Raggle-Taggle (1933)/Chapter 7

by Walter Starkie

 

Chapter VII

The Hungarian Idiom in Music

Adventures with Tunes

MY experiences in Budapest were a god-send to me as a vagabond fiddler, for in the cafés I heard the greatest Gypsies of Hungary play the national melodies and dances, and in my own playing I tried as far as possible to copy their style. In Hungary it is not enough for the village minstrel to play the folk-tunes: he must interpret them in such a way that they work their spell, and he must embroider them and improvise.

One of my most difficult tasks was to cultivate the strong rhythmical accentuation of the Hungarian style so alien to the spirit of northern nations. Whenever I played in the villages I felt it necessary to whip my Anglo-Celtic nature up to the pitch of orgy in order to satisfy the peasant audience.

My Gypsy friends seemed to be able to produce the orgiastic spirit in the people with very little trouble: they would stand at the table of some peasant like statues, but their sardonic eye like that of a wizard would know at a glance what mood the peasant was in, and they would tune their fiddles to that mood. As for me, I struggled along, perspiring and wearing myself out in the attempt to rouse the men to song. At first I wandered in a musical maze without any clear, logical ideas concerning the huge mass of Hungarian folk-music. I would play tunes at random without realizing that the most important task of a minstrel was to choose his tunes carefully according to a preconceived plan, for every one of them possesses very definite meanings and where one tune will make the men yawn or the women titter, another will draw them all to their feet in an outburst of triumphant mulatni. Then gradually a certain order came into my chaotic mind and I began to divide up the Hungarian folk-tunes into groups and I would build up my rhapsodies following a logical order.

A rhapsody means according to its Greek origin, a sewing together of songs, and the minstrel must sew them together so that the emotional excitement of his audience grows in intensity as the piece progresses. Rhapsodies always start with slow, sad music, meandering on in endless melancholy, for the Magyar enjoys himself in weeping and the first approach to his soul may only be made through those melodies which call up in his mind visions of tragic battles long ago. The lassu of the rhapsody is a slow melody full of restless notes followed by long pauses:

The restless phrase is repeated again and again monotonously and the long pauses lull our senses. I always compared it to the singing of a lonely nomad in the desert: he cries out his song to the void and then pauses to hear the echo. After hearing many of those melodies constructed on the same principles I found it possible to improvise others with similar restless bow strokes, followed by long pauses and the repetition of the melody a fifth higher. A great many slow Hungarian melodies are formed in this pattern which must be a very ancient one, for we find the following in Mátray’s collection under the date 1553–1554:

When I had played the lassu over and over again my Gypsy friend who was accompanying me on the cimbalom would suddenly wink at me and strike a major chord. Then the rhythm would become more martial and strict in tempo. At this point of the rhapsody it is customary to use a sharply accentuated rhythm with a snap in it—the kind of snap we get in the Scotch song “Comin’ thro’ the rye”! This rhythm occurs so frequently in the Hungarian music that we must consider it a fundamental part of the Magyar idiom. The Gypsies revel in it and beat it out triumphantly on their fiddles. According to Fox Strangways, the rhythm is the same as one found frequently in Indian music. The following example is a characteristic one and taken from a melody which I have heard sung to improvised words:

This rhythm which is nearly always in ⁠4/8⁠ in its leaps and bounds often resembles the Asclepiad in Latin verse.

If the dominant emotion of the first part of the rhapsody, the lassu, is full of languid melancholy and despair, and that of the second part or friss is martial vigour, the third and final part, the csárdás, is the orgy. In my experience of playing in the village cafés and the fairs I found that all success depended on the csárdás. No matter how poetical and how rhythmic my playing might have been in the beginning of the rhapsody, all went for nought if my powers of resistance were not sufficient for the vertiginous dance. In a café where there was a good cimbalom-player I had little difficulty, for he would support my faltering bow, but out in the country where the people danced around the solitary fiddler one needed the force and concentration of a Hercules to play the following tune until the whole audience became galvanized into mad rhythm:

As a relief from the fast rhythms of the csárdás the Gypsies taught me various melodies that they called “bird songs.” One of the most famous is always associated with the name of Reményi, the celebrated Gypsy violinist who played the Hungarian army into battle in the war of liberation of 1848:

Every Gypsy prides himself on his playing of those bird songs, for it enables him to show off all his powers of florid ornamentation. Grace-notes, trills and flourishes become as much of an obsession with him as the arabesque did with the architects of the Alhambra. The Tzigan is unable to play a single melody without festooning it with ornaments and thus he shows his Eastern origin, for Indian music is full of such embellishments.

In my attempt to assimilate the Gypsy style of performance I cast away as much of the good old classical violin tradition as I could, for I remembered how Liszt had said that there is no rule or discipline in Gypsy music. Everything is allowed provided it pleases the audience, for Gypsy art is not a science but a mystic song. There must be no attempt to modulate, for the Tzigan likes to spring suddenly to a remote key just as in his conversation he leaps from one question to its direct opposite. When playing in the minor key it was necessary to adopt the augmented fourth, diminished sixth and augmented seventh. After some weeks of ceaseless training I acquired the Gypsy idiom, and I was proud of myself, for I began to know how to read the faces of my audience: I could go up to the table and play to the dark eyes of some Magyar girl and make her sing to my playing, and I also acquired the sardonic and yet fawning air of one who knows how to play his way into her cavalier’s pocket.

Then one day my pride came tottering down like a house of cards.

I became acquainted with a young musician of Budapest, a highbrow who detested the very name of Gypsy, and who was determined to correct me of my bias in favour of the Romany race. It was useless for me to quote Liszt’s panegyrics at him, for he was a devotee of Béla Bartók, Kodály, and the new music of Hungary. Liszt and Brahms, he told me, did a great harm to Hungary by their so-called rhapsodies and Hungarian dances. The success of those hybrid works seventy years ago did, it is true, turn the thoughts of Europe towards Hungarian art, but it was the art of a foreign race in Hungary. Liszt intended his book on Gypsies to be the prologue to the rhapsodies which were the separate cantos of a gigantic Gypsy epic in music, but he made the mistake of calling the Gypsy music Hungarian, as though it was the wandering Indian race created all the Magyar music. According to his theory, the Gypsies brought their scale as well as their language from the East into Hungary, and the Magyars adapted their national dances to the Gypsy airs and sang melodies of Gypsy origin to Hungarian words which have remained until to-day in the villages of the countries.

All critics from Bartalus and Brassai down to Béla Bartók and Kodály have refuted Liszt indignantly. The title of the book of Liszt should have been “The Gypsies and the manner they handle music in Hungary.” They have never been creators, but they have perpetuated the music of the peasant and the city-man, owing to their position as minstrels. “And I would say, a plague on them for their perpetuation,” said the young musician from Budapest. What have they done save deform those old melodies handed down from father to son? Nowadays it is only with the greatest difficulty that the folk-lore expert can separate the commonplace art-music of the town amateur from the genuine peasant music.

When I played the melodies and dances I had learnt the young musician would adopt a critical air. He was most polite and he had the ineffable courteous tact of the Budapestian, but he would sniff when I used in my playing plenty of rubato and Gypsy harmonies. In the end he sat down at a piano and made me play Vivaldi Concertos and Corelli Sonatas, and when he had played several hours he said: “Now you have opened wide the windows and the stink of that Gypsy art has disappeared.” A few days later he took me to hear the well-known violinist Szigeti play a programme which included works by Béla Bartók. The playing of Szigeti was the complete explanation in music of all that the young musician had told me. Szigeti was the antithesis to the Gypsy in his playing: cold, statuesque, perfect, he fascinated me by his sculptural qualities. Music for him was architecture, and emotion was subordinated to design. There was fire in his playing, but it was a fire well slacked down and never allowed to blaze out into a raging furnace. Occasionally his refined art would become more rugged and primitive. In Bartók’s second sonata there was something barbaric about his playing, and the strange melodies resembled the fantastic improvisations on flutes by shepherds. The violin revelled in arabesques, but they were more primitive than the Gypsy ones, as though the basis of the music was a primeval rhapsody of the Magyar race before the invasion of the Gypsies. The varying rhythms, too, gave the same impression of Oriental primitiveness, but without a trace of the usual monotony.

Another evening I went with my friend to hear the “Psalmus Hungaricus” of Kodály, one of the great works of modern Magyar music. The solo tenor takes the part of the prophet who sees in his mystical visions the sorrows and distress of Hungary, the land that must breed heroes of unflinching courage if she is to survive her sad destiny. The chorus symbolizing the people answers the voice of the prophet and cries out at one moment its despair, at another its triumphal joy and hope in the future. In Kodály there is less variety of rhythm, less subtlety and contrast than in Bartók, but there is more of the epic spirit and more musical imagination. In both of them we may admire an art which stretches down to the roots of their race.

As Jean Cocteau said, “plus un poète chante dans son arbre généalogique, plus il chante juste.” Bartók and Kodály have given a wonderful example to Europe by their researches into Hungarian folk-song. In the days of Erkel and Liszt the music of the country was outwardly Magyar, but only in the sense that Tchaikowsky’s style is Russian. It was necessary to penetrate to the soul of the race, and it was left to these two modern composers to undertake the task. They shunned the cities and wandered through the countryside visiting the cottages of the peasants and the huts of the shepherds. There they found an amazing wealth of traditional songs and ballads describing the life of a people through centuries, and in discovering this treasure they saw pass before their eyes the panorama of Hungarian history. Béla Bartók in his journeys among the people carried a phonograph with which he recorded the singing and playing of the peasants. From the plain of Hungary he passed into Transylvania and from there to Roumania, recording all that he heard in the villages,and he deposited the disks in the Ethnographical Section of the National Hungarian Museum at Budapest. All his efforts were directed towards separating popular art music, or the music of more or less cultivated amateurs from peasant music. Among the peasants there exists a primitive musical style, but it is liable to disappear because they are in constant contact with more cultured classes, such as, for instance, the town-dwellers, and also with the peasantry and upper classes of the neighbouring countries.

Two opposite tendencies assert themselves among peasants: one is to preserve old traditions unaltered, and the other is to imitate novelties. When the imitative tendency becomes stronger than the conservative instinct the peasant gets hold of many cultural products of those classes; but as peasant life is secluded those foreign, borrowed elements become transformed, and finally thoroughly assimilated into the music of the race. Bartók therefore divides his collection into two parts consisting of the old style and the new style of Hungarian peasant music.

The old style, which is becoming very rare, is confined to elderly people who can only be persuaded with great difficulty to sing because they know that their young relations deride all that is old-fashioned. Their songs are mostly sung in the semitoneless pentatonic scale: g, b flat, c, d, f, and in the performance each line of the text is often introduced with an interjection consisting of one syllable such as hey or ey. This interjection is to give a flying start for the principal accent which in Hungarian verse always falls on the first syllable of the line.

The new-style tunes differ from the old-style tunes through their structure, which is more architectural and less primitive. Every boy and girl in the villages sings these tunes, and they are sung in unison by the men working in the fields or by soldiers on the march. Whereas the old-style peasant music was more individual the new-style is more collective and expresses more completely the life of a community. The Hungarian peasant in his singing uses only chest-notes, and Béla Bartók says it is a sign that a singer has been influenced by town life if he uses head-notes. Another characteristic of Hungarian peasant tunes is the very large compass. The Hungarian has a greater range of voice than most other races, and in consequence he does not select a suitable pitch with much care, contenting himself with simplifying difficulties whenever they occur.

The researches of Bart¢k and Kodaly on the folk-music of their country have been a great boon to music in Europe for they have pointed the way that young composers may tread. Bartók and Kodály did not follow the example of so many folk-lore experts and content themselves with locking up their tunes in a glass case as specimens of antiquarian interest. They moulded their own style upon them and wrote music which though not actually folk-song yet took its sinews from folk-song. They have thus carried on further the process of nationalism in music. From hearing their music and studying many of their records I came to the conclusion that there might be danger in pursuing the Bartók-Kodály example too far. Bartók and Kodály are not chauvinistic, but many of the younger musicians are. My young Budapestian friend, for instance, would not listen to the rhapsodies of Liszt or the dances of Brahms because they were not genuine Magyar music. He had a hatred for the nineteenth century which was a mania. At times I heard him even say that he would like to destroy all the music of the world from 1750 up to 1900. “We have been surfeited with romanticism,” he would cry: “Beethoven’s grim frown, Schumann’s sentimentality, Brahm’s pompousness have destroyed the pure outline of an art that was dying when Mozart was born. Over the nineteenth century the spirit of Wagner stretches like a pall stifling not only music, but all the arts. Nietzsche was right to attack him, but he was no musician and that was why he glorified Bizet’s Carmen with the refrain of the Parisian boulevards. Thank God the moderns are working in the right direction and creating a music from the soil of their own country.” I was becoming wearied of the heresies of my friend, and I could not help answering him “You are suffering from the modern cénacle spirit and you are terrified of the obvious. You hate the great figures of the nineteenth century because they trumpeted out a message for all humanity whereas your gods only pipe for the few. Beethoven and Wagner were not narrowly national and they welcomed everyone into their fold. Even Liszt that you decry was the worthy henchman of Wagner, one of the most generous artists who ever lived, because he broke down the narrow bonds of nationality and welcomed all European artists. You disdain the Gypsies because they are the foreigners in your country, though they have lived there for five hundred years and have brought to your music their strange, exotic personality, making themselves part of the great pageant of the world. You disdain them for deforming your music, but you forget that for centuries they preserved it from total extinction. ‘The Lord will provide’ is the motto of the Gypsies, and their retentive ear caught any tune they heard in their wanderings over the Puszta, whether it was the song of the shepherd, the scullery-maid, or the lord in his castle, and they transformed it into a strange wild music by the magic of their self-taught art. They have been the minstrels of your country, spreading music among the masses of the people, but you of the narrow cénacle produce works which are caviare to the multitude. No, sir: narrow nationalism in politics has created post-War Europe, with its absurd tariff walls, its customs barriers, its passport visas, its meddlesome police and spy-systems, but narrow nationalism in music is a still greater disaster, for it will end by killing the spirit of music which brought harmony into the discordant world of the Tower of Babel. Music is the only true international language, and there must be no barriers. And that is why you must listen with pleasure to me, an Irish Gypsy, playing your melodies in my own way, adding in my own colours, my own ornaments, my own individual interpretation. The spirit of music is great enough to include all of us, whether scholars, composers, clowns or vagabond minstrels.”