The Eighth Tribe, 1981 (8. évfolyam, 1-12. szám)
1981-05-01 / 5. szám
Page 8 THE EIGHTH TRIBE May, 1981 “Weep bloody tears and disfigure your faces, all you Huns!” the Táltos bugle sounded. “Atilla is dead!” During the day the smoke signals, during the night the beat of the drums, relayed the grim news from the River Tisza to the River Volga, from Buda to the great Chinese wall. “Atilla is dead!” Clad in white, the entire nation mourned. The SAMANS embalmed the body of the Ruler of the World, while the TÁLTOS searched the sky for a sign, until, speaking in a trance, he was able to announce the will of Heaven. “Bury Atilla in sunray, moonbeam, and darkness. Bury him under the earth, and under the water. Bury him in such fashion that no man shall ever find him and disturb his rest until the end of time!” The TÁLTOS spoke, and it took the Hun leaders forty days of mourning to solve the riddle. They laid Atilla’s body in a golden coffin. Then they placed the golden coffin in a silver one, and the silver coffin into one of black iron. Thus, Atilla was placed into golden sunray, silver moonbeam, and the darkness of black iron. While the head TÁLTOS made the offering of the hundred unbroken white stallions to UR, somewhere, in a secret place, hundreds of slaves had built a huge dam, diverting the flow of the river. Then, in the riverbed, they dug a large grave, lining it with silk, velvet and precious furs. In the dark of the night, a few of Atilla’s childhood friends took the triple coffin to the secret burial ground. After placing it into the grave, and covering it with soil and rocks, the dam was destroyed and the river returned to its original bed. All the slaves were killed, and even the Huns who were there followed their beloved Leader into death, by killing themselves with their own swords. There was no one left who knew where Atilla was buried, and no one has ever found the place. Translated by Elizabeth M. fVass Reprinted from Selected Hungarian Legends by Albert Wass. In this issue and coming issues we will have articles on “Atilla (Attila) and the Huns.” In these articles ‘Atilla spelled with one ‘t’ and two ‘ll’-s. This has created a controversy amongst the readers regarding the correct spelling. The two ‘11’ s are the old version, can be found in many articles about Atilla. The newest version is spelled with two ‘tt’-s and one T. BELA BARTÓK Bela Bartók was born in Nagyszentmiklos, now part of Romania. Bartók began to take piano lessons from his mother at 5; by 9 he was composing dance tunes. As a student at the Budapest Academy of Music, he was drawn to Liszt and Strauss and he began to write flashy music flavored with the Hungarian paprika of Liszt. In the summer of 1904 Bartók overheard an unusual song sung by a girl from Transylvania. It was the first real folk music—as opposed to the gypsy cafe music of Liszt’s “Hungarian Rhapsodies”—that Bartók had ever heard, and it changed his life. Along with Zoltán Kodály, a fellow Bartók toured the outlying regions of Hungary, recording nationalist composer and member of the academy’s faculty, peasant songs. He wrote scholarly articles about his findings. Bela Bartók Essays (St. Martin’s Press) is a representative sampling. He transcribed dozens of songs and dances for various instrumental combinations. In all, he recorded nearly 8,000 cylinders on his portable Edison machine—preserving for posterity a now extinct musical culture. For about twenty-five years he was professor of piano at the Budapest Academy of Music. At the same time he performed much of the standard keyboard literature at various concerts throughout Europe. Even a shortened list of his works would be beyond the scope of these notes- He added significantly to the music literature, with Chamber music, Piano and Orchestral works, as well as works for the voice. Like many great _ twentieth-century composers, Bela Bartók started out in a flurry of opposition. Unlike many others, the eminent Hungarian composer did not end up in a storm of applause. Although he was internationally known by the 1920s, Bartók—an excessively private man —was his own worst promoter. His final years, as a sick, lonely emigre in New York City, where Bartók and his wife moved because he was disgusted by the Nazi takeover in Europe, were especially grim. Few American orchestras performed his works; few critics championed him; his position as a research fellow at Columbia University ended for lack of money. “Our situation is daily getting worse and worse.” he wrote in 1942. When he died of leukemia in 1945, fewer than a dozen people attended his funeral. While Bartók is not yet considered as the fourth “B” behind Bach, Beethoven and Brahms, he has certainly held his own in the company of the other great 20th century innovators. Stravisky and Schoenberg. In addition he left us a highly valuable folksong collection and perhaps more importantly, he developed a scientific methodology for collecting folksongs. To preserve our Hungarian Heritage and at the same time, to save our churches, the pastors should urge their membership to subscribe to the Eighth Tribe. This magazine is the ONLY monthly publication that serves the Hungarian American Community in both languages. God forbid that it should cease publication.
