Remember This

I can’t write music, so I’ve always composed my songs by whistling. I play piano with one hand only, the left one, ‘cause with my right hand I keep time. I conduct myself. As for my singing, my boss puts it this way, “Little Seress, you’ve got a voice, you just can’t sing.” They call me Little Seress because when I sit down behind the piano I pretty much disappear behind it. I’ve been making music for 43 years. I include the four years in forced labour camp and the eight years the Communists banned me from playing. I include them because even then I had all of my songs inside me. The very first time I sat down behind a piano I knew I was home. This is what I wanted. What amazes me most after all these years - even now in 1966 when my music’s not exactly the fashion any more - is that I managed to pull it off.

People still remember Gloomy Sunday. That was my song. Billie Holiday had a big hit with it in 1941. Louis Armstrong sang it. Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Josephine Baker, Sarah Vaughn, Ray Charles. They sang it all over Europe too. They recorded it in China and Japan, even somewhere in Africa. 28 languages it’s been translated into, at least. People came from all over the world to hear me play. Toscanini and Visconti from Italy, Otto Klemperer from Berlin. Louis Armstrong! Even Spencer Tracy and John Steinbeck came from Hollywood. All this because of one song. All this from the old ghetto of Budapest.    

I think what made Gloomy Sunday such a big hit was the times we were living in. I wrote it in 1933. The Nazis had just come to power. We were all recovering from one world war and already we could smell another one coming. The chords at the start, they really set the tone. I work those high octave keys for emotion. As for the words, I didn’t write them. I mean I did, originally, but mine were considered too bleak. You can’t tell people, “Love is dead”. You can’t say, “The world has ended”. You can’t take away people’s hope. It isn’t right. Maybe the doctors can, or the Nazis, but not the musicians, not the poets. People come to us for hope, for relief. So we went with Jávor’s lyrics. I wouldn’t go so far as to call his version optimistic, it was still my song after all, but he made it more personal. People could relate to it because everyone’s had a broken heart before, and everyone loves a love song, ‘cause even when it’s love gone wrong, it’s still love.

No one in Hungary has ever had an international hit like me. Not Feri Lehár and not Feri Liszt either. They invited me to Paris and New York. I didn’t go. Even before the war I wasn’t big on traveling, but after the war I didn’t want to go anywhere. I just wanted my piano, my audience. It’s not just all the unknowns when you travel, it’s the trains and aeroplanes which scare the hell outta me. Boats are the pits. After I’ve been on one of those Danube barges my bed rocks for days. I don’t even like buses or trams, that kind of bone shake I can do without. I never take the metro because the thought of being underground sends me into a spin. I rarely even go to Buda. This is where I wrote my songs, so this is home. Kispipa is only two blocks away. The food is best not spoken about and they don’t clean the place too often, but every night that’s where I play.

The royalties never quite panned out. Maybe I should have gone to New York? But to hell with the money, everyone’s poor here. What really gets me though is that I’m going to be defined by that song, and its ugly wake too. When it started getting attention in the ‘30s and ‘40s there were all these stories in the papers about people who committed suicide clutching the score to Gloomy, supposedly. Then the Americans dubbed it “The Hungarian Suicide Song”. Personally, I blame Ray Ventura. He was the one that started this whole business. They say that in Paris, in ’36, every night before he played my song, he’d read out all these lies to the audience. How many people died in Reykjavik when they heard my song and how many in Rome. Then, as if that wasn’t enough, after the first verse, the drummer would get up and shoot himself in the head with a starter pistol! Talk about a bunch of posers! The thing is no one can control what happens to their songs. Music travels, and don’t I know it, but rumours, once they get started, they travel more.

I used to print up song lists and hand them out to the audience so that they’d know I’d written other songs too, but they always wanted Gloomy Sunday. I guess that without meaning to or wanting to it seems I captured what they call the spirit of the times. Gloom. Doom. Lost love. Love I don’t mind, even lost love I don’t mind. But that kind of love, the kind that kills you and you kill yourself for, I don’t want to be remembered for that.

The other night someone in the audience asked me what my favourite song is and I said, Let’s Love Each Other Peeps. Hands down. That was a big hit for me too. I wrote it the year before Gloomy, in 1932, and that year the whole country sang it.

Let’s love each other peeps,

the heart is the greatest treasure.

In all the wide world,

Love is the grandest pleasure.

The melody is sweet as a good liqueur, the words too, most of them anyway. It’s the sense of urgency that makes it so timeless. Let’s love each other right now, ‘cause it’s all so damn fleeting. I’ve started opening and closing every set with Let’s Love Each Other Peeps. I like to sing it on my way to work and on my way back home. I whisper it to myself like a prayer, as if it mattered. As if the right song really could change something. Remember this. ◊

"Remember This" was first published by Tell Magazine, Sydney, June-August 2018