Kodály’s influence
A first glance at his oeuvre reveals that the young composer was initially attracted to vocal compositions. During the decade from the mid-1930s onwards, he wrote choral works and songs, genres in which he did not compose again in later years (with one exception) [1]. He was predominantly concerned with arrangements of folk songs and settings of folk texts, and to a lesser extent with poems by Hungarian poets. Pongrácz’s first work in print, Csallóközben, Patason (In Csallóköz, in Patas), for children’s choir, is the most fully in keeping with Kodály’s ars poetica: the composer arranged folk songs for children from his own collection.
One of the major undertakings of 1935 was the nine choral works composed for the 200th anniversary of the death of Prince Ferenc Rákóczi II. The choruses, published in Őszi harmat után (After the Autumn Dew) [2], share some striking technical features, despite their different characterisations of the sound: the use of secondary fricatives, the frequent use of fourths, the alternation of polyphonic sections with a bound phrasing and freer homophonic sections, and the abundant use of alternating beats. The latter can be traced in the Slovak Folk Dances for piano, the musical material of which is partly based on the composer’s own collection of folk songs.
It was during this period that he composed his first stage work, the one-act, three-scene dance play Ördög ajándéka (The Devil’s Gift), the text of which was also written by the composer on the basis of a folk tale. The dance play was also made into a five-movement suite, which was performed in 1939 under the composer’s baton at a concert given by the Budapest City Council’s Committee for Popular Culture, which also gave Zoltán Pongrácz, who had won the Ferenc József Prize that year, the opportunity to perform alongside three other young composers [3]. The work was well received by the critics of the time, with its deep lyricism, grotesque humour, occasional dramatic tension, plastic forms and brilliant orchestration [4].
In 1938, the staging of the Magyar csupajáték (Hungarian Game) was a major artistic undertaking. This series of “folk plays” was directed by Béla Paulini and choreographed by Aurél Milloss, with Bella Bordy and Aurél Milloss dancing the leading roles, among others. Each of the nine scenes was set to music by a different composer, including Ferenc Farkas, Ottó Vincze, Sándor Veress, György Ránki and Zoltán Pongrácz, the latter of whom composed the music for the Vízdal (Water Song) scene for the premiere at the Művész Színház (Artist Theatre) on 21 May 1938. The performance was a huge success not only in Budapest, but also in London a year later, in April-May 1939, where the company conquered the English audience night after night from the stage of the Adelphi Theatre. Pongrácz even scored the overture that opened the whole work.[5]
One of the most frequently performed vocal compositions of the period is the three chamber orchestra accompaniment songs – Őrizem a szemed (Guarding Your Eyes), Kék dal (Blue Song), Mennyei színjáték (Heavenly Play) written to poems by Ady, József Borsi Darázs, and Babits, respectively. Although they can be sung separately, these three form a unity: their common leitmotif is the singing of the idea of passing.
The cyclical nature of the whole, made up of several smaller pieces, is also typical of orchestral compositions of the period. Pongrácz’s attempt to synthesise national and classical musical values is evident. The themes of movements 1 and 4 of Magyar eklogák (Hungarian Eclogues) are taken from the composer’s own collection of folk songs. The Hajdú dance of movement 2 is based on the 1583 book of organ tablatures by Jacobo Paix, and this theme is repeated at the end of the piece after the grotesque humour of the short 5th movement, in a romantic manner. Similar ambitions can also be observed in the Verbunk Suite, which was the composer’s greatest success of the period: in the 1935 Hungarian Radio competition for Verbunk music, he won first prize out of 57 entries.
The main orchestral work of the turn of the 1930s and 1940s is undoubtedly Szimfónia (Symphony), originally conceived as a string quartet. The original work was premiered by Ferenc Albert’s quartet in Budapest at Zoltán Pongrácz’s first recital of the work on 27 April 1939. Although the critics clearly praised the new chamber work – describing it as “the most outstanding number of the evening” – they also pointed out the clearly discernible Bartók, Kodály and even Stravinsky influences.[6] After the concert, at the suggestion of Zoltán Gárdonyi (modelled on Kodály’s String Quartet No. 1), Pongrácz rewrote the work for string orchestra and added a double bass solo. After hearing the latter version, the final form of the work for symphony orchestra was prepared at the suggestion of János Ferencsik.
The years of transition
The three-movement composition Gamelán zene (Gamelan Music), composed in 1942, was the first attempt to break away from the Kodály school. The composer presented the sound of the gamelan music he had become familiar with during his studies in Berlin. This music is mostly polyphonic, heterophonic music, with the peculiarity that the theme and its many variations are played simultaneously. This structure was also followed in Pongrácz’s composition. However, whereas in gamelan music there is no definite beginning and end, and one can start and stop anywhere, Pongrácz used a closed framework in shaping his gamelan music.
In a broader sense, Zoltán Pongrácz’s compositions on ancient Greek themes can also be seen as a peculiar European exoticism. His very first composition of this kind was clearly not internally motivated: he was commissioned by the National Theatre to write incidental music for Aristophanes’ comedy The Birds in 1938. But the years of stylistic change saw a striking increase in the number of works with Greek themes.
The most ambitious work of the period is the three-act opera Odysseus és Nausikaa (Ulysses and Nausicaa), the first opera in Hungarian music history to deal with mythology. The work rested on his desk for ten years, until the company of the Csokonai Theatre in Debrecen staged it to great acclaim, and it went on to have thirteen performances. The script was based on a short excerpt from Homer’s Odyssey. The plot of the opera is not to be found in Homer’s epic, only the setting – and the setting and the characters are Homeric. Its message is universal for today’s man: the purity of love, patriotism, the conflict between reason and emotion. The composer frames the Greek-themed works of the transitional period with the incidental music to Sophocles’ tragedy of King Oedipus.
Electroacoustic works
After completing his studies in electronic music at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands, he wrote his first electroacoustic work, Phonotèse. He began in the Netherlands, but completed the realisation of the nearly seven-minute Luna 9 in his own home studio, based on the idea of expanding the human scientific worldview and the quest for a way to express in the language of electronics the ever-increasing amount of information about hitherto unknown worlds.
Among the electro-acoustic works, but also in terms of his oeuvre as a whole, Mariphonia was what brought the composer international recognition: the piece won first prize out of 71 entries in the 1974 Bourges International Composition Competition. The work is an acoustic portrait inspired by the composer’s wife Mary, the Greek word “phonos” meaning sound. From the first note to the last, the model herself speaks to us. The sonic material of the piece consists of sung vowels, recitation, laughter, crying, heartbeats, etc., modulated in various electronic ways. The rhythmic movement and the proportions of the whole piece are determined by more than 20 figures (head size, body length, etc.) derived from the model’s body measurements. The resulting time scale data follow each other in a permutation order. The same principle of permutation applies to the melodic, rhythmic, tempo and other aspects of the work.
The concept of Mariphonia can be related to several of the author’s plays. Zoophonia is electronic music made of animal sounds and the environmental sounds of the animal world. Its anonymous “contributors” are sheep, frogs, crickets, dolphins, various birds and even sea fish, as well as the chimpanzee Böbe, a popular animal at the Veszprém Zoo, and the natural sounds surrounding the animals, such as the sound of wind or rain. Barisphere, a continuation of the cosmic music that begins with Luna 9, is a reference to the Earth’s innermost core of glowing iron and nickel, and its sonic material is based on synthesis and natural sounds. Its shape is mathematically based, with the proportions of the individual parts corresponding to the main dimensions of our Earth. Mathematical calculations are also the basis of Sesquialtera, which uses the so-called complete square to determine the internal proportions of the composition.
Mariphonia allowed Pongrácz to enter the international electroacoustic circuit, both as an active member of various electroacoustic music organisations and as a composer, which granted him access to one of Europe’s most modern studios, the Charybde Studio in Bourges, where he regularly visited from the mid-seventies onwards to realise several of his works. The earliest work completed in Bourges is Egy Cisz-dúr akkord története (The Story of a Chord in C-sharp Major), the first work he created electronically without mathematical systems. Two years later, Tizenkét körszalag (Twelve Circular Ribbons) made the circular ribbons used as auxiliary instruments in electroacoustic music the main protagonist. Of the dozen circular ribbons, four are synthetic sounds produced from generators and oscillators, four are folk instruments (e.g. the zither and the horn), and the remaining four carry industrial noises.
The last work composed in Bourges is called Poláris és szukcesszív kontrasztok (Polar and successive contrasts). Its title refers to the sharp contrasts present throughout the piece, some of which are synthesised sounds as opposed to concrete sounds. The latter is based on the consonant “s” recorded with a vocoder.
Although made in the studio at Hungarian Radio, the interesting experimental piece of the 1970s, Les parfums, conveys French impressions.The multimedia evokes Baudelaire[8] (the second single large scene to the French poet’s poem Harmonie de soir) is a peculiar 20th-century interpretation of Gesamtkunstwerk. In this composition, which is a veritable parade of scents, colours and sounds, all the components are equally weighted, none accompanying or underpinning the other. Modern aesthetic-psychological research has helped the author in his choice of colours and scents. The scents of sandalwood in the first part, incense in the second part and Peruvian balsam in the third are accompanied by a number of compositional elements: live recitation, a recitation choir played on a magnetophone, abstract figures projected from slides and spotlights and ultraviolet lamps of different colours.
An electronic sound drama, Közeledni és távolodni (Drawing Near and Far), exploring the eternal questions of male-female relationships, takes us into the world of “concrete” poems with South American roots. A particular feature of these poems is that the words are used only in their dictionary form, without any conjugation, thus offering free associations to the recipient.
Egy Cisz-dúr akkord története (The Story of a Chord in C-sharp Major) can be found in the composition 144 hang (144 Voices), at least in the sense that in the first part of the work, the huge mass of 144 voices that form the basis of the work is broken down into its constituent parts. The 144 notes cover a narrower frequency range than the piano keyboard, and the composer has therefore used spacings even smaller than the quarter tones, so-called microspacings. As in Rotációk(Rotations) and Sesqiualtera, this is quadraphonic music, i.e. music with four channels, which makes extensive use of the possibilities offered by the playback of space from different places and directions, which is much richer than stereo.
Old and new elements are mixed in Madrigál (Madrigal) – Pongrácz’s most performed work to date, which has been performed more than a hundred times – and in Balgaság dicséretében (Praise of Folly). In the former, Petrarch’s Sonnet LXI frames an electronically enriched choral work written by the composer, who associated one of the most popular genres of the Renaissance with electronics. The two four-line stanzas of the sonnet open with an unaccompanied rendition in the original language, which gradually blends into the sound of the choir, who then blend into the blurred, suggestive sound of the electronics. The performance of the three stanzas that conclude the sonnet, also unaccompanied, provides a fitting setting for the work. Coda is a 33-note final chord, from contra E to the five-line E flat, lasting two minutes, each of whose notes, with its own dynamic life, sometimes emerges and sometimes recedes from the structure of the musical fabric, so that the static chord always takes on a different appearance.
Balgaság dicséretében (Praise of Folly) is based on Erasmus of Rotterdam’s book of the same title. It’s as if the listener has been transported back in time to the Middle Ages, as a fairground comedian greets the audience at the beginning of the play, before revealing the folly, faults and wickedness of the people with a killer irony and humour.
The synthesis of tradition and the avant-garde
From the 1980s onwards, his work again takes on a new direction. Electroacoustic music dominates the compositional output, its role disappears, its importance becomes secondary, and it is henceforth understood as “live electronica”. The other layer is music interpreted live by performers. This concept appears in both of the composer’s concertos, where the concertation takes a double form: on the one hand, the tempered sound of the instruments is contrasted with the non-tempered sound of the oscillators, and on the other, the rhythm of the computer is the freest rubato. The triple articulation of Concertino szaxofonra és magnetofonra (Concertino for saxophone and magnetophone) is clearly recognisable to the listener. The work opens with the saxophone solo expressing infinite loneliness, which is not dampened by the electronic material that later filters in. The highly virtuosic cadenza is not written in musical notes, but merely defines the programme that can be realised in the time available.
In Cimbalomverseny (Cimbalom Concerto), the solo instrument enters the musical process after a grand introduction, initially with broad rubato melodies, and later as if imitating computer-generated rhythms, followed by a fugato melody. In the vocal works of the last period, the texts chosen by the composer, which are of particular importance and become the main organisers of the musical texture, are considered to be the defining element. This ambition is reflected in the opera composed in 1989, which is also the overture to the great vocal compositions of the period: the Kossuth kantáta (Kossuth Cantata), the two oratorios and the Mass.
His final stage opera is set in the second half of the 20th century in one of the world’s capitals. The libretto, divided into three pictures, is the work of Zoltán Polner, who collaborated with Pongrácz again when he composed Teknőkaparó (Tub Scraper) a few years later. The opera’s plot is two-dimensional in time: the protagonists are twelve-year-old Tamás, a symbolic figure of Hope, and the highly educated but cruel Major, a fan of Puccini’s music. In the opera’s conclusion, hope is reborn, and Good triumphs over Evil. Among the memorable moments of the work, two scenes deserve special attention: the stylistic study in the second frame, which sounds like an excerpt from an imaginary Puccini opera that never existed in reality, and the funeral music for flute and harp that closes the scene.
The libretto of the oratorio Teknőkaparó legendája (The Legend of the Tub Scraper) is also the work of Zoltán Polner. In fact, only the introductory and concluding parts of the text can be considered his own work, the rest being a series of authentic folk texts (folk prophecies) collected in twenty-one villages of Csongrád County in the 1960s and 70s. Independently of each other, the folk sources refer to an Uncle János, who lived sometime in the 18th and 19th centuries and had a rather rare occupation among peasants: he was a tub scraper. Considered by the villagers to be a man of foresight, with powers of clairvoyance similar to Nostradamus, he became increasingly legendary and his real name was blurred, and he is still referred to as the Tub Scraper. At the composer’s request, Polner compiled the libretto mainly from prophecies referring to the last decades of the 20th century. As the text is prose throughout, the music, which lacks the periodic pulsation of the poems and is devoid of folk elements, is characterised by many changes of beat, polyrhythm and frequent tempo changes.
Ut omnes unum sint (Hogy mindnyájan egyek legyenek, That they may all be one) is a large-scale ecumenical oratorio, a unique composition in many respects. It presents the unifying teachings of the great monotheistic figures in ten movements, regardless of age, church or people, with electroacoustic sound masses, traditional and special instruments and choirs. In addition to the polyphonic choral technique, the author often uses a recitative choir to enhance the dramaturgical impact of the work.
In 2003, the composer, who was in his nineties, completed another – his final – work, Missa Solemnis, which he considered to be the summing up of his entire oeuvre. After a long search, he discovered the primary source of his work. It was over three centuries of music history that he discovered the inspiration for his mass, Matteo Simonelli’s Missa Buda expugnata, inspired by the liberation of Buda Castle in 1686. Pongrácz originally planned nothing more than to “restore” Simonelli’s Mass, orchestrating the vocal parts and adding new passages in places, as well as adding some new musical passages to the original work. The concert performance planned for November 2000 was cancelled, however, and the time saved encouraged the composer to continue working on the concept and to expand it. Although he continued to regard Simonelli’s Mass as the cornerstone of his work, he nevertheless enriched the existing musical material with new movements of his own composition and pre-recorded CD material. The Mass does not employ soloists, and the “absence” of this tradition is most noticeable in the Gloria and Credo movements, both of which are opened by the choir. The Kyrie movement retains most of the original, with only a few instrumental chords and a harp or harpsichord ending. The Gloria, like the Kyrie, begins with a Preamble, the text of which was also written by the composer (based on the text and Gregorian melody of the Easter Praeconium Paschale, drawing a parallel between Christ and the Resurrection of Hungary), and for the sake of clarity he placed special emphasis on the insertion of the words Europa, Hungaria, and Victoria. The trumpet fanfares placed in the space add a special light to the movement. The Credo is a movement of darkness and light: starting with the Crucifixus. Pongrácz used modern instruments instead of the pared-down quartet motives used in Simonelli’s Mass as the music for the Crucifixion: the brass instruments play with a cordino the lowest note that can still be sounded on the instrument, and after the passus et sepultus est, a long generic pause stops the musical process. It is a silence (not a pause) to be built up, by which the composer tells us more about the death of Jesus than any dissonance. The dismay is resolved by a slow, gradually intensifying percussion-tremolo. The Pater noster is divided into two parts in the composer’s reading. The first part is about God, performed by men, while the second part, the supplication, is considered by the composer to be a task for women’s interpretation. The composer concludes the Missa solemnis with a remembrance of Hungarian history, with the beautiful lines of Psalm 90 of the Genevan Psalter, saying, “In Thee we have trusted from the beginning".
[2017]
[1] Song composed in 1997 to the poem Egyhelyben (Stationary) by Tibor Gyurkovics.
[2] Őszi harmat után (After the Autumn Dew) – nine choral works written to Kuruc poems, for the 200th anniversary of the death of the Grand Prince. Bp., Hungarian Choral Works, 1935.
[3] In addition to Pongrácz’s work, the orchestral suite by Mihály Hajdu, György Geszler’s Piano Concerto in D major and Pécsi Sebestyén’s Szent István szimfonikus költemény (Saint Stephen Symphonic Poem) were performed.
[4] A Zene (Music), 5 Apr 1939.On the concert see also the review of Új Nemzedék (New Generation) and Pesti Hírlap (Pest News) (18 Apr 1939).
[5] Selected reviews of the Budapest and London performances: National Museum and Institute of Theatre History – Dance Archive – The legacy of Bella Bordy and Béla Paulini.
[6] Budapesti Hírlap (Budapest News), Pester Lloyd, 28 April 1939.
[7] Accompanying study by János Decsényi in the programme of the concert for the composer’s 90th birthday. Műcsarnok (Kunsthalle), 28 September 2002.
[8] The basic idea of the work was inspired by a line from Charles Baudelaire’s poem Corréspondances: “Les parfums, les couleurs et les sons se répondent” (Scents, colours and sounds correspond).