PROGRAMME NOTES

              Zoltán Kodály

Zoltán Kodály (1882 - 1967)

Missa Brevis

                        INTROITUS                             SANCTUS

                                KYRIE                                      BENEDICTUS

                                GLORIA                                  AGNUS DEI

                                CREDO                                   ITE, MISSA EST

Kodály was born at Kecskemét in Hungary on 16 December 1882. Brought up in the country, he knew folk music from childhood and also learnt to play the piano and string instruments, and to compose, all with little tuition. He was a chorister in his youth at Nagyszombat (now Trnava), Czechoslovakia, where he wrote his first compositions.

In 1902 he went to Budapest to study with Koessler, and in 1905 he began his collaboration with Bartók, collecting and transcribing folksongs. After studying for a short time in Paris with Charles Widor, he became teacher of theory and composition at the Budapest Academy of Music (1907–41). He and Bartók worked side by side as composers. Their first quartets were played in companion concerts in 1910, marking the emergence of 20th-century Hungarian music.

Kodály preferred to accept rather than analyse folk material in his music, and his style is much less contrapuntal, smoother harmonically and less percussive than Bartók. His individual style was derived from Hungarian folk music, contemporary French music, and the religious music of the Italian Renaissance. His major works, notably the comic opera Háry János, the Psalmus hungaricus, the 'Peacock' Variations for orchestra and the Dances of Marosszék and Galánta draw on Magyar folk music for inspiration.

His work in musical education convinced him of the value of choral singing as a way to musical literacy and after World War II his ideas became the basis of state policy, backed in part by his own large output of choral music, much of it for children.

The Missa Brevis was written in 1943 as an Organ Mass and was dedicated to his wife. In 1944/45 he re-arranged it for performance by a mixed chorus and orchestra with organ and it received its first performance in the Cloakroom of the Budapest Opera House during the Siege of Budapest in 1945.

His wife died in 1958 and he remarried in 1959 at the age of seventy-seven; his bride a 19 year old student at the Budapest Academy.