Nausikaa, Sappho, and Other Women in Love : Zoltán Kodály's Reception of Greek Antiquity (1906-1932)

Dalos, Anna (2013) Nausikaa, Sappho, and Other Women in Love : Zoltán Kodály's Reception of Greek Antiquity (1906-1932). In: Revisiting the Past, Recasting the Present. The Reception of Greeek Antiquity in Music 19th Century to the Present. Hellenic Music Centre, Athens, pp. 265-273. ISBN 978-618-80006-1-2

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Abstract

Zoltán Kodály showed a great interest in Greek antiquity in his whole life. He not only studied the language thoroughly and read up on the different editions of Homer’s Iliad and Odysseus, but he had planned an opera about the latter figure since 1906. Only one song survived from this opera plan, Nausikaa, written in 1907 to a poem by Kodály’s former secret lover, Aranka Bálint. It was published only in 1925, at a time, when Kodály, stimulated by the Hungarian writer, Zsigmond Móricz, and his new drama, The Wanderings of Odysseus (1924), turned himself towards the Odysseus theme again. Though he abandoned the new plan of the opera soon, his desire to wrote music for the stage proved to be lasting. He finished his Singspiel János Háry in 1929, and his lyrical play, The Spinning Room in 1932. Even contemporary critics recognized the similarity between the figures of the adventurer Háry and Odysseus, and they refered to Kodály’s possible identification with the two heros. A recent study investigated the role of the Young Man in The Spinning Room from the same point of view. My paper however, examining Kodály’s songs from his first mature period (1906–1923), first of all Nausikaa and Sappho’s Love Song (1915), as well as the series of Hungarian Folk Music (1924–1932), and the two plays for stage from the second period (1923–1945), scrutinizes the role of the women in love in Kodály’s oeuvre. Kodály’s songs introduce women who are lovelorn and for this reason feel defencelessnes. These woman portraits are connected to one characteristic musical feature, the use of pentatony. Pentatony symbolizes here for Kodály not ’Hungarianess’, as usual, but the archaism of the ancient music and culture on the one hand, and women’s longing on the other.

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