Although not well known on stages in America or Western Europe, Zoltán Kodály's opera Háry János has been an institution in the composer's native country of Hungary since its premiere in 1926, and it continues to receive regular performances in Budapest and elsewhere. Despite the special connection the opera has with the soil from which it sprouted, Western audiences would find much to appreciate: the rustic exoticism of Kodály's folk evocations is entertaining, and the score, while perhaps not the weightiest in all of opera, has much in its orchestral and stylistic synthesis to recommend it.

Called "A Song Play in Five Adventures," the opera takes its story from a tale by poet Johann Grey. The opera depicts the various yarns spun by the title character, a beloved war veteran and local curiosity who enjoys entertaining his fellow townsfolk with stories of his many adventures. These are, of course, fabricated, but he recalls them with such vivid detail that eventually Háry himself fails to discern autobiography from fiction. The townsfolk, so amused by his wild claims, play along with him as he invents his past adventures.

The score that Kodály provides to accompany Háry János' imaginings is filled with local stylistic color as well as brilliant orchestral effect. The whole of the work begins with what may be the only (and is certainly the most convincing) orchestral depiction of a sneeze: a quivering, ascending inhalation followed by an enormous and percussive explosion. According to longtime local legend, a sneeze at the beginning of a story is a sign of its truthfulness. Sneeze completed, Háry proceeds to describe his various encounters. The images and events described are rendered with pictorial charm. Hungarian elements appear prominently throughout, particularly the use of borrowed folk melodies and idioms, as well as the use in several scenes of the cimbalom. Kodály also demonstrates his skill and cleverness at other kinds of borrowings as well. Worthy of particular note is the music for the scene "The Battle and Defeat of Napoleon," which parades around in a clumsy caricature of a march and which employs a sly distortion of the French national anthem La Marseillaise. (This scene has been compared to Prokofiev's later military music parody in Lieutenant Kijé.) While the opera may not grace Western stages frequently, it is known to many through its reincarnation as a concert suite programmatically encapsulating the story in five movements: "Prelude: The Fairy-Tale Begins"; "The Viennese Musical Clock," a Hungarian folk-themed song; the aforementioned "Battle and Defeat of Napoleon"; a lively Intermezzo based on the folk dance Verbunkos; and the final "Entry of the Imperial Court."

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