Székelyfonó

Székelyfonó (The Spinning Room) is a one-act theatre piece with music by Zoltán Kodály from Hungarian folk songs. The work is described as ‘Daljáték egy felvonásban’, folk songs in one act. First created in 1924 as a short cabaret with a small accompanying orchestral ensemble, Kodály expanded the work, with mime but without dialogue for a full production at the Royal Hungarian Opera House, Budapest in 1932. The songs and dances are taken from Transylvanian folk music, and include spinning choruses and musical pictures representing death, burial, betrothal and marriage folk-rituals. The work is sometimes referred to as The Transylvanian Spinning Room in English.

After the 1924 performances Kodály wrote "through hearing these songs in the concert hall I realized that, torn from their natural environment they are scarcely intelligible. The whole purpose of my present experiment was to attempt to display them in a living unity with the life from which they have sprung..." Kodály continued "Székelyfonó is not an experiment in opera"; Eösze describes it, with its 27 songs, ballads, dances and musical games, as a dramatic rhapsody or operatic folk-ballad.

In his first stage work, Háry János, Kodály had used the layout of musical 'numbers' with solos, duets, and choruses and spoken dialogue in between. In the final version of Székelyfonó orchestral bridge passages link some of the numbers. The music consists mostly of Transylvanian folk melodies whose words suggest action, although the nature of the work is more that of a scenic cantata. The piece might also be described as "a mimed action to vocal, choral and orchestral accompaniment" and is in some ways reminiscent of Stravinsky’s Les Noces. The work came a year after Kodaly's first major success with Psalmus Hungaricus, and along with the Székely folk material contains "lush chromaticism and rigorous contrapuntal devices".

The first performance of Székelyfonó took place at the Royal Hungarian Opera House in Budapest on 24 April 1932, when it was warmly received. It was the first Hungarian operatic work to be produced in Italy (as La Filanda Magiara) in Milan on 14 January 1933, and was broadcast from London on 26 May 1933 with the composer conducting. It was produced in Brunswick (in German) on 9 February 1938. A semi-staged version was produced at the 1982 Buxton Festival, a recording of which was broadcast in January 1983 by BBC Radio 3. A new production by Michał Znaniecki, conducted by Kocsár Balázs, was mounted at the Hungarian State Opera in October 2016.

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Wikipedia