Notes for: July 12, 2011
The Hungarian Zoltán Kodály was a man of many parts. In addition to composing, he was a 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, the father of the “Kodály method” for developing musical literacy in schoolchildren.
Perhaps most important, he was a leading ethno-musicologist, working with Béla Bartók to free Hungarian folk music 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 folk songs on wax cylinders or jotting them down in notation as the villagers sang them. This pioneer effort resulted in a series of folk-song collections and studies, which are classics in their field.
In his composing, Kodály, like Bartók, 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 that 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 won a permanent place in the international repertoire – his national opera Hary Janos and the orchestral suite drawn from it, the “Peacock” Variations, the Galanta and Marosszék Dances for orchestra, and the Psalmus Hungaricus for chorus and orchestra.
In contrast to these masterworks of his maturity, the Intermezzo dates from 1905 immediately after his graduation from the Budapest Academy of Music and just before his first field research with Bartók. The principal themes, however, reflect his early interest in Hungarian folk melody.
In a simple A-B-A form, the five-minute work has the character of a relaxed serenade. The theme of the A section is a gracious strain presented by the violin over a moving pizzicato suggesting a zither, a plucked string instrument common in central Europe. The B section is more lyrical, rising to an emotional climax. In the words of an anonymous English writer, “the Intermezzo sounds rather like Dvorák with a slight Hungarian accent.”