Collector's items 1900-1967 Hungary

Nationalism didn't really get going in Hungary as quickly as elsewhere - unless you count Brahms and Liszt and their Hungarian dances and rhapsodies. The Habsburg Empire ruled over the territory until 1918, and Viennese influence was strong, but many Hungarians had a powerful sense of national identity. A couple of young composers met up in Budapest just after the turn of the century, and discovered they both wanted to write in a truly Hungarian style, incorporating folk song into their music. So, Bela Bartok (1881-1945) and Zoltan Kodaly (1882-1967) set out together to collect songs systematically, using the latest recording techniques.

What they found was a source of material richer than they had hoped for: not the gipsy violin music of the city cafes, but real Magyar (Hungarian in Hungarian) peasant music, and lots of it. As first they restricted themselves to Hungary, but their later field trips extended into neighbouring Romania, Transylvania and Slovakia. The travelling came to end with the First World War, but they had already built ip impressive catalogue and established themselves among the first ethnomusicologists (great word meaning people who study music of various cultures).

They also took an interest in what was happening in the contemporary classical scene, studying composers as diverse as Richard Strauss and Debussy, and integrating elements of their styles into their own music too. By 1910 when their first string quartets were premiered, they had developed a distinctive modern Hungarian sound.

Kodaly restricted himself to Magyar folk music, using tunes he had collected as themes in his work, and established himself as a truly Hungarian composer at around the time Hungary gained its independence. Bartok, however, spread his net wider and took the process further. He drew on sources from all over Eastern Europe, and even Turkey and North Africa, and his research into folk music whetted his appetite for exotic scales and modes. Not content with merely quoting or imitating, he tried to capture the essence of his findings by detailed analysis and reconstruction, adding his own personal slant. He was not only meticulous in his work, but also reserved and introverted ( a quality that was refreshingly unlike his contemporary, Stravinsky) and this shows in his music.

Okay, he could, when he wanted, write exuberant  dance-inspired music for orchestra, and his three stage works are at times violently expressive, but even when writing on a large scale he tends to be rather broodingly introspective. He was more comfortable with piano and chamber music, where especially in the six string quartets, he emerged as one of the giants of music in the twentieth century.

You will enjoy Kodaly. Everybody does. Especially the orchestral music. The suit from his opera Hary Janos is fun and so are the Dances of Galanta, Dances of Marosszek and the Peacock Variations. For the more serious side, the two string quartets, or the glorious Psalmus Hungaricus.

Bartok's last work, the Concerto for Orchestra is one of my favourite and it is probably the most approachable, but give the Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta a try too. And there is always the opera Duke Bluebeard's Castle, the ballet The Wooden Prince or the mime drama The Miraculous Mandarin. But the best stuff, in my opinion, is in the six string quartets, the three piano concertos and the amazing Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion.  The Nine Splendid Stags, in English, originally titled The Cantata Profana, is an amazing legend. On this recording Bartok himself telling the story in Hungarian before the music starts.