There was something else in those eyes, too, something indefinably wild and exotic, and it scared me a little. We hadn’t known each other long, yet here we were, moving as one, she responding to my every touch My clumsiness and inexperience were no problem for Viktoria. She knew exactly what she was doing and she did it wonderfully well. That time it ended badly: after careering blindly at full gallop down a Worcestershire lane, I’d ended up in a hedge. I thought I should explain my chequered equestrian past to Miklos, who was leading me out to ride on Hungary’s Great Plain – the puszta – and found his response less than reassuring: “Don’t worry – no hedges on the puszta.” I hadn’t come to Hungary for the horses so much as the music. What really interested me was Hungarian folk music, which has been woven into the work not only of the famous Hungarian composers, Liszt and Bartok, but also Beethoven, Haydn and especially Brahms, with his Hungarian Dances.
Somewhere in the depths of the countryside, I hoped I might be able to trace some of this music back to its source.So I was very fortunate, while in Budapest, to meet Dr Iren Lovasz, who combines an academic career as an ethnomusicologist with one as a highly successful folk singer. As Bartok did 100 years before her, Dr Lovasz has travelled throughout the Magyar-speaking world, from the marches of Slovakia to the heart of Transylvania, collecting traditional songs from towns and villages, many of which she has recorded.In Hungary, as everywhere, traditional musical forms are under threat from globalising pop. Dr Lovasz told me about her latest project, a collaboration with a local jazz fusion ensemble called Makam, which involves pairing traditional lyrics and melodies with new settings, incorporating influences from Czech bluegrass to Estonian and Tibetan sacred music.I wondered whether she wasn’t in danger of diluting the very tradition she had worked so hard to preserve Absolutely not, Dr Lovasz replied. It’s more a case of keeping the tradition alive and bringing it to new audiences. “In a postmodern world anything goes, so why not use your own culture, your mother tongue, to create something new?” she said.”I don’t want to put music in a museum.
World Music makes our work accessible to anyone, so my ancient, thousand-year-old songs can reach anyone from New York to Tokyo. In this way I hope I serve my grandmothers as well as leaving something for my granddaughters.”As we talked, a folk duo were going through their paces: a man squeezing bagpipes that looked uncannily like a rubber chicken, and a woman singer who had, across her knees, what looked like a crude, home-made cello, which she hit repeatedly across the strings with a stick. (It was called a gardon, and is used only in one small corner of Transylvania.) But the sound they made was vigorous and lovely, so I asked Dr Lovasz where I should go if I wanted to hear this sort of music in traditional settings It wouldn’t be easy, she told me. I was looking for something that hardly existed any more but she said that some of her favourite songs came from the southern part of the Great Plain, the area between Hungary’s two major rivers, the Danube and the Tisza. So that’s where I decided to go.I had another reason to go that way.
On a recent trip to Transylvania, that lost domain of the old Austro-Hungarian empire, I’d been fascinated by Patrick Leigh Fermor’s description of the puszta, which he walked and rode across in the 1930s. In his memoir, Between the Woods and the Water, he describes an untamed land of savagery and heroic deeds, peopled by half-wild gypsies, cowboys and bandits, the wide flatness of the landscape punctuated only by the occasional lonely farmstead or csarda (wayside inn), or tall wooden sweepwells sticking up out of the earth like skeletal, wagging fingers. Even by the time Fermor was there it had become a land sunk deep in myth, familiar to every Hungarian schoolchild from the paintings of Mihaly Munkacsy and the work of Hungary’s great Romantic poet Sandor Petofi, who, puszta-born and bred, celebrated the landscape ceaselessly in his work.From Budapest I caught the train east to Eger, an impossibly pretty little town of pastel-painted Baroque streets and fine churches. There, in a leafy square facing the vast neoclassical cathedral, I sat down and read Janos Vitez (John the Valiant), Petofi’s long children’s epic. An old man nearby was playing a harmonica, and people came and went around me.
