Gloomy Sunday: Part Three

Andre Kertesz, Budapest, 1914, © Estate of Andre Kertesz, glass plate, photograph from ArtStack

July 2018

He was born Rudi Spitzer in Józsefváros in 1889, in a lively, eclectic Pesht neighbourhood populated by writers, artists, the more successful Gypsy musicians and the less successful Jews. A few blocks in from the Ringroad were the giant Ganz carriage works. Early on, Rudi changed his name to Rezső Seress. It was a time when Jews in Hungary changed their names, and that kinda time has still not entirely ended in Hungary. I’m going to call him Rez for the sake of readability. So Rez dropped out of high school just after the turn of the new century and ran away to join the circus. He was small so he began training to be a trapeze artist. The circus director thought it laughable that this ugly, little upstart Jew wanted to be a ringside entertainer. So up to the gods it was for Rez, but a bad fall from up high quickly put an end to his circus days. He survived, but he would be on crutches for months after that. A chance meeting in a pub with a friend led Rez to his next life gig: acting. When he went to audition at Madame Szidi Rákosi’s drama school on his crutches, she looked the little 156 centimetre Jewboy up and down and sceptically asked,

“What do you want to be?”

“Do you have any parts for bon vivants?” Rez answered, “Or maybe for a dancing comic?”

He wasn’t tall, or handsome, or born under the right star, but Rez had chutzpah. He found work in small country theatres and in various demi-monde Pesht dives with dubious variety shows and rarely sober clientele. For nine years he eked out an existence at Műszin in the City Park where he was paid in the ticket sales of the last row of the theatre, which more often than not was empty. Rez’s one consolation was that the theatre director would let him play the piano when it wasn’t being used. So Rez would sit in the theatre wings, behind the dormant stage scenery and play a few tunes to himself. It was the early 1920s and around this time Rez started experimenting with song writing.

When the theatre director realised Rez could actually play, he hauled the piano out onto the street, sat Rez down behind it and told him to bang out some tunes and drum up some business for the place if he wanted to eat this week. At first he was shy about playing in public, much less playing his own songs, but little by little he found his voice, and he found that it was liked. He didn’t know how to write music, but that didn’t stop him from composing, which he did by whistling. In 1925 he published his first song, “One More Night…” As part of the punitive Treaty of Trianon from 1920 (the post-WWI peace agreement between the Allies and Hungary), the manufacturing or selling of recorded music was forbidden in order to stamp out military propaganda.  But by 1925 the local recording scene was picking up. Rez’s timing was good. His song was a hit. He sold 18,000 copies. Overnight Rez went from penniless street performer to respected composer/pianist with a steady job in a warm restaurant and a paying audience. For the first time in his life Rez had a stable existence. What followed were ten years of intensely prolific composition. Between 1923 and 1933 Rez wrote more than 60 songs and the lyrics to 40 others, working with some of the best musicians of his day. He became famous, a fixture of Budapest nightlife, known as much for his songs as for his smoky voice, one-handed playing and bon vivant charm. He married too, above his station, one might say. Helen Jászonyi was a Christian woman with an army officer husband and Rez was two heads her junior. This was also the time when “Gloomy Sunday” started becoming a worldwide sensation. It was 1936, Hitler had been in power for three years already and war was coming to Europe once again.

Rez, circa 1930s, at the height of his success

 From 1938 onwards widespread anti-Jewish laws came into affect in Hungary. Top- down anti-Semitism became the norm. On his way home from work one night Rez was severely beaten. Then in 1941 the military police knocked on his door and took him away to a forced labour camp for the next four years of his life. Most of the Jews and other political prisoners there were either worked to death or died from privation. His survival was in part due to a music-loving Nazi officer who’d seen him play at Kulacs in Pesht. In 1945 he came home minus a kidney to find his wife living with another man and that his beloved mother had been murdered in a Ukrainian forced labour camp. Post-war Budapest was a bombed out place of scarcity and trauma. The people needed music more than ever before. Rez soon found work and his audience again. He was reunited with his beloved piano, and eventually with his wife too. Existence was tough, but so was Rez. The audience paid however they could to hear him play, some nights it was potatoes and onions, other times it was just flint, but worse was yet to come. In late summer 1947 the Communists stole the country’s parliamentary elections by severely rigging the vote. With that veneer of legitimacy they proceeded to establish a ruthless Stalinist dictatorship. Rez’s music was banned. His songs did not glorify the revolution. The ban would not be lifted until two years after Stalin’s death. During that wasteland of time, “Gloomy Sunday” continued to be recorded and performed across the globe. The publishing company that had originally released “Gloomy” had folded after the war and with the establishment of Communism, Hungary was cut off from the U.S. market. Rez had no way of retrieving his royalties.

When the terrible ban was lifted in 1954 Rez found work at Kispipa in the VII district of Pesht, just down the road from where he used to play before the war. Twenty years on and his audience still remembered him and his music. Perhaps it was this sense of continuity that made him so popular again. In a country that had endured so many upheavals Rez was living proof that not everything changed. The songs were the same. The eternal themes were the same: love, heartbreak, happiness, inevitable sorrow. Maybe the voice was now more croaky than smoky, but outwardly Rez appeared as he always had, neatly dressed in his one good suit, smiling, joking, seducing his audience with bonhomie and charm. But Rez had become a man who jumped at the sound of doorbells and the sight of uniforms. He lived a quiet life of simplicity and discipline, perhaps it was even a circumscribed life, but who’s to say? Too poor to be able to afford a piano, he had the keys of the piano painted onto his kitchen table. Every afternoon before work, which was two blocks from his home, Rez would practice, but his muse never came to him again, and there would be no more new songs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vncAr6BSRE

An original recording of Rezso Seress singing his song Szomoru Vasarnap/Gloomy Sunday, circa 1930s, © Estate of Rezso Seress

In 1956, Hungary was galvanized by new hope when the Hungarian Revolution broke out. Hungary was the first of the Soviet bloc countries to rebel against the despised yoke. The Revolution looked set to succeed when the Politburo announced that they were willing to negotiate a withdrawal of Soviet troops from Hungary, but then they changed their minds and invaded the country instead. Over 2,500 civilians were killed, 700 Soviet troops also lost their lives. 200,000 Magyars fled the country. What followed was a brutal consolidation of Soviet power, sending a powerful message to all the other satellite states. The Reds installed their man János Kádár who would become one of the longest serving Soviet-era leaders. With Moscow’s permission the economic and cultural reins were eventually loosened in an attempt to appease the grieving nation and experiment with a softer version of Communism, a.k.a. Goulash Communism. A degree of privatisation was allowed and consumer goods entered the country more freely. Transistor radios, records, televisions, all became part of Hungarian life, as did rock ‘n’ roll. They would spell the end for Rez.

Rez at Kispipa circa early 1960s?, photograph taken from Kotta.info

 Throughout most of the ‘60s Rez hung in at Kispipa playing his songs. With his dwindling audience and increasingly hoarse voice he sometimes seemed to be singing to himself, as if in a trance. He still had a smile and a story for anyone who would listen, but whereas once there had been such a contradiction between the bon vivant composer and his dark creations, now that gap seemed to be closing. His downstairs neighbour, Gábor Presser (who would go on to become a famous musician himself), would later tell this story about Rez:

“I remember, he always used to listen to ‘Gloomy Sunday’, every day, precisely between 2 and 6, one version of the song after another.”

It was as if the tragic, melancholy logic of that song was finally closing in on him. In June 1968 Rez threw himself off his balcony, only to survive the fall. He was rushed to hospital but a few days later he succeeded in his aim. He strangled himself with the wire that was holding his busted up limbs in place. He was 69 years old.

Kispipa, the restaurant where Rez played for the last 14 years of his life now seems to be closed, but in late 2015 it was still open and I went to see the place for myself. It was practically empty, decidedly grotty, the food was woeful and the waiter’s shoe was tied up with a piece of string. The only other table was a group of Jewish roots tourists who’d been suckered into coming as Kispipa is/was in the heart of what is still known as the ghetto. There was a pianist, as fagged and dreary as the place itself, who banged out a few of Rez’s old tunes with about as much verve as the cook who made my catfish stew. Presiding over it all was a lit portrait of Rez looking young and intense, looking like the serious musician he was. “Gloomy Sunday” continues to be recorded around the world. In Hungary Rez’s songs continue to be taught, played and sung. They are part of Hungary’s musical patrimony. Books, films and plays have been written about Rez, his music and that song. Rez was never interested in strategizing or in the dictates of the mind. Had he been that way inclined he might have chased those royalties that were his due, he might even have left home. But that wasn’t Rez’s way. He preferred his piano, his audience and his music to everything else. To be daily connected to what was human and eternal: love, heartbreak, happiness, elusive, slippery happiness. ◊