Notes for: August 12, 2008
The Hungarian Zoltán Kodály was a man of many parts. In addition to his composing, 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 has been adapted to many other countries including the United States.
Perhaps most important, he was a leading ethno-musicologist, working with Béla Bartók in compiling and editing more than 3,000 Hungarian folk songs – that is, authentic Magyar songs free from the gypsy encrustations heard in European cafes. Over a 10-year period, starting in 1905, Kodály and Bartók spent their summers touring Hungarian villages and recording songs on wax or jotting them down in notation as the villagers sang them. This pioneer effort resulted in a series of authoritative folk-song collections and studies, starting in 1905 and extending over the next 60 years.
Like Bartók, in his composing Kodály was committed to furthering the musical heritage of his country, drawing his subjects from Hungarian literature and folklore and seasoning his music with the pungent vigor of Hungarian peasant idioms. In this regard, Bartók paid his friend the highest praise: “If I were asked,” he wrote, “in whose music the spirit of Hungary is most perfectly embodied, I would reply, in Kodály’s. His music is a profession of faith in the spirit of Hungary. His work as a composer is entirely rooted in the soil of Hungarian folk music.”
But unlike Bartók, Kodály wrote mainly in a late romantic style, conservative in its harmonic language and easily accessible to modern audiences. Several of his nationalist compositions have a won a permanent place in the international repertoire – his national opera Hary Janos and the orchestral suite drawn from it, “Peacock” Variations, Galanta and Marosszék Dances for orchestra, and Psalmus Hungaricus for chorus and orchestra.
Kodály composed the Duo for Violin and Cello in 1914 at the height of his interest in Hungarian folk music, and the work reflects that interest. Folk elements and idioms abound – for example, the use of five-tone scales and early modal church scales, abrupt changes in mood, extravagant ornamentation, and long rhapsodic passages as if the instruments were telling a story or reciting a poem. You might imagine yourself in the square of a Hungarian village on a summer evening listening to the local fiddler and cellist extemporize – except that the music demands virtuoso technical skills far beyond the average village musician.
The first movement is in conventional sonata form – that is, with the presentation of two themes, their development, and their restatement. The first theme is declaimed at the outset by the cello, with the violin punctuating with double-stop chords; then the violin takes up the theme. The second theme is ushered in by a bouncing pizzicato figure in the cello, against which the violin offers a more tranquil melody. When the themes return later in the movement, the instrumental roles are reversed, with the violin shrieking the first theme in its highest register and the cello launching the second theme.
The second movement introduces a mood of despair – Kodály’s biographer László Eösze speculates that it may reflect the composer’s sense of foreboding on the imminence of World War I. Three thematic elements are heard in the opening measures – the first, a moody monologue for the cello; the second, an undulating figure for the violin, and the third, an outcry by the violin high in the instrument. These elements are developed with mounting tension, and the music then dies down into a state of weariness and desperation.
The third movement opens with a long and highly rhapsodic solo for the violin. The music then breaks into a series of highly accented dances, played at a presto pace. To this listener, however, the feeling of sadness carries over from the preceding movement, and the emphatic chords ending the work underscore the composer’s depressed mood.
Notes for: July 18, 2023
“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 spent his life working to establish a national musical culture and to make it the basis of music education in Hungary. So great was his success that by the time of his death he was revered throughout Hungary as a national hero, and the system of music education that he developed for school children had international influence.
The Duo for Violin and Cello is an invigorating example of the way in which Kodály melded folk music with formal, classical structure in his own compositions. While the first movement is in sonata-allegro form – exposition, development, recapitulation — the work gets its flavor from features that it shares with Magyar folk music: the pentatonic themes, free-flowing melodies that range from languorous to fierce, independence of the phrases, speech-like patterns, fluid rhythms, and underlying rhythmic ostinatos. After the cello’s opening declamatory statement, the instruments pass melodies back and forth as if in conversation, with the violin starting the give-and-take. When one is in the spotlight, the other fills in with pizzicato or other ornamentation. From the beginning, moods, tempos, and meters shift rapidly. The texture becomes thicker and the music more aggressive in the development section, which ends with a cello cadenza that leads to a restatement of the themes, but this time with the cello going first.
The conversation that begins in the first movement continues in the heartfelt, rhapsodic Adagio, which, like the rest of the Duo, highlights Kodály’s melodic gifts. This intense, sometimes tormented movement opens with an expressive soliloquy from the cello, which is answered with a restless violin melody. The tension builds as the two instruments exchange melodic ideas, in a pattern that seems almost like speech. The exchange becomes at times dramatic, such as when, early on, the cello keeps up a steady, unnerving tremolo under the violin’s passionate outbursts. If the second movement creates a sense of uneasiness, good humor is restored in the earthy, rhythmic finale, a series of Magyar-style dances, some slow and some fast, that bring the Duo to a vigorous and playful conclusion. Better than words could, the Duo shows just what Kodály wanted, musically, for his country.