Háry János

Introduction

“What grows in the Hungarian heart?” they sing on the stage of Háry János, where we can also learn almost everything there is to know about what grows in the Hungarian imagination. Well, sorrow, love, pure emotions and powerful passions, and, last but by no means least, life’s untruths, elevated to poetry and capable of creating an identity. For, as the most authoritative person on the subject, Kodály himself, described the title character of his work: “He does not lie: he creates a fairy tale; he is a poet. What he recounts never happened, but he experienced it, and is therefore truer than reality.” Ideally, this is how we should regard Háry and Háry János, although this also requires the collaboration of performers and audiences alike, in every generation. This work demands a collective commitment from us, or, if you will, an act of faith. Once that faith is established, however, the occasionally embarrassing text of the fairy-tale play becomes incidental, as do Baron Ebelastin’s doggerel rhymes and even the Theatre Overture, which Kodály composed retrospectively and which, regrettably, gives the comic opera very little initial momentum. In other words, through the composer and his material, folk songs and folk-music motifs, alongside the verbunkos dance music associated with Bihari, the performance can truly overcome the force of gravity and rise towards poetry, towards the realm of an imagined Hungarian identity and, if you like, of ideals.

With a little goodwill, all this may help explain why it is so painfully easy to come to grief over Háry János, whether as well-intentioned stage directors or as ticket-holders in the auditorium. In The Spinning Room, the barely concealed absence of a conventional plot presents a particular difficulty and challenge; here, by contrast, the problem lies precisely in the existence of an adventurous plot and its overwhelming childishness. Naivety is notoriously difficult to bring to life on stage, and perhaps even more rarely does it come across as genuinely innocent and sincere. For this reason alone, it is far more worthwhile to follow Kodály than Béla Paulini and Zsolt Harsányi. What is more, the musical numbers in Háry János offer not only the much-desired element of authenticity and authenticity itself  but also a sensitive portrait of the national self-image and an unillusioned view of how ordinary people perceive history.

What is this Hungarian identity like? Sober, experienced in the ways of life, accustomed to enduring hardship and prepared to make sacrifices. It avoids speculative reasoning and is equally sincere and restrained in joy and sorrow. Its music, too, strives for clarity of expression, for, as Kodály summed it up: “Like its language, Hungarian music is terse and lapidary. A succession of masterpieces of limited scope but great weight. Melodies of just a few notes seem to have stood, carved in stone, through the storms of centuries.” The Hungarian people have little to expect or hope for from history. In the great military campaigns, they are usually cast in the role of cannon fodder, while Napoleon and Emperor Francis can acquire human features and a recognisable face only through the medium of the fairy tale. Here, then, storytelling is an elemental means of orientation: an indispensable, age-old tool for survival, for interpreting life including high politics and history and magically rendering it more bearable. Perhaps this is difficult to accept and understand only if we insist on taking the hussar-recruiting song Toborzó at face value: “How well the good cavalry soldier fares…” If there is one work from which we must understand what is meant by a “life of bliss”, beyond which “nothing could be better”, it is surely Háry János.

Ferenc László

From Garay to Kodály

Many people know that the story of Háry János originates in János Garay’s (1812–1853) poem The Veteran. Fewer are likely to be familiar with the poem itself, and Garay’s other works are scarcely known at all. Yet during the Reform Era of the 1830s and 1840s, he was one of Hungary’s best-known authors, and not entirely without good reason. His early poems, particularly his light, lyrical love songs (such as The Sting and The Thieves), bring Sándor Petőfi to mind, while his historical ballads (Kont, Erzsébet Báthory, The Vovivode of Nagyida, and Toldy’s Oath) recall János Arany. Chronologically, however, the relationship ran in the opposite direction: Petőfi and Arany grew up reading Garay, along with Czuczor, Bajza and others, before developing their own styles in contrast to his, at times undeniably formulaic, declamatory Romanticism. In the case of The Gypsies of Nagyida, for example, Arany’s approach is the very opposite of Garay’s. At the same time, it is no exaggeration to regard Kont’s Page as a precursor to one of Hungary’s finest ballads, The Two Pages of Szondi. Both commemorate a servant mourning his master who chooses death rather than accept the enemy’s mercy. Garay was primarily a journalist, secondarily an aspiring playwright with little success, and only in third place did he consider himself a poet. By his own account, and judging from some of his poems, his influences included Vörösmarty and Károly Kisfaludy, while his shorter verses also reveal the influence of Csokonai.

The Veteran (1843) stands apart from the rest of his work. It is a genuine masterpiece, written with a light touch and abundant humour. Not only did it provide the source for Kodály’s Háry János, but some of its elements also reappear in Petőfi’s John the Valiant, for instance, the towering Styrian mountains that almost reach the Sun, and the rejection of a proposed marriage to the king’s daughter. Much has been written about whether Háry János was a real person, but from the perspective of the story’s essential meaning, this is entirely irrelevant. Garay portrays a recognisable human type: the boastful storyteller, rendered with the razor-sharp accuracy of caricature, yet also with great affection and understanding.

Béla Paulini and Zsolt Harsányi originally intended to adapt The Veteran as a popular folk play for the National Theatre, with incidental music by Rezső Lavotta. Béla Paulini (1881–1945), a cabaret writer and well-regarded journalist, developed the plot and the sequence of scenes. Zsolt Harsányi (1887–1943), who also translated Mozart’s Le nozze die Figaro and Don Giovanni into Hungarian, was primarily responsible for the lyrics. In the version eventually created by Kodály, there was less need for his contribution in this respect, so the popular writer of light fiction and tabloid journalism of the period instead versified the dialogue. In his 1926 review for Pesti Napló, Aladár Tóth criticised the pair for adhering rigidly to the conventions of the popular folk play: “The veteran, sent on his way by Garay, was indeed extraordinarily fortunate to find, in the twentieth century, a ‘contemporary adapter’ of such distinction: Zsolt Harsányi, an excellent man of the theatre, and Béla Paulini, an original humorist. […] The writers of the new comic opera may have interpreted the idea of a ‘contemporary guise’ rather too literally: they relied on theatrical devices that had already proved their worth rather too well. […] In their methods, both in constructing individual scenes and presenting the characters on stage, and in the general style of the dialogue, they drew from a variety of sources: the popular folk play, Hungarian Romantic operetta, the folkloric fairy-tale play (John the Valiant) and the world of Hofmannsthal-like ‘cultivated comedies’.”

The project subsequently evolved from a production for the National Theatre into an a work for the Opera House, and Lavotta’s incidental music gave way to Zoltán Kodály’s (1882–1967) Háry János. Kodály had long been planning stage works, first with Béla Balázs, who is said to have originally suggested the idea of Bluebeard’s Castle to him before turning to Bartók after Kodály declined, and later with Zsigmond Móricz. Neither collaboration came to fruition.

Háry János, meanwhile, proved more difficult to complete than anticipated, forcing the postponement of its premiere from the 1925/26 season. Several passages of The Adventures of Háry János from Nagyabony to the Burg Castle, performed for the first time on 16 October 1926, were completed at the last minute. These included the Intermezzo, which Kodály had not originally intended to include and composed only after considerable dramaturgical pleading. Other planned sections were never written at all. Although the fourth scene was soon dropped, the work gradually expanded over time, sometimes in accordance with Kodály’s intentions and sometimes in response to local or individual demands. The opening of the work, the unaccompanied singing of the folk song beginning Sej, Nagyabonyban, belongs entirely to theatrical folklore and oral tradition: there is no documentary evidence that the piece was originally intended to begin this way.

More intriguingly, Kodály never subsequently revised the libretto, not even in the 1950s, when he could presumably have secured sufficient support to do so. We are therefore compelled to conclude that the libretto not only met with Kodály’s approval, but was precisely what he needed. It was probably the combination of music and text that brought Háry János its success, even though contemporaries generally singled out the music for praise. Aladár Tóth, quoted above, wrote: “What makes Háry János truly timeless is, of course, Zoltán Kodály’s music. Had Kodály composed the libretto as an opera, he would surely have concentrated his score on the central idea of the text: Háry, the tragic figure in his own dreams. But the text was written as a comic opera, and composing the inserted musical numbers and intermezzo-like passages brought an entirely different set of challenges to the fore. Their diversity would probably have perplexed any musician, except Zoltán Kodály. With almost astonishing intuition, this dazzlingly rich music masters the most varied situations. And, above all, amid all this diversity, it presents us with a single, immense poetic idea.”

Before the premiere in 1926, Kodály spoke about his work as follows: “As soon as Háry speaks, ‘the fairy tale begins’. This is the key to the Háry of the piece, who retains the essence of Garay’s immortal veteran but is more than that. He is much more than a colourful character, a Hungarian miles glorious: he is the living embodiment of the Hungarian imagination that creates fairy tales. He does not lie: he creates a fairy tale; he is a poet. What he recounts never happened, but he experienced it, and is therefore truer than reality.

“The music, too, had to be something of this kind, though I do not know how successfully I achieved it. But I do know that the characters’ songs are good. Every one of them comes from the folk tradition, and with a journey of an hour or two, they can still be heard in the villages today. They are better suited than any individual lyric to lend the characters’ words the force of ‘lyrical authenticity’. They are pearls; the setting is mine alone. I have tried to make it worthy of them.”

Háry János achieved enormous success, not only in Hungary but also, for example, in Cologne and Aachen. An orchestral suite was soon created from the work. Its unofficial premiere took place in Barcelona on 27 March 1927, with Pablo Casals’s orchestra, while the official premiere was conducted by Willem Mengelberg in New York on 15 December 1927. During the 1930s, Hermann Scherchen toured with the suite, a rare example of a foreign orchestra taking a contemporary Hungarian work around the world. Jenő Ormándy made the first recording, and the work became a favourite in the repertoire not only of Hungarian conductors living abroad, such as Reiner, Fricsay, and Doráti, but also of Arturo Toscanini. To this day, the suite remains one of Kodály’s best-known works internationally and continues to be performed regularly. (Based on János Breuer: Kodály-kalauz, Budapest, 1982)

Gábor Mesterházi

Our timeless desires – Thoughts from director Attila Béres

Directing a production at the Hungarian State Opera has long been on my bucket list. I am delighted to have this opportunity, and I hope that we will tell this rather strange, Dadaist and surreal story successfully on the Opera House stage. At times painfully bloody, at others extraordinarily cheeky, and in places remarkably topical, I believe Kodály would be very proud that we intend to tell the whole of Háry János. And there is a reason for that.

The starting point for my interpretation was the opening moment of Háry János: people are talking in some run-down tavern to a very strange man who tells very strange stories. There is something timeless about this situation. These people are listening to stories, and perhaps they are listening to themselves. We decided that our story would begin at a railway station. A station is a place that is not permanent. People do not go there in order to stay; they go there to leave, or to arrive and then depart. It is therefore a space in constant motion, with one constant presence within it: Háry János, who remains there, telling his stories to the people around him.

But why, for example, do we need the entire overture? I wanted to show that Háry János, as a work, belongs to our very genes; it is part of our collective consciousness. Just as Hamlet belongs to the English and Dostoevsky to the Russians, Kodály’s work is part of our shared consciousness. I have tried to represent this by placing children at the station who play Háry János during the overture. For them, this is entirely natural. You do not need to know the fairy tale to know how to play it. That is why I needed so much of the music, including the passage from the overture that is usually omitted and which refers specifically to the adventures. We tell all four adventures, and it is important to tell every one of them in full because all four are about the same thing that makes Háry’s presence at the station constant: the ordinary man can, at least in his imagination, certainly defeat the mighty. He defeats the Viennese court and Napoleon, then rejects the empire and the hand of the emperor’s daughter.

The ordinary man is capable of anything, at least in his subconscious. What is interesting is that the character known as Háry János recounts, we might say, lies about his life from beginning to end, but he does not really lie: he tells it through poetic exaggeration. There is one thing about which he does not lie, one thing he recounts with unvarnished honesty: his love.

This is one of the greatest discoveries I have made since my production in Szeged. If you listen carefully to the music, you will find that the most painful passages are the duets, and the most painful of all are Örzse’s songs. Háry neither exaggerates nor diminishes Örzse herself or his love for her; instead, he tells us of the pain it brings him. I love this story. In one sense, it is remarkably topical; in another, it is timeless. Our desires are timeless, but whether they are true or not…