Erzsébet

Who am I to sing. I cannot sing again.
I am Erzsébet.
I am Countess Báthory. I am a noblewoman.
Countess. I am Countess Báthory-Nadasdy.
Ferenc was my husband. I remember him.
Where are my children?
I am cold, not hungry, but cold--and sick.
What language are you? My native Magyar?
Perhaps German? Latin? Copernicus was my friend.
And the King my cousin. I am the Countess.
My children, where are they?
The barbarians...
I turned them back East, I turned them back West.
My tongue negotiated, my hand signed.
I turned back my enemies, and each others'.
Where are my children?
My servants are faithless. A few dead peasants.
Anna, sing to me, to me sing.
O Lord of Cats, sing to me.

Two addenda: 1. News media are welcome to request high-resolution copies of photographs for publication. 2. If you want to use something from my site on your website, read this now. Please do not use or link to photos without contacting me! Updated April 2003

Okay. Here is what I have been thinking about Erzsébet, as I wrote in an email to a friend when she asked me, "I am still struggling with her rage. Are you saying that she took her anger out on the victims? Why did she murder them? Because they failed to be properly beautiful? That's just doesn't seem enough to torture over 200. What do you understand about her disorder? What was her childhood like? Did some one show her what to do?"

This is the heart of the mystery of Erzsébet. No one knows these answers -- and there will be no real clues until we can read those diaries. What we do know is that Erzsébet was born into the most powerful family in Eastern Europe ... so great, they changed the name of the family to 'bathor' -- valiant. István (King Stephen the Great) ruled nearly all of present-day Hungary, Slovakia, and Romania. Erzsébet was reported to be precocious and exquisitely beautiful and transparently pale, china white ... the latter a characteristic of Hungarian beauty to this day. The skin seems so thin you can see the blood vessels under it even in the healthiest of children. She was educated in written and spoken Hungarian, Latin, and German, and was apparently fluent in all of them. She must also have had some knowledge of the language of the Ottomans (what was it then? Turkish?). She studied everything a Western boy-child might study, but in that more matriarchal society it was natural for her to do that. The men would fight. The women would negotiate. And that was one of her roles, keeping the Ottomans from Vienna for years. If you look at the geography of that area, you can see how the castles of the day formed a line along the formidable Vah, Vtala and Danube. That was her domain.

So if we think about her as not only beautiful among her own kin, but also made to believe that she was a truly great beauty, we can guess how she must have hated her servants at Cséjthe. They were Slovak -- coarse of demeanor by the standards of that time's often inbred Hungarian nobility. This prejudice becomes exaggerated because Hungarians are not Westerners, nor is their language. They look different, as I've said: paler, more delicate. And the language is very harmonious, part of the Finno-Ugric group (the only Western languages that do not arise originally from Sanskrit, and surviving today as Hungarian, Finnish, Estonian, and Karelian). [Note March 2002: Jonathan Saxon tells me Finno-Ugric languages are still spoken in the Mari-El and Udmurt Republics in central Russia.] The accent is without exception on the first syllable, and prepositional agreement is harmonic -- that is, the prepositions (which appear appended to the end of words) must sound lovely with the noun they belong to, and different speakers may use different relationships to achieve that. So Erzsébet's native tongue was like song itself and her nobility was all a so-called 'translucent beauty'. But her servants were not only peasants, they were speakers of a Slavic language full of gutturals and hard consonants unknown in Hungarian, and they were coarse-skinned from her ethnically narrow viewpoint. She probably loathed them in look and sound and peasant smell.

That isn't enough, as you say, to torture and kill so many. So your word "disorder" has got to be included. I don't know how. Schizophrenia? To her family, she was an embarrassment -- power taken to extremes, once permitted because of her dominion and beauty. Later in life, as she became "very old" (over 50), and consumed by debt and making the mistake of killing Ilona Harczy (the minor Hungarian noblewoman in Vienna), she became politically vulnerable. She was taken to trial by Thurzo, the servants he hated were executed (along with Anna), and Erzsébet was imprisoned for more than two years in her own tower. How strong she still was to survive up there in that cold, alone, dirty and (eventually) sick to her death in 1614. That is the tower that still stands, and that you can see in my photos. It is a confounding sight, black even in the daylight.

A recent correspondent objected in general to some of these thoughts. She wrote, "I am sure that Elisabeth, a noble woman, did not like the local poor people for various reasons, such as the language (she did not understand it very likely) and their harsh look and manners. Her attitude does not surprise me as it was natural for a person of her status. What does surprise me is your attitude to Slovak peasants - maybe I should say that it is the description and the final impression a visitor has after finishing reading the FAQ. You have described them in a way as if they were different (in a negative sense) from all other peasants - Hungarian, French or any other nationality. Your letter just suggests that peasants of other nationalities had soft skin, noble manners and smelled after expensive French parfumes. It is nonsense, naturally. These kinds of differences were due to the social status of the particular person, not his nationality."

To be clear, all Western peasants were comparatively coarse-skinned, not only Slovaks; however, for purposes of the opera, only Slovaks are of interest, as she had Austrian and Hungarian servants in the castles that are not part of the story I'm telling (I even relocated the singer from Austria). I had no reason to contrast the peasants' harsh manners with other nationalities any more than I had to contrast Erzsébet's nobility with other nationalities. (Would I be inclined to make the latter comparison, though, I would note that the Hungarian ethnic group, peasant or not, has extremely smooth skin in flat expanses, often considered the mark of beauty in the Western view.)

She continues, "My next comment concerns the musicality of the language. I am sure you are partial mainly because of your Hungarian roots. But I find expressing only your personal attitudes to Slovak and Hungarian languages unfair. Everybody likes his mother tongue best (even if English seems to be your mother tongue) but it does not give him any right to despise other languages or nations. Can you add into FAQ a note that most foreigners find Slovak folk songs really charming?"

Again, she is absolutely correct about song. But to restate my note above, Hungarian (which is not my mother tongue; English is, and my second languages are French and Dutch) and the other Finno-Ugric languages have characteristics which make them more akin to music as it is composed. That is, the languages are, in their native spoken state, more like musical expression to one who does not care about the meaning of the words. The consistent first syllable accent is one very interesting characteristic; the words contain their own downbeats, so to speak. The lack of gutturals and plosives is another; the former sound is absent, the latter suppressed (though these softenings are also noticeable in some French, Italian and Portuguese speakers). But for me, the third -- and foremost -- reason (speaking only of Hungarian here, because I'm not sure of the other three Finno-Ugric tongues) is that its grammatical inflection is harmonic in nature, and its diacritical marks (doubled vowels in Finnish) indicate differences in duration as well as timbre. This is a characteristic of no other Western languages, and very significant to me as a composer.

February 2003: Eydís Björnsdóttir recently wrote to amplify this: "All that you say about Hungarian, especially the parts about the emphasis being on the first syllable: Well, I do believe Iceland is one of the Western nations, and the Icelandic language does exactly have that characteristic. And in poetry based on old poetry 'rules', the rhythm of the language is highly important." Many thanks to Eydís for that information. (See more about language in Visitor Comments #4, below.)

My goal is not to defend Erzsebet, but to explain, in terms of breaking down unsupportable mythology and replacing it with a different one, more based on what can be ascertained about her behavior in more modern terms. Remember I'm writing an opera, not a history book.

Sometimes it gets just plain weird, like this one: "First of all, yes you do 'glorify' her. You admire her avarice and power, latent or expressed. There is another issue besides 'blood' and 'ghosts.' There are people out there who are psychopaths. They should not be glorified. If you have ever experienced the suffering and loss of life-direction at the hands of a psychopath (whether murdering, cannibal, or just entrapping, using and ruining), it's very serious and very real. Maddening--incredibly horrible to any socially inclined person. I'm still looking for some commentary on your site that would explain how monsterous 'Bathory' was. The 'thing' (not person) was a monster. That so-called nobility permitted this to occur...and why does this always seem to come from Hungary and Romania. What's with you 'people?' Are you all carnivores?"

Weird or not, let me take this on a little. First of all, this modern-day politically correct prattle is an infection. "Entrapping"? "Ruining"? "Life-direction"? Kids are being taught this stuff. Yuck.

But to the topic: Nobility (if that's the word) nowhere in the world seems to have been immune from these predilections. The old testament is full of personal slaughter. What were the crusades but legitimized slaughter? The ritualized lynchings in near-modern America? Sometimes it's a religion -- Torquemada and his inflamed minions of death -- sometimes a title -- Henry VIII and his murderous impulses toward his wives, and who knows how many anonymous servants, while being a writer and composer -- and sometimes the madness in modern times is disguised in political/ideological terms, such as the lunatic behavior made manifest in rulers such as Pol Pot or Stalin or Idi Amin or Mao ... or yet still in personal one-on-one Erzsébet-like behavior (less the literally bloody hands) as in a Mengele. All, yes, modern people in modern dress with ancient madness.

The world is made up of the psychopaths. Where we deviate from the norm, we show, in such political terms, anti-social behavior, and when we repeat it, anti-social pathology. Where it arises out of mental aberration (as an artist, I am by definition aberrant), it's psychopathological, an ongoing life's work of insanity. Everyone is a psychopath at some level. Sports are psychopathic manifestations. When employees lives are left in ruins by ravenous corporate executives, it's because of psychopaths at work. Cops who beat and maim suspects until they're dead are among them, as are mothers who drown their children one by one, and terrorists who dump feeble humans off cruise ships in the apotheosis of a vacation. Certainly all, yes, manifesting the madness, and there's an opera about that last one ("The Death of Klinghoffer").

What the bruised and battered and damaged goods among us must know is that Erzsébet's acts of long ago are gone, taking with them and her both her own malevolence and the anguish of her victims. Now she can speak only through artists and writers like me, and our self-styled obligation is to re-interpret humanity for our fellow humans, escape it though you desire. We are far from her time, but we have not grown consistently well as a species.

But no, the opera -- and the distant story of her life -- is no morality play. It's a thrilling and horrifying story by which we learn if we have separated ourselves from our demons. We ask again and again and again. And discover again and again and again that we have not. How else would we artists have given birth to Dracula and Frankenstein and fearsome modern Hannibal Lecters and even the more mundane Freddies and Chuckies? We are fascinated, hypnotized, by the incomprehensibly horrible. And we, as artists, swim in that rank pool of horror so that you need do little more than read or hear or watch the summarized and sanitized result that may raise momentarily a hair on your neck. (Between snacks. And emails upbraiding us.)

So when someone writes to me as they have in this note, they reveal a clear misunderstanding not only of art, but demonstrate also a psychopathic, if you will, focus on the centrality of their own existence in their own world, and their simple-minded weakness in facing what it is to be human.

I ran across your page by accident (attracted to the Hungarian name in my daughter's links to free sheet music), was intrigued enough by your list of compositions and lectures to search google for more about you and found the Erszébet opera site.

I just wanted to comment on the question of emphasis in Hungarian vs. Icelandic. Not that I'm an expert, or particularly qualified. I have studied both languages but have no real fluency in either. The point that Eydís misses is that, while in Icelandic there is emphasis on the first syllable of every word, the emphasis alternates through the rest of the word, as is frequently found in English. So, the 3rd, 5th, 7th, etc. syllables are also emphasized. What you get then, is natural iambics that match the stresses in our most prevalent musical meter - 4/4 time. No wonder it's called "common."

This, of course, is not the case in Hungarian, where only the first syllable is emphasized. This is what gives these Finno-Ugric languages that strange (to western ears) singing but monotonous (literally) quality. Of course, this is the characteristic that makes it pretty much impossible for us non-native speakers of Hungarian to ever speak it well.

I have a friend whose first language is Estonian and who was a foreign exchange student in Finland. She assures me that the emphasis is only on the first syllable in Estonian and in Finnish, as in Hungarian. Estonian also has the longer duration associated with long vowels, like Finnish and Hungarian.

As for the "old poetry rules"--they involve two different sets of alliterative consonants in the two halves of each line, internal assonance, and "kenning," where the poet substitutes metaphors for everything possible, thus making the meaning so obscure that only gnostics can understand what it's about!

One last thing--I don't want to bore you or take up more of your time--but I think you do a great job in the FAQ of answering those who criticize your failure to condemn Erszébet. I don't understand why it is that our society believes that every possible fictional and public figure must be a role model, represent an ethnic or national roup, or make an overt political statement. Who is so stupid or unimaginative that they want to imitate all of the actions of someone in sports, politics, a book, or a movie? I have tried several times to start reading groups (just to have someone to talk to about books) only to discover that most people are unable to read or discuss any piece of literature except as a personal self-help guide. Frankly, it had never occurred to me to read Lolita as a sociological text...

Anyway, bravo to you for plowing forward, at whatever pace you can manage, in your musical career.

Köszönöm és jó estét.