The Hungarian Suicide Song

by Dean Terry
In the early days of rock ‘n’ roll, Jerry Lee Lewis became known as The Killer. Little did old Jer-Lee know, that decades before his time, a Hungarian composer more rightfully deserved that nickname for one of his compositions.

Hungarian composer Rezső Seress

Gloomy Sunday is a song written in 1933 by Hungarian pianist and composer Rezső Seress and due to stories about its inspiring hundreds of suicides it was dubbed the Hungarian Suicide Song.

The composer wrote the song for a former girlfriend, who committed suicide shortly after the songs release.

Legends have been told about Gloomy Sunday over the years and how it was allegedly connected with various numbers of suicides. Many American and European radio services found it too depressing for broadcast, and banned the song.

The BBC is said to have been forced to ban the song because of its lethal effect and its growing reputation for bringing bad luck and disaster to all who heard it (a woman in the East End of London is reputed to have put her head in a gas oven after listening to the song and taking its message to heart.)

Up to seventeen suicides were purportedly linked in some way to the song in Hungary before it was banned. These included people who reportedly killed themselves after listening to the song, or who were said to have been found dead with references to Gloomy Sunday in their suicide notes. Some were supposedly found with Gloomy Sunday sheet music in their hand, or with Gloomy Sunday playing on their gramaphone.

Some sources claim that up to 200 cases of suicide, worldwide, can be attributed to the English-language version of Gloomy Sunday.

The Billy Holiday version, recorded in 1941, was probably the most popular of the English-language versions.

It is also rumored the music played without lyrics will put the listener into a deep sleep and induce vivid dreams and nightmares. The nightmares usually consist of falling or flying sensations.

Even though, at times, I have jokingly said that I’d rather kill myself than listen to any of the new country music, I can’t imagine any one song being able to cause a person to commit such a tragic act. Well, Garth Brooks or his alter-ego Chris Gaines… maybe.

It is amazing then, that with all the notoriety surrounding the song, Gloomy Sunday has been recorded by such diverse artists as Mel Torme, Ricky Nelson, Ray Charles, Elvis Costello, Marianne Faithful, Bjork, Sarah Brightman and Anton Lavey, just to name a few.

Billy Holiday’s version was featured in The Simpsons episode Treehouse of Horror XVII. Gloomy Sunday is featured at the start of the film Schindler’s List and also featured in the movie Grindhouse. In the film The Man Who Cried, Christina Ricci sings the song in the scene where she and Cate Blanchett are on the ship bound for America.

How did a song like Gloomy Sunday become popular, dispite it’s morbidity?

Well, it wasn’t easy. At first Rezső Seress had a difficult time getting someone to publish the song. No one would have anything to do with it. One publisher reportedly stated, “It is not that the song is sad, there is a sort of terrible compelling despair about it. I don’t think it would do anyone any good to hear a song like that.”

However, time passed and Seress finally got his song published. Within the week Gloomy Sunday became a best seller.

Seress contacted his ex-lover and made plans for a reunion. The next day the girl took her life through the use of poison. By her side was a piece of paper containing two words — Gloomy Sunday.

While some experts have claimed that broken romances, and not the song, were the true causes of these suicides, few people who have ever listened to the melody and lyrics fail to confess that it has a horribly depressing effect.

And few can dispute the songs affect: In New York, a pretty typist gassed herself leaving a request that Gloomy Sunday should be played at her funeral. An 80 year-old man jumped to his death from a seventh story window followed by the wailing strains of Gloomy Sunday. A 14-year old girl drowned herself while clutching a copy of The Suicide Song. In Berlin, a young shopkeeper hung herself while beneath her feet lay a copy of Gloomy Sunday.

Perhaps the strongest of all was the case of an errand boy in Rome, who, having heard a beggar humming the tune, parked his cycle, walked over to the beggar, gave him all his money, and then sought his death in the waters beneath a nearby bridge.

Rezső Seress was as bewildered as the rest of the world. Although he wrote the song on the breakup of his own romance, he never dreamed of the results which would follow.

However, as fate would have it, not even the composer could escape the strange affects of his own song.

After complaining that the success of Gloomy Sunday actually increased his unhappiness, because he knew he would never be able to write a second hit, Rezső Seress committed suicide by jumping from the window of his apartment in Budapest in 1968.

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The Hungarian Suicide Song

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