Štefan Németh-Šamorínsky

"Németh-Šamorínský’s activity as a composer was influenced by his life experience: he was the organist in St. Martin’s Cathedral, and this bore fruit in the composition of four short Masses and one Bratislava High Mass, as well as other smaller forms with a religious focus. A second source of inspiration for him was his concert and conducting activity. For the Béla Bartók Choral Group he wrote Fifteen Male Choirs, based on Bartók’s cycle of piano pieces For Children. Similar arrangements of folk songs were produced also for others, especially Hungarian choral collectives operating in the south of Slovakia, and for Slovak choral bodies also. The core of his artistic achievement, however, consists of Songs to Words by Endre Ady, Slovak Rhapsody for Piano, Piano Trio, Piano Sonata, Piano Quintet, Concerto for Piano and Orchestra, String Quartet, Concerto for Organ and Orchestra, the cantatas In the Name of Peace, Song about the Váh, Concerto for Organ, Sonata a tre for Organ, Sonata for Violin and Piano, Partita profana for Organ, Accomodatio ad nomen BACH etc. The artist was also a teacher, one who never forgot the young performers, for whom he wrote numerous arrangements of folk songs and instrumental pieces.

Németh-Šamorínský’s music takes its departure from a classical foundation, in terms of construction. All his life long he was a great admirer of J. S. Bach, L. van Beethoven and J. Brahms. He learned to appreciate the values of modern compositional procedures in work by B. Bartók, as well as by the creators of dodecaphonic music. Of these stimuli he appropriated only those which corresponded to his personal taste, giving preference to musicality formed by a clearly conceived body of themes and working with those. His compositions are unified by thoroughgoing work with motifs, thematic recurrence, and adequacy of the harmonic structure. The musical subject bears marks of vocal-instrumental feeling; frequently it is close to folk singing, while at other times it is conditioned by the Bach-Reger type of polyphony or by later neo-romantic, impressionist and postimpressionist inspirations. These ideas were thoroughly worked up by the composer and given an impressive emotional charge and a tastefully structured harmony, originally respecting the principle of the third in chord construction, though later enriched with chords constructed on fourths, sevenths and ninths, by which stage the artist was not far removed from the dodecaphonic registers. He did not hide the (evident) fact that in many ways he had learned from B. Bartók’s legacy; many of his works in the vocal and instrumental genres are marked by this, and especially his musical thinking as influenced by the studio of folk song, drawing upon old tonal models. Nemeth fully identified with Bartók’s opinions on the relationship of melos and harmony in folk music, though he never went as far as Bartók. For Németh it mattered that his art should be communicative, and he avoided atonal registers."

(PALOVČÍK, Michal: Štefan Németh-Šamorínsky. In: A Hundred Slovak Composers. Eds. Marián Jurík, Peter Zagar. Bratislava : National Music Centre Slovakia, 1998, p. 210.)