Dances of Galánta

The composer Zoltán Kodály made it his life’s work to study the folk music of his native Hungary and to write original compositions inspired by it. That said, his Dances of Galánta from 1933 are much more than arrangements of folk dances from a field trip. This music held deep personal meaning for Kodály, because he had grown up in the town of Galánta, having moved there as a toddler with his family. (The town was then in Northern Hungary, now part of Slovakia.)

In the preface to the printed score, Kodály wrote:

The author spent the most beautiful seven years of his childhood in Galánta. The town band, led by the fiddler Mihók, was famous. But it must have been even more famous a hundred years earlier. Several volumes of Hungarian dances were published in Vienna around the year 1800. One of them lists its source this way: “from several Gypsies in Galánta.” ... May my modest composition inspired by this music serve to continue the old tradition.

During his research, Kodály found extensive evidence to show that the fame of those musicians had indeed spread far beyond the boundaries of their hometown.

As a child in Galánta, Kodaly not only had ample occasion to hear Mihók’s band, he also learned many folk songs from servants and his “bare-footed companions from the Galánta public school.” During his time in Galánta, Kodály was also introduced to Western classical music. He took up the cello and, because his parents loved to play chamber music with friends, young Zoltán was soon able to participate directly in musical evenings at home.

Forty-odd years after this initial encounter with the music of Galánta, Kodály returned to the published source material as a mature composer and leading scholar of Hungarian musical traditions. He took the melodies from the early 19th-century Viennese editions, which had recently been rediscovered by a musicologist named Ervin Major. But Kodály didn’t have to rely solely on the printed notes, for he also had the sound of the old town band still in his ears as he scored the music.

The style of these dances is known as verbunkos, from the German Werbung or “recruitment.” In centuries past, Austrian army recruiters traveled the countryside with impressively-dressed troops and musicians in tow; the officers would dance in formation to rhythmic music — all meant to entice young men to sign up. This verbunkos became the dominant Hungarian instrumental tradition of the 19th century.

In his Dances of Galánta, Kodály gave the various verbunkos melodies exquisite musical coloring, and arranged them in a masterful sequence with alternating moods and tempos. The pensive introduction anticipates the stately principal melody, played by solo clarinet. Later on, this melody returns several times as a rondo (or variation) theme. Two intervening episodes (one played by flute, the other by oboe) are faster in tempo and lighter in character.

In the second half of the composition, the variations of the rondo form are cast aside and we hear a series of dance tunes that — apart from one contrasting slower theme — gradually get faster.

The climactic ending is delayed for a moment by the return of part of the opening melody, with a short clarinet cadenza added. The entire second half of the piece is dominated by a characteristic syncopated rhythmic figure (short–long–short), which provides an ending that is as striking as it is simple. 

— Peter Laki

Peter Laki is a musicologist and frequent lecturer on classical music. He is a visiting associate professor of music, emeritus, at Bard College and was The Cleveland Orchestra’s program annotator from 1990 to 2007.