Buza Péter: Spring and Fountains - Our Budapest (Budapest, 1994)

Wehner’s next of kin do not know, the old gardeners cannot remember, and the people at the organ factory where the musical mechanism was probably made do not know-the Russians took all their documents when the factory was in “public" ownership for some years. There is no trace of matter in the still available files of the Board of Public Works. Neither do the old students who learned the art from Géza Wehner know. But then comes somebody promising to conduct an experiment with musical instruments thus trying to recall the tune heard so often before.

Ferenc Gergely pianist is the enterprising spirit who has to be credited with the fact that in a few weeks the answer is found. The “experimental reconstruction” of about three quarters of the ten minute long fragmentary composition is successfully concluded. The order of the fragments is uncertain, but we still know far more then we did about the musical programme of the second Bodor fountain.

The building blocks of the lost composition included a part from the second movement of Ruralia Hungarica by Doh- nányi, a tune from the Intermezzo in Kodály’s Háry János, and a two or three minute motif from Bartók’s Este a székelyeknél [An Evening with Székely People]. The old tune of the Bodor fountain could thus be heard once again, for the third time now since its pipes were first sounded. Is this a tragic turn in the story, or is it, on the contrary, elevating?

These are the fountains and springs around us. Their fate is like our own.

Water is life itself. And history is what it reflects.

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