Háry János

Like his close friend and fellow ethnomusicologist Béla Bartók, Kodály was instinctively drawn during his formative years to Hungary’s indigenous folk music. In 1905 he collected around 150 folk tunes on phonographic cylinders, a vast and untapped musical repository. Keen to find a way of combining this material with sophisticated Western techniques, in 1907 Kodály headed for Paris, where he immersed himself in Debussy’s brave new world of tonal, temporal and textural suspension. Over the following 20 years, Kodály refined his creative vision in a remarkable series of instrumental and vocal works. In 1926 he hit the jackpot with his light-hearted “play with music”, Háry János, which focuses on an old war veteran regaling listeners with inflated tales of his heroism, including his single-handed defeat of Napoleon’s armies. “What he tells us may never have happened,” Kodály explained, “but he has experienced it in spirit, so it seems more real than reality itself.” Although the original score proved only moderately successful, Kodály created a suite from the finest numbers, whose subsequent popularity guaranteed him creative immortality.