The joy of freedom
“Strings in the earth and air / Make music sweet; / Strings by the river where / The willows meet.” One could imagine a Monteverdi madrigal melody accompanying this verse from the Chamber Music cycle by James Joyce. The poem’s delicate flute and lute parts evoke in my mind the open-eyed wonder of infants on discovering something new: the world is still full of gods; branches and clouds live; a caress has a taste; sight has a sound: sensation is still whole and free, not broken into fragmentary experiences.
I look on chamber music as a kind of unbounded space – all in a singularity. Just as the body is incapable of sealing within it emotions, so, too, musical notes always leak from an enclosed space, through gaps in the doors and windows, flowing out onto the street. For many years I passed houses out of which the constant sound of music filtered: pianos and wind instruments of the Óvár music school in Cluj-Napoca, or later on the mystery of snatches of arias wafting from behind the closed windows of the Budapest Opera House. Even today they live in my ear, conjuring up smells, places, tastes. The memory of the Cluj-Napoca school chamber choir, conducted by a most excellent headmistress, evokes even stronger sensations and emotions. There I could gratify the turbulent sentiments of adolescence. Joy, love and weltschmerz reverberated and whispered in the heart-piercingly beautiful madrigals. We lived through a brutal dictatorship, frequently we had no electricity, but during choral rehearsals the arches of the old school building glimmering in the candlelight took us back several centuries to an age when it was permitted to sing freely in Hungarian.
György Dragomán and Anna Szabó T. (Photo: Gábor Valuska)
Later on, in Budapest, I learned the motto of another fine school in Eötvös College: ‘The spirit serves freely’. I sensed this free service in Cluj-Napoca as well, where earthbound humility and discipline are required for the pure sounding and the heavenly joy of singing, but humility and discipline of a kind totally different from that demanded of us by the harsh military system. In the choir, form was not the purpose but rather a means in the interest of the total enjoyment of a joint creation. Amidst the severe walls where by day we lived in distress and at the mercy of others, we found true freedom in the afternoons because we were surrounded by love, and love directed us. In the end, the awful sounding brass and tinkling cymbal of marches did not dominate, but rather heavenly harmony. (Goethe’s choir of young boys comes to mind: “Hands now entwining, / Joyfully circling round, / Soaring and singing / With sacred feeling’s sound.”) To live something voluntarily and for joy was a rare gift at that time. My life was filled with much, much more music after this: there was the King’s Singers mania, the municipal choir in Szombathely (I sang with them for three years), a bit of Mozart, headphones-Walkman, later cassette music in America (where we discovered the Chanticleer chamber choir and Mexican Baroque church music, which we listened to a thousand times), a ton of Telemann (primarily musique de table; Telemann was also in evidence at our wedding), then back in Hungary the totally amateur, improvised home music for recorder, Irish flute, guitar, tambourine, shaman drum and even synthesizer. But everything I know about the joy and freedom of chamber music I learned in Cluj-Napoca, in the marvellous madrigal choir of Katalin Halmos.
Anna Szabó T.