2024-06-14 02:15:04
Within the e-book Nebo, peklo, raj devoted to the Slovak musician Marián Varga, the phrase “genius” is usually repeated. Nonetheless, the organist, pianist and composer, who died in 2017, paid a value for his exceptionality. He was destroying himself as a result of his “expertise dragged him within the tooth” and it was tough to bear the burden, the lyricist and collaborator Kamil Peteraj remembers within the nearly five-hundred-page publication.
The scene is harking back to an artwork movie for a slender circle of viewers, though the protagonist was as well-known as few artists in pre-November Czechoslovakia. The scene takes place in Bratislava throughout normalization and is subsequently essentially drowned within the chiaroscuro of a wasted time, for which Varga’s distinctive expertise additionally paid for it.
Within the e-book Nebo, peklo, raj, printed in Slovak by Slovart publishing home, the incident is described by the musician’s second spouse, Jana. When the physicist and dissident Ján Langoš was pouring plaster on the fallen ceiling above Varga’s piano, the musician was sitting in an armchair, puffing on a cigarette and cheerfully discussing with the long run post-revolutionary minister the thinker Karl Jaspers and metaphysical guilt, in keeping with which an individual is accountable even for actions he didn’t commit , however he knew about them.
Marián Varga, as a maladaptive scholar after being kicked out of the conservatory, recorded the album Zvonky, zvoňte with Pavol Hammel and the group Prúdy Czechoslovak “Seržanta Pepř”. Subsequently, he based the artwork rock group Collegium Musicum, which was so profitable that he introduced royalties from the early recordings residence in a suitcase stuffed with banknotes. Nonetheless, he was clueless in on a regular basis life. With out associates of Langoš’s sort – who watched over him particularly after his first spouse left him – and with out his second spouse, he could be misplaced in on a regular basis life like in a deep forest.
The one factor he was fluent in was the music he composed, performed and listened to. And literature, he already learn avidly and spent hours discussing it with associates – maybe in lengthy late-night cellphone calls. “For instance, he learn passages from Kundera to me from three within the morning till half previous six within the morning,” archeologist and Polish Minister of Tradition Ladislav Snopko remembers within the e-book. And the author Dušan Dušek notes that, due to his superb musical reminiscence, Varga all the time quoted the sentences of his favourite writers verbatim, within the precise rhythm and melody of the phrases, with all commas and accents.
Search for a cigarette behind every little thing
The strain between Marián Varga’s sensible and inventive life is the axis of the e-book Nebo, peklo, raj organized by Jana Vargová and journalist Marian Jaslovský, amongst others the writer of the 2007 monograph Collegia Musica. he lit up for the primary time within the sixth grade throughout recess, died of lung most cancers.
Marián Varga lit up for the primary time within the sixth grade throughout recess. | Photograph: Jan Šilpoch
The pupil’s smoking drawback was ironed out by “detonating from reminiscence” one in every of Rachmaninov’s piano concert events throughout a school-wide dialogue with the heroes of the Slovak Nationwide Rebellion, remembers classmate Tomáš Berka, later a musician and scenographer. He’s stated to have dumbfounded the educating employees, so from then on he was capable of proceed smoking at school.
“It was apparently the primary ever contact of the varsity administration with a genius little one,” believes Berka. Varga smoked virtually till his final moments. He informed the nurses on the cell hospice that he really leads a lifetime of intermittent smoking.
The smoke allegedly additionally had an impact on his departure from Prúdy. “I had an argument with Freš a few cigar,” he defined to bassist Fedor Freš, with whom he later based Collegium Musicum. The ensemble’s repertoire was characterised by the sound of Varga’s Hammond organ and motifs borrowed from the classics of Johann Sebastian Bach, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky and Joseph Haydn.
Cash meant nothing to Marián Varga. | Photograph: CTK
Varga’s photograph with a cigarette in the correct nook of his mouth was alleged to be on the title cowl of their massively profitable double album Konvergencie from 1971, which, in keeping with composer Vladimír Godár, was ordered by a number of hundred thousand folks even earlier than its launch. However the Opus publishing home didn’t commit such a scandalous act and had the cigarette retouched from the image.
The unique unedited photograph didn’t seem till after November 1989 on a CD reissue, and once more in 2004 symbolically in an album format on the duvet of the typographically and content-extraordinary e-book of interviews About roads that don’t result in Rome, ready by journalist Peter Uličný with Varga. A brand new publication additionally quotes from it a number of instances.
It doesn’t present a steady, one-hand written biographical narration of the story of the musician, who would have been 77 years outdated this 12 months. Marián Varga is remembered right here by many literary fluctuating, generally very inspiring and generally dry reminiscences of associates or colleagues, in addition to newspaper interviews, excerpts from books, articles or critiques.
A number of data is unnecessarily repeated, even when from completely different views. And the reader has to create his personal Varga from them and put collectively connections. He seems like a customer to an archive by which he can freely discover and separate the much less essential from the important.
Marián Varga with Collegio Musico and the orchestra play one in every of his most well-known compositions, Hommage à JS Bach. A recording from the Nitra theater. Photograph: ČTK | Video: The Crystal Wing Awards
From one other world
The transcription of an episode from Boris Filan’s Pálenica radio program is noteworthy. In it, the lyricist describes, with weird exaggeration, a booed Collegia Musica live performance in a Slovak village, the place farmers have been anticipating a enjoyable selection present and never an artwork rock band. Following the instance of Erich von Däniken, Filan involves the conclusion that Vargo’s exceptionality can’t have some other trigger than the truth that he’s an alien.
Or the chapter by which Jana Vargová remembers her first go to to her future husband’s dilapidated residence, the place the pungent smells of cigarette smoke, mustard – which was the most well-liked delicacy, which he stated he ate with nearly every little thing – and intoxicating paulownia from the neighbor’s backyard have been blended. And the place James Baldwin, Milan Kundera, Max Frisch, Julio Cortázar, but in addition Jorge Luis Borges, Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Vladimir Nabokov or Witold Gombrowicz lay on the ground across the mattress in “fixed alertness” together with albums and sheet music, so there was nowhere to face .
“Over time, I understood that that is the actual world he inhabits, and what at first look seemed like a horrible mess, has a logic, a sort of sacred ‘order’, into which he later tried to provoke me,” writes Jana Vargová.
In any case, the musician commented on the connection with the a number of dwellings that he modified within the documentary movie referred to as Varga, by which the younger director Soňa Maletz adopted his final interval: “It would not matter which residence you do not exit of.”
One other legend speaks volumes in regards to the internal battle between order and chaos. Throughout normalization, rock musicians needed to go requalification exams in an effort to carry out in public. When Vargy was requested within the political a part of the take a look at the place the best conflicts and unrest are at present raging on the planet, he answered with well-known honesty: “In my soul.”
In the summertime of 2005, a number of hundred folks skilled an especially late evening dawn live performance by Marián Varga on the Pohoda competition. | Photograph: CTK
As if the satan was there
The internally struggling Marián Varga is sort of a theme for Dostoyevsky. He glossed the title of his composition PreHry with the phrases that he couldn’t write the composition VýHry as a result of he had misplaced sufficient in his life. Capturing Varga’s rampages might be an important literary process, to which the e-book Nebo, peklo, raj encourages by capturing numerous small and enormous dramas.
When, for instance, Varga was forcibly evicted from his residence in 1975 because of unsettled property relations, for which he was not accountable, he resisted in such a manner that they took him to the road together with his mattress. Books and sheet music flew by means of the window, and Varga’s father, who was current, suffered a stroke. Even the then Communist Minister of Tradition and poet Miroslav Válek, whose verses Smutná ranná električka Varga set to music for the Zelená pošta album, couldn’t stop that malice, as a result of StB was most likely behind it.
Marián Varga’s music all the time grew out of one thing already current. | Photograph: Profimedia.cz
Even when he was single, Marián Varga performed his deeply religious Antiphon for cello and piano with Jozef Lupták within the Basilica of St. Jakub for 2 thousand enthusiastic listeners. In accordance with Lupták, the native chaplain had an issue with the composition, so he had the church consecrated after the live performance. “It is just like the satan is there,” says the cellist, who’s an acclaimed chamber musician and government chairman of the Mariano Varga Society.
The lifetime of a person who, figuratively talking, didn’t depart the residence is filled with related paradoxes. Whereas within the early Seventies, Varga’s royalties awarded by the authors’ union reached as much as 250,000 crowns, which was a staggering quantity on the time, in a single 12 months within the second half of the Nineteen Eighties they reached solely 37 crowns. At the moment, the regime excluded him from the media and Varga nearly didn’t carry out.
However cash meant nothing to him. He himself admitted that he had a quite contemptuous relationship with them – they belonged to these mundane issues that, in comparison with music and literature, will not be price such consideration. “The truth that I had some huge cash as an immature individual harm me. I may have purchased extra alcohol,” he stated in an interview.
In accordance with the testimony of associates, throughout Vargo’s profitable interval, cash was mendacity everywhere in the residence, amongst socks and canned items, and he lent it or gave it away. In Roads That Do not Result in Rome, he informed Peter Uličné that he used to place the payments in numerous books, and when he was later within the purple, he went to his library to search for them. “As soon as, Dušan Mitana and I went by means of the whole library piece by piece. It took us all evening to seek out the vein,” he recounted.
The particular association of Joseph Haydn’s Concerto in D main was first recorded by Collegium Musicum in 1971. Photograph: ČTK | Video: CS music
Did Beethoven surpass Mozart?
It’s unusual that Varga’s comparatively demanding music introduced appreciable viewers and monetary success. He himself stated that after the live performance he doesn’t have the chance to satisfy individuals who understand his work in the identical manner as he does.
The Collegium Musicum primarily based its repertoire on inspiration from the classics that Varga had studied since childhood. Even earlier than the conservatory, he started often attending the opera composer Ján Cikker’s classes, whom he attended for seven years.
Varga was not all in favour of standard music till he heard the Beatles recordings with their “Bartók quartets”. And likewise the information of jazz pianist Dave Brubeck, as a result of in keeping with Varga, even his rhythms have been “fairly clearly taken over” from Béla Bartók. The Hungarian big of the primary half of the twentieth century was strongly impressed by folklore. And Marián Varga launched into the same fusion. He simply turned it round and enriched rock with classics.
Within the e-book Nebo, peklo, raj, the composer Vladimír Godár writes that, for instance, Varga’s composition Possibly you want me from the album Zvonky, zvoňte, grows out of Bartók’s citation of a Slovak folks track, thus drawing consideration to a brand new, unsuspected supply of beat inspiration on the time. Godár’s analyzes of Varga’s work are probably the most constant within the e-book Heaven, Hell, Heaven, positioned in broader contexts than the same old criticism of standard music is able to.
Godár additionally factors out that Varga’s work was by no means fully authentic and all the time grew out of one thing already current. However Marián Varga had a solution to that: “There aren’t any views in music, not even what is known as growth. Nonetheless heretical it could sound. If there was growth, Beethoven must surpass Haydn or Mozart. And Haydn and Mozart must surpass Bach. And Bach himself must surpass others.”
Nobody can beat the music of Marián Varga both. That is additionally what the e-book Heaven, Peklo, Raj is about, the title of which refers back to the experimental prose of the identical title by his favourite Julio Cortázar. By the best way, to the well-known, usually reproduced photograph of him with a cigarette in the correct nook of his mouth.
Jana Vargová and Marian Jaslovský: Marián Varga – Heaven, hell, paradise
Slovart Publishing Home 2023, 480 pages, 24.90 euros