Kodály: Dances of Galánta

Zoltán Kodály (1882-1967)

Dances of Galánta


Kodály spent his childhood in the Hungarian countryside. His father worked as a station master for the State Rail Company at a number of small town stations, including between 1885 and 1892 the small town of Galánta, then part of the Kingdom of Hungary, now Slovakia. Kodály’s first musical experiences came care of his parents - his father played the violin, while his mother sang and played piano - and also through the elementary school he attended in Galánta. Here he heard the traditional folk songs of the region sung by his classmates. Kodály retained fond memories of this time; he described it as “the best seven years of my childhood.” When he set out on the first of his folk song-collecting trips, it was to Galánta that he went.


Kodály composed Dances of Galánta in 1933 for the 80th anniversary of the Budapest Philharmonic Society. It was written in part as a sequel to an earlier work, Dances of Marosszék, a piano suite which he had recently orchestrated. Dances of Galánta takes most of its themes from a collection of Hungarian songs published in Vienna in the early 19th century. It makes particular use of the themes and structures of verbunkos music: recruiting tunes associated with the Magyar tribes who were the forerunners of the modern Hungarian people. Thus a slow opening section precedes and intersperses a sequence of four fast dances, with a final reminiscence of the slow music just before the music hurtles towards its coda.


The dances, along with the set from Marosszék, were used as the basis for a ballet presented by the Budapest Opera in 1935. The ballet’s failure was certainly nothing to do with the music; one reviewer remarked that its story was “obviously written by someone who was unable either to understand the music or to adapt himself to the requirements of the choreographer.”

Kodály’s remarks about Dances of Marosszék could apply equally to Galánta: “The Hungarian Dances composed by Brahms are typical of urban Hungary around 1860, and were in the main based on the work of composers that were still living. My Dances... have their roots in a much more remote past, and represent a fairyland that has disappeared.”