Zoltán Kodály: The Peacock Has Taken Flight – Variations on a Hungarian Folk Song

Zoltán Kodály gave his work a somewhat complicated title—The

Peacock Has Taken Flight – Variations on a Hungarian Folk Song—but

we usually just call it the Peacock Variations. It is, incidentally, one of his most famous works, written at the request of the Amsterdam Concertgebouw Orchestra to mark the ensemble’s fiftieth anniversary. It is a truly virtuosic orchestral piece, giving the orchestra every chance to show off its skills. In discussing this work, it is worth talking first and foremost about folk music, since this is the piece that best brings out the profound dedication with which Kodály—and Bartók, of course—introduced Hungarian folk music, this wonderful treasure of ours, to concert-hall audiences. And not just in any old way: the world barely notices the masterstroke by which Kodály and Bartók managed to fold even the most ancient elements of Hungarian folk music into the centuries-old tradition of classical musical thought. They did it in such a way that a unified, meaningful, new language was born.

Both the Kodály and the Bartók languages—which are, of course, not identical and cannot be mistaken for one another—became wonderfully suited to making Hungarian folk music an integral part of concert music and art music, and indeed one of its most important new sources. Just to be safe, let me put the question: what is the most important feature of folk music?1 It is a communal language, in that any of us can be its creator, any of us can add to it, yet none of us does anything that would alter this language or estrange it from itself. It must be understood quite literally: when I sing a melody, my neighbour takes it up, sings it a little differently, yet knows exactly which essential element cannot change. He may embellish it a little, alter a note or two, use passing notes or substitute notes, yet the melody stays essentially the same.

Consequently there are countless versions of a single folk song—depending on which village we visit, or which villages our collectors visited in their day. For this reason the same melody, or the same words, has been recorded in the most varied forms of written folk song—yet their essential kinship is easy to grasp. This is precisely what we call a communal language! When we understand one another so well that, although everyone speaks the language in their own individual way, they still know exactly what lies outside it and does not fit within it. The value of all this is easy to grasp when we consider that, in the twentieth century, expressions foreign to the language in question have crept into the spoken languages—not just Hungarian, but almost every European tongue.

Instead of taking the trouble to find a native equivalent, we adopt some foreign (mostly Americanised) expression, and so elements enter our language that simply do not belong there. This, sadly, leads to the disintegration and corruption of the language. ¹ ‘Folk music is made up of melodies sung by many people over a long time.’ (Béla Bartók) Folk music is so important because it shows us that paradisiacal state of language as communal communication—when a community is able to use language in its purity, in its immeasurable richness, yet in complete security, to preserve its own identity. We Hungarians are very fortunate that, at the start of the twentieth century, Bartók and Kodály—and many others—found folk music still in its living reality, part of which is demonstrably a thousand years old, and whose survival, despite the pressures of civilisation, proves the value of this culture.

If we set out today to collect folk songs, it would be too late. Just as it would be futile to set off for Germany, France or Scandinavia in search of thousand-year-old folklore—it no longer exists. They have a new folklore, which shows how much of what many people feel is their own has become folklore. For example, if you ask Germans to sing the folk song ‘Am Brunnen vor dem Tore’,2 most will start singing it at once. Yet they may not realise that this song was written by Schubert—so it is not a folk song, but a composition by Schubert that has now become part of the folklore. Our folk songs are the products a community has accumulated over a long stretch of time.

Thanks above all to Kodály and Bartók, our Hungarian folk music was successfully recorded in its original form at the start of the twentieth century, opening up a previously unknown world to these two composers, and to many others besides. Hungarian folk music also comes in several forms. There is an older layer, the folk songs in the old style, and there is a newer layer, the folk songs in the new style, in which we can already detect the influence of Western-style music. At the same time, the ancient layer of Hungarian folk music has preserved, alongside its tight-rhythmed dance songs, the parlando and rubato3 ² ‘Am Brunnen vor dem Tore’: a German art song, part of the song cycle Winterreise (Winter Journey), to poems by Wilhelm Müller. Schubert set the whole cycle. Schubert’s song was arranged by Friedrich Silcher for a cappella male choir and became a folk song.

³ Parlando, rubato: markings for the authentic performance of folk music, valuable for posterity. Parlando (speech-like) denotes a rhythm fitted to the spoken text, a text-led manner of performance. Rubato (‘stolen’) denotes a free, unstructured pulse. character, which here denotes a mostly slow style of performance, sung in a free, text-like, ornamented manner, but certainly hard to set to a regular rhythm. The peacock melody4 is an old-style folk song and belongs to our repertoire of songs to be sung freely, in a rubato manner. Our old-style folk songs used the pentatonic scale. Pentatonic means having five notes; the scale consists of five different notes. Many of my generation can still sing solfège, so I’ll write it out in solfège too: these are the notes do, re, mi, so and la.

It used to be customary to teach this at school by leaving out fa and ti—at least that’s how it was taught in my day, though I suspect that’s no longer the case. This approach is wrong, because a system can never be understood by defining the elements missing from it. There is no doubt that the diatonic scale—the seven-note scale (do, re, mi, fa, so, la, ti, do)—is a far more widespread musical system than the pentatonic, which has survived as a remnant of more ancient cultures; the latter can indeed be derived fairly simply from the absence of two otherwise important notes in the diatonic scale, but in doing so the very essence of the tonal system stays hidden. A small child first begins to hum in a kind of two-note pattern, and accordingly even our simplest children’s songs use these two notes, for example the song beginning ‘Zsip-zsup’.

After a short while a third note is added (for example, ‘Bújj, bújj, zöld ág’—‘Creep, creep, green branch’). Just as these two or three notes may make up the whole of a young child’s melodic repertoire at this stage, so the five notes mentioned above (do, re, mi, so, la) represented completeness for our ancient community. This does not mean pentatonic songs strictly use only these five notes; notes foreign to the system may also appear in them, as passing or transitional notes. But the very essence of a system lies in its power to distinguish clearly between the elements that constitute it and those merely present within it that do not define it. So in pentatonic songs we also hear notes from the seven-note scale, and in the diatonic scale we hear notes from the twelve-note scale, that is, from dodecaphony.

Fortunately, even in the twentieth century European music did not venture beyond dividing the octave into twelve parts.

⁴ The peacock melody: ‘Felszállott a páva’ (‘The Peacock Has Taken Flight’). The peacock melody is thus a pentatonic folk song, of a rubato character, and, above all, a symbolic folk song of our nation and our history. This is embodied in Ady’s famous poem,5 for which Kodály wrote choral settings in both male- and mixed-voice versions, and also in the fact that Kodály chose precisely this melody as the theme for a set of orchestral variations meant for concert halls around the world. Why is this melody symbolic, and what is it actually about? According to the words,6 it is about nothing less than the Hungarian nation’s longing for freedom, our eternal bondage and oppression. Let us admit it: Hungarians know how to mourn most beautifully—this folk song shows that too.

During our earlier performance, none of you thought to sing any notes other than the central, fundamental ones of this melody. Yet whoever transcribed it7 back then certainly did not hear it that way. I’d like to ask Dániel Szabó—who, incidentally, plays the cimbalom—to sing this song the way it must have sounded when it was first recorded!