Sándor Szokolay, the composer (1931–2013), was one of the emblematic representatives of the generation born in the 1930s – the “harmincasok” (lit: from the thirties) to use the term of the music historian Imre Földes. Immediately after the debut of György Ligeti and György Kurtág, he entered the stage of musical life alongside Emil Petrovics, József Soproni, István Láng, Miklós Kocsár, Zsolt Durkó and other excellent composers, who were followed by Attila Bozay and soon after by Zoltán Jeney and László Vidovszky. Among all of them, it was perhaps Szokolay – the music academy student emerging from Ferenc Farkas’s class – who attracted the most attention at the end of the 1950s, thanks not only to his talent but also to his personality, energetic character and unparalleled activity. He burst into Hungarian and international musical life almost in a single moment with Két ballada (“Two Ballads”), Tűz márciusa (“March of Fire”), his Violin Concerto, Iszonyat balladája (“Ballad of Horror”) and Déploration, written in memory of Poulenc. In 1964 he achieved a sensational success with his opera Vérnász (Blood Wedding), which was soon performed on another twenty stages across Europe and translated into more than a dozen languages. Thereafter, for decades he was present in nearly every sphere of Hungarian cultural life: on juries of competitions, in radio and television broadcasts, and he taught at the Music Academy for almost thirty years.
He did not join any artistic movements or groups of composers; in seeking his own path, his style was often steered in a direction opposite to his earlier one – at times by success itself, at other times by the similar solutions adopted by his contemporaries. Among his musical roots, alongside Hungarian folk music, the works of Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály held primary importance, and already as a young man – in a way almost unique in Hungary – he recognised his own artistic nature in Stravinsky’s music as well. Later, like many of his contemporaries, he also made use of dodecaphony, though only in part of his oeuvre and not with absolute consistency even there. His music is strikingly varied and multifaceted, yet from the totality of its traits a distinctly outlined portrait emerges. From the beginning, his compositions were defined by instinctive musicality: he shaped his inner experiences into works of elemental impact spontaneously, guided by the first impulse. Rational control tended to assert itself only in the final stages of shaping the form – in contrast to those composers who carefully plan out the details of a work, calculate its proportions, and only then begin to commit it to paper.
His central theme for a long time was the articulation of opposites, which was paired with a boundless desire for expression and an intensified need for expressivity. Instead of concealment, he chose honest self-revelation; instead of shrouding his workshop secrets in mystical fog, he preferred repeated declaration. He rarely had to wait for inspiration – the real challenge for him was choosing among the multitude of ideas that kept piling up. By the end of the century, two factors came to play an increasingly significant role in the background of his works: national commitment and the profession of faith in God. For him, these were not merely poetic or ideological programs, but sustaining and motivating forces that propelled him forward and, in the literal sense, kept him alive for two decades.
School years, family, workplaces
He was born on 30 March 1931 in Kunágota, Békés County, the second son of Bálint Szokolay and Erzsébet Holecska. His father was a clerk at the town hall, but as an amateur musician he devoted all his free time to music. He played several instruments and as a young man he played the violin with the Orosházi Philharmonic Orchestra. As an adult, he studied at the conservatories in Szeged and Debrecen, organised and led choirs, and was over fifty when he finally chose music as a profession. His son, Sándor, completed four elementary school years in Kunágota, then moved to Gyöngyös and Gyöngyöspata in the north, and then to Csanádapáca, near his homeland. In 1944, they settled in Orosháza, the family's place of origin, where Sándor attended the Lutheran grammar school. In the autumn of 1947, he continued his studies at the Békéstarhos Music High School, a musical institution with excellent results, which was led by György Gulyás, a conductor, according to the music pedagogical ideas of his master, Zoltán Kodály. Szokolay graduated in 1950. The years in Tarhos were a life-changing experience for him, without which he admits he might never have become a composer.
He began his formal musical studies only at the age of sixteen and a half. He studied piano and composed several dozen – and within a few years more than a hundred – small pieces or “finger exercises” for himself, following nothing but instinct, without any prior training in composition or knowledge of musical styles. His models were the works of Zoltán Kodály, Béla Bartók, Igor Stravinsky and Ferenc Farkas, as well as Hungarian folk songs. The series later labelled Opus 1 and given the collective title Zene-bona forms a repository of ideas and musical solutions from which its composer later drew on many occasions.
From 1950 Szokolay studied at the Budapest Academy of Music, first for a short period under Ferenc Szabó, then under Ferenc Farkas. He received his degree in composition in 1957. The compositions dating from his Academy years – from the Tarhos Sonata to the later revised Pastorella – are built largely on material from Békéstarhos. Farkas helped to smooth out their unevenness, though he often approved their original form without any alteration. The results of this feverish work manifested in 1956–57 in the composition of such noteworthy works as the Sonata for Solo Violin and the Violin Concerto. In the latter, Szokolay recognised Bartók’s music as a common treasure and translated its musical and technical elements into his own language. After his youthful mosaic technique, he appeared before the public with large-scale shaping and sweeping melodic writing – though not yet in the passionately thunderous intonation born in this period.
His professional advancement was confirmed by successes at international competitions: with the Sonatina he won a prize at the World Festival of Youth and Students in Warsaw (1955), and with the first movement of the Violin Concerto he won an award at the Wieniawski Competition held there in 1956. The Solo Sonata brought him victory in Moscow (1957), and the Two Ballads did the same in Vienna (1959) at the WFYS festivals.
At the time he obtained his composition diploma, from 1955 to 1961 Szokolay worked as a music editor at Hungarian Radio, after which he spent a few years trying to make a living as an independent artist. In parallel with his studies, he taught solfège within the framework of the Metropolitan Music School System, and from 1966 until his retirement in 1994 he taught composition, counterpoint and prosody at the Academy of Music. Between 1977 and 1988 he also served as music reader for Hungarian Television.
In 1952 he married the pianist Sári Szesztay, and in 1970 he married Magdolna Weltler. All his children – except Tamás – chose a musical profession: Gergely and Balázs are pianists, Ádám is a flautist, and Orsolya, born of his second marriage, became a violinist. Several of his grandchildren have already demonstrated exceptional musical talent, for example Szofia Anna (Gergely’s daughter), Ádám Zsolt (Ádám’s son) and Dominik Krisztián (Balázs’s son).
The first decade of getting started
From the late 1950s onward, Szokolay received countless commissions to compose film music, ballets, and incidental music for radio and stage productions, and in the course of this work he gained professional experience of incalculable value. He had to force his soaring imagination into strictly fixed frameworks, while at the same time he was given wide scope for experimentation and for trying out his ideas. The main line of this period is formed by vocal works, primarily oratorios. The counterpart to Two Ballads, written to Bulgarian and Bantu African ballad texts, is the 1962 Negro Cantata, composed to poems by the Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén, and, on a larger scale, the oratorio March of Fire based on poems by Attila József. All three works strikingly display the characteristics of the young Szokolay style: the heightened exploitation of poetic musicality, a fascination with rhythmic, drumming texts, and a striving for monumentality and direct impact. March of Fire was commissioned in 1959 for the 40th anniversary of the Hungarian Soviet Republic, yet Szokolay secretly dedicated it to the victims of the 1956 Revolution.
Around 1960 he discovered in Bartók the creator of The Night’s Music and The Miraculous Mandarin, and this influence, combined with a strong imprint of Stravinsky, appears in the above-mentioned vocal works as well as in the Piano Concerto and Ishtar’s Descent into the Underworld. The latter, an oratorio drawing on the mythic world of Gilgamesh, is the lyrical counterpart to March of Fire: alongside the passionate tone and ostinato technique, it gives a prominent place to the depiction of the feminine ideal of beauty. At the work’s première in Tours, Szokolay met Francis Poulenc, and this connection enriched his musical vocabulary in a new direction in the mid-1960s. After the master’s unexpected death, he composed the Deploration in 1964 – a work that fuses the genres of piano concerto and requiem – in Poulenc’s memory. The influence of French music likewise characterises the most important choral work of the period, the 1966 Révélation.
The main body of his oeuvre, the operas
Szokolay’s path of development – through the musical expression of emotions and gestures and through dramatic texts – led straight to the stage. Blood Wedding, premiered in 1964, was followed within a decade by two further operas: Hamlet in 1968 and Samson in 1973. The first opera is a milestone in the history of 20th-century Hungarian opera. Based on the play by Federico García Lorca and the translation by Gyula Illyés, the composer – as he later often did – wrote the libretto himself, and through the compression required by the vocal genre he further highlighted the contrasts and intensified the dramatic effects. The story, set in a Spanish folk milieu, centres on a love triangle. The lovers, unable to resist their fatal passion, flee on the day of the girl’s wedding, and their act reawakens the tradition of blood feud between Leonardo and the Bridegroom’s family.
Hamlet, premiered in 1968, marks a stylistic shift in Szokolay’s career. The popular success of Blood Wedding pushed him in a more experimental direction, although he never renounced the achievements of his first creative period. Hamlet required a different, more abstract kind of music than Blood Wedding. As a result, strictly structured dodecaphony – as the adequate vehicle for the philosophical content – permeates the entire opera. Yet Szokolay did not use twelve-tone technique in a Schönbergian way; rather, he employed it melodically, preserving elements of traditional melodic shaping. By frequently using thirds and fourths, he created a “diatonised” dodecaphony in which a certain degree of functional order remains. For Szokolay, Hamlet was also a drama of contradictions: just as Blood Wedding explored the opposition of heart and mind, here he articulated the conflict between thought and action. In Samson, premiered in 1973 and composed after the verse drama by László Németh, he depicted the conflict between vocation and romantic desire.
More than ten years after Samson, between 1984 and 1985 Szokolay composed Ecce homo, based on Nikos Kazantzakis’s novel The Greek Passion. In the passion-opera’s story, the inhabitants of a Greek village, preparing for the following year’s Passion Play, assign the biblical roles among themselves, but the twists of the Passion story begin to unfold in their real lives as well. Seeking a scapegoat, the crowd kills Manolios – the villager portraying Christ – even before Christmas, signalling that in the modern age the Redeemer could expect even less understanding than he received two thousand years ago.
Works and genres in the background of opera
Alongside the operas, numerous works were created that address compositional–technical problems, often in connection with stage works. Ballada sinfonica is, for example, the stylistic and thematic preparatory study for Hamlet, while Missa pannonica functions as a postlude to the sacred tone of Ecce homo. One of Szokolay’s characteristic compositional procedures is systematised almost didactically in the five cimbalom duos titled Játék a hangközökkel (Playing with Intervals). In the movements, the dominant intervals follow one another in ascending order from seconds to ninths, demonstrating the composer’s general principle for melodic formation and chordal construction: beginning from a central pitch, the steps and distances gradually expand, while mirror-like correspondences arise in the upward and downward directions.
For Szokolay, experimentation and the renewal of musical language occurred not in the operas but typically in works written for smaller forces. Dramatic cantatas and oratorios prepared the way toward the operas, and in the 1970s his attention increasingly turned toward an intimate tone and miniature forms. A decisive step in this direction was his I. vonósnégyes (String Quartet No. 1) of 1972, dedicated to the memory of Zoltán Kodály. String Quartet No. 2, composed nine years later in homage to Béla Bartók, acknowledges its inspirational source more openly, yet moves away from it more boldly. Each of the eight brief movements is built on a single technical element – pizzicato, sordino, glissando, etc. – offering a glimpse into Szokolay’s carefully crafted microcosmos.
In the decade between the two quartets, Szokolay experimented with cluster textures in his chamber music – for example in his songs to poems by László Nagy – and employed barline-free, aleatoric procedures in Fuvolaszonáta (Flute Sonata), the cimbalom work Quattro lamenti, Csellószonáta (Cello Sonata), and Polimorfia (Polymorphia). The conciseness of chamber music and the miniature form also appeared in his choral compositions. Instead of a fresco-like structure, the cycles Aforizmák (Aphorisms), Tíz József Attila töredék (Ten Fragments by Attila József), and Tabernákulum (Tabernacle) display a design comparable to small sculpture.
The solo cantatas accompanied by a few instruments – Minden titkok titka (The Secret of All Secrets), Orbis pictus, and Jeremiáda (Jeremiad) – condense the essence of Szokolay’s experimental period at the end of the 1970s, replacing the large-scale scenes of his oratorical works. A decade later, in 1988–89, the genre returned to prominence in the composer’s oeuvre with Aeternitas temporis, Leben-Natur-Liebe and Palme.
External impulses also decisively influenced the main directions of Szokolay’s artistic development. In certain periods, entire chains of works were written for specific ensembles and performers, and this determined the instrumentation, genre, character, style, and level of difficulty of the compositions. From the second half of the 1950s, the Children’s Choir of the Hungarian Radio regularly commissioned works from Szokolay, and as a result, in addition to several dozen short pieces, he also composed musical plays and cantatas. In the composer’s world, humour and irony found their place through children’s poems and nursery rhymes, and these only reached their definitive function in his artistic toolkit by the late 1970s, at the time of the creation of the fairy-tale opera Csalóka Péter (Peter the Deceiver).
At the request of the State Folk Ensemble, he produced numerous folk-song arrangements, as well as the ballet Jóka ördöge (The Devil of Jóka), Néger kantáta (Negro Cantata), and Hódolat Kodálynak (Homage to Kodály). His collaboration with György Gulyás, conductor of the Debrecen Kodály Choir, bore such significant mixed-choir works as Istár pokoljárása (Ishtar’s Descent into the Underworld), Magyar kórusszimfónia (Hungarian Choral Symphony), Ódon ének (Ancient Song), and Tabernákulum (Tabernacle), followed by the choral fantasia Jönnek a harangok értem (The Bells Are Coming for Me), performed at the conductor’s funeral, and the Szabó Lőrinc kantáta (Lőrinc Szabó Cantata) composed in his memory.
In addition to professional ensembles, Szokolay also maintained continuous contact with the amateur movement: his main link in this direction was the choirs of his father. To some extent, the young musicians led by László Szabó were also considered amateurs, and for them he composed a series of brass works beginning with the 1975 Sestetto d’ottoni.
Church works
In the 1970s, questions of faith assumed an increasingly important role in Szokolay’s thinking. At the Deák Square Lutheran Church, the performances of Bach and Handel by the Lutheránia Choir under the direction of Jenő Weltler made a deep impression on him. From the early 1970s he composed numerous choral works for the ensemble and later enriched its repertoire with large-scale contrapuntal oratorios. From this point onward he felt an artistic need to testify publicly to his convictions. In Gályarab-kantáta (Galley-Slave Cantata), which uses the text of the Szencsey Codex, he commemorated the deported confessors; Libellus ungaricus (Hungarian Little Book) drew from the sermons of Péter Bornemisza; and Confessio Augustana conveyed articles of faith as it celebrated the 450th anniversary of the Augsburg Confession.
The Luther-kantáta (Luther Cantata) marked a turning point in his use of language in musical settings: it was written from the outset in two languages, Hungarian and German, to enable performances abroad. In shaping the vocal lines, Szokolay took into account the upbeat-driven prosody of Western European languages, and then translated the text into his own mother tongue. The closing work of his collaboration with the Lutheránia Choir and Jenő Weltler was Korál-rekviem (Chorale Requiem), composed in 1992 in memory of the conductor.
The style of the works composed for the church congregation was decisively shaped by Szokolay’s desire to address and serve an audience broader than ever before. He therefore strove for comprehensibility, which manifested itself in archaism. The sincere and persuasive tone of these works attests that his rediscovery of Baroque music did not signify a conservative turn or retreat, but rather a fresh and vivid experience. He handled the techniques of past eras with such natural ease and confidence as though he were speaking his native language as a contemporary of Bach, Handel, or Lassus. The same is observable in his secular works, for example in his brass fanfares, his arrangements of historical melodies, and his madrigals – Miniatűr kantáta (Miniature Cantata), Scarbantia dicsérete (In Praise of Scarbantia), Quattro madrigali – as well as in Három epigramma (Three Epigrams), which promises an “old” style already in its subtitle.
The maturation of Szokolay’s ecclesiastical style and his increased engagement with chamber music arrived at the end of the 1980s, when he developed a close artistic collaboration with the Tomkins Vocal Ensemble led by János Dobra. The fruits of this collaboration include the cantatas Ima rontás ellen (Prayer Against Harm), Bencés-ének (Benedictine Song), Szeretet himnusza (Hymn of Love) and Tanúságtétel (Testimony), but its first and perhaps most significant result was the 1987 Missa pannonica. In this technically demanding mass, the number of vocal parts at times reaches twelve, and in the block-like sections that follow imitative openings, the full sonic space of the mixed choir often resounds with rich harmonies. In addition to Gregorian chant, the influence of Eastern liturgy – especially Rachmaninoff’s Vespers – can be felt among its sources of inspiration.
The Jelesnapi kántálók (Feast-Day Carolers) composed for the ensemble represents a broad group of Szokolay’s religiously themed works in which elements of the folk belief system preserving pagan motifs appear. Of particular note is the album Magyar Karácsony (Hungarian Christmas), which sold more than one hundred thousand copies in a short time.
The last years in Budapest
In the late 1980s, during the political transition, Szokolay assumed an active public role. More than twenty social organisations, societies and foundations elected him president or board member, including the Hungarian Kodály Society, the Hungarian Music Chamber, the National Foundation, the Fészek Artists’ Club and the Hungarian Radio Foundation. He placed his nationwide popularity at the service of shared goals – a popularity earned not only through his compelling personality and his work as a composer and organiser of musical life, but also through his presence on several widely followed television programmes and competitions (such as Repülj páva [Fly, Peacock] and Ki mit tud? [Who Knows What]) as a jury member. His public commitment was also reflected in his choice of artistic themes: from the 1980s onward, several of his works focused on issues of musical culture, education and patriotism. Among the choral works aiming at the moral reanimation of society are Ne hagyjátok az éneket! (Do Not Abandon the Song!), Már csak a dal, csak az segít! (Only the Song Still Helps!), and Mélyre ások (I Dig Deep), composed to a poem by Jenő Dsida. In 1987 he protested the destruction of Transylvanian Hungarian villages with Ima rontás ellen (Prayer Against Harm), and he later commemorated the victims of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution with Siratóének (Lament), Magyar zsoltár (Hungarian Psalm) and Az 56-os évre (For the Year 1956).
Among the works inspired by national destiny, the oratorio Tanúságtétel (Testimony) – a cantata about the Transylvanian bishop Áron Márton – stands out. Its text is drawn from the introduction to Péter Domokos Pál’s volume Rendületlenül, as well as from writings by Áron Márton published there. It successfully unites expressive tools formerly tied to different genres, creating a balance among them: it blends the bold solutions and philosophical depth of the chamber works with the refined choral writing of works composed for professional ensembles, and with the archaic and sermonic tone of his religious compositions. At the same time, it clearly signals the simplification and increased concision of Szokolay’s late style.
The three operas of the period – Bölcs Náthán (Nathan the Wise), Margit, a hazának szentelt áldozat (Margit, the Sacrifice Consecrated to the Homeland) and Szávitri (Savitri) – exhibit similar tendencies. Szokolay originally composed the 1988 three-act version of Savitri (Op. 101) for full orchestra, but ten years later he condensed it into two acts and reduced the performing forces to chamber ensemble. The opera is based on an episode of the ancient Indian epic Mahābhārata, proclaiming the triumph of love over death. At its centre – musically and dramaturgically – stands a sequence of four “stations” in which the heroine, through her fidelity and steadfastness, wins back her deceased beloved from Yama, the god of death. Here Szokolay definitively broke with tragedy, aiming instead to articulate love, forgiveness and an affirmation of life.
Margit, the Sacrifice Consecrated to the Homeland is based on the medieval legend of Saint Margaret and unites onstage the two dominant directions of Szokolay’s works from the 1990s: its thematic framework is both sacred and Hungarian.
The Sopron creative period
In 1994, due to political conflicts and a worsening heart condition, Szokolay withdrew from public life and moved to the calmer surroundings of Sopron. At this point his interest turned increasingly toward instrumental genres. In the II. hegedű-szólószonáta (Second Violin Solo Sonata) he added a slow middle movement (Elégia – Elegy) to two compositions from 1996 (Passacaglia-fantázia and Fantázia). For his flute piece Elégia és pasztorál (Elegy and Pastoral) he similarly planned to compose a third movement. Other sonatas were also taking shape in his workshop: while the violin pieces of this period were inspired by his daughter Orsolya’s violin playing, his piano works in progress were intended for his son Balázs.
The three symphonies composed at the end of the 1990s enriched Szokolay’s oeuvre with a new genre. Preparatory steps toward them were Római vonósszimfónia (Roman String Symphony), Ergo sum, which elaborates the Cartesian quotation, and the Kettős hegedűverseny (Double Violin Concerto). The first symphony, barely twenty minutes long and scored for a small orchestra, did not yet fully appropriate all the elements of the new genre; its composer intended it as a homage to the Viennese classics. In the Second Symphony – composed for the 145th anniversary of the Budapest Philharmonic Society – Szokolay already used his own means, creating a unity of his old and new artistic selves. The Symphonia Ungarorum (Third Symphony), expands the genre boundaries to the scale of an oratorio and was written for the opening celebration of the Hungarian Millennium in 2000. Based on a cycle of poems by Gáspár Nagy, the work reflects on a thousand years of Hungarian history and simultaneously sums up the composer’s stylistic and intellectual aspirations.
In the final decade of Szokolay’s life, alongside a few representative large-scale works (Október végi tiszta lángok – Pure Flames of Late October, inspired by the 50th anniversary of the revolution, 2006–2008; Télvégi tavaszváró – Late-Winter Welcoming of Spring, 2010) and orchestral pieces (Nyitányfantázia – Overture Fantasy, 2009), vocal and especially sacred compositions came to dominate (for example Ecce panis angelorum, 2007; Korál-himnusz és hálaének – Chorale Hymn and Song of Thanksgiving, 2009; Amor sanctus, 2010; Kamarakantáta Isten szeretetéről – Chamber Cantata on the Love of God, 2011). He strove for simplicity and clarity, attempted to refine his works, summarise his artistic aims, and at the same time recreate the instinctive world of his younger self. In 2011 he closed his oeuvre and, with the help of his daughter and son-in-law, revised his catalogue of 400 works.
He died on 8 December 2013 at the age of 83 and was laid to rest in the Lutheran cemetery in Sopron. His tomb was created in 2015 by Mária V. Majzik, and its unveiling took place on 1 October, the Day of Music.
[2016]