Zur Sammlung der Soldatenlieder von Bartók und Kodály, erstellt 1918 im Auftrag des k. u. k. Kriegsministeriums

Abstract

In the last years of World War I, Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály compiled a folksong selection One Hundred Hungarian Soldiers’ Songs from their own collections, requested by the Centre for Music History of the Monarchy’s War Ministry in Vienna. The collapse after the war interrupted the publication already in press. Parts of the song collection Kodály asked back in 1921 were returned in 1940 through diplomatic intervention. Later the manuscript was lost, but some parts have been found in the Kodály estate recently. However, the tunes are still latent; not even Kodály knew in his last years where they were. The present paper discusses the circumstances of the volume’s genesis and fate, and as a new development, the process of reconstructing the music section on the basis of the segments of the manuscript found in the estate (introduction and list of sources), the folksong collections of the Institute for Musicology of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (Bartók-and Kodály-Systems) and the earlier researchers of the author concerning Kodály’s collection. The collection is an important document of Hungarian folk music history and the history of research. It is also the only collection of the series initiated by the Centre for Music History that was ready for the press as the next volume after Bernhard Paumgartner’s 100 deutsche Soldatenlieder published in 1918.