Memory and remembrance

Arany János’s Song Collection (1874)

Abstract

The most important document of Arany János’s musical knowledge is the manuscript score he compiled at the request of his friend, musicologist and composer Bartalus István, between approximately 1871 and 1874. Its main purpose was to record melodies from his childhood and youth for the Universal Collection of Hungarian Folk Songs, which was based on Bartalus’s collecting trips and earlier manuscripts copied by him. The seven-volume series included only selected and reworked material from Arany. At the same time, the manuscript parallels the concept of the Hungarian Folk Poetry Collection, which was also produced with the participation of the Arany family. From this perspective, the Song Collection is the background material for a scientific and artistic series of publications. However, its compiler did not only follow academic considerations, but above all sought to exploit his own memory as deeply as possible, since he collected the songs himself, and the recorded songs are deeply connected to his own poetic oeuvre in terms of form and poetics. While the manuscript is a subjective musical and textual document on the one hand, on the other hand it preserves the memories of several communities: Nagyszalonta, Debrecen, and part of Nagykőrös, and more broadly, the imprint of Hungarian public culture in the Partium region. His repertoire ranges from family memories to Hungarian poems published in the 1830s and quickly set to music (Vörösmarty, Kölcsey, Bajza), and in this respect, too, it goes beyond a collection of personal memories.

The scientific processing of this unique source is linked to the Academy. The manuscript is preserved in the MTA KIK Manuscript Library, and its first critical edition was published in 1952, edited by Kodály Zoltán and Gyulai Ágost.