Zoltán Farkas

The Ballad of the Amorous Sun

A Kurtág Premiere in Cluj

 

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Among several variants of the colinda, Kurtág picked the fullest and the most poetic. In one variant, for instance, the story comes to a brutal end after the second trial. When the two characters reach the middle of the bridge spanning heaven and the sea, the Sun’s sister exclaims: “Great Sun, I will throw myself down to the bottom of the sea, on the cliffs, in the darkness with the fishes, rather than be your whore!” Or else a great King woos his sister Solomia (Salomé!) and wants the holy Sun and Moon as witnesses at the wedding. The Sun and Moon duly appear, but at that very moment the earth splits in four. Yet another version has God himself preventing the priest from blessing an incestuous union.

Colindã-Baladã is scored for tenor solo, double chorus and an instrumental ensemble consisting of viola, cello, clarinet, bass clarinet, horn, trumpet, trombone and percussion (including the toaca, the traditional wooden board used in orthodox monasteries). Kurtág’s music narrates the story, comments on it and illustrates it, and the musical form observes the repetitions in the plot. Therefore, one gets the illusion that there is much in the music itself that can be recounted in words.

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Zoltán Farkas,
is a musicologist and music critic. He was a fellow at the Institute of Musicology of the
Hungarian Academy of Sciences between 1987 and 2006, specializing in
18th-century church music and contemporary Hungarian music. Since 2006 he has
been director of MR3-Radio Bartók, the classical music channel of Hungarian Radio.