By Daniel Arthur Egyed-Kiss
Hungary’s national anthem is one which doesn’t boast. It prays. Set beside the anthems its neighbors wrote during the same years, under the same empire, it raises a harder question: when a nation tells the story of how it survived, who does it say is in charge of its fate?
Picture a Budapest apartment at 11:59 on New Year’s Eve. A bottle of pezsgő (sparkling wine) sweating on the table, upon the stove some lencseleves (lentil soup) for good luck, and the television is turned up for the countdown. The clock strikes twelve, and instead of cheering, the room stands up.
From the screen comes a slow, grave melody that sounds more like church than stadium; the guests sing along solemnly, some under their breath, some with their eyes closed, head slightly lowered: ‘Isten, áldd meg a magyart.’ (God, bless the Hungarian). Among them, an outsider, let us say an American, a friend of a friend, holds a glass he isn’t sure he’s yet permitted to drink from; he stands because everyone else does.
The music ends. For a moment, no one moves. And into that moment, cheerfully and on instinct, the outsider claps. Providing us three, maybe four claps, loud in the quiet room, sharp to our ears. He soon stops when he’s noticed that no one has joined him.
Only then do the fireworks begin.
Why nobody claps
The scene is imagined, but the silence is real. Nobody applauds after the Himnusz (National Anthem), and no rule anywhere says you can’t. Hungarians stand for it the way people stand in church.
A symposium on anthem etiquette in Új Köznevelés, a journal of Hungary’s Education Office, tells students to stand at attention with their hands at their sides, or clasped in prayer if the setting is a church, and not to chew gum or keep their hands in their pockets – for the same reason, one contributor writes, that one removes a hat on entering a church. In the same symposium, the conductor Ádám Medveczky puts it more bluntly. Running through the German, Italian, Russian and British anthems, each of which glorifies a people or a monarch, claims that the Hungarian is the only one that does not partake in self-glorification, being a humble prayer instead – “Ez nem is csak egy himnusz, hanem inkább egy vallásos zsoltár,” says Medveczky. (It is not merely an anthem, but rather a religious psalm).
The treatment has institutional ancestors. After the First World War, according to Classic FM, Hungary’s culture minister established restrictions on the anthem’s use, given its prayerful nature, to only serious occasions, and so kept it out of sporting events. In the communist 1950s, it was played without its words.
The American’s hands were trained by an opposite history. When a Navy band appeared and played impromptu ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ during the seventh-inning stretch of the 1918 World Series, the baseball fans sang, and at the final notes, burst into applause, according to The New York Times account published the following day.
So our midnight stages a collision: an anthem that became a match day ritual meets one that was once barred from them. The Hungarians have treated theirs as more sacred than performative, and the reason is not sentiment, but rather genre.
A prayer, not a boast
It is not strictly a song sung in the room. ‘Isten, áldd meg a magyart’ opens a poem Ferenc Kölcsey finished on January 22, 1823, now Hungary’s Day of Hungarian Culture, and published in 1829. All of its eight stanzas are recognized as the official anthem; only the first being sung through the ritual.
It can be regarded as a sacred petition sung, ‘Nyújts feléje védő kart, / Ha küzd ellenséggel’: (Extend a protecting arm toward him / when he struggles with an enemy) [translation mine]; the Hungarian fighting for his life, but it being God’s arm which decides his fate. Even the grammar kneeling: ‘a magyart’ (the Hungarian) being singular, depicting the nation as a single individual standing before God.
Compare this to the anthem our American has grown up with. ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ ends its first verse with a question, ‘O say does that star-spangled banner yet wave / O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?’, which Loras John Schissel of the Library of Congress has called the only national anthem to conclude with a question mark. were written by American lawyer and poet Francis Scott Key, the American lawyer and poet who wrote the lyrics to ‘The Star-Spangled Banner, having asked a question about a flag/symbol, whilst Kölcsey having asked his question of God – one anthem waiting for daylight; the other waiting for mercy.
Then the strangest claim: ‘Megbűnhődte már e nép / A múltat s jövendőt!’ (This people has already atoned / for the past and the future!) Megbűnhődte is a completed past tense acquisition. A paid debt, even for sins yet to be committed; the lyrics sound like confession, though it works as a plea of innocence.
Is it humility, or simply camouflage? Kölcsey’s subtitle, ‘from the stormy centuries of the Hungarian people,’ has put the nation’s suffering safely in the past, and it is often argued that this helped the poem pass Habsburg censors, a notion first promoted through literary historian Pál Gyulai’s lectures in the 1880s. The dates don’t quite cooperate however, this subtitle having been on the 1823 manuscript, and when the poem was first printed in 1829, it appeared without the subtitle and drew no objection. The never-sung third stanza indeed being boastful, of Tokaj nectar and an army that made ‘Bécsnek büszke vára’ (Vienna’s proud fortress) whimper. But this is only about history.
Hungary had another option. Mihály Vörösmarty’s ‘Szózat’ (1836) commands the Hungarian to remain unwaveringly faithful to his homeland, and welcome, if it must come to it, ‘a nagyszerű halál’ (the glorious death) and insists that the sacrifice surely paid for something: ‘Az nem lehet hogy annyi szív / Hiába onta vért.’ (It cannot be that so many hearts / shed blood in vain). Szózat addresses the Hungarian; Himnusz addresses God, and its seventh stanza, also one never sung, refuses the bargain outright: “S ah, szabadság nem virúl / A holtnak véréből,’ (And ah, freedom does not bloom / from the blood of the dead). Hungary never came to choose between them; both songs open and close official celebrations.
A melody from church
The words kneel, but so, it turns out, does the tune, although the story Hungary spent a century telling itself about why it is mostly myth. In Géza Gárdonyi’s famous version, the composer Ferenc Erkel is locked by the National Theater’s director in a room and forced to compose on the spot the day before the deadline. In the silence, Erkel remembers his first teacher in Pressburg (Bratislava, or Pozsony in Hungarian), who had told him that those who write sacred music should always think of the bells. Then, tolling in his ear, he hears them, these same bells of the city in which he had studied as a youth. The musicologist Ferenc Bónis was blunt. Gárdonyi’s account is fine literature, though “…in terms of music history it is a mystification.”
The reality was really quite bureaucratic. On 29 February, 1844, the National Theater of Pest announced a contest to promote Hungarian poetry, not to choose a national anthem. Entries were anonymous, marked only by mottoes. Erkel won.
Then the twist. It was found by the musicologist Katalin Kim, who quotes Bónis’s verdict in a 2021 study of the anthem’s genesis, found that the opening of Erkel’s melody matches that of a Pange lingua setting in Devotio Sacris Hymnis (1815) – a Catholic hymn book that had been compiled by Heinrich Klein, that very first teacher of Erkel at the Benedictine school in Pressburg. Despite being wrong in its details, the legend is right in its instinct: the tune really does come out of a church.
A reviewer in Regélő Pesti Divatlap heard the church’s bells in 1844 and predicted, on those grounds, that the hymn “will not find an echo on the people’s lips.” – a line Kim recovers from the July issue. Her verdict on it: “He was wrong.” He had the roots right and the consequence backwards; the church in the music may be exactly why it lasted.
Next door, 1844–1848
Please stay in Pressburg but a moment longer, since in January and February 1844, weeks before Pest announced its contest, a 23-year-old student named Janko Matúška was writing Nad Tatrou sa blýska in that same city (Pozsony to Hungarians, Bratislava today), where Erkel had learned his church music.
Matúška wrote in protest. The Slovak scholar Ľudovít Štúr having been forced from his post at the city’s Lutheran lyceum at the end of 1843, after objections were raised by authorities of the Kingdom of Hungary to his Slovak nationalism. In March, about two dozen students would leave Pressburg as a show of solidarity.
‘Nad Tatrou sa blýska, / hromy divo bijú. / Zastavme ich, bratia, / veď sa ony stratia, / Slováci ožijú.’ (Lightning flashes over the Tatras, / thunder strikes wildly. / Let us stop them, brothers; / surely they will vanish, / the Slovaks will come alive).
‘Let us stop them’. The Slovaks are depicted as the actors, writing their own destiny – God does not appear.
And the storm they wanted driven off was, in part, Hungary.
The Himnusz is unusually willing to accuse its own nation, its fifth stanza, unsung, turning on the nation itself: ‘Hányszor támadt tenfiad / Szép hazám, kebledre,’ (How often your own son rose, / my beautiful homeland, against your breast), until the homeland became ‘your offspring’s funeral urn’. But look who is in that sentence. The son and the mother are both Hungarian. The poem is capable of imagining Hungarians destroying Hungarians; it cannot imagine Hungarians as somebody else’s storm. Kölcsey’s accounting is real, and it stops at the border.
Set the two songs side by side and Kölcsey’s poem appears in silhouette. Matúška’s Slovaks have a verb: stop them. Hungary’s anthem hands its people almost nothing: struggling, suffering, and atoning, while someone else’s arm decides the outcome. The nation that expressed oppression within Pressburg wrote itself an anthem in which it can barely act.
Now change one variable and put God back in. It would be four years later, in 1848, when the Transylvanian poet Andrei Mureșanu would write ‘Deșteaptă-te, române!’; first sung in Brașov, then in Hungarian-ruled territory. The historian Nicolae Bălcescu called it the ‘Marseillaise’ of the Romanians.
‘Deșteaptă-te, române, din somnul cel de moarte, / În care te-adânciră barbarii de tirani!’ (Wake up, Romanian, from the sleep of death / into which the barbarous tyrants sank you!) Himnusz reaches the same invasions and blames nobody outside: ‘Hajh, de bűneink miatt / Gyúlt harag kebledben,’ (Alas, but because of our sins/anger kindled in your breast.) Romania names its oppressors whilst Hungary names itself.
Nor is this piety versus secularism. Another line of Mureșanu’s poem reads, ‘Preoți, cu crucea-n frunte, căci oastea e creștină’: (Priests, with the cross at the front, for the army is Christian.) God is invoked in both songs, but in Himnusz God acts, and in Mureșanu’s, God blesses an army that acts – an army assured that death in battle is better than living again as slaves, which is precisely the bargain Kölcsey’s seventh stanza refuses, and Hungary never sings. Romania would make the song its anthem on January 24, 1990, weeks after its violent revolution.
So the prayer given in Himnusz is not a sign that Hungary was the more religious country, but rather a question of where the verbs went, and of who ends up in the ledger. Its neighbors’ anthems are willing to identify an enemy, while Hungary’s could only name itself.
The prayer took a long time to become law, with Himnusz only becoming Hungary’s official anthem in 1989, when it was written into the constitution during the democratic transition; a 1903 bill having passed parliament but failing to take effect.
That lag is part of a pattern: with the United States recognizing theirs in 1931, a mere 117 years after Key wrote it; Romania in 1990; Slovakia on January 1, 1993, at independence. The adoption of a nation’s anthems is done not when they are written but when the state needs to say what it is.
The 2012 Fundamental Law, the politics of which are still contested, went further: its preamble opens with the anthem’s first line. The poem’s last stanza repeats its first almost word for word. Only the verb changes.
‘Szánd meg Isten a magyart.’
(Pity, God, the Hungarian).
