Campfire Tales
written by Matthew Gorman
I
s it possible that simply listening to a song could drive someone to end his or her own life? Can a song be cursed? According to an urban legend that has been built up around a song composed in Hungary in the early 1930s, the answer to both of these questions is a resounding yes. The song is sometimes known as ‘The Hungarian Suicide Song’, and by some accounts it can be linked to over 200 deaths by suicide the world over in the seventy plus years since its inception. The title of the song is “Gloomy Sunday”. Self-taught Hungarian pianist, Rezsö Seress, and the Hungarian poet, Làszlò Jàvor, who would provide the song’s melancholy lyrics, co-wrote “Gloomy Sunday” in 1933. Legend has it that Seress wrote the song’s tortured melody on an actual gloomy Sunday, pouring out his broken heart into his musical arrangement in the wake of a failed romance. And Jàvor’s lyrics recount the woeful tale of someone contemplating suicide after their lover has died. Seress allegedly met with one rejection after another in his attempts to publish the sheet music and lyrics for “Gloomy Sunday”. One publisher went so far as to tell him, “It is not that the song is sad, there is a sort of terrible compelling despair about it. I don’t think it would do anyone any good to hear a song like that.” Eventually though, Seress was able to get “Gloomy Sunday” published, and within a week the song became a moderate success, propelling Seress into a world of semi-acclaim and financial gain. Feeling confident once again with his newfound degree of notoriety and an upstart fortune, Seress, some stories claim, made an attempt to reunite with the very young lady who had inspired his melancholy anthem in the first place. In a somewhat dubious twist to the tale, however, it is said that this girl then poisoned herself to death on the day after Seress had contacted her. On a piece of paper found next to her lifeless body, the legend says, Seress’s former lover had supposedly written just two words: “Gloomy Sunday”. Another version, however, has the lyricist, Làszlò Jàvor, as the lovelorn protagonist in this tragic tale of unrequited love. Jàvor’s original lyrics, in their native tongue, are so renowned for their unabashed bleakness that no translation is said to have ever done them proper justice. And yet it is of Seress, and of the heartbreaking melody that he composed, that most people speak of when they speak of “Gloomy Sunday”.
What is known for sure is that while investigating the suicide of Joseph Keller, a local shoemaker, in February of 1936, police in Budapest found that the cobbler’s suicide note quoted the lyrics of the recently popularized song. This was to be the first of many alleged suicides in Hungary that were connected to the actual song “Gloomy Sunday” itself. A month later, in March of 1936, Time Magazine reported that shortly after the suicide of Joseph Keller, seventeen additional suicides had occurred in Hungary, each and every one somehow involving the song “Gloomy Sunday”. The brief article recounted how two people had blown their brains out while listening to a Gypsy band perform the song. It also claimed that several people had apparently drowned themselves in the icy waters of the Danube River while clutching copies of the song’s sheet music to their breasts. The article then went on to tell of yet another man who had reportedly requested that a band in a nightclub play the song for him, and had then walked outside into the street and promptly shot himself in the head following the performance. And while little to no verifiable evidence exists today to substantiate these additional claims of sonically induced suicide, the burgeoning saga of the song “Gloomy Sunday” and its inferred causal effect (despite the questionable veracity of such an ostensibly folksy yarn) did very little to stop the savvy machinations of the world media. Not long after the Time Magazine article, in fact, The New York Times would go to press with the sensationalistic headline of “Hundreds of Hungarians kill themselves under the influence of a song”. Now, Hungary at the time had the highest suicide rate of any country in the world. In the fractured and pessimistic culture that existed in the country during the 1930s, suicide was considered a reasonable solution to the overwhelming troubles of life. Also not uncommon is for suicides in any country to incorporate popular lyrics or writings into their final letters to the world. As such, it could be wholly possible that the Hungarian suicides did, in fact, occur, but for reasons far less mysterious than originally extolled. And yet, an air of foreboding has seemed to linger around the song and its dark history all the same. Well, that’s the facts, and after that, the story, as is so very often the case with so many an urban legend, becomes a bit murky. Some sources claim that in light of the song’s strange (re: fatal) effect on the populace, Hungarian authorities actually officially banned the song from ever being performed or broadcast over the airwaves throughout the entire country. Other historical accounts claim that the musical number was simply squelched in a number of Hungarian municipalities by an overwhelming public adherence to generally accepted social conduct. In other words, the Hungarian people within their respective communities, in the interests of “good taste”, unofficially banned the composition, with radio stations and musicians soon following suit. But the tale grows deeper yet. Apparently, after the fervor surrounding the song and its purported effect had gradually began to wane, the B.B.C. agreed to release the song in Britain as long as it would only be performed instrumentally (by some historically questionable accounts the song had hitherto been banned throughout all of England by this time). This was until a London policeman patrolling his beat heard the song being played over and over again from an apartment during his travels. Having heard of the controversy surrounding the musical number and deeming it rather
odd that someone would play such a tune again and again so incessantly, the lawman went up to investigate. His curiosity soon turned to horror as he found the apartment’s occupant, a young woman, dead from a self-administered overdose of barbiturates, and with the instrumental version of “Gloomy Sunday” repeating itself over and over on an automatic phonograph. It was then, that the B.B.C. allegedly reimposed the ban on any version of the song. A ban which some say still remains in effect today. Now, whether or not there ever was, or if there still remains, a ban on the song “Gloomy Sunday” in the U.K. is a matter for researchers far more adept and well, let’s face it, far nerdier than I. So, if you do happen to have the time on your hands between your “X-Files” and “Dr. Who” marathons and your busy schedule of not getting laid to instigate some sort of amicable, epistolary correspondence with some fellow nerdling who just so happens to have unfettered access to the B.B.C. policy records from the 1930’s until present day, please let me know. I’ll buy you some “Lord of the Rings” collectibles for your effort. Honest. But seriously though, the London incident did actually occur, and remains one of the modern
aesthetic backdrops wherein the tale of the “cursed” song is still relayed. I, myself, first heard that it was the highly popular Billie Holiday version of the song that so many people had offed themselves to, and that her cover of “Gloomy Sunday” was the last record found on their phonographs or gramophones when their bodies were discovered. Well, the phonograph thing was indeed true in one instance at least, and perhaps more than that, although not with regards to the Billie Holiday version of the song. But then that’s just how legends grow, with a dash of truth, and a whole lot of ad libbing. The thing is that some sources believe that it was only the original Hungarian version that had “caused” people to kill themselves, while others will attest that the sorrowful song in any form can still exude its enigmatic influence. Many claim that it was the lyrics that had given the song its power, and that when it was translated into other tongues the song was rendered harmless. As such, they believed that the song was only deleterious to the Hungarian population, and yet tales of suicides connected to the song, such as that of the London woman, began to pop up in several European countries not too long after the suicides in Hungary. In Berlin, a young shopkeeper hung herself, leaving a copy of the sheet music to “Gloomy Sunday” below her dangling feet. An errand boy in Rome who had been riding his bicycle through the streets purportedly heard a beggar simply whistling the song’s melody. The youth, it is said, parked his bike, gave the beggar all of his money, and then drowned himself in a nearby river. In the United States, a young girl working as a typist in a New York office building put her head inside her gas oven and asphyxiated herself. She left a note requesting that “Gloomy Sunday” be played at her funeral. Which brings us now to the song’s influence in America. After news of the morbid hype surrounding the musical number reached American shores, it wasn’t long
Reszo Seress before musicians in the U.S. were practically chomping at the bit to record their own versions (be they simply instrumental or with the original lyrics translated into English) of “Gloomy Sunday”. American lyricists Sam M. Lewis and Desmond Carter each authored translated versions of the original song lyrics, with Lewis’s version eventually becoming the better known, and more often covered, of the two. In fact, in 1936, the very same year as the original reported rash of suicides in Hungary, Hal Kemp and his Orchestra, employing the Lewis translation, would record the first American version of ‘The Hungarian Suicide Song’. The band claimed that it took twenty one takes to achieve a performance suitable for recording, and every band member reported feeling uneasy and pessimistic throughout the entire ordeal. It was the Billie Holiday version of the song, recorded in 1941, however, that would become the most popular interpretation of “Gloomy Sunday”. To this version was added a third stanza in which Billie sings that her wish to die had all just been a dream. This was done in the attempts to temper the pessimistic feel of the song, but it seemed to do little good. There were alleged reports of young jazz enthusiasts committing suicide after listening only to Holiday’s version of the song. To date, “Gloomy Sunday” has been recorded by artists as diverse as Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong, Ray Charles, Björk, Sinead O’Connor, and the Satanic songstress Diamanda Galas, to name but a few, and has been translated into a number of languages including Swedish and Japanese. A myriad of theories still abound as to just what element it is within the song, or whether it is perhaps an amalgam of all its properties, that gives “Gloomy Sunday” such purported power. Some claim that the depressing monotony of the instrumentation set in C minor helped to create some kind of disheartening resonance that could dramatically affect the psyches of certain individuals, and even this theory of tonal influence is further bisected by some proposing a scientific cause and effect and others one more supernatural. It is even said that the French government employed psychics at one point to study the ‘Suicide Song’ and its strange effect. When asked about how he felt about his song and its purported connection with so many suicides, the composer Seress answered, “I stand in the midst of this deadly success as an accused man. This fatal frame hurts me. I cried all of the disappointments of my heart into this song, and it seems that others with feelings like mine have found their own hurt in it.” Seress jumped to his death from his Budapest flat in 1968.