János Vajda: Saint Peter and the Mercenaries

In this chapter we present a brilliantly witty, joyful piece: János Vajda’s Saint Peter and the Mercenaries — which I have called an oratorical scherzo1 — a truly sensational work of a unique genre. It is based on a poem by Hans Sachs2 the cobbler,3 translated into Hungarian and expanded by Lajos Mann.4 ¹ Scherzo: from the Italian word for ‘joke’. After Beethoven it became the third movement of symphonic works, replacing the minuet, and dramaturgically it serves as a kind of respite within the symphony. Until now no oratorio had been called a scherzo. Dukas was the first to designate a work — The Sorcerer’s Apprentice — a symphonic scherzo. ² Hans Sachs (1494–1576): an early-modern German master singer and playwright. ³ In the fifteenth century it was by no means uncommon for master craftsmen to write poems and songs.

This was the heyday of master-singer culture, when craftsmen founded master-singer guilds in which songwriting was governed by strict rules, the tabulatura. ⁴ Lajos Mann (1931–2020): writer and literary translator. He is credited with translating Hans Sachs’s volume of thirty-three verse carnival comedies, as well as the comedy(!) Bánk bán, about King Andrew of Hungary and his loyal governor. To our delight, the author was also present at our performance — which always makes the explaining harder. You will know that anecdote about János Arany: a poem of his was published, and the very next day a review of it appeared. The learned critic dissected the work and explained to the audience — and mostly to himself — what the poem was about and what the author had in mind when he wrote it. Then, when Arany read the review of himself and his poem, his reaction was: “the devil take it”!

Let us hope that today’s author will not think the same of everything I am about to say about his play. The text, then, comes originally from Hans Sachs, who, as it happens, also became the protagonist of Wagner’s famous opera Die Meistersinger von

Nürnberg.

Hans Sachs was a practitioner of the German master song,5 a distinctive genre that flourished in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. What is interesting about it is that, by today’s standards, its practitioners were amateurs; most worked as craftsmen organised into guilds. The rigidity of the guild’s rules is one of the driving forces behind the plot of Wagner’s opera. Hans Sachs fought, within this bureaucratic musical genre, for true poetic freedom and for openness to the new. ⁵ Mesterdal: a ‘bourgeois’ form of aristocratic poetry rooted in troubadour lyric, which began to flourish in the fifteenth century. Sachs’s best-known works are the so-called Schwanks. The Schwank6 is a verse form that was in fashion during the Renaissance; though its content often carries a serious moral, it is in fact an entertaining, humorous genre, most often associated with carnival season.

In Germany the tradition is still kept up enthusiastically today — even without the guilds — in merry-making that bears no resemblance to Hans Sachs’s art, but is rather got up in a boozy atmosphere. ⁶ Schwank: from the Middle High German schwanc (svank), meaning an amusing idea. The subject matter itself had a certain piquancy even in its own day. Hans Sachs’s story is about dead mercenaries ascending to heaven and, as is customary on such occasions, knocking to be let in at the gates of paradise. They keep begging until the good-natured Saint Peter persuades the Lord to let them in — even though, in the Lord’s eyes, they are not exactly fit for heaven. At any rate the Lord warns Saint Peter: ‘You’ll see, this will cause trouble!’ And so it did.

No sooner are the mercenaries let in than they really do start behaving as one might expect of mercenaries: they play cards, roll dice, cause a ruckus and get into fights. Saint Peter, who thinks the mercenaries owe him a debt of gratitude, tries to call them to order — only for them to give him a thrashing too. Bitter at being treated so, he turns to the Lord, who tells him to his face that, indeed, he really shouldn’t have let them in. But what can be done, now they are here? Of course the Lord has a solution for this as well: ‘Send the angels out beyond the gate to sound the alarm, and you will see the mercenaries rush back out through the gates of heaven within minutes, almost without a second thought.’ And so it happens, and Saint Peter can at last happily lock the gates of heaven, never to let a mercenary in again.

Hans Sachs conveys the moral of this little tale — that you can’t make bacon out of a dog — in a most charming and playful way. And Lajos Mann’s additions make the text fit to be turned into a dramatic work; he supplements it chiefly with dialogues and with passages that give the scenes their spice, conjuring up images that go on to become the composer’s excellent companions. Generally speaking, when you listen to contemporary music you automatically — and often with some trepidation — ask yourselves how far the piece is connected to older music. This is a question that has only recently begun to arise among listeners of new works. Until the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, composers and listeners alike regarded every new work as a continuation of what they had learnt from their fathers, their masters and their predecessors.

So, while listening to a new work, they could attend without any fear or uncertainty to how it differed from, and what was new in it compared with, what they had heard before. In the nineteenth century a practice emerged whereby not only new music was performed but music of earlier periods alongside it. A symbolic moment of this came when Mendelssohn premiered Bach’s St Matthew Passion. This was, of course, no genuine rediscovery, since every generation of musicians since Bach had known the work; but once Bach’s creative era had passed there was no longer any reason to perform it in public. I should add that Mendelssohn’s aim was not to revive old music as such, for the version performed on that occasion was one he had significantly reworked to suit the musical thinking of his time.

Yet the event — like every symbolic milestone — was not only a catalyst but also an embodiment of the emerging public taste. From this point on, the public could regularly meet the works of composers from bygone eras, and, as we know, the balance has by now shifted decisively towards early music. In the twentieth century, among the much-discussed compositional paths, Stravinsky realised the remarkably obvious idea of taking everything that had been part of the earlier musical world and absorbing it into his own language, in a distinctive, individual style. Stravinsky’s way is not really a school but rather the exemplary courage of an exceptional personality: how to fold every kind of compositional technique, musical source and musical form into a single language so that it stays unified and, at the same time, becomes easier to understand.

For anyone who knows music history, listening to Stravinsky is in effect a constant sense of déjà vu. We keep recognising melodies and harmonies, and the rhythm of the works is utterly captivating. It is just that, at the very moment of recognition, Stravinsky plays a trick on us: the melody does not continue as we expect, he always throws a spanner into the harmonies, sometimes sounding several at once. And everything he does with the rhythm, with the regularity of the pulse, is — to use the modern phrase — ‘a complete trick’. Put simply, we may feel like listeners of a bygone age: everything we hear is familiar, yet the wholly individual treatment keeps us in a state of uncertainty.

I would venture to say that this is in fact the direction which — after many twists and turns — came to dominate by the end of the twentieth century, with the addition that the younger generation now dares to say, quite consciously, that they want to write music which communicates with the audience at once, and which the audience is likely to recognise more readily. Nowadays much of what we expect from melody is reflected in the music. Compared with Stravinsky, composers are increasingly less likely to play tricks on our expectations of harmony, rhythm and rhythmic balance. Out of all this they create a truly individual musical language, with an individual tone, individual logic, individual form and individual ideas. In this there are composers who are markedly original and those who are less so.

János Vajda undoubtedly belongs to the former group — and his musical language is, moreover, accessible and enjoyable. Before we look more closely at this language, however, we must clarify the concept of the cliché. These days the cliché carries a negative connotation in our thinking. By it we generally mean tired ideas already overused by many. Yet in art a cliché conveys a sense of recognition, a meaning that is essentially the same for everyone. Listening to a Mozart opera, we can find within it an indescribable number of clichés that already held clear references and meaning for the audience of that era. If we went back to the world of eighteenth-century Italian opera, I could spend hours explaining the schematic, clichéd content of the individual characters and scenes. These served to make sure the audience could safely grasp what the composer meant to express.

In that sense, clichés are elements present in the language and knowledge of the audience of the day, to which we refer regularly — whether implicitly or explicitly. In that sense, clichés are part of our collective memory. A twentieth-century composer has little choice but to fold the clichés of different eras and cultures into his or her language in some way. The fact is that when audiences of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries go to a concert, switch on the radio or put on a record, they do so with a vast array of musical styles and genres already under their belt. When I speak of Vajda’s work, then, I must necessarily build on the store of experience you already possess. So when I refer to clichés I am appealing to your memory of them. Let us look at a few examples — fortunately today’s piece is full of them.

They are, in the main, musical motifs that we recognise at once and whose meaning we understand. Let us see how the work begins: with a magnificent fanfare — only natural, given that we are talking about mercenary soldiers. A trumpet fanfare — another cliché — calls the soldiers to order; this conjures a clear image in everyone’s mind. Of course the music we hear is a far cry from a real trumpet call; if we didn’t know what it was, we might even mistake it for an Olympic or ceremonial fanfare.