A Csango-Hungarian Lament

Abstract

characteristic features of Hungarian music and the words of their songs are mostly Hungarian, with some dialect differences. When Bartok divided the whole body of Hungarian music into four dialect regions he added the CsIng6 music of Bukovina to the fourth dialect region, that of Transylvania (Bart6k 1925:5). At that time only a few Bukovinian Csango songs were known. Therefore Bart6k, not knowing the Moldavian Csango songs, mentioned only the Bukovinian ones (ibid.). But from 1929 on, a great deal of research was done in Moldavia, especially in the 1930's and also later in the early 1950's after the repatriation of the Csangos in their new homes in Hungary (Domokos-Rajeczky 1956:131-43). By this large-scale research, our knowledge of Csango music was greatly increased. Thus P. P. Domokos, a well known authority on the Csang6 question suggests that a fifty dialect region, that of the Csang6 music, should be added to the four dialect regions of Bartok (DomokosRajeczky 1956:11). The first traces of the Csgng6s are in early chronicles that mention Hungarian groups, now identified with the Csang6s, living within the borders of what is now Rumania as early as the fourteenth century. According to these chronicles they we re already in Moldavia when the Principality of Moldavia was founded (the dates are uncertain; they vary from 1299 to 1342). After the Hussite wars in the fifteenth century, they were joined by emigrants from different parts of Hungary. Again, in the eighteenth century, we hear of political emigrants from Transylvania, the Seklers, reaching the Csang6 settlements in Rumania.1 In 1941, Hungary and Rumania reached an agreement concerning the repatriation of Csangos and Seklers from the above-mentioned territories. One of these repatriated Csangos is the peasant woman, Mrs. F. J. Simon, who sang the lament of our recording.2 She came in 1952, after her husband's death, when she wanted to join her son and his family who had come to Hungary a few years earlier. Shortly after she came, her old mother, whom she had left in Moldavia, died. Mrs. Simon's feelings about not being with her mother at the

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