Composers: Apostle of the Mother Tongue

As a boy in the dreary village of Galánta, Hungary, Composer Zoltán Kodály haunted the local railroad station, watching the come-and-go of peasants lustily singing their folk songs. “I would stand open-mouthed,” he once recalled, “listening to the music die away as the train bore them off. But even then it always seemed to me that a thread of melody remained trembling in the air.” For Kodály, who died last week of a heart attack at 84, those simple melodies became the wellspring of a creative life that enriched the music of Hungary and the world.

When Kodály entered the Budapest Conservatory as a young, sandaled Bohemian, he was appalled at the tyrannical influence of the German professors who, he snorted, “couldn’t even speak Hungarian.” Determined to develop “the natural mother tongue of every Hungarian composer,” he teamed with another ardent nationalist, Bela Bartók, and armed with primitive Edison recording machines, roamed the Magyar countryside and collected 12,000 folk songs.

New Language. By melding the sprightly vigor and natural speech rhythms of the folk melodies with traditional harmonies, Kodály and Bartók forged a new, distinctly Hungarian musical language. The works of Bartók, always the more inventive and adventuresome, became increasingly dissonant and experimental. Kodály’s music was more a paean to peasant simplicity—edges blunted, the passion sometimes prettified, but always stimulating in its warmth, clarity and soaring lyricism.

Bartók left Hungary and eventually died in New York City in 1945. His work was neglected during his lifetime, but the compositions—notably his six quartets, the violin concerto and Concerto for Orchestra—are now deservedly regarded as masterworks of the century.

Kodály, darkly warning of the dangers of experimentation, never strayed from his roots, disdained writing for “the well-trained and elite” in favor of reaching “the simple man who can understand by direct feeling without learning music.” A steady but not prolific composer, he excelled more at vocal than orchestral music, and pieces like the suite from his bright, good-humored opera Háry János became concert-hall staples. His life’s output was remarkable for its uniform excellence; his unabashedly melodic First Symphony, for example, written when he was 79, evokes the same atmosphere of Transylvanian winterscapes and shepherd’s watch fires on the puszta as his earlier works.

Endless Stream. In the past 15 years or so, he had set out to raise “my people’s musical education.” He preached against the “highbrow poses” of music teachers who, with their force-feeding methods, “inculcate hatred of music instead of love.” His revolutionary techniques for teaching music—using singing, games and pictures—were introduced in 108 elementary schools in Hungary and widely copied in the U.S. and elsewhere (TIME, Aug. 26).

In 1959, after the death of his first wife, who was 18 years his senior, he married a comely blonde music student, Sarolta, who was 56 years his junior. She acted as intermediary and hostess for Kodály who, as the dean of European composers and Hungary’s most revered citizen, received an endless stream of visitors in his Budapest apartment during his last years. A shy, slight, spade-bearded man with the face of an El Greco apostle, he admonished people to “go to the peasants. Hear them sing. You can’t learn from musical scores only.”