Two opera composers

Extract

There is no strong opera tradition in Hungary. The founder of our national opera literature, Liszt's contemporary Ferenc Erkel, clung chiefly to the ‘verbunkos’ style as a characteristic Hungarian element in his attempts to form a national operatic style. He succeeded in fusing this with the style of his Italian models, and this was his great merit as a composer. But he left unsolved the crucial problem: the creation of a melodic style arising out of the characteristic accentuation of Hungarian speech, out of the spirit of the language. From this point of view Bartók was the epoch-making master. Bluebeard's Castle was the historic event in the rise of new Hungarian opera. As Kodály wrote after the première: “Bartók has taken the road to liberating the language, transforming its natural inflexions into music, thereby greatly furthering the emergence of a Hungarian recitative style. This is the first Hungarian operatic work in which the singing is consistent from first to last, free from all jarring prosody”. But Bartók's opera had no successors. The two stage works of Kodály, whose feeling for drama and theatre was not strong, were more in the nature of experiments, and were so intended by their composer. The following generation could hardly have made any progress in the direction indicated by them—though there was much that later opera composers could learn from his other vocal music, the songs and the choral works.