DISCLAIMER: DON’T LISTEN TO THIS SONG IF YOU’RE DEPRESSED. IT MAY CAUSE SUICIDAL TENDENCIES. WE ARE NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR ANY SUCH ACTIVITIES OR SUICIDE PROVOKING THOUGHTS.
In Vienna, a teenage girl drowned herself while clutching a piece of sheet music. In Budapest, a shopkeeper killed himself and left a note that quoted from the lyrics of the same song. In London, a woman overdosed while listening to a record of the song over and over.
The piece of music that connects all these deaths is the notorious “Gloomy Sunday.” Nicknamed the “Hungarian suicide song,” it has been linked to over one hundred suicides, including the one of the man who composed it.
In December, 1932, a down and out Hungarian named Reszo Seress was trying to make a living as a songwriter in Paris, but kept failing miserably. All of his compositions failed to impress the music publishers of France, but Seress carried on chasing his dream nevertheless. He was determined to become an internationally famous songwriter. His girlfriend had constant rows with him over the insecurity of his ambitious life. She urged him to get a full-time 9 to 5 job, but Seress was uncompromising. He told her he was to be a songwriter or a hobo, and that was that.
One afternoon, things finally came to a head. Seress and his fiancée had a fierce row over his utter failure as a composer, and the couple parted with angry words.
On the day after the row - which happened to be a Sunday - Seress sat at the piano in his apartment, gazing morosely through the window at the Parisian skyline. Outside, storm-clouds gathered in the grey sky, and soon the heavy rain began to pelt down.
"What a gloomy Sunday" Seress said to himself as he played about on the piano's ivories, and quite suddenly, his hands began to play a strange melancholy melody that seemed to encapsulate the downhearted way he was feeling over his quarrel with his girl and the state of the dispiriting weather. Thirty minutes later he had completed the song. Seress sent his composition off to a music publisher and waited for acceptance with a lot more hope than he usually had in his heart. A few days later, the song-sheet was returned with a rejection note stapled to it that stated: "Gloomy Sunday has a weird but highly depressing melody and rhythm, and we are sorry to say that we cannot use it."
The song was sent off again to another publisher, and this time it was accepted. The music publisher told Seress that his song would soon be distributed to all the major cities of the world. The young Hungarian was ecstatic.
But a few months after Gloomy Sunday was printed, there were a spate of strange occurrences that were allegedly sparked off by the new song. In Berlin, a young man requested a band to play Gloomy Sunday, and after the number was performed, the man went home and blasted himself in the head with a revolver after complaining to relatives that he felt severely depressed by the melody of a new song which he couldn't get out of his head. That song was Gloomy Sunday.
FATE OF SERESS:
During World War II, he was put in a labor camp by the Nazis, which he survived. After that, he worked in the theater and the circus, where he was a trapeze artist. He later returned to songwriting, though he never had another hit as big as “Gloomy Sunday.”
In fact, the story goes that when the song first became a success, Seress attempted to reconcile with the ex who inspired it. Shortly after, he heard that she had poisoned herself, and there was a copy of the sheet music of the song nearby (in other versions of the story, she left a note with just two words: "Gloomy Sunday"). Whether that’s true or not, Seress himself did commit suicide, in 1968, jumping from the window of a Budapest apartment building.
Of course, this might all be an urban legend.One thing’s for sure, though. “Gloomy Sunday’s” composer Rezso Seress did take his life, and the success of his greatest hit may have been a contributing factor.
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