Zoltán Kodály: Psalmus Hungaricus

My lecture on Kodály’s Psalmus Hungaricus was the last in a series I dedicated to my teachers. With this concert I pay tribute to Imre Földes.1 He is perhaps the one most ‘responsible’ for my obsessive efforts to introduce my audience to music, to help them understand it and to make them love it. It was from him that I learnt the most important precept of a practising performer: that one must understand every note and every harmony of a work in order to become a knowledgeable interpreter of the composer’s intent. From him, too, I learnt the responsibility—and the method—of making music intellectually and emotionally accessible to laypeople and music lovers. I chose the Psalmus Hungaricus for two reasons. First, because we sang it so often with the choir, and every performance was a celebration for us.

Second—I looked it up—Professor Földes gave an unforgettable lecture on the piece at the Academy of Music exactly thirty years ago. I remember that lecture; my understanding of the work, and everything I believe and think about it, I learnt there, then, at that lecture at the Academy of Music. This, of course, will soon become clear—certainly to Professor Földes. From the professor—among other things—we learnt a very important lesson, one that has echoed stubbornly in my ears ever since, in almost every moment of my life: namely, that we, as musicians, must understand every note—why it is what it is, and why it is not something else. The search for the answers of the moment has made it clear to me that the reception of music can be grasped in terms of the relationship between our expectations and their fulfilment.

For the listener, the enjoyment of music shows itself above all in the fulfilment of expectations, which we might simply call recognition. To encourage you, I’ll let you in on a secret: the joy of listening to music includes the unusual and the unexpected—though, of course, only if our ultimate feeling is, after all, the fulfilment of our expectations, the experience of recognition. Believe me, you too love best, and find most exciting, those works in which the composer often deceives you in relation to your expectations. We musicians, too, learn music in such a way that we first grasp the rules through lesser masters and lesser works, and then, when we meet the great masters, we try to learn the magic from them: to recognise what we expected, and why we received something else instead.

If we are lucky, we can even put the answer into words for ourselves, but more often—and I’m sure you’ve often felt this way too—we sense something suspicious, something strange, in our gut. After all, this is one of the most essential elements of listening to music. The Psalmus Hungaricus we are about to present is unique in this respect. ¹ Imre Földes (Budapest, 8 March 1934), music historian and musicologist. Let us sing the Psalmus melody, which we regard as a kind of perfection set in stone.