If I had never studied ancient Hungarian literature, I would never have had the idea of composing the Psalmus, Zoltán Kodály said in a 1963 interview. The name of preacher Mihály Kecskeméti Vég was unknown outside philological circles, and only his 1561 translation of the 55th psalm has come down to us. Kodály set the psalm’s powerful text, enriched with allusions to Hungarian circumstances, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the union of Pest, Buda and Óbuda to form Budapest in April 1923, during a period of creative paralysis.