Tell Magazine June 2018 5778

{REMEMBER THIS}
Nicole Waldner
I can’t write music, so I’ve always composed my songs by whistling. I play piano with
one hand only, the left one, ‘cause with my right hand I keep time. I conduct myself.
As for my singing, my boss puts it this
way, “Little Seress, you’ve got a voice,
you just can’t sing.” They call me Little
Seress because when I sit down behind
the piano I pretty much disappear
behind it. I’ve been making music for
43 years. I include the four years in
forced labour camp and the eight years
the Communists banned me from
playing. I include them because even
then I had all of my songs inside me.
The very first time I sat down behind a
piano I knew I was home. This is what
I wanted. What amazes me most after
all these years - even now in 1966 when
my music’s not exactly the fashion any
more - is that I managed to pull it off.
People still remember Gloomy Sunday.
That was my song. Billie Holiday
had a big hit with it in 1941. Louis
Armstrong sang it. Bing Crosby,
Frank Sinatra, Josephine Baker, Sarah
Vaughn, Ray Charles. They sang it
all over Europe too. They recorded it
in China and Japan, even somewhere
in Africa. 28 languages it’s been
translated into, at least. People came
from all over the world to hear me
play. Toscanini and Visconti from Italy,
Otto Klemperer from Berlin. Louis
Armstrong! Even Spencer Tracy and
John Steinbeck came from Hollywood.
All this because of one song. All this
from the old ghetto of Budapest.
I think what made Gloomy Sunday such
a big hit was the times we were living in.
I wrote it in 1933. The Nazis had just
come to power. We were all recovering
from one world war and already we
could smell another one coming. The
chords at the start, they really set the
tone. I work those high octave keys
for emotion. As for the words, I didn’t
write them. I mean I did, originally, but
mine were considered too bleak. You
can’t tell people, “Love is dead”. You
can’t say, “The world has ended”. You
can’t take away people’s hope. It isn’t
right. Maybe the doctors can, or the
Nazis, but not the musicians, not the
poets. People come to us for hope, for
relief. So we went with Jávor’s lyrics. I
wouldn’t go so far as to call his version
optimistic, it was still my song after all,
but he made it more personal. People
could relate to it because everyone’s had
a broken heart before, and everyone
loves a love song, ‘cause even when
it’s love gone wrong, it’s still love.
No one in Hungary has ever had an
international hit like me. Not Feri Lehár
and not Feri Liszt either. They invited
me to Paris and New York. I didn’t
go. Even before the war I wasn’t big
on traveling, but after the war I didn’t
want to go anywhere. I just wanted
my piano, my audience. It’s not just
all the unknowns when you travel, it’s
the trains and aeroplanes which scare
the hell outta me. Boats are the pits.
After I’ve been on one of those Danube
barges my bed rocks for days. I don’t
even like buses or trams, that kind of
bone shake I can do without. I never
take the metro because the thought
of being underground sends me into
a spin. I rarely even go to Buda. This
is where I wrote my songs, so this is
home. Kispipa is only two blocks away.
The food is best not spoken about and
they don’t clean the place too often,
but every night that’s where I play.
The royalties never quite panned out.
Maybe I should have gone to New
York? But to hell with the money,
everyone’s poor here. What really gets
me though is that I’m going to be
defined by that song, and its ugly wake
too. When it started getting attention
in the ‘30s and ‘40s there were all
these stories in the papers about people
who committed suicide clutching the
score to Gloomy, supposedly. Then the
Americans dubbed it “The Hungarian
Suicide Song”. Personally, I blame Ray
Ventura. He was the one that started
this whole business. They say that in
Paris, in ’36, every night before he
played my song, he’d read out all these
lies to the audience. How many people
died in Reykjavik when they heard my
song and how many in Rome. Then,
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