Buza Péter: Spring and Fountains - Our Budapest (Budapest, 1994)
have the miraculous fountain of Péter Bodor rebuilt on Margaret Island. The article reporting the story indicates that the new installation will be an exact replica of the old one in Marosvásárhely, except that it will be quieter so as not to bother the guests of the neighbouring hotels. It will be another matter that it will not only play its music at regular times, but also when a coin is inserted. In any case, the reproduction will not be perfect musically either-no wonder given that not a line of the original tune was noted down. Engineer Andor Páll studied the documents for many a long month before he started to re-create the new blueprint of the musical well in cooperation with his partner, the architect Gyula Jankó. Complete with the rotating Neptune (the sculpture was made by Béla Ohmann), the wonderful mechanism, which played some toned-down music, was publicly inaugurated in 1936. The fountain operated for eight short years, until during the siege of 1944-45 almost everything was destroyed. In 1954 the construction was restored, now to plans by Egon Pfannl. Neptune was put back into its original place, and even water could be made to flow from the spouts, but the water-driven musical mechanism with its organ pipes was not rebuilt. Available data do not reveal the reason. However, what is known for a fact is that when plans, commissioned by district thirteen to whose jurisdiction the island belongs, for a musical mechanism to be installed again were prepared by the Department of Water Engines of the Budapest University of Technology in 1977, nobody was any longer able to recall what tune had been played day after day for eight years by Péter Bodor’s rebuilt fountain. All that could be discovered was the fact that the college teacher and distinguished organist Géza Wehner had selected the pieces for this mosaic of tunes from the music library of the National Museum. Another source said that the organ pipes played Hungarian classics, which obviously does not contradict the above, but similarly lacks concreteness. Finally, Dezső Rexa's book on Margaret Island claimed that the Bodor fountain “plays old Hungarian music”. Thus György Gábri, who compiled the tunes for the new musical mechanism, had no choice but to select pieces according to his own taste. This is how the third variation was born. Nevertheless, this music remained on sheets. The device to play it was not made. The Bodor fountain is mute to this day. How can it be that in less than fifty years’ time a city could completely forget what it once liked and knew so well? That a tune which was, after all, listened to by hundreds of thousands for many a long year, should be lost as if it had never been heard? 55
