Religious Repertoire Research Articles

Kodály's Choral Music

It is nearly twenty years since the performance of ‘Psalmus Hungaricus’ in Gloucester Cathedral awakened English singers and their audiences to the existence of Zoltán Kodály and induced a considerable number besides I.S.C.M. adherents to place his name on their musical map of Europe. It was not a matter of general sympathy for the Hungarian loss of three million Magyars under the treaty of Trianon, or even of polite interest in the Jubilee celebrations of the union of Buda and Pesth which had occasioned the production of the work in 1923. In forming musical inclinations the English do not think much of revisionist movements, least of all in the Shires. All the same, it was fitting that singers whose oratorio tradition had been closely bound up with the forms of Italian and German opera and the literary devotion of the English School should turn for a change to a fresh and intensely national sphere of influence by way of freshening their religious repertoire.