Sunday, Gloomy Sunday

The line between mass hysteria, emotional hypersensitivity, urban legends and paranoia is sometimes foggy and unclear, that line can fade to the extent that it skips logic and enters speculative waters. That is why sometimes all that mixture can bring to the surface a phenomenal story...like the one about music that leads to taking one's own life...All attempts to find a correct transcription of the name of the main character of the story remain unsuccessful in the absence of people who speak Hungarian. And there are not many of them in the area and therefore instead of Rező Seress, Rező Seress (?), Rező Seress and other unlikely combinations, it is best to have his name in the original.

Rezső Seress, a Hungarian composer who lived in Paris, composed the song Gloomy Sunday in 1932, a piece of music that allegedly took thousands of lives. The composer at that time was trying to build a career in music, taking great risks, without making compromises and without looking for additional work to support himself. His fiancée could not bear the constant poverty and waiting and left him. Rezső Seress was left alone, without money, without the girl he adored and who made his lonely life in emigration easier, without friends and without a future...in one word he became Forever Alone. All this was followed by the December Parisian days with rain and fog...the final result of his mental state was the greatest success of the composer who in a single day turned his difficult `suffering` into notes. The myth was born.

A record company accepted the music and printed the composition, and it was released to the public via radio and gramophone records performed by then and future pop stars such as Pál Kalmar, Paul Robertson, Damia, Hall Camp and superstar Billie Holiday.

The first victim falls in Berlin, where the song becomes an instant hit.

A young man asks to have the song played for him in a bar, goes home, tells his friends that the song has "beaten him up" and that he can't go on any longer, locks himself in a room and kills himself with a revolver. A week later, again in Berlin, a young girl hangs herself. A copy of a Gloomy Sunday record is found in her room. Two days later in New York, another young girl commits suicide with gas, and the note says that she wants Gloomy Sunday to be played at her funeral. The next victim, an old woman, also in New York, jumps from the seventh floor after listening to the song. That same day, a teenager in Rome jumps off a bridge. The last song he listened to was Gloomy Sunday...

The media has already begun to treat the song. Especially after the case in London when the neighbors of a girl, irritated by her gramophone that plays that song for several hours because of the scratched record, decide to take action. No one answers the calls and knocks on her door. The police are called and break in... the girl is found dead. Suicide by overdose of barbiturates. Months pass and news reports of suicides become more and more frequent, especially among depressed people who have had the misfortune of listening to Gloomy Sunday. The BBC board decides to play it safe and bans the song from being broadcast on national radio.

In Paris, Rezső Seress has collected a good amount of money in royalties during this time. Finally financially stable, he writes his girlfriend a letter in which he begs her to come back to him. Instead of her answer, he receives a letter from her parents informing him that the girl has taken her own life by poisoning. The police find, in addition to the poison, a copy of the record with Gloomy Sunday next to her body...With the beginning of World War II, the song fell into oblivion, the wave of reports of hundreds of suicides was overshadowed by the horrors of war and the suffering of millions of people. And as people say, suicides tend to be a bit redundant in wartime. However, the song once again found itself on the front pages many years after the war, and that day after the suicide of Rezső Seress, the composer of the most melancholic song of all time.

"Gloomy Sunday with a hundred white flowers

I was waiting for you my dearest with a prayer

A Sunday morning, chasing after my dreams

The carriage of my sorrow returned to me without you

It is since then that my Sundays have been forever sad

Tears my only drink, the sorrow my bread..."

(Roger Mortis, 084)