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.
"Yes, Gloomy Sunday! That will be the title
of my new song" muttered Seress,
excitedly, and he grabbed a pencil and
wrote the notes down on an old postcard.
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.
A week later in the same city, a young
female shop assistant was found hanging
from a rope in her flat. Police who
investigated the suicide found a copy of
the sheet-music to Gloomy Sunday in the
dead girl's bedroom.
Two days after that tragedy, a young
secretary in New York gassed herself, and
in a suicide note she requested Gloomy
Sunday to be played at her funeral. Weeks
later, another New Yorker, aged 82, jumped
to his death from the window of his
seventh-story apartment after playing the
'deadly' song on his piano. Around the
same time, a teenager in Rome who had
heard the unlucky tune jumped off a
bridge to his death.
The newspapers of the world were quick to
report other deaths associated with Seress'
song. One newspaper covered the case of a
woman in North London who had been
playing a 78 recording of Gloomy Sunday at
full volume, infuriating and frightening her
neighbors, who had read of the fatalities
supposedly caused by the tune. The stylus
finally became trapped in a groove, and the
same piece of the song played over and
over. The neighbors hammered on the
woman's door but there was no answer, so
they forced the door open - only to find the
woman dead in her chair from an overdose
of barbiturates. As the months went by, a
steady stream of bizarre and disturbing
deaths that were alleged to be connected to
Gloomy Sunday persuaded the chiefs at the
BBC to ban the seemingly accursed song
from the airwaves. Back in France, Rizzo
Seress, the man who had composed the
controversial song, was also to experience
the adverse effects of his creation. He
wrote to his ex-fiancée, pleading for a
reconciliation. But several days later came
the most awful, shocking news. Seress
learned from the police that his sweetheart
had poisoned herself. And by her side, a
copy of the sheet music to Gloomy Sunday
was found.
At the end of the 1930s, when the world
was plunged into the war against Hitler,
Seress' inauspicious song was quickly
forgotten in the global turmoil, but the
sheet-music to the dreaded song is still
available (on the Net too) to those who are
curious to know if the morbid melody can
still exert its deadly influence...

stew: www.qsl.net/w5www/gloomy.html

Hmmmmm

why would i want to listen to such a gloomy song as if d ebola scare n BH threats r not gloomy enough 4 me?

I don't know what to say except hhhmmmm

The doctrine of ethos. Music has a direct effect on the soul of the listener. How I wish I was born in the 16th,17th or 18th century when music was still music.

I want to listen to the song
What site do I go to download it

KillerBeauty: I want to listen to the song
What site do I go to download it

are u sure?

abbeywasc:
are u sure?

done. I got the score online and played it. It's not that gloomy