Zoltán Kodály

Zoltán Kodály spent his early summers walking through Hungarian villages with a phonograph and notebook, recording folk songs before they disappeared, often alongside his friend Béla Bartók. Those thousands of melodies fed his music for the rest of his life, and unlike Bartók he stayed in Hungary through war and dictatorship, becoming a national institution.

He was as much an educator as a composer. His conviction that every child could learn music through singing grew into the Kodály method, still used in schools around the world.

Start with the suite from Háry János, his opera about an old soldier who spins tall tales, which opens with an orchestral sneeze: Hungarian custom holds that a story preceded by a sneeze must be true. Then hear the Dances of Galánta, built on tunes from the town where he spent part of his childhood.