Music: Birthday in Budapest

In 1923, it had been 50 years since the twin cities of Buda and Pest had been welded into one, and the city fathers wanted some commemorative music. They chose a black-bearded Hungarian named Zoltan Kodaly (rhymes with so high) to write it. The Psalmus Hungaricus that he wrote for the occasion is still considered by some critics the finest choral work of the 20th Century.

Last week it was the city’s turn to honor the composer. In the cool, wide Romanesque gardens of Budapest’s Karolyi Palace, concertgoers gathered to pay Zoltan Kodaly homage on the 25th birthday of his best—but not best known—work. First they heard the Budapest Symphony Orchestra galumph pleasantly through the concert suite from Kodaly’s bright, bumptiously good-humored opera Háry János.

Then frail, 65-year-old Composer Kodaly himself, looking like an El Greco with his sunken face and pointed white beard, took the podium to lead the orchestra and two choruses in the work which first won him fame. When it was over, Education Minister Gyula Oretetay presented the composer with a gold-leafed baton, and bull-necked Communist War Minister Peter Veres, a self-educated peasant who makes a point of never wearing a necktie on formal occasions, gave Kodály a wreath of fresh Hungarian wheat.

In honoring a composer who could be there, many a Hungarian felt as if he were also paying respect to another composer who couldn’t. Wrote one critic: “We are able to honor Kodály in his lifetime—which, sadly, we were unable to do for Bartók.” (Bartók died, neglected, in New York City in 1945).

As young men, Kodály and Bartók, both ardent nationals in music, had squirmed together at the Budapest Conservatory under German professors who, snorts Kodály, “couldn’t even speak Hungarian.” They had tramped the hills recording more than 6,000 samples of folk music on a primitive Edison machine—and each used this folk music as a base, though what each did with the music was different. Bartok loved stubborn dissonances and wild rhythms; Kodaly preferred to be lyrical and simple. Says Kodaly: “Bartok was more eager to find new-effects and possibilities. I was content with less. I am still less curious than Bartok.”

Politically, they were both militant liberals then (Bartók refused a decoration from the Admiral Horthy regime). Today Kodály is content to play along with the Communist government. Although he says he is not a party member, he composes little nowadays because so much of his time is taken up as president of Hungary’s Arts Council, Academy of Sciences, and Academy of Music, and as a member of Parliament. Once a sandaled Bohemian, he is now one of Budapest’s most elegant dressers, lives in fashionable Andrássy Ut. This fall in London he will conduct his latest major composition, a Missa Brevis, which he completed in a cellar in the last days of the Russian siege of Budapest.