By Laurence Vittes | From the January/February 2026 issue of Strings
At the summit of the cellist’s art, Zoltán Kodály’s Sonata for Solo Cello, Op. 8, stands beside Bach’s Fifth Solo Cello Suite as a pinnacle of power and beauty amidst fierce complexity and of sound reborn through scordatura—the retuning that, in the Kodály’s case, lowers the cello’s C and G strings to B and F-sharp. Its opening Allegro maestoso ma appassionato unfolds with classical discipline charged with passion yet grounded in structure. The lamenting lines of the Adagio (con grand’ espressione) revealthe cello’s most human voice. The Allegro molto vivace dances, flares, and finally streaks into the light.
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The “shock throughout the music world must have been immense when people first encountered it,” says cellist Daniel Müller-Schott. Kodály had written the Sonata in 1915 while teaching at the Budapest Academy during the First World War. “In an age still shaped by late-Romantic sonatas and salon miniatures,” Müller-Schott underlines, “a 30-minute work for unaccompanied cello built on Hungarian rhythms, folk inflections, opera tunes, and daring harmonic invention seemed nothing short of revolutionary.”
A century later, its challenge remains absolute: Every generation’s aspiring cello virtuosos must learn how to speak Kodály. Last summer at the Verão Clássico Festival and Academy in Lisbon, I heard a young cellist who spoke it fluently—20-year-old Italian Matteo Fabi, whose performance of the finale, I noted at the time, “felt less like interpretation than reckoning. Pizzicatos flared, bow strokes scorched, and lines opened out with the sweep of true conviction before he finished off the fireworks with a swashbuckler’s grin.”
Fabi learned the Kodály—all three movements—on his own in the three months leading up to the Verão Clássico. “I studied it mostly alone,” he says, “and I think it worked, because it’s a piece where you need to feel free to express—it’s solo music, so you can go your own way.”
Before going to Lisbon, he played it for Giovanni Gnocchi and Giovanni Sollima, refining small details but keeping his own conception intact. At the Verão Clássico, he worked on the Kodály with Gary Hoffman, who challenged him mentally and physically. “Awareness and control of every part of the body,” Fabi recalls of Hoffman’s expectations. “Not for effect, but to make the cello sing. I hadn’t found a position I was truly happy with, so I asked him to push me.”
Fabi soon realized that freedom in the Kodály Sonata meant acquiring a Hungarian accent. “Like the language, the music is all in the pulse—never on the second or third beat, always on the first. Even in the last movement, with all its sections, the same breath has to carry it from start to finish.”
That sense of musical speech—rhythm shaped by language—is one that Hungarian cellist Ditta Rohmann knows by instinct. Once a student of Miklós Perényi and now professor at the Liszt Academy, she resists the notion that Hungarian is difficult. “Anyone can learn to speak Hungarian, but not many try. The diction of the language, like the people, is direct, and that has an influence on the music. Kodály starts with maestoso. It’s very outspoken. You can learn and possess the idiom, and you must breathe it.”
Although the Sonata’s defining color comes from the scordatura, not every cellist welcomes it. The great Mstislav Rostropovich once told Gramophone: “I never play Kodály. I have absolute pitch. Scordatura is impossible for me. I hear the wrong notes.”
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In Budapest, Rohmann sees—and hears—it differently. “Our eyes are so used to seeing the score as written. The best version includes an additional score where you can see the actual pitch. Kodály’s original Universal Edition gives only the scordatura notation, so for a non-cellist, it’s impossible to grasp what you’re hearing or reading. It’s our secret piece,” she adds with a smile.
Fabi, by contrast, enjoys living dangerously with the old setup. He begins each morning with open strings followed by scales “for intonation and to find the sweet spots for each note, which is really necessary when you put a new tuning on your instrument.” During the months he was learning the Kodály, he tuned his cello up and down twice a day. And when it came to his own endurance, he often played the Sonata twice in a row to build stamina and mental control.
At the same time, he also practiced the Sonata both with and without Kodály’s scordatura, keeping the left-hand positions while hearing the “wrong” pitch. “It can be confusing,” he admits, “but I think it helps in the long run. Now it doesn’t bother me or my cello so much to change it.”
Now based in Düsseldorf, where he studies at the Robert Schumann Hochschule with Pieter Wispelwey (who has recorded the Kodály several times), Fabi, at press time, is planning to record the Kodály himself in December 2025.
Structure and Style
Cellist Marc Coppey, who studied the Sonata with János Starker, puts Kodály alongside Schoenberg, Ravel, and Stravinsky as “the figures who really changed the perspective on stringed instruments. Suddenly the cello is not just a cello—it’s a guitar, a voice, a flute.” Coppey calls that transformation “one of the cello’s great challenges—and the Kodály embodies its most fascinating and inspiring aspects. You have to make the cello sound like a fantastic new five-octave instrument.”
Coppey hears the first movement not as a free declamation but as a rigorously built sonata form. Too often, he says, performers treat it “as a kind of a free prosodic thing, shaped like speech, which it is not. Maybe the second movement has something of that, but not the first at all. It’s a sonata—exposition, development, coda—very structured.”
The Solo Sonata’s demands remained an understated generational crucible until Starker’s advocacy helped bring it into mainstream view with the first of his four recordings in 1948. Rohmann is blunt about performance tradition: “People connect Kodály with Starker—but not to my ears. His recordings are much too dark.” Her emphasis is on staying close to Kodály’s markings: “The score speaks for itself.”
Rohmann’s colleague Miklós Perényi shares her preference for a more vocal, folk-rooted color over Starker’s taut modernism. And while few dispute his brilliance, fewer try to sound like him, and his pupils usually stress seeking the balance between discipline and freedom that the music demands.
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The Kodály Sonata remains a rite of passage—a 30-minute test of memory, stamina, and imagination. It invites comparison not only with Bach’s Suites but also with 20th-century solo works that followed. Kodály’s Sonata transforms the cello through retuning—to a degree no earlier work had attempted.
Hoffman, who studied with Starker, sees the Sonata as a study in musical cause and effect—everything arising from sound, not display: “All events are musically generated, not technically. I try to have students understand the piece’s dimensions and how to spread energy over its long span. Endurance and mental pacing come from that.”
The most common misconception about the piece, he adds, “is to think it’s Gypsy music. It is not. It is Hungarian music—Mr. Starker insisted on that, and he was right.” What matters most, Hoffman tells his students, is to build a direct, personal relationship with the score before letting anyone else’s interpretation interfere.
Speaking Kodály, in the end, means more than mastering his notes. It means retuning the cello—and oneself—to his way of hearing.
Kodály’s Sonata in Print—From Vienna to Budapest
First Edition (1921, Universal Edition, Vienna)
Published as Sonate pour Violoncelle seul, Op. 8, this was the version prepared under Kodály’s own supervision. It remains the reference text for all later editions. Kodály’s careful indications of string choices, dynamics, and tempo relations reveal his intent to blend folk inflection with a disciplined, architectural form.
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Mid-Century Reprints and Revisions
In the 1950s, Edition Sieber (Paris) reissued Universal’s plates under its own imprint—not a new urtext, merely a French-market reprint. Around the same time, János Starker prepared his now-classic International Music Company edition in New York. Though often treated as a “modernized urtext,” it is a performing edition based on Universal, reflecting Starker’s own bowings, articulations, and solutions to Kodály’s notoriously difficult slurs and crossings.
Urtext Restorations
In 2005, Editio Musica Budapest published an authenticated urtext edited by László Eo˝sze and László Vikárius, who consulted Kodály’s manuscript and correspondence. Their work clarified rhythmic ambiguities, restored several expressive markings omitted in Universal’s engraving, and incorporated Kodály’s final dynamic refinements.
Consensus Today
Most performers now study from Universal or the 2005 Budapest urtext while consulting Starker’s markings as a practical guide. As Ditta Rohmann observes, “Kodály wrote exactly what he wanted—bowings, accents, tempo shifts. The danger is to ‘improve’ them away. The score speaks for itself.” —LV
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