Stephen Sisa : The Spirit of Hungary

The true spirit of Hungary is best expressed in her music. Before beginning a survey on the subject, however, a misconception should be dispelled regarding the source and essence of Hungarian music which. for decades, has been identified with Gypsy music. This is a myth.

As Zoltán Kodály pointed out,

...For 500 years, the Gypsies have been living here, lamenting. singing, fiddling, asking for bread. The Hungarians listened, suffered them, gave them food, but did not accept their mode of musical expression and only made friends with their music when the Gypsy, with his gift for mimicry, learned to play Hungarian music for the Hungarian people.

Another misbelief still regards the Hungarian Rhapsodies of Liszt or the Hungarian Dances of Brahms as examples of typical Hungarian music. While it is true that both composers borrowed Hungarian themes for their works, they contain only traces of true Hungarian music, which has become known to the world through the efforts of Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály in the 20th century. Together, they found a treasure house of Magyar folksongs that has survived through many centuries as a heritage of a once flourishing Eurasian culture which existed contemporaneously with the Chinese, Southwest Asian and classical Western cultures. As Kodály later put it: "The Hungarians are the outermost branch of the millennial tree of the great Asian musical culture, which has its roots in the soul of a large number of different peoples from China, through Central Asia, all the way to the Black Sea."

This music, rediscovered from a sunken Hungarian culture brought from the East, is alien to the Indo-Germanic surroundings. Based on the pentatonic scale, it is rather more active than passive with sharp, resolute and diversified rhythms radiating dynamic energy in a true expression of Hungarian soul and spirit.

The first reference to a Hungarian song comes from a chronicler of the eleventh century who describes how Bishop St. Gellért arrived in Hungary from Venice and was amazed by the peculiar lilt of a Hungarian song sung by a maid. Unfortunately, no musical notation of secular music has been preserved from this early era.

The sacred music of medieval Hungary has more exact documentation. From the 11th century on, there was regular teaching of singing in monastery schools, churches and cathedrals, while minstrels, bards and lute players kept the interest in music and songs alive. In the 14th and 15th centuries, many musicians became traveling showmen and were called igricek. Others - lute players and fiddle players - were called regs, singing ancient legends or putting actual events into verse.

At the Royal court, musical life was enriched by famous European musicians who visited Hungary from the 13th century on. By the 15th century, about the time when the vanguard of the wandering Gypsies first appeared in Europe, the music heard at the court was so advanced that a papal envoy reported back to Rome that the music there rivaled that of the papal chapel choir. King Mátyás invited German, Flemish, Italian and French musicians to visit his court, among them Tinctoris, who dedicated his Diffinitorium to Queen Beatrice. Great composers of the Renaissance period like Thomas Stoltzer and Adrian Willaert actually lived at the Hungarian Royal court. In the meantime, Hungarian students also studied in Italy and Germany. However, the catastrophe at Mohács in 1526, which was followed by 150 years of Turkish occupation, halted the development of an independent Hungarian polyphonic style.

The Late Renaissance Period

During the 16th and 17th centuries the center of Hungarian music was Transylvania - a region free of Turkish occupation. The first song books were printed in Kolozsvár (now Cluj-Napoca). One of the best known lute-playing rhapsodists, known as kobzos or lantos, was Sebestyén Tinódi (1505-1556) who published his Cronica in 1554, recording 23 songs, mostly historical in subject. He was the most important early Hungarian epic poet,. a man of culture and experience, equally familiar with the traditions of the courtly minstrels and the popular fiddlers.

However, the first, and for a long time the only, Hungarian musician who acquired a high ranking in European music was Bálint Bakfark, a lute player, whose name, surprisingly, is little known to most Hungarians. Bakfark spent his youth at the court of János Szapolyai, Prince of Transylvania, but left Hungary in 1541. His artistry being well known abroad, Bakfark was welcomed first by the French Court and later by the Polish King Sigismund Augustus II in Cracow in 1549. In 1571, he moved with his family to Italy, where he died in 1576. Few of Bakfark's manuscripts survive today, because most of them were burned after his death in accordance with his wishes. His surviving works will be published in a scholarly edition by Editio Musica in Budapest in the early 1980's.

The Baroque Period

The dawn of the eighteenth century in Hungary was marked by her fight for freedom against Habsburg oppression, a fight led by Ferenc Rákóczi II. During this period, the nation produced a remarkable folklore, eloquently expressed in the so-called Kuruc (pronounce Kuruts) poetry and music. The Kuruc songs are among the finest in Hungarian music, but most of them existed only by oral tradition. They were collected and noted down only generations later by Ádám Pálóczi-Horváth in 1813. The poet, Kálmán Thaly wrote many poems and songs recalling the Kuruc era.

The Kuruc era also produced a unique instrument, the tárogató. This is a double-reed woodwind instrument, similar to the oboe, with a penetrating sound. It was used primarily as an instrument for signaling fighting troops, but after the battle, the tárogató-players would use it to entertain the tired soldiers. After Rákóczi's freedom fight was finally lost, the Imperial forces ordered that all tárogatós be burned as symbols of Kuruc resistance. But their efforts to eradicate the instrument failed. In fact, it is very much in fashion in a modified form even today, mostly in villages. Some Gypsy clarinet players use it as a solo instrument.

The Pre-Classical and Classical Period

Western trends emerged in Hungarian music from the middle of the eighteenth century. With the Kuruc era gone, the nation became reconciled to the rule of the Habsburgs. The high aristocracy spent most of its time in Vienna, basking in the glamor of the Court, speaking French and German instead of their native tongue and learning to appreciate the minuets and rondeaux of the then-fashionable Louis XIV style. A new period began. resulting in the "contamination" of the original musical heritage of Hungary. Imitating foreign composers, Hungarian composers produced tunes in Western patterns, composing melodies for the minuet and waltz. Eminent foreign musicians and composers, like Michael Haydn, Karl von Dittersdorf, Joseph Haydn and others were employed in the residences of the aristocracy and high clergy. In 1761, Haydn became the Kapellmeister (chief conductor) at the Eszterházy estate in Eisenstadt. Even Beethoven and Schubert stayed in Hungary on many occasions. The vivid rhythm and dashing style of Hungarian musicians made a deep impression on these visiting composers, as can be seen from Haydn's Rondo all' Ongarese, from the Trio in G major (No.1). Hungarian motifs also appear in the works of Beethoven. That he made the Hungarian idiom part of his artistic expression is evidenced in the finale of the Eroica symphony, where suddenly through the formal variations there bursts the rhythmic beat of a vivid Magyar march tune. Again in the finale of the Seventh Symphony we find the characteristic 2/4 tempo with its syncopated rhythm. In 1812, Beethoven was commissioned to write the music for the prologue of King Stephen and the epilogue for Kotzebue's dramatic work, the Ruins of Athens. In both pieces, Beethoven consciously adopted the national Hungarian idiom.

During Schubert's stay at Count János Eszterházy's estate in 1818 he spent most of his time with the servants, from whom he learned to love their folk tradition and national airs. One of the songs he had heard appeared, with embellishments, the following winter in his Divertissement ŕ la Hongroise (op. 54), which actually contains a succession of national tunes. Furthermore, Schubert, in his C major symphony, reveals himself artistically as a "naturalized" Hungarian. In the Sonata in B flat (op. 30) there are passages where the depth and nobility of expression of Hungarian melody are developed, wrapped in traditional German form.

It was during this period when ŕ la Ongarese, airs hongrois, Ungarisch, and many similar terms became common, and with them also some of the styles which are distinctively those of the Magyars and the Gypsies of Hungary.

The Recruiting Dance (Verbunkos)

At the end of the eighteenth century, a characteristic musical style was born. In recruiting soldiers for the Emperor's army, military committees engaged Gypsy bands to stir up among young people enthusiasm for military life. The roots of the Verbunkos go back to Hajdu dances and even Islamic and Slavic influences can be detected in them; but the performance and special interpretation given by Gypsy musicians molded all these elements into a style which left its imprint even on the art music of the mid-nineteenth century.

The most outstanding composer and interpreter of the Verbunkos style was the Gypsy primás János Bihari (1764-1827). The 84 melodies of his compositions that have survived show extraordinarily rich invention, heroic lyricism and grandiose compassion. Bihari also returned to the music of the Kuruc era and fused it with the Verbunkos style. The best Gypsy violinist of his time, Bihari was in great demand even in the highest circles, including the Vienna Court, where he played through the entire Congress of Vienna in 1814. It was also Bihari who composed the famous Rákóczi March - transcribed later by Liszt and Berlioz - based on old kuruc melodies. Ferenc (Franz) Liszt was one of Bihari's most enthusiastic admirers. When Bihari died in 1827 (the same year as Beethoven), representatives from the whole nation appeared at his funeral.

The Beginning of Hungarian Opera

The revolutionary influence of the Verbunkos had changed all of the existing theatre music in Hungary. The scripts of early plays had historical backgrounds and their style was inspired by Mozart and Rossini, but many of the scenes and arias were composed in the Verbunkos style.

In 1837, however, the Verbunkos mode began to change when the National Theatre was opened in Pest, its first music director being Ferenc Erkel, who was to become Hungary's best known operatic composer. His creation of genuine Hungarian national operas coincided with the national and cultural awakening of Europe and came at a time when Mihail Glinka was creating national operas in Russia as was Giuseppe Verdi in Italy. Erkel's most important works were Hunyadi László, composed in 1844 and Bánk Bán, composed in 1861. Both have become permanent fixtures in the repertoire of the Hungarian Opera.

Folk-style Popular Songs

The various Gypsy bands and their leaders, each of whom formed "dynasties" after Bihari's death, were instrumental in popularizing the folk-style songs - called nóta -which were written by such composers as Béni Egressy, Márk Rózsavölgyi, (who created the csárdás), Pista Dankó, (1858-1903) the Gypsy-primás,. Lóránd Fráter 1872-1930), Árpád Balázs (1874-1941) and Imre Farkas.

Since the general population did not much care for the higher forms of music - symphonies, sonatas, operas - it was the nóta that filled their musical needs. Strictly speaking, the nóta is not a folk song, because the songwriter's name is known, and because the writer uses intervals which do not appear in real folk songs. But the nóta is Hungarian, simple, and in a certain mood everyone can find joy or consolation in singing one, or listening to one. Many individual nótás have had lasting popularity.

Romanticism In Music

In Hungary, the trend toward romanticism in music began around 1860 as a reaction to Erkel's national opera style, with Mihály Mosonyi (1815-1870) the best known romantic composer of his time. Mosonyi's name has undeservedly gone into semi-oblivion, as have his works, including the operas Szép Ilonka and Álmos, which were overshadowed by the works of Erkel.

At the same time, concert virtuosi like Ede Reményi and Joseph Joachim began to appear in concert halls throughout Europe. It was Reményi who encouraged and influenced the musical development of Brahms.

When they first met in 1853 Reményi, a well-known violinist and political exile, was quick to appreciate the talent in the shy youth of twenty, and invited him to join him in a concert tour. This was the beginning of Brahm's artistic career. It was during this tour that Brahms began to collect the Hungarian musical melodies which were to

have such a profound effect on his style and which immediately inspired him to write his Variations on a Hungarian Song. His Hungarian Dances, written some years later, also probably owe much to this early collection. In these dances, Brahms aims at stylizing the spirit and idiom of the national airs in the traditional form of the concert piece. In a way, they are the antithesis of Liszt's rhapsodies, which attempt to translate the color and texture of a Gypsy band in terms of piano technique. In Liszt's method, being the more superficial, we naturally find little trace of the Hungarian idiom except in his professedly Hungarian music. Brahms, however, early absorbed the spirit of the Hungarian air, and translated it into his own musical vocabulary. This is apparent in the dance-like finale of the Violin Concerto, a pretty compliment to the Hungarian composer Joachim, and the treatment of some of the Haydn Variations, the theme of which was written for the band of Prince Esterházy's troops. Furthermore, his two serenades for orchestra also show the Hungarian influence, and no clearer instance could be given than the finale Ŕ la Hungarese from the C minor Quartet.

Musically, the most interesting example of Hungarian influence on Brahms is the Zigeunerlieder. Here Brahms is dealing with a text taken from a Hungarian folk song and instead of writing an imitation of a Hungarian air, he steeps himself in Hungarian feeling. That this method of approach was quite deliberate can be clearly seen in a comparison between the Zigeunerlieder and the Hungarian Dances. Although the latter are more Hungarian in character, the former are more imbued with the true Hungarian spirit. This profound artistic subtlety could only have been achieved by the mature Brahms - the Brahms who had spent his whole creative life in contact with Hungarian music and musicians,. among them Ferenc Liszt.

Ferenc (Franz) Liszt (1811-1886)

Ferenc Liszt was born in Doborján, a German speaking Hungarian village, of a Hungarian father and an Austrian mother. Although Liszt never spoke Hungarian, he proudly declared his adherence to his country when he said:

"Although, unfortunately, I don't speak Hungarian, I want to remain Hungarian in heart and mind from cradle to grave. I want to work for the development of Hungary's musical culture."

When Liszt's father, Ádám, a clerk at the estates of Prince Esterházy, discovered his son's talent, he left his position and sold all his belongings in order that he could give his son the best possible education. They moved to Vienna, where Ferenc took piano lessons from Karl Czerny, the best instructor of the time, and studied composition under Antonio Salieri. When Czerny admitted that there was nothing more he could teach Liszt, they moved to Paris where, helped by letters of recommendation from various aristocrats in Vienna, they were well received. The young Liszt was invited to give private concerts in the homes of aristocrats and was introduced to impresarios, who booked him on concert tours around Europe. In Paris, he met with violin virtuoso Nicolo Paganini, Frederic Chopin and Hector Berlioz, as well as with leading philosophers of the era. The instrumental virtuosity of the first two, and the orchestration technique of Berlioz gave Liszt a tremendous inspiration: he set out to become the "Paganini of the piano" and began composing piano music in the virtuoso style for orchestra. His Hungarian Rhapsodies are highly valuable models of paraphrasing the Hungarian melodies he believed to be folk songs.

But they were not folk songs; they were only melodies he had heard while sitting at the tavern table and listening to the semi-art music of the Gypsies. He and his friends liked this nostalgic conjuring of the past, the glories of saber-rattling heroes and the sadness of national grievances. They liked to indulge in the fashionable romantic illusions expressed by the Gypsy musicians and enjoyed dancing to their wild accompaniment. The real folk songs - kept alive by the peasants and folk musicians in the villages and on the puszta - as yet went largely unnoticed, a sort of buried treasure still awaiting exploration.

Since Liszt did not speak Hungarian and spent most of his life abroad, it is understandable that he failed to realize the significance of peasant folk material, which was in danger of being lost forever. This is why Liszt eloquently but erroneously identified Hungarian music with Gypsy music in 1859 in his book The Gypsies and their Music in Hungary, which only further contributed to the myth.

As a piano virtuoso, Liszt's pre-eminence is undisputed.

Without a doubt he achieved his goal of becoming "the Paganini of the piano." No musical performer has ever captivated such a wide audience; his stamina and repertoire were unbelievable. On one tour, Liszt gave twenty-one concerts in two months, playing some eighty compositions ranging from Bach to Chopin.

Liszt as a composer was more controversial, partly due to his innovations. He would find a title and compose a musical piece for it, in this way inventing the symphonic poem. Année de Pelégrinage, Love Dreams, Consolations, St. Francis Preaches to the Birds and many others are of this type. Among his symphonic poems written during his stay in Weimar, the Hungaria (1854) is the most representative of those containing Hungarian musical idioms.

Liszt first visited Hungary in 1839-40 after a flood devastated Pest in 1838. Prior to this visit he raised 24,000 guldens in Vienna through a series of piano recitals, the largest single donation to victims of the flood. In Pest he was received as a national hero. In 1846 he again visited Hungary in a concert tour.

He wrote most of his rhapsodies in Weimar, as he did many of his more important orchestral and choral works of Hungarian character. His Ungaria Kantate was the first of a series of longer pieces. It is a strongly patriotic work that was inspired by the Hungarian War of Independence.

In the last period of his life, Liszt divided his time among Rome, Weimar and Budapest. Before 1869, he had visited Hungary only for the premieres of his Coronation Mass (1864) and his Legend of St. Elizabeth in which he freely used nationalistic elements, overstepping the rules of the Catholic Church. In 1875, Liszt was appointed by the king to the presidency of the Academy of Music in Budapest, where he also became head of the piano department. One of his admirers, Saint-Saens, wrote in 1893:

Liszt has the inestimable advantage of having typified a people: Schuman is the soul of Germany, Chopin of Poland, Liszt of the Magyar. He was a delightful combination of pride, native elegance and wild, untamed energy.

It was not his fingers alone which made him such a marvelous performer but the qualities of the great musician and the great poet which he possessed, his large heart, his beautiful soul - and above all, the soul of his race.

The Late Romantic Period

In the late nineteenth century, the Academy of Music in Budapest began to expand its staff and courses of study - and as a result started producing composers and artists of world-wide renown.

Ödön Mihallovich, the Academy's principal, expanded its department of orchestral instruments, and also established a new department for training opera singers. Among those engaged as professors for the Academy were the cellist David Popper, the violinist Joseph Bloch and the composer and concert violinist Jen Hubay, who had developed an outstanding method for string training. The performers that emerged from the Academy included the opera singers Anna Medek, Mária Basilides, Olga Haselbeck, Anna Gyenge-Roselle, Ella Némethy, Sári Sebk and Erzsi Sándor.

Its graduates of composition included Béla Bartók, Zoltán Kodály, Leo Welner, Ern Dohnányi and the great figures of the operetta: Jen Huszka, Viktor Jacobi, Imre Kálmán and Albert Szirmay. Jacobi's musicals also became successful on Broadway. Szirmay lived in New York in his later years; where he became the vice-president of Chappel Music Publishing Ltd. During his lifetime he counted among his personal friends George Gershwin, Cole Porter, Richard Rogers and Jerome Kern.

Renowned musicians who studied under Jen Hubay included Ferenc Vecsey, Stefi Geyer - one of Béla Bartók's great loves - József Szigeti, Géza Kresz, lmre Waldbauer and Endre Zathureczky. István Thomán, as a professor of piano at the Academy, gave the world such concert pianists as Ern Dohnányi, Imre Stefániai and Arnold Székely.

No discussion of the late romantic period in Hungary would be complete without mentioning two men who gained fame and respect from their compositions, which were largely influenced by German romanticism: Robert Volkmann (1818-1883) whose Serenade for Strings is still on the concert repertoires of many orchestras, and Károly Goldmark (1830-1915) for his choral and orchestral compositions, and his operas about biblical subjects, his most famous being Queen of Sheba.

Three men whose reputations rest on their success in planting Hungarian national elements into their musical form were: Ede Poldini (1869-1957), a composer of instrumental pieces and the comic opera Wedding at Carneval, and Béla Szabados and Jen Zádor who both composed music for ballet.

The Twentieth Century (1900-1945)

The dawn of the new century found Hungarian musical life steeped in controversy. The Academy of Music was producing artists, composers and performers of worldwide stature. International stars were performing at the Royal Opera House and the concert halls. But those who attended the operas and the concerts tended to be the same audience. The general public was more inclined toward Viennese operettas, Gypsy music and the songs of the cabaret.

Meanwhile, composers in Western Europe were searching for new forms of expression. Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel composed in the impressionist style, Igor Stravinsky and Manuel de Falla mixed elements of folk music with avant-garde harmonization and Arnold Schönberg had already begun to build up his twelve-tone system. In Hungary, however, composers and their public were still influenced by post-Wagnerian and Brahmsian German romanticism.

This was the situation when two young men arrived in Budapest to study composition at the Liszt Academy: Béla Bartók (1881 - 1945) and Zoltán Kodály, who started their studies at the same time and became good friends. They searched for a way to appeal to both the concert goers and

the general public. Anxious to create a new style of Hungarian music, they reached out to the oldest root: the almost forgotten peasant songs. Bartók and Kodály spent several summer vacations together in remote villages, recording on wax cylinders the songs the village elders remembered, and in 1906 they published their first collection. Today, as a result of their efforts, an incredible 60,000 folk melodies are classified and preserved at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.

Both Bartók and Kodály were subsequently appointed professors of the Academy. Bartók as a professor of piano, and Kodály as professor of composition helped develop the talents of many outstanding artists while, through their own compositions, they successfully achieved a synthesis of Hungarian music and national character, creating compositions which have gained international significance. Their idiom relies on folk music without repeating or imitating folk songs. On a Hungarian level, they paralleled the experiments of Stravinsky, Debussy and Richard Strauss,

Of these two Hungarian music giants, Bartók is the less popular in Hungary. He was and remains a musician's musician. While throughout the world more and more musicians become devotees of the serious study of his compositions, his own Magyar audiences always preferred his folk song arrangements, as these are less modern and have a more immediate appeal. In the musical world, however, Bartók has garnered a tremendous following. His most outstanding works are the Mikrocosmos - pieces for piano from the most simple to the most demanding - and theatrical pieces such as Prince Bluebeard's Castle, The Prince Carved from Wood and The Miraculous Mandarin. He also composed Three Piano Concerti, orchestral works such as Dance Suite, Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta, Cantata Profana and many others.

Perhaps the most arresting quality in Bartók's music is his individuality. He was not a faddist. He used whatever material, form, or technique best expressed his thoughts. Bartók's amazing versatility of medium and expression can be found even in his shorter works for the piano. His six quartets are milestones in twentieth century music and deserve a position previously granted only to the quartets of Beethoven.

Although Bartók was accepted at home as the most original musician of his time, he left Hungary before World War II and finally settled in America, where he died a disillusioned man, not without material worries. His last masterpiece, Concerto for Orchestra, commissioned in 1943 by Sergej Koussevitsky, is a giant in orchestral literature. It was a product of those unhappy years just prior to Bartók's death, and expresses much of the misery and longing he went through during that time. As it is often the case with great innovators, he received universal recognition only after his death.

Zoltán Kodály, who chose to remain with his people in spite of two world wars, is, among Hungarians, the most widely accepted Magyar composer of this century.

A muted modernist, closely adhering to native tunes and regional traditions, his works brought immediate success on publication and are understood by many more than the unsymmetrical compositions of Béla Bartók. He was a great reformer of vocal music. His style of choral composition has given a tremendous repertoire to male, female, children's and mixed choirs: Jesus and the Moneymongers, To Ferenc Liszt, Evensong, and many others. His best known chamber and orchestral works - Dances of Galánta, Dances of Marosszék, Variations on a Hungarian Folk Song, Sonatas for Cello, Trio Serenade - and his theatrical works - Háry János and Székelyfonó (Székely Spinning Room) - opened new perspectives in Hungarian music,

What is probably his greatest work, the Psalmus Hungaricus, was first performed in 1923. A dramatic 16th century paraphrase of a psalm provided an excellent text for Kodály's monumental choral work, which was built on a pentatonic tune. The titanic complaints and unwavering belief of a people suffering under Turkish suppression surface in this work. Understandably, Hungarians have, ever since, regarded this work as a manifestation of their appeal to the entire world. By 1944 the Psalmus had been presented in almost two hundred cities abroad, and sung in eight languages. Toscanini himself conducted its performance in Milan.

Next to his compositions, Kodály's great achievement lies in the introduction of general music education, From 1929 to 1953 he led a protracted fight for the introduction of universal and uniform music education in Hungary. In his crusade, he propagated the ideas that: music belongs to everyone; musical illiteracy, which prevents the masses from enjoying higher levels of music, should be done away with; music education has to be based on folk songs

as the musical heritage of the nation; daily musical education contributes to the well being of body and soul as much as does physical education; and the basic foundation of musical culture has to be first vocal, to be followed by instrumental studies.

Since the introduction of general music education in Hungary in 1953, symphony orchestras, performances and recitals draw masses of people, and choirs are flourishing as musical educators all over the world try to emulate Kodály's teaching principles in their own countries. Kodály's words, "The flame shall never be extinguished..." are coming true.

Among those who were taught or influenced by Kodály are the outstanding conductors János Ferencsik, Antal Doráti, Jen Ormándy, Frigyes Reiner, György Széll, József Kozma, Sir George Solti, Jen Zádor, Miklós Rózsa and Leo Weiner; the pianists Ern Daniel, Géza Anda, Gyula Károlyi, Imre Keéri-Szántó, Dr. Otto Herz; the violinists Géza Kresz, Erna Rubinstein, Ferenc Gábriel, Andrea Neményi, and numerous string quartets including the Léner, Végh and Walkbauer-Kerpely String Quartets.

János Starker who studied at the Academy of Music in Budapest became the principal cellist of the Metropolitan Opera in 1949, while the conductor Ferenc Fricsay achieved world fame overnight at the 1947 Salzburg Festival. Later Fricsay became general musical director of the Stadtische Oper in Berlin and then in Munich.

By far the most important musician in the footsteps of Bartók and Kodály is Sándor Veress, a pianist,. musical folklorist, composer and writer on music.

Born in 1907 in Kolozsvár he studied piano with Bartók, and composition with Kodály to become the former's assistant in the folk-music department at the Academy of Sciences, Budapest. He taught at the Academy of Music in Budapest from 1943 to 1948. In 1950 he began teaching at the Conservatory of Music in Bern, a position he has since retained despite long foreign sojourns as visiting professor and performer.

In Veress' life the year 1949 was the great watershed when he chose exile after refusing the Kossuth prize offered to him by the Hungarian government. At that point he already had a distinguished career behind him, having produced his main opus The St. Augustine Psalm, a work comparable with Kodály's Psalmus Hungaricus. His violin Concerto, created in 1937-39 is considered one of the outstanding compositions in its kind of our time. Together with these works, his Threnos (Sirató ének), an orchestral composition written in Memoriam Béla Bartók in 1945 represent the summit of Veressian art to date.

The 20th century has also seen a number of Hungarian composers whose international reputations rest on their Viennese-style operettas.

The best known is Ferenc Lehár (1870-1948) who placed the plot of each of his operettas in a different country, attempting to recreate the musical atmosphere of that particular land. Hungary is the scene of his Gypsy Love (Cigányszerelem) while the Hungarian public's favorite, The Land of Smiles (Mosoly országa), places its bittersweet plot in China. The action in Lehár's The Merry Widow, regarded as the most successful operetta of all time, is placed in Montenegro.

Imre Kálmán (1882-1953) ranks second to Lehár in the field of operettas. The tunes he composed in his Csárdás Queen, Countess Marica and Circus Princess are rich in Hungarian elements.

Hungarian elements also abound in the works of Viktor Jacobi, Pál Ábrahám, Szabolcs Fényes, Ferenc Farkas and Tamás Bródy, although their operettas were written in the Viennese style. Three other men - Jen Huszka, Pongrácz Kacsóh and Ákos Butykay - achieved their reputations by writing strictly Hungarian operettas. Huszka's Prince Bob and Baroness Lily became very popular with the urban audiences in Hungary. Pongrácz Kacsóh's John the Hero (János vitéz), albeit unknown abroad, has become a favorite musical play in Hungary due to its Magyar atmosphere.

In 1981, the world observed Béla Bartók's 100th birthday by celebrating the inspirational force of the Magyar folk songs from which he succeeded in creating a new musical genre. His genius re-created the essence of Hungarian music which sprang from the soil of his land in the Carpathian Basin. In a way, his personal fate symbolized that of his nation in the 20th century. His birthplace, Nagyszentmiklós, was ceded to Rumania in 1920. Nagyszölls, where he wrote his first compositions, is now part of the Ukraine. Pozsony, where he spent his teenage years, has become Bratislava in Slovakia. Like so many of Hungary's brilliant sons, he sought, and found refuge in America, where his remains are buried. The world-wide celebrations held in his memory elevated Bartók to a position in contemporary music equal in importance to Beethoven's in his own century.

The outline of this chapter is based on an essay by Prof. Tamás Légrády. Some descriptive passages were drawn from an article by Margery Binner published in 1939 in the Hungarian Quarterly.

Albert Szentgyörgyi (1893 Budapest - 1986 Woods Hole, Mass.)

Nobel Prize in physiology and medicine in 1937 for "his discoveries in connection with the biological combustion process, with special reference to vitamin C and the catalysis of fumaric acid." He later with Ilona Bangha and Bruno Straub isolated the newly identified Myosin B and actin, the proteins active in muscular contraction.

George von Hevesy (1885 Budapest - 1966 Freiburg in Breisgau)

Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1943 for "his work on the use of isotopes as tracer elements in researches on chemical processes." He then turned to use this method in physiology and pathology creating one of the basic tools in clinical diagnosis.

George von Békésy (1899 Budapest - 1972 Honolulu)

Nobel Prize in physiology and medicine in 1961 on account of "the discovery of the physical mechanism of the ear's cochlear excitement... There is hardly any problem concerning the physical mechanism of acoustic stimulation to which von Békésy has not added clarity and understanding."

Dénes Gábor (1900 Budapest - 1979 London)

Nobel Prize in physics in 1971 for the "discovery of Holography." The three dimensional image of holograms nowadays is provided with the aid of laser beams.

Eugene Wigner (1902 Budapest -)

Nobel Prize in physics in 1963 (with Maria Goeppert-Mayer, Germany and G. Jensen, Germany) for the "development of the theory of atomic nucleus and elementary particles and the symmetrics in quantum mechanics introducing new ideas and methods.

Philipp Lenard (1862 Pozsony. now Bratislava -1947 Messelhausen).

Nobel Prize in physics in 1905 for "his works with cathode rays."

Richard Zsigmondy (1865 Wien - 1929 Gottingen)

Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1925 for "explanation of the heterogen nature of colloid solutions and for the applied methods (ultramicroscope, etc.) which are basic in modern colloid chemistry."

Robert Bárány (1876 Wien - 1936 Uppsala)

Nobel Prize in physiology and medicine in 1925 for "his work on the physiology and pathology of the vestibule (the organ of equilibrium in the ear)."

John C. Polányi (1929 Berlin -)

Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1986 shared with Herschenbach and Lee for contributions to the "development of a new field of research in chemistry-reaction dynamics."

Stephen Sisa : The Spirit of Hungary