Minuet for String Quartet (1897): Kodaly's First Surviving Composition Rediscovered

Abstract

Zoltan Kodaly's first published work, the chorus Este (Evening), was written in 1904, the year in which the composer graduated from Hans Koessler's class at the Budapest Academy of Music.' It was written in a highly personal idiom that already contained many of the stylistic features characteristic of the mature Kodaly; in it the twenty-two-year-old composer had definitely moved far beyond the student stage. It is wellknown that Este was preceded by other compositions; however, our knowledge of Kodaily's earlier music is extremely scarce. We know that an overture was performed by the orchestra of Kodaly's high school in the North Hungarian town of Nagyszombat (now Trnava, Czechoslovakia) in 1898.2 The next year, Kodaily and two colleagues played his string trio in a school concert. In addition to these early compositions, the various Kodaly work lists3 contain several titles dating from the years before 1904, but very few of these works have been treated in the literature;4 many are apparently lost, and only a few have been published to date.5 In his conversations with Lutz Besch in 1964, Kodaly commented on the two pieces performed in Nagyszombat, describing their style as hav-