Building a Library
Malcolm Hayes is enthralled by a Hungarian folk hero’s swashbuckling tales as he searches out the best recordings of Kodály’s orchestral suite
Malcolm Hayes picks out the finest recordings of Kodály’s folk-inspired orchestral suite, Háry János
The composer
Zoltán Kodály (1882-1967) was more than just a composer. In August 1905, he headed out on a tour of Hungary, recording local folksongs as he went. His findings not only informed his PHD thesis – ‘The stanzaic structure of Hungarian folksong’ – but were also incorporated into his compositions. His Psalmus Hungaricus of 1923, composed to mark the 50th anniversary of the union of Buda and Pest, was his first major success, followed soon after by Háry János. He took a keen interest in children’s music education, establishing the ‘Kodály Method’ in the 1940s.
The work
Háry János – who he? There is flaky historical evidence that he may actually have existed – an army veteran of the Austro-hungarian Empire’s sequence of (usually losing) Napoleonic wars in the early 19th century. He then evidently became a local hero by regaling listeners with his extremely tall stories of his (always winning) exploits against the enemy, enabling the triumph of his Hungarian homeland and people.
Háry János duly became the subject – a situation of which he would doubtless have approved – of an opera based on his legendary tales. Composed by Zoltán Kodály, it was premiered at Budapest’s Hungarian Opera House in 1926 and quickly became a much-loved cultural icon of the newly independent Hungarian nation. It has remained so ever since.
Kodály prefaced the score with his own take on the would-be national hero he immortalised in his opera, and in the orchestral suite he extracted from the score a year later. ‘He is a peasant, a veteran soldier,’ wrote the composer, ‘who day after day sits in the tavern, spinning yarns about his heroic exploits which are an inextricable mixture of realism and naïveté, of comic humour and pathos. Though superficially he appears to be merely a braggart, essentially he is a national visionary and poet. That his stories are not true is irrelevant, for they are the fruit of a lively imagination seeking to create, for himself and others, a beautiful dream world.’
That world and its subject-matter were very much pitched at a home-grown Hungarian audience. Háry János is the Magyar counterpart of other locally designed stage works – Smetana’s Dalibor and Libu e, Janá ek’s The Excursions of Mr Brou ek, Nielsen’s Maskarade, the operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan – whose music is better known beyond their nation’s boundaries through orchestral extracts in the form of concert suites (where those exist) rather than in their original form.
Like Béla Bartók, his compatriot, fellowcomposer and friend, Kodály combined a ‘high art’ concert-hall idiom of impressive and gorgeously coloured mastery with an encyclopaedic knowledge of his people’s folk music (which, along with Bartók, he collected and researched extensively), and with a deep commitment to the cultural values behind this. Háry János has all these elements in abundance, plus with a richly humorous streak which, it’s fair to say, was not Bartók’s natural territory.
Both composers, while proud nationalists and patriots, were also naturally ambitious for recognition beyond Hungary. Kodály must surely have had an exportable suite from Háry János in mind from the start, and this was first heard in Barcelona in 1927. By omitting the
The music has an irresistible quality that has you repeatedly catching yourself grinning
opera’s voice parts and spoken dialogue and focusing on the score’s main ideas, the suite’s six-movement design conjures a brilliantly entertaining portrait of Háry and his assorted encounters with the (supposed) world around him. Somehow, however rain-sodden the weather outside and however depressing the morning news bulletins, the music has an irresistible quality that has you repeatedly catching yourself grinning in delight.
Although the suite’s reputation has happily swept the musical world, concert-goers outside Hungary still have surprisingly few opportunities to hear it. The obvious up-front reason is that, besides a standard-sized symphony orchestra, the score has a prominent role for the cimbalom. This unique easteuropean instrument consists essentially of a low open-topped box, traditionally slung from the standing player’s neck and hanging at hip level like a tray; in the 1870s a larger, free-standing concert version with a more powerful sound was developed in Hungary, of the kind that Kodály wrote for in Háry János. The strings deployed across the instrument are usually not plucked, but played with a set of hand-held beaters, and are arranged in a complex, non-linear layout of pitches, making mastery of the instrument a specialised skill.
Soloists outside native cimbalom territory can usually be found, sometimes in an orchestra’s percussion section, but the instrument’s relative rarity is still a programming disincentive. Kodály’s deployment of it is nonetheless a masterstroke. In this ‘proper’ orchestral context the cimbalom’s distinctive and entirely different sound, tangy and acrid, has the effect of adding local colour to the music while at the same time roguishly sending it up – as, no doubt, the oh-soredoubtable Háry János himself enjoyed doing to his surrounding listeners.
Turn the page to discover the finest recordings of Kodály’s Háry János