Can a song kill you? In the 1930s, Gloomy Sunday was accused of doing just that — sparking a global panic and a wave of government bans on the song. But what is the truth behind the so-called Hungarian Suicide Song?See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Chapter 1: What is the story behind the mysterious song Gloomy Sunday?
The record feels perfectly normal in your hands. A black vinyl disc about the size of a dinner plate. But when you set it on the turntable and the needle begins tracing the grooves, the music is curiously overwhelming. Music has never made you cry in the past, you're just not that type of person.
And yet, there's a melancholy quality to this song that is so pure, so effective, that tears immediately rise in your eyes. A lump in your throat. The pain of the world almost seems reflected in the melody. Suddenly, you feel the urge to rise from your chair and cross to the window of your high-rise apartment. But you resist. You were warned that this song has a power unlike any other.
In fact, for nearly a century, it's been banned by broadcasters across the world. Authorities have made desperate attempts to suppress the publication of its sheet music. Because when this song plays, people inexplicably die. The year is 1932. It's raining in Paris. Laszlo Jaber is taking a walk. He's an aspiring poet from Budapest struggling to make a living in post-war France.
He had thought the life of an artist would be easier in the city of love. But the only thing he found was a larger community of struggling artists. And now, after the love of his life left him, all he has are the gloomy streets of Paris. It's a quiet, wet morning. Most Parisians are clustered indoors. The buildings loom above him like melancholy tombstones as he walks. Passersby look like ghosts.
Slowly, before his eyes, a familiar figure takes shape from the mist. Yavor's eyes light up with recognition. It's his good friend, Rezo Seres. They are kindred spirits in a way. Seres is a fellow Hungarian, a musician and songwriter, who came to Paris for much of the same reason. As the two men meet each other, Yavor notices that Seres is also downcast. The two of them start walking together.
Yavor tells Ceres about his broken heart, how his lover took a contract in Sicily, and how he has neither the funds nor prospects to follow her. Ceres understands his pain. His girlfriend has also left him. She'd long insisted that he get a stable job and quit pursuing his dream of becoming a successful musician. Ceres had hoped that she'd come around.
For a while, it seemed like he would become a famous songwriter. He did write a hit song in 1925 and made a decent living as a live accompanist of silent films. But now that silent films have been replaced by talkies, picture houses have no need for a pianist anymore. That period of Ceres' life is over, and he has no idea what in the world is next for him.
Without much more to say, the men walk on in silence, each lost in their own thoughts, but grateful for the company. Ceres starts whistling. It's a melody that he wrote earlier that day, seized by inspiration. The tune catches Yavor's ear and he shivers. If he was emotional before, this tune caused the sadness to well up inside him. It makes him think of a poem he wrote not long ago.
And so he begins to recite it alongside his friends whistling. Two stanzas long, the poem is a prayer to a loved one who has passed on. In it, the unnamed narrator is so tormented by the loss of his lover that he considers suicide. The piece's title is fitting for a day like this. In Hungarian, it's called Sommaru Vasarna, or in English, Gloomy Sunday.
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Chapter 2: Who were Laszlo Yavor and Rezo Seres, the creators of Gloomy Sunday?
Several years later, Metallica's Fade to Black would gain similar notoriety. Public outcries would follow suicides from song to song, carrying into the 2000s and beyond. These songs have little in common beyond this strange, morbid connection. Some are metal, some are rock. Gloomy Sunday exists as a jazz song, a tango in swing time.
And even though moral panics about suicide songs continue to this day, Gloomy Sunday maintains a higher, more well-documented body count than any of its successors. Could it be that the newspapers in 1936 were perhaps correct when they labeled Gloomy Sunday as an unholy, so-called fiend tune capable of influencing people supernaturally with black magic?
there's actually a far more likely explanation for the Gloomy Sunday suicides and why they were bound up so tightly with that song in particular. The song that Rezo Seres and Laszlo Yavor wrote happened to strike a chord at just the right time to have such a perceived impact. The Great Depression hit Hungary in the early 1930s, causing waves of unemployment and poverty.
The songwriters who struggled to live paycheck to paycheck were no longer writing a song about just themselves, but rather about their whole country. A country that was mere years away from falling to fascism and condemning thousands of its people to die in Nazi labor camps. It didn't matter that the song was about yearning for lost love, that despair was universal.
The urban legend of Gloomy Sunday as a suicide song may, in the end, have things entirely backwards. The song does not cause suicidal depression, but rather, those suffering from depression find the song uniquely relatable. This music, with its profoundly unique words, expressed their longing to be free of despair, of heartbreak, and sorrow.
This is a story not about a cursed tomb, but about one of the darkest periods in world history, and how a single song spoke deeply to that darkness. Late Nights with Nexpo is created and hosted by me, Nexpo. Executive produced by me, Mr. Ballin, Nick Witters, and Zach Levitt. Our head of writing is Evan Allen. This episode was written by Robert Diemstra. Copy editing by Luke Baratz.
Audio editing and sound design by Alistair Sherman. Mixed and mastered by Schultz Media. Research by Abigail Shumway, Camille Callahan, Evan Beamer, and Stacey Wood. Fact-checking by Abigail Shumway. Production supervision by Jeremy Bone and Colt Locazio. Production coordination by Samantha Collins and Avery Siegel. Artwork by Jessica Claxton-Kiner and Robin Vane. Theme song by Ross Bugden.
Thank you all so much for listening to Late Nights with Nexpo. I love you all, and good night. You can listen to new episodes of Late Nights with Nexpo early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. You can also watch episodes of Late Nights with Nexpo on my YouTube channel, youtube.com slash nexpo.
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