Szerelem, szerelem

Márta Sebestyén was born in Budapest in 1957. Her mother was a composer who had studied music with Zoltán Kodály, and when Márta was seven her father, an economist, came back from a visiting professorship in the United States with a large collection of ethnic music recordings from the Smithsonian Institution. Szerelem, szerelem, love, love, is not a composition but a traditional Hungarian folk song, and Sebestyén recorded it with Muzsikás, the folk group founded in 1973 that also plays the music of Béla Bartók, himself a collector of folk tunes. Their partnership produced a string of highly regarded recordings, and the group had been touring the world since 1978. Then, in 1996, their recording of Szerelem, szerelem was used in Anthony Minghella's film The English Patient, carrying a Hungarian folk melody to cinema audiences around the world. It was part of a remarkable run of unexpected appearances. Three Muzsikás songs had already turned up in Studio Ghibli's 1991 anime Only Yesterday, where the characters talk about the group while the music plays, and Sebestyén's adaptations of folk songs featured on Deep Forest's album Boheme, which won the Grammy for best world music album in 1995. In 2010 she was named a UNESCO Artist for Peace. Thanks to one film, an old Hungarian love song became, for millions of people, the sound of longing itself.