What did I want?
To collect Hungarian music. To determine the serial number of all our music, of each of our melodies. What is still glistening from the darkness of the forgiveness of the past centuries is slowly falling on us: to bring it all to light. To make a perfect inventory of every melody in our music. To this end, to select, define and compile Hungarian material from the works of music composers of foreign origin.
Káldy undertook this as well. He presented the idea of his proposal and his offer of a suitable job to Wlassics.
And what did our good Wlassics do?
He took out his ministerial mind. The strange Estonian, which is not only his, but also his, and about which I once had to talk a lot in my good mood. S a-275- Ministerial reason advised him to issue Káldy ‘s proposal to the Hungarian Royal Academy of Music for an opinion and a proposal.
Oh, ministerial common sense! To illustrate this reason, I will give a small example of a fairy tale.
Our Lady’s Day is approaching, maybe she’ll be here tomorrow or the day after tomorrow. The village girl takes a large bundle of flowers in the meadow to tie a wreath out of it and puts it in front of her mother-in-law.
However, he throws a large bundle of flowers in front of the ox. Tie the wreath out of the ox.
And the ox eats the flower, and even which thread he does not like, he spits it out and wades it, but does not tie a wreath out of it.
… There is no village girl in the world who would do that. I only came up with it as an example. Even the dumbest chitri girl knows that the ox does not tie a wreath out of the flower, but eats it.
And yet Wlassics published a large collection of national treasures of Káldy’s majestic works for the Hungarian Royal Academy of Music.
We have to look at Ödön Mihálovich’s response to the minister. He’s in the ministerial archives if someone hasn’t eaten yet.
Ten or fifteen lines throughout.
There is not a word of appreciation in him for Káldy and his great offer and the great works of his noble life.
There is not a word about what a great and necessary thing it would be to collect material from Hungarian music.-276-
Instead, with a dry brevity, the director of the Hungarian Royal Academy of Music and Performing Arts recommends that Káldy mark the source works from which he collects Hungarian music and Hungarian dance and then deserves some help, support or a donation. Surely this academy even thought that Káldy should be obliged to prove with his 50-pound stamp certificate from the police and district prefectures what his name was, where he was born, whether he was a boy or a girl, what he ate, what he drank, where he farmed, and e, when he works for the art of his nation, the permission of the industrial authority?
However, this was not written down by the music academy, it was just what I think he thought.
But what did the mighty governor of the Hungarian Empire’s public affairs do at that time? What did our Minister Wlassics do?
Let’s say it briefly. Don’t embroider. Let’s stand up openly!
He allocated 400 HUF to Káldy under certain unfulfilled conditions, in other words four hundred forints in Austrian value as a donation!
And now let’s stop here a little.
Four hundred forints is a big money when it comes to rewarding a nice cockatin rooster and duck in the poultry field. For four hundred forints you can buy a tolerable good officer’s horse at the Bertalannapi fair in Székesfehérvár. For four hundred forints, two trained Vizsla dogs are given at the dog park in the city park.-277-The price of the mouse, which won the first prize at the 1901 Brussels Mouse Exhibition, was four hundred forints. I remember being exhibited by some English breeder. The mouse was pretty big, reddish in color, like the field heather in Hungary, and there were some traces of it. That’s why he mainly won the first prize. And that’s why it sold for four hundred forints.
So four hundred forints is big money. Not all bushes can find it.
What did only Káldy work for?
He collected and published four large bundles of Hungarian music. These addresses are:
»Treasures of old Hungarian music. 1672 to 1837. «
“Kurucz songs.”
»Old Hungarian fighting songs, verbs.«
»Songs and Starters of the War of Independence. 1848 to 1849. «
He toured the country with them and ignited the love of Hungarian music in their souls. He spent thousands and sacrificed for these works.
In addition, he offered to release:
“Songs of the Awakening Age (1825–1860)”;
»Musical works of the age of the old Hungarian lutos, Tinódy and Balassa«;
“Songs of the Verseghy and Csokonay Ages (1780–1825)”;
»Description of the Hungarian dances of the 16th century«;
»Description of the old Hungarian musical instruments«;
»Writing the history of Hungarian color music or opera«;
»The establishment and collection of Hungarian music by foreign composers«.-278-
These are great achievements of honest and working human life, but of all human life.
And I dare say, even to the Minister, even to the experts, even to the Royal Academy of Music, that this work is still worth more than two Vizsla dogs or the Brussels-winning mouse.
What a thought it was! To give a donation of four hundred forints to Káldy, the modest but self-righteous Hungarian artist, the greatest story diver of our musical mult.
It’s true! You can get a beggar for three forints, you can buy beggars for fifty pennies, you can also get a blind guide for twenty pennies a day, and compared to that, four hundred forints is a huge amount! However, this was also made an insurmountable condition by the Hungarian Royal Academy of Music and, on his wise advice, by the Minister.
Oh, ministerial common sense!
Did Gyula Káldy ever pick up or accept this money?
I don’t know, but I don’t think so.
He was a destitute man. He never had a house or capital, but he did not get into debt. He was able to teach singing, music and acting with a wonderful influence. His students were fond of him. He earned his daily bread honestly for himself, his family.
He didn’t even complain. He didn’t even complain to me, not even for this offensive four hundred forint. The statue of Ferenc Liszt there on the facade of the Opera House, the country does not even provide a vile grave for Káldy. Flour-279-Ferencz could only waste the Hungarians and we sacrificed a lot of crowded thousands for him, because he was a stranger, he was German, he was a grumpy friend and not a single Hungarian word was ever uttered from his lips. And we wanted to offer Káldy with begging bread that hurt his blood. Because he was true, he was a good Hungarian.
But let’s be fair on the other side as well.
I know Wlassics, the minister. He is not a bad person and he is not a bad Hungarian. He just doesn’t know and doesn’t really feel: how much trouble we have, how much disease we have, and in how many forms, with how irresistible the weight of the alien element is on us. He does not know and does not really feel today what a damn genocidal institution the Royal Academy of Music is and how many decades of its operation have wiped out a sense of race and how much dislike, how much degeneration in the spirit of the sons and daughters of our capital’s wealthy class.
The Academy of Music was to blame for this too, the minister just weak.
However, we have not forgotten Káldy yet. The millennium national holiday has come. The Opera was headed by a man named Nikisch, neither his country nor his homeland as director. He didn’t know a word of Hungarian. It would have been cuddly to go with such a man to celebrate Árpád’s great work in world history, the conquest. Fortunately, the opera’s intendant was Baron Nopcsa, a Transylvanian lord, full of true Hungarian hearts. He chased the stray and Hungarian-hating stray music knight to hell and invited Káldy to head the Opera.-280-
From where he was harassed seven years ago because it was proclaimed that he was not even suitable as a chief director: he was now brought back there with glory and triumph as director, as head of the great institute.
It was a brilliant satisfaction for man and the artist.
He was happy and his sweet wife was happy. The noble daughter of the waist could not have attained this beautiful family happiness. Flowers have been open on sirhalma since several springs.
He came to me to consult over his contract with a soul bursting with joy. He was modest in his needs. He did not want to think that he would have the same salary as a stranger who hated our nation. Yet by then he was well known throughout the country and the appreciation of the nation gave him a beautiful and great name. The far countryside resounded a hundred and a half from Kurucz’s music.
But the people of the Academy of Music and the foreign mocking owls of the opera house greeted Káldy with gnashing of teeth. »Jetzt kommen die Kurutzen!« Now the kurucz are coming to us! That’s how they sighed. The thundering heaven goes around their ears when they hear only the news of Hungarian music. This alien musician race is an amazing race.
The Academy of Music raised this for us.
Káldy was also very disappointed. He experimented with all Hungarian music. He performed some at the Opera. There were or would have been ten or twenty.
But there was no thanks at all.-281-
An earthquake, a flood, a thunderstorm, a Tartar invasion do not destroy the field as much as the ignorant and hostile musicians of the Academy of Music have destroyed the taste of Hungarian music and all the abilities of Hungarian musicians for a generation.
The whole adolescent talented youth was made a Wagner fool.
Wagner music is not national music. It is the individual creation of a talented madman. It is interesting and great in itself, a special neurological disease of our time. It is very similar to opium disease. At times, the patient feels heavenly pleasure, but his body and soul wither away. And the Academy of Music has inoculated this disease into the younger generation of music composers.
There is also a Hungarian direction to music creation, an Italian and a French direction. One is kinder than the other, Hungarian would be the kindest for us. But this is either exterminated or falsified by the Academy of Music.
If Tokaj wine were seasoned with musk and garlic: it would be similar to Wagner’s Hungarian music. Disgusting like the ipecacuanha. The effect is the same.
Poor Káldy found a desert in all recent Hungarian musical works. But the audience also found it. There is hardly a mediocre exception. From the old Hungarian musical works before Wagner, we had to take out the two or three that we have at the height of great music if we wanted to admire national music.
Or we had to turn our backs on the big institute and turn to the good gypsy.-282-
The Academy of Music once again pushed the great Hungarian music back into the gypsy violin and under the eaves of the inn.
And that is why we donate half a million of the state’s money every year to all state music institutes, academies and song theaters.
Will there be deliverance?
There will be!
Then the day of Kaldy really rises.
I will finish my teasing over Káldy. It also spread longer than I thought. I didn’t want to write a professional study or an exhaustive biography. Just to remember when he died, the life and death of one of my faithful friends and one of my faithful, enthusiastic and strong comrades in our struggle for our national affairs, his great work, his glorious merits.
He couldn’t finish his job. Others need to continue and finish it. But who are the others? Have they been born yet? I don’t know anyone who would like Hungarian music, would have such a great knowledge of music and creativity, would feel and see the greatness of the goal so clearly, and would strive to achieve it with such zeal.
He had many enemies intact in the world in which he lived and worked. In the world of musicians.
And he didn’t want to gather enemies. He also sought to disarm his most angry enemies with gentle manners, paternal and brotherly benevolence. On the occasion of the millennium holiday, in Jekelfalussy’s great work, he wrote about Hungarian music and its history, past and present. This literary work is not worth much; not even as a writer -283-he was significant. But in this work he also praises the useless musical teachings of the teachers and students of the Academy of Music. He knew that these were huge people and that ministerial reason only understood them. He didn’t want to be hindered in his work.
I didn’t understand it, I didn’t use it for anything.
Musician world!
Does my gentle reader know the musician? The musician in general, but especially the musician who is now sitting in our country like the fairytale black cat at the end of the carriage stretcher? That we can’t move our car out of the pit forwards or backwards because of it.
The musician is the creation of a strange god. As far as you know, the real musician. The one who is blessed with providence by a musician-mind, or who is holy and convinced for life and death, thinks that he must be a musician.
I don’t want to talk about the gypsy musician and the soldier musician.
The gypsy is born poor and dies poor. No matter how famous a gypsy he is, even though he earns hundreds of thousands in his life, his child is born a beggar and is buried himself or herself at the expense of the city or the village or the gypsies. So even a gypsy musician doesn’t have a vital mind.
But the gypsy musician is not even a fool. In the fight against poverty, misery, deprivation, however, his mind is forced to master some practical thinking as well. There is no way to fill your mind forever with music andalgamation.-284-
There is also a bit of everyday sobriety in the military musician. Military iron discipline does not allow his mind to do anything but vomit a gypsy wheel.
So that’s not what I’m talking about. But about educated and professional musicians. Who are nothing but musicians.
They form three classes. One is the class of great composers, the other is the class of great musicians, and the third is the class of great directors. There is hardly any real difference between these three types of musicians in the composition of their minds. There must even be some difference between their minds, but we can hardly ever notice that.
It’s a strange brain. Let us briefly analyze this.
Music, both as a practical art and as a science, belongs to that part of natural science which we call arithmetic. Arithmetic is included in all arts. Least in poetry. The sizes of the lines, the sections, the rhymes, the longer or shorter syllables and the proportion of their application in poetry cannot escape the intervention of arithmetic, but here they are limited to them. After all, it has a small role to play here. What is most important in the appearance of poetry: the complete coincidence of thought with verse and sentence: there we hardly notice the effect of arithmetic. It has much more influence on the visual arts, the works of painters, builders and sculptors. These-285- in its dimensions and proportions.
In music, the arithmetic is entirely the ur.
Sound has degree, power, and color.
Dividing the sound into whole, half, and less than half; the ascent and descent of sound to the extent that the human ear hears it and can be considered a musical sound; the establishment of a series of dissolved or divided sounds by musicologists, the regulation of transitions, the search for the constituent parts of harmonies, and their purposeful application: all belong to the realm of natural arithmetic.
It also includes determining the volume of sound. The degree of sound depends on the number of waves of air moved by the instrument, and the strength of sound does not depend on the weight of the blows of the waves. The autumn beetle complains in the same degree of sound as the clarinet, but the song of the autumn beetle, when the wind is blowing, is barely heard from five to six steps away, while the sound of the clarinet is heard from a great distance.
The scientific definition of the color of sound was not well understood when I was studying at the papal college. It is true that science did not even stand at such a high degree then as it does now. But I don’t understand perfectly today. That the sound of the trumpet has a different sound than that of the reptile, and that the sound of the violin cannot be confused with the sound of either the harp or the cymbal: I know all this well. From the mouth of Blaháné, the song of the Cherry beetle sounds different than if it were heard from the Prime Minister.-286-This is without a doubt. I read somewhere sometime that a different color of sound is caused by a different shape of the sound wave. Maybe. I’ve never seen a sound wave, so I don’t know its shape in perspective. But if the color of the sound really depends on the shape of the sound wave: then the wizarding power of number and size must also be there in the formation of the waveform.
But I’m no longer wise. Scientists should bother with this question and we should not. It is enough for us to know that many essential parts of phonology and musicology are completely related to natural arithmetic.
Number – number: this is the main thing here.
Because the number in moderation is a superior nutrient to the young mind. From her, she swells, becomes stronger, harder, faster and more cheerful from her and will slowly become able to give birth to smart thinking and develop a normal character for the young and adult man.
But if we vomit the number out of measure and without rest on the mind, the mind is either distracted or set aside. Nothing spoils the developing mind like number.
There are miraculous babies in whom any part of the body grows badly or grows aside. A two-headed child, a legless infant, a bisexual newborn, a bearded girl and more.
But there are wonderful babies whose brains are outgrown.
Such are those who, by the age of eight or nine, were great numerologists, great music virtuosos, great chess players. -287-If only one of these hundreds becomes usable, it is a great luck. He dies before ninety-nine times or by the time he grows up: he becomes quite stupid. Either his mind or character will be atrophied.
I used to be a famous person and my happy parents came to me many times to show me their prodigy. They really introduced prodigies. Who could count better from the head than all the famous teachers of the Technical University and could play the piano better than the musicians of the Royal Academy of Music.
It didn’t happen at all. Either he died early or he fell asleep in both thought and character.
Such a child of counting, playing chess, and music must be prevented at all costs from engaging in the science of miracles. If you have the ability to music: you have to take it a hundred miles away from all the music and instruments and occupy your mind with other work.
Maybe that’s how his distorted brain will be repaired and he will become a human being.
And if you still want to thrive in music: only get started late, after the age of eighteen. When his brain is already strong enough, constant one-sided occupation does not make him sick.
I believe there are exceptions. I know that both Beethoven and Liszt Ferencz were prodigy, both of them did great things and neither of them became fools.
But none of it was far from foolishness. In his old age, Beethoven’s brain was also paralyzed in many respects,-288-Throughout his life, Liszt was a man whom the Hungarian people called whimsical. Dreamy, dreamy, self-admiring, ostentatious to the unconscious, not staying in place, moving forever, hiding from one country to another, squandering money, not caring about wealth and home and happy family life.
Every musician is more, less eccentric, half-hearted and whimsical. His one-sided occupation transforms his brain enough to be like that.
Of course, not all are born prodigies. But the fact that some secret of nature distorts the brain even before birth: the uninterrupted one-sided occupation can distort the brain born intact. Especially when dealing with numbers and music.
Look at the engineers. There are many so-called smart people among them. Among those who regularly dealt with more than just the number and extent. But the engineer who, from the time of his studies, has done only an engineering job with great zeal and uninterruptedness, will later become half-nailed, back-thinking, insensitive to a thousand kinds of noble objects. There are hardly any exceptions. Among the people who had lived so far, Newton had the strongest brain and deepest thinking. But he was almost alone in calculation. And because of this, his divine brain also went crazy later.
But just look at the music learner.
He beats his fingers on the piano fifty times in a second. If five hours of teaching and practice per day-289- we count: then it hit the rocker nearly a quarter of a hundred million times in a year. By the age of twenty, a number will emerge that is only used in astronomy. Every punch is done with the muscles of your finger. Muscles are tied to the brain with some nerve fiber, the will starts from the brain to strike, so some part of the brain does the same job almost a million times a day.
So that there would be no outgrowth and distortion in that part of the brain? And the proportion of the brain that grows in one part: it decreases, paralyzes, and atrophy in the other part.
Even the violinist gets in a worse condition than the pianist. On the piano, the whole and halved sounds are ready, but not on the violin. Here the artist must find the necessary sound with special care and skill. His attention, then, must be somewhat more alert than that of the pianist.
Perception, observation of the outside world, objective thinking, comparing oneself with others, one’s strength with relationships, in a word, the musician lacks judgment. His feeling, his thinking and his instrument: this is his world. There is no more dreamy, hiub, lighter and more sensitive person than a musician.
Naturally, the musician is stubborn in his views and konok in his decisions. You can’t reason with him. He does not accept or accept an argument. Either lying on his back or horse-running for the day. Order, degree, position-290-he knows nothing. He must be kept under guardianship and custody until his death.
There are exceptions, but very few. There are quite a few among the great virtuosos. Put together the lives of great authors, great players, and great directors in detail, and then you have before you such a rich collection of whimsical minds that you have no idea yet. But there are no psychiatric gentlemen either.
Such musicians surrounded Káldy and still surround the minister today. Those who are also strangers are Germans, Czechs and Hungarian music haters. And who are not even virtuosos.
So they don’t even have that excuse.
