"Gloomy Sunday": The Most Notorious Song I Know

Editor's Note: This article is in part about depression and suicide. If you think of harming yourself, the National Suicide Hotline is there to help: 1-800-273-TALK.

When German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe published The Sorrows of Young Werther in 1774, he intended for readers to finish it, but not, you know, to end it. To Goethe's disbelief, his novel sparked a spate of suicides. The title character, whose obsessive love for a married woman was unrequited, ended up shooting himself, and soon the copycatting started. Young men of the era would dress just as the fictional Werther had—yellow trousers, blue jacket—and use a similar pistol. Often, a copy of the book was found at the scene. The number of deaths was unsettling enough that Italy and Denmark banned Goethe's novel. The German city of Leipzig even outlawed Werther-style clothes for a while. The phenomenon is now known as the Werther effect (footnote 1).

Because history, per Mark Twain, "doesn't repeat itself but often rhymes" (footnote 2), the pathway between glum art and self-harm exists in the world of music, too. Exhibit A has to be "Szomorú Vasárnap," or "Gloomy Sunday." Artists as diverse as Paul Robeson, Billie Holiday, Diamanda Galás, Bing Crosby, the Kronos Quartet, and Sinéad O'Connor have covered this somber song, written by Hungarians Rezsű Seress (music; pictured below) and László Jávor (lyrics) in the 1930s. Seress had a hard time getting his dirge-like composition out there, with one potential publisher demurring and telling him: "It's not that the song is sad, but there is a sort of terrible compelling despair about it. I don't think it would do anyone any good to hear it."

The man had a point. No two ways about it: "Gloomy Sunday" is a grim (and perhaps communicable) lament from someone whose lover has died and who is considering taking his or her own life. In the English translation by Sam M. Lewis:

Little white flowers will never awaken you; not where the black coach of sorrow has taken you.
Angels have no thought of ever returning you.
Would they be angry
If I thought of joining you?

Later interpretations sometimes added an extra verse that employs a particularly hoary literary device intended to avoid offense and further deaths:

Dreaming, I was only dreaming; I wake and I find you asleep.

It's unclear whether the cop-out addition cut down on the sadness and depression that crept through the heart of many a "Gloomy Sunday" listener, or on self-inflicted death.

But honestly, much about the effect of the song is debatable. Its legacy is shrouded in urban myth. What we know for certain is that it became known as "that Hungarian suicide song"; that more than 200 cases of people killing themselves were attributed to it, rightly or wrongly (footnote 3); that in the late 1930s, the Hungarian authorities forbade the playing of the apparently deadly tune, to the chagrin of Rezsű Seress; and that the BBC banned it from the airwaves in the early 1940s because it was thought to undermine wartime morale. (The British ban lasted six decades, until about 2002.)

Some of the purported consequences of listening to "Gloomy Sunday" seem too bizarre to be true. For instance, the Dutch newspaper Argus reported that "In Germany, an 80-year-old man plunged to his death from the seventh floor while he played the song on his trumpet with his right hand; and in Rome, a 14-year-old gave all his money to a beggar who'd been humming 'Gloomy Sunday,' and threw himself in the river, where he drowned."

Also according to Argus, "In 1937, police in the US state of Indianapolis [sic] raided a bar where a man named Jerry Flanders had paid a pianist to play the suicide song, after which he imbibed a poisoned cocktail."

Good luck fact-checking that; I came up empty. It all carries at least a whiff of fantasy and fabrication, and there's a pretty good theory (footnote 4) that the self-harm imputed to the song is in fact based on the many Hungarian suicides that occurred in the 1930s and '40s. Realistically, war, poverty, and famine played a bigger part than the song did.

Less disputable is that "Gloomy Sunday" had a role in its creator's demise. Rezsű Seress's obituary in the New York Times noted that he "complained that the success of 'Gloomy Sunday' actually increased his unhappiness, because he knew he would never be able to write a second hit." It didn't help that Seress, who was a bit of an agoraphobe, lived on the cusp of poverty, mostly because he didn't want to leave his native Budapest—not even to pick up his royalty check from the United States, which had reportedly grown to $370,000. Even in the autumn of his life, he continued as a piano player in a local bar, living on subsistence wages.

At age 78, on January 12, 1968, Seress's often depressive state got the better of him. In Hungary's coldest month, when the sun often doesn't bother showing up, he jumped out a window ... and survived the fall. He finished the job in the hospital by strangling himself with a piece of wire. It wasn't a Sunday, but the gloom that always followed the composer was in plentiful supply that freezing Friday, too.


Footnote 1: See tinyurl.com/4fdx76m5.

Footnote 2: The attribution is doubtful, as with so many of Twain's supposed bon mots.

Footnote 3: Some sources claim that lyricist Lászlo Jávor, who reportedly had an in with the Budapest police, persuaded an officer to place a copy of the lyrics at two local suicide scenes, thus kicking off the song's notoriety. See tinyurl.com/37hrzsta.

Footnote 4: See tinyurl.com/j8y8nh4c.

COMMENTS
Fleschler's picture

Mel Torme with Marty Paich, 1959 Mel Torme - Torme on Verve
Interesting that my wife finds it depressing and gloomy and won't listen to it again after the first hearing. Excellent sound too!

Poor Audiophile's picture

George Jones' "He Stopped Loving Her Today" was sad!
BTW,the label above says "For perfect tone use Columbia needles". Does anyone know if that was true or did it at least make a difference? Audiophiles want to know.

barfle's picture

There were plenty of them when I was growing up. I can think of “Running Bear” and “Patches” and perhaps “Leader of the Pack.”

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