Most professional musicians are early starters. Music agents will wax lyrical about how so-and-so picked up the violin at the age of three; but to be honest, we've heard this too often to care.
Zoltan Kodaly's formative experiences, however, would engage the attention of the hardest cynic. "I made my first instrument myself," he recalled in 1966. "I was hardly four years old when I took mother's draining-ladle, threaded strings into its holes and fastened them to the end of the ladle. On these strings I played the guitar and sang improvised songs..."
Kodaly was born on December 16 1882 – a Hungarian who spent much of his childhood in what is now Slovakia. He was one of music's great folklorists: "Like their language, the music of the Hungarians is terse and lapidary, forming masterpieces that are small but weighty," he once remarked. Bela Bartok learned much at his side, and though their musical fortunes diverged markedly over the years, the two remained firm friends.
Kodaly never seemed quite cut out for the Twentieth Century. Liszt was still active at his birth, Ligeti was on the rise at his death, yet Kodaly's work stubbornly refuses to bow to any events in between, no matter how shattering they may have been. His music is history-proof. Bartok (an altogether more engagé figure) championed Kodaly's essential values, often in the teeth of fierce, organised resistence. "It is possible that Kodály's music is not so 'aggressive' [as mine]," he wrote in 1921. "It is possible that in form it is closer to certain traditions; it is also possible that it expresses calm meditation rather than 'unbridled orgies'. But it is precisely this essential difference, reaching expression in his music as a completely new and original way of thinking, that makes his musical message so valuable..."
The point was well made, but it wasn't until five years later – with the international success of Kodaly's Psalmus Hungaricus – that critics accepted that Kodaly, far from plagiarising Bartok, possessed a distinct, yet profoundly Hungarian musical voice.
The Sonata for cello ought to have been enough. If we ignore Max Reger's Suites (and who wouldn't?) Kodaly's is the first major work for unaccompanied cello since Bach. It is original and shapely, it makes sensitive and inventive use of folk forms, and it exercises a cellist's technique superbly well, without ever turning ugly under the hands. (Kodály turns the two lower strings down a semitone to affect the piece's contest between B-major and B-minor, making him the first composer to muck about with the tuning since – yes – Bach.)
Dedicated to one of Hungary's leading cellists, Eugene de Kerpely, and first played by him in Budapest on 7th May 1918, the Sonata is, like all good music, a lot cleverer than it sounds. Bartok, ever Kodaly's champion, wrote: "Here [he] is expressing, with the simplest possible technical means, ideas that are entirely original. It is precisely the complexity of the problem that offered him the opportunity of creating an original and unusual style, with its surprising effects of vocal type; though quite apart from these effects the musical value of the work is brilliantly apparent." The three movements are tightly linked by recurring motifs and intervals, though you'd be hard-put to keep track of them without the score. Much more likely, you will find yourself dreaming up an entire village-band-worth of exotic instruments, whose cadences and eccentricities Kodaly superbly evokes: drones, shepherd pipes, cimbalons, zithers...
Once it was done, Kodaly never wrote another piece in this form again.
Ethan Ames, 2008
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Last image c/o Marco Borggreve
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