and then assistant director at the Budapest Academy of Music. He was a music critic for newspapers and journals in Hungary and the author of numerous scholarly writings on central European folk music. And he was an internationally recognized music educator; his “Kodály method” for developing musical literacy in schoolchildren, using songs and exercises based on folk material, has been adapted to many other countries including the United States.
He was also a dedicated Hungarian nationalist. In his composing Kodály was committed to one musical objective – furthering the musical heritage of his country. As a result, he wrote consistently in a late romantic style, conservative in its harmonic language but seasoned with the pungent vigor of Hungarian peasant idioms. Several of his nationalist compositions have a won a permanent place in the international repertoire – the opera Hary Janos and the orchestral suite drawn from it, The “Peacock” Variations and the Galanta and Marosszék Dances for orchestra, and the Psalmus Hungaricus for chorus and orchestra.
The Serenade, Opus12, composed in 1919-20, was for the unusual combination of two violins and viola. Although Dvorák had written a Terzetto for this combination in 1887, Kodály was unfamiliar with it, and it in no way served as a model. Apparently, Kodály had been interested in such a blending for some time since he had attempted a trio for these instruments while still a schoolboy.
Kodály called the work “serenade” rather than “trio,” and the distinction is important. The term “serenade” was popularized in the 18th century to denote an instrumental composition in several movements whose purpose was to provide an evening’s entertainment, often for performance in the garden. Composers in the 19th century, while dropping the outdoor connotation, continued using the term for a piece of lighter emotional weight, and that is what Kodály now had in mind.
The first movement is marked Allegramente, an unusual term meaning “gaily” or “merrily,” and the term sets the mood. All three instruments open the movement with a vigorous stamping theme; here and elsewhere, Kodály makes repeated use of the viola’s open bottom string to create a distinct tonal color and richness of sound. The viola presents the lyrical second theme against a pizzicato accompaniment in the violins, which is then expanded by the violins in octaves. After a brief climax, the viola continues its strain leading to a long high A signaling a shift of gears.
Instead of developing the above themes, the viola introduces still another theme against a repeated strumming in the second violin, and the first violin imitates it. The two instruments mingle and work up to the ff restatement of the stamping opening theme followed by the restatement of the second theme and its expansion.
The second movement is a parlando (speech-like) dialogue between the viola and the first violin. In fact, a biographer of Kodály, László Eösze, suggested a specific dramatic scenario involving a lover and his mistress: The lover pleads. The mistress laughs. The lover repeats his suit. The mistress is coy. The lover presses harder. The mistress rises to a mood of passionate rejection. The lover is about to give up, but the mistress relents. Now the lover seems to mock, but he, too, relents, and the movement closes in an almost inaudible sigh.
The final movement is mainly a sequence of folk-dance-like passages in varying moods – robust, flirtatious and moody – over a throbbing rhythm. Toward the end the dancing is interrupted by a more contemplative section, but the dancing returns to end the serenade on an appropriately joyful note.
Notes for: August 14, 2018
Kodály’s music is connected in essential ways to each of the other composers on today’s program. He was influenced by Debussy’s early Impressionism, and he and Dvořák shared a passion to preserve their countries’ folk heritages.
“If I were asked to name the composer whose works are the most perfect embodiment of the Hungarian spirit, I would answer, Kodály,” Béla Bartók wrote of his compatriot, fellow ethno-musicologist, and close friend. Kodály was a man with a mission: to capture and preserve the authentic folk music of the Hungarian peasantry, and to make that folk heritage the basis of a genuine Hungarian musical style. Bartók shared Kodály’s passion, and around 1905 the two composers began traveling to remote back-country villages, where they recorded and catalogued thousands of Magyar songs. Kodály’s lifelong focus remained on Hungary’s ethnic heritage, and he spent his life working to establish a national musical culture and to make it the basis of music education in Hungary. By the time he died he was a national hero, and the system of music education that he developed for school children had international influence.
Years before that, though, Kodály had run into political trouble. During the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic that was established in 1918, he was appointed Deputy Director of the National Academy of Music in Budapest. When the Republic was overthrown by a right-wing dictatorship, Kodály lost his job and was accused of crimes against the state. He eventually was allowed to return to teaching, but his reputation had been damaged. One of the few works he composed during this fraught period was the Serenade for Two Violins and Viola, Op. 12. Bartók, impressed by the work and eager to see his friend’s reputation restored, wrote a glowing review that praised its unusual chord combinations, its originality, and the superb richness of its instrumental effects and melodies.
The Serenade is an ingratiating work that is typical of Kodály’s style: a blend of folk inspiration and modern harmonies, wrapped in classical form. It begins with a rousing rhythmic pattern that drives the sonata-form first movement, and it ends with a rambunctious, dancelike finale. These movements bracket an unusual Lento, a witty and entertaining dialogue between the viola and the first violin, carried out over the second violin’s tremolo. The viola opens with a seductive, come-hither melody, which the violin answers with chirps that Kodály marks ridando (laughingly). Throughout the movement, he issues directions such as imitando, indifferante, disparado – emotions that inspired one listener to imagine it as a conversation between a lover and the coy object of his affections. For Bartók the movement was a delight: "We find ourselves in a fairy world never dreamed of before."