Alan E. Williams

Dezső Tandori Set to Music

 

...
Dezső Tandori is an extraordinarily prolific creative mind; he has been active as poet, prose writer, translator and graphic artist. Perhaps as a result of this feverish pace of activity, he has a reputation for reclusiveness similar to that of Kurtág. His subjects are wide-ranging and idiosyncratic, ranging from translations of Adorno to children's stories, and his career has been accompanied by obsessive interests in horse-racing and birds. He has edited catalogues of visual arts exhibitions, and made significant contributions to the understanding of philosophers such as Wittgenstein in Hungary. Such wide-ranging interests give Tandori a connection with many creative artists and intellectuals.
Yet it is really in Tandori's first two volumes of poetry that we find the majority of his influence on composers. The first publication of Tandori's original work, as opposed to translation, occurred in 1968, with his verse collection Töredék Hamletnek (Fragment for Hamlet). One of the poems in this collection provides the title for László Sáry's 1979 piece dedicated to Tandori, Koan Bel Canto; and Kurtág sets this same poem, as well as seven others from that collection in his opus 23 choruses to Tandori's verse. Tandori's next collection, which originally appeared in 1973, was Egy talált tárgy megtisztítása (Cleaning an Objet Trouvé), and it was this volume on which Tandori's early reputation as a poet is largely based. Jeney first came across Egy talált tárgy megtisztítása in 1971, when the volume was still in manuscript form. Jeney did not at that time know Tandori, but later, in around 1974, Tandori himself sought Jeney out.1 It provides the texts for Kurtág's op.12 Eszká-emlékzaj (S.K. Remembrance Noise, 1975), as well as the form to Jeney's Orfeusz kertje (Orpheus' Garden, 1974), and Arthur Rimbaud a sivatagban (Arthur Rimbaud in the Desert, 1976). Further connections with Tandori's Egy talált tárgy megtisztítása can be found in a number of other pieces: Jeney's Végjáték (Endgame, 1973), which uses the idea of chess notation as structuring idea for music. His A leaf falls-brackets to e.e. cummings (1975), derives its title from Tandori's poem "Halottas urna két füle e.e. cummings gyűjteményéből" (The Two Handles of the Funeral Urn from e.e. cummings' Private Collection): the "poem" consists of this:

)
(

And Sáry's Kotyogó kő egy korsóban (Pebble Playing in a Pot, 1978) also takes its title from one of the poems in this same collection.
The musical results of all these settings and references are extremely disparate: Kurtág's Nyolc kórus (Eight Choruses, op. 23) for example, share the same dense emotionality of his Russian settings, such as the Ommagio a Luigi Nono (op.16) which immediately preceded the composition of his Tandori choruses. On the other hand, Sáry's and Jeney's Tandori references result in pieces which avoid intentional expression altogether. Moreover, only one of Jeney's pieces - Világnyelv (World Language, the second of his 1985 collection 12 Songs) actually sets a Tandori text in the traditional way, and this carries a dedication to Kurtág, suggesting a sort of hommage to the older composer. The other Tandori references by Jeney and Sáry either use the title of a Tandori poem as a poetic image from which to start, or borrow some structural idea, which allows the composer's individual expression to be minimised. Thus both the means and the end results of the influence of Tandori on Hungarian music in the 1970's are very varied, so the answers to the question posed above-namely why it was that there was such a strong, if short lived, interest in Tandori's work, in the mid to late 1970's, and why it was restricted to this group of composers-will also yield disparate answers.
Undoubtedly, Tandori's status as merely (or barely) "tolerated", unofficial poet, was appealing to the New Music Studio, whose members had a distinctly anti-authoritarian attitude. After the publication of Tandori's first volume, it took several years before his second was published. Tandori himself describes this period as his "prohibition".2 Similarly, his experimental approach to language and to form must have appealed to a group predicated on the notion of experiment in music. But there are other reasons, connected with the philosophical content of Tandori's work which made his work appeal to the New Music Studio. On the other hand, the reasons for Kurtág's interest probably lie more closely with one particular strand in Tandori's work, the short, aphoristic forms. It is this aspect that I shall discuss first.

The aphorism, the fragment, the koan and the haiku

Anyone familiar with Kurtág's work will not be surprised at his choice of texts for his 1975 work, Eszká-emlékzaj (op.12). These seven pieces, which predate the works explicitly termed "fragments" from the 1980's, have forms that could variously be described as "aphoristic" or "fragmentary", or a mixture between the two. The unfinished, asymmetrical quality of the fragment should be contrasted with the symmetrical balancing of opposites, or the "sting in the tail" form of the aphorism. In a previous article for this journal, I have described this as the contrast between Kurtág's "closed" and "open" forms. In the first of the set, A damaszkuszi út (The Road to Damascus), the text is a fragment:

Now, when it's just the same, as always,
It is high time that.

The music, on the other hand, is a closed form-in the sense that it reaches a sense of completion, with the opening chord on the open strings recapitulated at the end, and the chromatic line leading to a D/A open fifth.
On the other hand, Kavafisz-haiku, the fourth of the set, leaves the tonality, at least, open, although there is an element of recapitulation of the opening diad (G sharp/A). The text, on the other hand, is a closed form, and with its sting in the tail, takes the form of an aphorism:

Already half past two!
How quickly a year has passed.

The third of the set, Két sor a "tekercs"-ből (Two Lines from "Tape") is closed in both music and text as I showed in a previous article, but these lines have been selected by Kurtág for this very quality from a much longer, and more disparate, poem. The search for formal balance, for the perfection of form with limited means that is in evidence in some movements by Kurtág is also the intention behind some of Tandori's early verse, called koans. A koan is a short story or epigram used for teaching purposes in Zen Buddhism, and is meant to unsettle and provoke further thought. Tandori's koans, on the other hand, which he wrote during the middle years of the 1960's strive for a formal balance between tightly controlled terms:

When I wrote my first koan in 1964, I did not believe that it was poetry. I even asked someone if it was. Here is Koan 1 itself:

Further from you?
Closer to you?
Neither from you nor to you.
Neither near or far.

It was possible to bring this material (consisting of few elements) to a state of perfection, better than a chess problem.

Traditional Zen koans do not reveal this formal balancing: the source for this is more likely to have been Sándor Weöres, many of whose works show this same kind of symmetry.
In Tandori's hands, the koan form resembles another Far Eastern form, the haiku. The closeness of the haiku form to the aphorism in Hungarian literature has been noted by Judit Vihar:

One of the basic genres of this poetry is aphoristic haiku, which has a philosophical message. Hungarian poets find, in the shortness of haiku, a trait similar to epigrams; consequently, this gives their original haiku-poetry philosophic content.

There are two Tandori haikus in Kurtág's work: Kavafisz-haiku, from Eszká-emlékzaj, and Ars Poetica, the last song from his opus 22 Seven Songs. This haiku by Kobayashi Issa appears in a volume of haiku translations by Tandori, published in 1981 and under the title Egy japán haiku versnapló (A Japanese Haiku Poem-Diary). As these songs were written in 1982, it seems likely that Kurtág read this volume.
The title Ars Poetica is given by Kurtág himself, and the text seems to be an ironic comment on the slowness and difficulty with which Kurtág writes:

Csak lassan, szépen;
Gondosan mászd meg, csiga
A Fuji hegyét.

Slowly, steadily,
Carefully climb, snail,
Up Mount Fuji.

It is possible to see Kurtág attempting to portray something of the "twist" of the last line in the perfect fifth which Kurtág sets the first syllable of "Fuji", suddenly removing us from the painstaking chromatic climb the piece has been hitherto.
Kurtág's op. 23 Nyolc Kórus Tandori Dezső verseire (Eight Choruses to Poems by Dezső Tandori) move away from the structural principle of responding to the form of the koan or the haiku. While the first two choruses, which set Tandori's Koans III and I, reflect the form of the text quite closely, the third chorus, which sets Koan II, introduces a familiar technique of choral writing, the repetition of text. Lines such as "tükrökben jár a szél" are repeated over and over, while Kurtág extracts in other parts vowels from this line: "ü á ő é". This points to an interest in expansion of scale into a massed, rather than chamber medium. This interest in the textural qualities of the massed choir sound is more akin to his other choir pieces, which had Russian texts: Ommaggio a Luigi Nono (op.16) and the Songs of Sorrow and Despair (eÂOIË UI?IË? Ë őÂ~?ÎËË, op. 18), which were both started around 1980, the year before the composition of the majority of the eight Tandori choruses.
Other elements creep in too: the fourth chorus is subtitled "Hallgató nóta", a style of dance or singalong music played at weddings. Here the rhythm of the first line of turns what in the original verse was a line of four stresses (anapastic tetrameter) into a traditional Hungarian folk song rhythmic pattern that we find in songs such as "Erdő, erdő de magas a teteje" (Forest, Forest, how high your Canopy). Although this is by no means the most characteristic feature of the chorus, it is striking in a composer who only rarely makes reference to Hungarian folk music. It should perhaps be heard in the same vein as the references to other "earthy" musics in Eszká-emlékzaj (Eszká Remembrance Noise), such as the waltz in "Kant-emlékzaj" (Remembrance Noise, no. 2), or the "Blues style" in Kavafisz-haiku (no. 4). Perhaps there is a paradoxical tendency in Kurtág, which leads him to choose texts for their purity of form, and then introduces an "impure" element to them.

 

 

Alan E. Williams
is a composer and Head of Music at the University of Salford. He studied in Edinburgh and Manchester and at the Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music, Budapest. His research is
principally in composition and contemporary music, as well as Hungarian music and culture.