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A favourite theme for artists and composers since the 19 th century has been the old legend of the great heroes Hunor and Magyar and how they chased the Magic Stag and were rewarded with the empire of Scythia.
Only portions of the legend have survived, but historical evidence shows that the Magyars, as the Hungarians call themselves, did in fact arrive in Europe from the East. Hungarian belongs to the Finno-Ugric language family, spoken by no more than twenty million people dispersed in many parts of Europe and Asia, and which originated some five or six thousand years ago in the area around the Ural mountains. The Hungarian speakers broke away from the larger family around 1000 B.C. and made their ancient home on the south-eastern slopes of the Urals. A good thousand years later they began their trek through the steppes and continued southward and westward for hundreds of years until they reached the basin embraced by the Carpathian mountain range, where present-day Hungary lies. During their wanderings the Hungarian, tribes lived for a considerable time alongside the Bulgarian Turks, so that the Byzantine historiographers even referred to them as a Turkic people.
Under the leadership of Prince Árpád, the seven Hungarian tribes took the land in the Carpathian Basin from their onetime allies, the Moravians, in the late 9 th century. The fertile land had been home to humans for millennia; an ancient skeleton found outside the village of Vértesszõlõs in western Hungary is some half a million years old. Numerous peoples lived here before the larger Celtic tribes came, who were followed by the Romans. Some decades before Christ, the Roman Empire invaded the western part of the Carpathian Basin up to the River Danube. The area, which the Romans called Pannonia, constituted an important province of the empire for 450 years.
Picture 10-1: Bird’s eye view of Aquincum, the capital of the Roman province of Pannonia
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Picture 10-2: Yurt, the dwelling place for wandering Hungarians
Then came the period of the Great Migrations when successions of peoples appeared in and disappeared from the area. A larger tribe were the Avars, who arrived in the 7 th century, and several historians believe that some of the newcomers were actually Hungarians. Certain is that around A.D. 895 the Hungarians reached the Carpathian Basin. A halfway nomadic people, their fame as vicious warriors had long preceded them, a lifestyle they would not give up for several decades. During their incursions into Western Europe they terrified everyone with their quick attacks, shooting arrows from horse-back.
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Picture 10-3: Hungarian raider shooting his arrows backwards (fresco in the Cathedral of Aquilea)
In the mid-10 th century, though, the shamanist pagan Magyars joined the west of Europe as they converted to Christianity. With Hungary’s geographic situation, however, it took more than a century for the new religion to take root. The Byzantine Emperor offered the Hungarian King a crown, just as the Pope of Rome did. The choice to accept the latter gave the Hungarians their “holy crown” and assigned them a place in Western civilisation a thousand years ago. The crown was the royal insignia for all Hungarian kings until the end of the monarchy in 1918.
As early as 996, the Benedictine order settled in Hungary and began to construct the abbey of Pannonhalma, still towering over the western Hungarian plain. At the turn of the millennium the Hungarian rulers converted to Christianity. (http:/mek.oszk.hu/01900/01993/)
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Picture 10-4: Bird’s eye view of the Benedictine Abbey of Pannonhalma
Hungary’s first king, Stephen (1000–1038), was highly successful at organising his people’s conversion, for which he was rewarded by being elevated to sainthood just decades after his death. Christianity brought with it the establishment of a religious and secular state administration. Saint Stephen minted the Hungarians’ first coins and issued the first legal codes. He established several Benedictine monasteries, but subdued anyone who conspired against him with an iron fist, and succeeded in fending off Poles, the Bulgarian Tsar and the German Emperor.
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Picture 10-6: The Holy Crown of Hungary
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Map 10-01: The Hungarian Kingdom at the reign of Saint Stephen (997-1038)
For three hundred years the House of Árpád remained Hungary’s ruling dynasty. Four more of its members were canonised; Emeric, Stephen’s son who died as a young man; Ladislas, the Knight King who fought the pagans (1077–1095); and two princesses, the sister and the daughter of King Béla IV. The former, Elisabeth (1207–1231), married Ludwig IV, Margrave of Thuringia, and devoted her life to caring for the poor, while Margaret (1242–1271) was a devout nun. Also canonised was Bishop Gerard, a Venetian who carne as a missionary and was killed by seditious pagan Magyars in Buda in 1046.
The three hundred years of the Árpáds’ rule were no less and no more unsettled and bloody than was the history of any country in mediaeval Europe. Hungary had to be protected from all sides, while internally there were the usurpers to the throne from within the family, and the pagan plots and attacks by mighty barons. King Koloman (1095–1116), known as Koloman with the Book for his great erudition, wrote a new legal code, and his reign produced the first Hungarian chronicle. The reign of King Béla III (1172–1196), an enormous man nearly two metres tall, provided the earliest records in the Hungarian language. Around 1181 he installed the royal chancellery, thereby establishing an organised administration and the use of written records. Andrew II (1205–1235) issued the Golden Bull in 1222, which regulated the relationship between the king, the barons and nobility, their rights and responsibilities, and set the foundations for a mediaeval Hungarian constitution. Later Hungarian politicians and lawyers like to refer to this bull when comparing the Hungarian constitution to the English one, which derives from the just seven years older Magna Charta.
The consolidation of the Hungarian state and its growing international recognition came from its conquests to the south, toward Croatia and the Adriatic sea, but also its clever marriage policies. The House of Árpád gave its daughters in marriage to the Bavarian, Polish, Bulgarian, Russian and Austrian ruling families and the Doge of Venice.
The legacy of Saint Stephen to link Hungary with the Western World obliged his successors to participate in achieving common European aims and objectives. Back in 1095, Saint Ladislas was preparing to join the crusade in the Holy Land, and Andrew II actually took off in 1217, but was forced to turn back after three failed attacks, because in his absence the country fell into anarchy. Six centuries later, in the period of national awakening in the early 19 th century, József Katona reinterpreted these events when he wrote the first great national Hungarian drama Bánk bán. In it, the rebels bring justice to a suppressed people and a nation exploited by foreigners.
Evidence of mediaeval Hungary’s ties with Christianity is the founding in 1250 of a separate monastic order, the still active Order of Saint Paul, by a hermit in the Pilis Mountains north of Budapest.
In 1241–42 the country suffered enormously when the Golden Horde swept through Hungary, as well as other parts of Europe, and left utter destruction in its wake. The “Tatar raid” is an expression of destruction that endures in the Hungarian language from this time. The villages, built mostly of wood, were pillaged, slashed and burned. They could pose little resistance to the Mongolian warriors shooting arrows from horseback much the same way the Magyars had three hundred years before. Where the Mongolians encountered stone buildings, however, such as in some parts of the area west of the Danube, they were powerless. This was a lesson to King Béla IV (1235–1270), who, after the Mongolians had retreated, began a grand programme of constructing stone fortresses. Buda, with the castle on the southern tip of Castle Hill, now became the royal residence. Still, the cathedral in Székesfehérvár to the south persisted as the coronation and burial site until the mid-16 th century. (http:/mek.oszk.hu/01900/01955)
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Picture 10-7: The Mongol invasion of Hungary (wood-print from the Thuróczy Chronicle, 15th c.)
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Picture 10-8: Foreign consorts of the Árpád dynasty monarchs, 11-12th centuries
When the House of Árpád died out in 1301, Hungary was a strong and well-organised country commanding respect in the region. Now the struggle for the succession began. A member of the royal family of Naples, Charles Robert of Anjou (1308–1342), emerged the victor. Under his long reign the Hungarian gold florin became the country’s currency, and in 1335 he succeeded in bringing the Bohemian, Polish and Hungarian kings, who until then had constantly been at war with each other, to the castle of Visegrád to forge an alliance. The understanding that they had interests in common proved short-lived. Nevertheless, 950 years later the first Hungarian prime minister after the fall of socialism in 1989–90 renewed the alliance, now known as the ‘Visegrád Four’ (with Bohemia being the Czech Republic, and Slovakia as the fourth member).
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Picture 10-9: Károly Róbert’s golden forint
The first Hungarian university was founded in the city of Pécs in 1367, under the other Anjou king, Louis I or the Great (1342–1382). Louis left no male heir, and the years after his death again brought a struggle for the succession. Sigismund of Luxembourg (1387–1437) proved the most powerful, and soon was also crowned King of Bohemia, and in 1410 he became Holy Roman Emperor as well. In the fifty years of his reign he transformed the fortress in Buda into a splendid gothic palace, and founded a second university, in Óbuda north of Buda. It was at this time, however, that the Ottoman Empire started its persistent northward expansion. (http:/mek.oszk.hu/01900/01949/)
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Sigismund was followed by a Habsburg king who, in turn, was succeeded by the Polish king Jagiello. Under their reign the country deteriorated to the point that civil war broke out, with the Turks threatening to invade all the while. It was then that one of Hungary’s most significant, and certainly most popular, kings took the throne. Matthias Hunyadi (1458–1490), also known as Matthias Corvinus for the black raven in his crest, lives on in numerous legends and children’s tales. He was elected king with the acclamation of the country’s noblemen in the middle of the frozen River Danube, and proved a strong ruler against the wilful lords, securing the support of the nobility against the barons. He established centralised rule, increased taxes, and set up a permanent mercenary army, which, as the “Black Army”, became the stuff of many legends. After he succeeded in securing the southern border against the Turks, he marched against Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia, which he was able to hold until his death. In 1485 he took Vienna, and thus made Austria a province of his kingdom. Matthias was a fierce man who did not shy away from involving himself in diplomatic intrigues, and he stood as one of Europe’s wealthy Renaissance sovereigns. With his connections through his second wife, Beatrice of Aragon, daughter of the King of Naples, he established a Humanist court in Buda that equalled the court of any Italian duke. He ordered works from the leading Italian artists of the time, such as Mantegna, Filippino Lippi, or Pollaiuolo. Perhaps even Botticelli made him paintings, and Verrocchio created two bronze reliefs, and the greatest artist of all, Leonardo da Vinci, painted a Madonna on his order. King Matthias acquired a magnificent library holding over two thousand volumes with codices containing the finest miniatures. Only a tenth of the Bibliotheca Corviniana survives today, dispersed over 43 cities in the world.
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Picture 10-12: Medieval Buda from H. Schedel’s Weltkronik, 1493
After King Matthias died the throne, for lack of a legal heir, fell again to the Polish ruling dynasty of the House of Jagiello. Their kings reigned Hungary for over three decades, and spread the Renaissance style that dominated in court to the rest of the country. But slowly, hardly perceptibly at first, the country was losing its significance. With the discovery of America in 1492, and other great geographic discoveries, the trade routes shifted.
The land routes that cut across Hungary lost in significance, while the proximity of the Ottoman Empire and the constant wars spread uncertainty to the entire region. In this situation Tamás Bakócz, a man who had risen from being a serf’s son to prelate, then to become the country’s archbishop and finally a patriarch of Constantinople, and who nearly even became Pope, was given the task by the Pope in 1514 to organise a crusade against the Turks. He gathered an army of peasants but they, under the leadership of György Dózsa, instigated a revolt. The forty thousand men wrought great destruction. In two month, though, they had to lay down their arms before the army of nobles led by John Szapolyai, the voivode of Transylvania. The revenge of the subjugators was ruthless, its horrors embellished in an humanist epic poem. In the name of reprisal, the diet imposed huge taxes on the peasantry, repealed the right of free movement for the serfs, and with that they rigidified feudal society for centuries. At the same diet, István Werbõczy, who acted as protonory and was an influential representative of the nobility, submitted his collection of feudal common laws, which became known as the Tripartitum, or Triple Book. Although the magnates prevented it from being voted into law, it became the legal code for three hundred years to come, was issued in 51 editions and translated into several languages. It remained in use until the Revolution of 1848.
Four years after the beginning of the Reformation, in 1521, the Protestant movement reached Hungary. The country, divided in more ways than one, proved easy prey for the Ottoman army. On 29 August 1526, in the Battle of Mohács, the 25 thousand-strong Hungarian army was subdued within a matter of hours by an enemy of 80 thousand Turks. Another army of ten thousand men camped on the other side of the River Tisza – John Szapolyai bided his time. Much of the country’s religious and secular leadership, a large part of the barons, and the young and inexperienced King Louis II (1516–1526) were lost, the latter drowned in a swelled creek. The royal palace in Buda stood unprotected when, a week later, Sultan Suleiman I saw it and exclaimed, “If only this palace could be our seraglio in Istanbul!” Not before long, Turkish ships took seven thousand leather bags of treasures and codices, not just from the royal palace but the churches of surrounding towns and villages, many of which they set fire to afterwards. (http:/mek.oszk.hu/01900/01919/)
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Picture 10-13: The Battle of Mohács on a contemporary German leaflet (wood-print, 1526)
The Ottoman troops withdrew to the Balkans for the winter, but left utter chaos in their wake in Hungary. Soon, the country had two kings. The nobility, most of whom had meanwhile converted to the Protestant religion, cited national considerations on electing John Szapolyai king (1526–1540). While claiming to ensure Hungarian independence he frequently turned to the Turks for assistance against his rival, Ferdinand of Habsburg (1526–1564), who claimed the Hungarian throne through earlier intermarriage between the two royal families.
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Map 10-02: Administrative map of Hungary divided into three parts in 1590
Hungary split into three. Transylvania, until then governed by a voivode, became an autonomous principality (1556). Though independent from Hungary, it was nevertheless subordinate to the Ottoman Empire, requiring the Sultan’s consent to install its elected princes, and had to pay high taxes and present elaborate gifts. The country’s centre was a Turkish province. On 29 August 1541 the Turks took Buda Castle by deceit, and used it for the following century and a half as the seat of their province, held by a standing army of four thousand men. The western part of the country and a northern slice remained part of the Habsburg kingdom, and were thus best suited to continue the development that the rest of Europe enjoyed. Their wealthy mining towns flourished, and Pozsony (the Slovakian capital of Bratislava today) was made the new capital, while Nagyszombat (Trnava, Slovakia) became the seat of the bishopric.
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Picture 10-14: A still existing Turkish historical monument: the Minaret of Eger
Transylvania was able to flourish as well, though very differently, largely because it was ruled by several talented princes, and because the Hungarian Protestant churches, mainly Calvinist and Unitarian, were strong enough to sustain a national policy not possible in the Habsburg-dominated, Catholic region. In the 16 th and 17 th centuries, Transylvania gave rise to an independent style of government that shaped Hungarian politics for many centuries. One of its leading statesmen, István Báthori (1533–1586), was elected Prince of Transylvania in 1571, and in 1576 the Polish estates elected him king. He rose to become one of the most admired kings of Poland, but he was never able to realise his greatest dream, to join Poland, Hungary and Transylvania in a national alliance to oust the Habsburgs and Turks. Prince Stephen Bocskai (1605–1606) pursued similar goals. By winning the Heyducks, the fierce Hungarian foot-soldiers, and with the help of the Turks, he was able to organise a rebellion to liberate Hungary from the “foreign” Habsburg invaders. The insurgent Hungarian nobility proclaimed him Prince of Hungary. Another eminent Hungarian statesman of the 17 th century, Gabriel Bethlen (1613–1629), also became Prince of Transylvania with Turkish support. He tried to establish a similar centralised government, set up a mercenary army, and support culture and the sciences as King Matthias once had in Hungary. He took part in large international alliances and hatched sweeping plans, which were destined to remain unfulfilled.
The political defeats of the Transylvanian princes, the subsequent traditions of national resistance and quenched rebellion, and the failed wars of liberation, all were in part due to the fact that the leaders of these struggles, after repeatedly being rebuffed in Europe, sought Turkish support against the Habsburgs. With that, they incurred the charge of being unreliable allies and traitors against the Christian cause.
The central part of Hungary was in a dismal state. The few thriving settlements in these destroyed and depopulated territories developed completely differently than the towns in the west and north that had been granted freedom in royal charters. Only a handful of castles led by courageous captains, such as Kőszeg, Eger, or Szigetvár, were able to resist Turkish onslaughts for a brief time. Several great men have tried to solicit the help of the Habsburgs and Catholic rulers to liberate these territories. They included Cardinal Péter Pázmány (1570–1637), Archbishop of Esztergom, the founder, in 1635, of the university that bears his name and which has functioned without interruption since his time, a capable orator and master of the language; or Count Miklós Zrínyi (1620–1664), military commander, author of military writings and poet, who wrote the great Hungarian Baroque epic The Siege of Szigetvár.
In the 17 th century came Leopold I, Austrian Emperor and King of Hungary (1657–1705), who during his long reign increasingly persecuted the Protestants and initially concluded a peace with the Turks. Inreaction to these measures, Count Ferenc Wesselényi directed a conspiracy together with other aristocrats (1669–1671). Following the execution of the leaders of the plot, the rebellion subsided only for a brief time, until Count Imre Thököly again led an uprising (1678–1683) for which the Turkish Sultan bestowed him the title of King of Hungary and Prince of Transylvania. The defeat of the Turks in their offensive against Vienna in 1683 brought also the Thököly movement to an end.
Ina relatively brief time now, the Ottoman Empire was driven out of Hungary. In1686 a joint European army liberated Buda, and four years later the Habsburg monarch gave also Transylvania its own administrative regulations, separate from Hungary, and observing its own laws.
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Picture 10-15: Recapture of Buda from the Turks in 1686 (Contemporary oil painting by Frans Geffels)
In the series of independence movements against the expanding and consolidating Habsburg power, the main war of independence was led by Ferenc Rákóczi II, Prince of Transylvania (1704–1711) and “Prince Commander” of Hungary (1705–1711). Several royal courts promised their support, but in the end only the Russian Tsar Peter the Great concluded a secret pact with him, although he never actually dispatched any military assistance. The superior Habsburg forces finally compelled the chief commander of the insurgents to conduct the Peace of Szatmár in 1711, against the will of Prince Rákóczi. Rákóczi finally fled to Turkey, never to return.
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Picture 10-16:Rákóczi Ferenc II (Copperplate by Jacob Folkena from 1739)
From this time throughout the entire 18 th century there was peace in Hungary. The Ottoman Empire had been relegated beyond the southern borders of Hungary and Transylvania, though the territory continued to be carefully guarded. To compensate for the Hungarian population decimated during the Turkish occupation, mainly Swabian and Saxon Germans were settled, and also Slavs were brought in from the northern areas. The bigger towns were reconstructed in the Baroque style, trade flourished, large market centres developed, and gradually permanent roads were built to connect them. Monastic orders returned and built schools, and later they expanded their activities to include caring for the sick and poor. Aside from her many reforms, Maria Theresa (1740–1780)–to whom the Hungarian estates offered their “life and blood” in Austria’s War of Succession–established the Hungarian Guard and a top-ranking state officials’ and diplomat’s school, the Theresianum, in Vienna.
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Picture 10-17: Hungarian nationalities: Germans from the Tisza Region (water colour, early 19 th c.)
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Picture 10-18: Hungarian nationalities: Slovakians from Upper Hungary (water colour, early 19 th c.)
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Picture 10-21: ‘Our life and our blood!’ The Hungarian estates swore fealty to Maria Theresa on 11
Vienna became the first centre for the Hungarian elite and emerging intellectual circles, and also acted as a melting pot, assimilating many. This was painful for the guardians of the traditions of independence. Joseph II (1780–1790) maintained a deliberate policy of centralisation along with the requirement that German be used as the language of the empire. He ruled Hungary without ever having himself crowned king of that country, for which Hungarians referred to him as the “King With the Hat”. Joseph, an impatient disseminator of the ideals of the Enlightenment and Freemasonry, inevitably evoked a contrary reaction. Just before his death, he repealed most of his ordinances. Europe was already tuned to the French Revolution, whose effects raised ever-greater concerns in the conservative Viennese court. When they learned that a Hungarian priest, Ignác Martinovics, was organising a Jacobinical conspiracy, they persecuted the movement’s members and executed their leaders. Among those convicted was Ferenc Kazinczy who, after his release, organised literary life in Hungary and spawned the reform movement to update the language to suit modern needs.
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Map 10-03: The Hungarian Kingdom at the end of the 18 th century
The French Emperor Napoleon I occupied Vienna and in 1809 was advancing toward Hungary when the country’s palatine, or governor, Archduke Joseph (1796–1847), called on the nobles to defend their homeland in accordance with the ancient covenant. The army they raised suffered a disgraceful defeat near the city of Gyõr. It was the end, once and for all, of the historic role of the nobility.
Once the Napoleonic wars had run their course, in 1815, the peace and tranquillity of centralised rule settled over the country. It was the “Age of Metternich”, the all-powerful chancellor of the Habsburg Empire. Initially the king saw no need to convoke the diet; censorship was strict and well organised, and the secret police stood ready to subdue even the slightest political criticism. Alas! Even a powerful empire cannot seal itself off from the developments in Europe and the world. The linguistic and literary revival gradually swelled to become a movement. Its initiator and for a time the main force behind it was Count István Széchenyi (1791–1860), a man of enormous energy who contributed to Hungarian civilisation more than any other individual. He founded the Hungarian Academy of Sciences; built the Chain Bridge, the symbol and first physical link between the two cities of Buda and Pest on the facing sides of the Danube, which ultimately lead to their unification into a single metropolis; launched steam shipping and the regulation of river ways; organised horse-breeding; introduced banking; initiated shipbuilding; and established the National Casino as the first social setting for political, economic and public discourse. His extensive, three-volume book series “Credit”, “Light” and “Stadium”, written around 1830, laid down the programme for the Age of Reforms. It staked out the course of Hungary’s development through economic growth with a national tendency along with steady social progress. A decade later, however, public life was bustling and the reform movement had transcended Széchenyi’s cautious programme. A highly effective orator in the national assembly, as well as an editorial writer, Lajos Kossuth (1802–1894), came to lead a political movement whose aim was to attain independent national statehood. Several rousing orators at county assemblies, artists and writers, enthralled the nation. Among them was Sándor Petõfi, one of the greatest Hungarian poets, who was to die in battle at 26 not much later.
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The start was promising; riding the wave of revolutions that were sweeping Europe at this time, the Hungarian uprising began on March 15, 1848. Ina matter of weeks the Habsburg king had appointed an independent Hungarian ministry with Count Lajos Batthyány (1806–1849) as prime minister. Inhis cabinet there were several brilliant statesmen who together determined the face of modern Hungary. Inquick succession new laws were issued, which abolished feudalism and censorship, and united ‘the two Hungarian homelands’, Hungary and Transylvania.
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Kossuth devised the Hungarian currency and set up an independent army which, in the autumn of 1848, was ready to march against the Habsburg Empire. The nation was ebullient, oblivious to the needs of the ethnic minorities within the country’s borders, giving rise to a seething anger among them. Led by a talented young military commander, Artúr Görgey, the army won one battle after the next, and the War of Independence continued until mid-1849. The national assembly, meeting in Debrecen on 14 April of that year, pronounced the end of Habsburg rule over Hungary and elected Kossuth governor. This meant an upset to the existing balance of power, which neither of the country’s two mighty neighbours would settle for. The Tsar of Russia offered his assistance to the Austrian Emperor. Görgey’s armies suffered a devastating defeat at Világos, near the city of Arad, and surrendered on August 13, 1849. Kossuth went into exile.
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“Now there is calm, and snow, and ice, and death”, goes a moving poem by Mihály Vörösmarty. Retribution was brutal. The generals of the War of Independence were executed, Görgey alone was allowed to go into exile. Throughout his long life he was decried as traitor to the cause of freedom. Kossuth, like many Hungarian independence leaders before him, was granted asylum in Turkey.
Two years later, following his widely acclaimed American tour, he settled in Turin, Italy, where he stayed until his death at 92. He never set foot on Hungarian soil again. For many people he embodied the living conscience of the nation, and a veritable cult developed around “Father Kossuth”.
It took a decade and a half for both the Habsburg court and the Hungarian leadership to search for a compromise. It took the political wisdom of Ferenc Deák (1803–1876) to convince the leading social groups, exhausted in their national resistance and growing receptive toward economic considerations, to conclude the Compromise of 1867. The pact gave birth to a new form of statehood, the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. Its first Hungarian prime minister was Count Gyula Andrássy (1823–1890)–a man the Habsburg authorities had sentenced to death in absentia following the War of Independence. In 1871 he became the Monarchy’s foreign minister.
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Picture 10-25: Ferenc Deák (Photo, around 1870)
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Picture 10-26: Crowning of Francis Joseph I (Coloured lithography, 1867)
The complex administration of the Monarchy gave both parties independent parliaments and governments. Common were the monarch, the foreign and war ministries and the latter two’s financial affairs, and a parliament-type of institution called Delegations. Economic compromise was re-evaluated every ten years, providing good opportunity each time for heated political quarrels. The two parts of the empire were given leeway to conclude compromises along the same lines with nationalities within their boundaries, which Hungary did with Croatia. The period of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy reshaped Hungary. Transdanubia, the area west of the Danube, and the central parts of the country, experienced a burst of growth. Especially Budapest, on which the main railway lines converged, witnessed a fantastic boom. By the turn of the 19 th–20 th centuries it had over half a million inhabitants, and new, mighty public buildings, such as the courts and legal administration buildings, schools, and foremost the Houses of Parliament, but also banks, insurance companies and the stock exchange, were raised with the city as a future regional centre in mind.
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Picture 10-27: The first underground railway of Europe in Budapest, under Andrássy Road (1896)
The grand-scale economic progress did not reach some of the country’s peripheries, including the historically developed northern and north-eastern regions, which in fact led to their decline. From here ever more people emigrated to America. Clouds of doom were looming along the horizon. Poor peasants, heavy industry workers, ethnic minorities, and radical civic parties were organising into movements, along with the traditional opponents of Austria and the Compromise.
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Map 10-04: The national minorities in Hungary in 1910
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Map 10-05: as above, in a coloured version
In the decade after 1910, an outstanding, conservative statesman, Count István Tisza (1861–1918), was elected prime-minister for a second term. He tried to hold the disintegrating country together with an iron hand, but was ultimately unable to prevent the split. In Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, pan-Slavic fanatics murdered Francis Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne. A month later, the First World War was on. Hungary could not stay out, even if it would have been in its interest. In 1916 the Emperor of Austria and King of Hungary, Francis Joseph I (1848–1916), died. For Hungary he embodied the crushing of its revolution, the Compromise, the country’s boom, the “happy years of peace”, the one-time despised foe turned “good old king”. His successor lasted less than two years, when his empire dissolved, and he was forced to abdicate.
The form of government established with the Compromise should have given the peoples living in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy the suitable experience to live together in a European community, but with the defeat in the First World War, the continuity of historic tradition was broken. With the forces that had forged them together no longer in effect, a wave of nationalism engulfed the region.
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Picture 10-28: Austrian-Hungarian battery at the Russian front, 1916
Joining the Entente, the alliance of Western powers formed already prior to the war, were the political leaders of various Central and Eastern European peoples who hoped to gain from the victory. These countries of the so-called Little Entente, Czechoslovakia, Romania and Yugoslavia, got large parts of their territories from what once belonged to Hungary. Hungary was left with one third of its land, and two-thirds its population. The victorious powers wanted to establish “national states” where a multi-national empire had been, though in fact only the minorities traded places with the majority populations. Millions of Hungarians now lived as ethnic minorities, hundreds of thousands chose life as refugees, living in train cars around Budapest railway stations for many years.
With public administration in shatters and the country in a desolate state, a succession of revolutions followed. It began in 1918 with the “Aster Revolution” – after the flowers the rebellious soldiers wore in their lapels – when István Tisza was murdered and, on November 16 th, the “Peoples’ Republic” was declared. The leaders of the revolution were from the radical middle-class, and they intended to quickly introduce such fundamental reforms as general suffrage by secret ballot and autonomy for ethnic minorities that earlier had been rejected for lack of political support. They came so far as to outline the framework for a West-European type of democracy, and elected Count Mihály Károlyi (1875–1955) as the first President of the Republic of Hungary.
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However, on March 21, 1919 the Communists took power, directed largely by prisoners of war returned from Russia. Béla Kun (1886–1938) became leader of the “Hungarian Soviet Republic”, a “proletarian dictatorship” that was to last one hundred days. Everything was nationalised, and everyone who was deemed a threat to their power their Red Commandos eliminated, even physically. These dictatorships, hatched in Budapest, were brought to an end by the Romanian army entering the capital. The leaders of the “Hungarian Soviet Republic” went first to Vienna and most ultimately emigrated to Moscow. Those who survived the Stalinist purges in the late 1930s – Béla Kun was among the victims – returned to Hungary after 1945.
After three months the Romanian army was forced to withdraw from Budapest, and was superseded by the National Army led by Miklós Horthy (1868–1957). Restoration of order, what came to be referred to as “White Terror”, was carried out by much the same means, excesses and military coercion as “Red Terror” had been.
Such was the state of Hungary when, on July 4, 1920, the victorious powers concluded the Peace Treaty of Trianon, named after the palace in Versailles in which it was signed. It was one in the series of Versailles Peace Treaties, which, with their humiliating dictates based on superficial knowledge of the conditions in the countries over which they judged, laid the foundations for the Second World War.
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Map 10-06: The Peace Treaty of Trianon (1920)
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From the early 1920s, Hungary had to build a new country and new economy with a society deeply wounded by defeat, loss of national identity, and within the embrace of resentful neighbours. To do this, and to restore Hungary’s international recognition, fell to the liberal-conservative prime minister, Count István Bethlen (1874–1947).
In the inter-war years, Hungary continued as a monarchy without a monarch, headed by Miklós Horthy as governor. In the 1930s Hungary tried for a time to balance increasing political pressure by Germany on the entire Central European region by strengthening its alliance with Italy. There were those including some prime ministers, who encouraged ties with Great Britain and the United States, but these counties had no interests in the region and even acceded to the idea that the area should belong to the Soviet-Russian sphere of influence, especially after the defeat of Nazi Germany. No political power in Hungary favoured a Russian orientation at this time; in fact, the Soviet threat turned many toward Germany. The strength of far-right political parties grew, and the country’s links with Nazi Germany grew as well. The first anti-Jewish law was passed in 1938, and in 1941 Hungary entered the war on Germany’s side.
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Picture 10-31: Slums in Budapest in the 1930’s
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Picture 10-32: Blocks of flats built in Bauhaus style in Budapest in the 1930’s
The two Fascist states, Germany and Italy, induced England and France to agree to Hungary’s re-annexation of those territories lost with the Trianon Peace Treaty which had a Hungarian majority population. It was a political gesture that carried a price, but it would have been difficult to imagine a government that would have rejected the chance to improve the lives of millions of its people who were suffering the consequences of a settlement perceived as grossly unjust by the entire populace. There were those who foresaw the inevitable consequences of Hungary’s German affiliation, among them a prime minister, Count Pál Teleki (1879–1941), who saw only one way of objecting: to commit suicide.
The final year of the war brought the German occupation of Hungary (from March 19, 1944), and following a failed attempt to pull out of its alliance with Germany (on October 15, 1944), the Hungarian Nazi party, the Arrow Cross, assumed power. The human loss was enormous. Hundreds of thousands of Jews were displaced and murdered. Individuals and organisations, among them the Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, were able to save only a few of them. In the end, Budapest was levelled by Allied bombs, and Hungary had again lost a war.
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Picture 10-33: Auschwitz II-Birkenau. Arrival of a transport of Jews from Hungary, 1944
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Picture 10-34: Withdrawal of the Hungarian army on the Russian front in the Don Bend, 1943
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Over forty years of Soviet occupation followed. The cream of Hungarian society went into exile in this third wave of emigration – in autumn 1919, leftist thinkers and radicals had left; in the late 1930s had left those who rejected the push to the right, among them the composer Béla Bartók; and in the late 1940s left the ones who foresaw the consequences of Soviet occupation, like the writer Sándor Márai, or the Nobel laureate in chemistry, Albert Szent-Györgyi.
After 1948, under the leadership of Mátyás Rákosi, the Communist party instituted a Soviet-type dictatorship. Political opponents were imprisoned or statutorily executed, churches were persecuted and most of their schools closed down, those of the aristocracy and bourgeoisie who had failed to emigrate were dispossessed and relocated in forsaken parts of the countryside, peasants were forced into co-operatives, the secret police operated a network of informers and tortured people en masse.
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The enormous political pressure and bitterness culminated in the Hungarian Revolution, which broke out on October 23, 1956. It lasted twelve days, before it was quelled by Soviet tanks. Over two hundred persons were executed, including the elected Hungarian prime minister, Imre Nagy, and other leaders. Two hundred thousand people fled the country. Yet this revolution was also in some ways a victory, because the Dictatorship could not continue in the same way after the autumn of 1956. The Cold War was replaced by a thawing period in which the world’s two superpowers tried to live side by side in relative peace. Several doors to Europe again opened to Hungarians.
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Picture 10-38: Revolution in Budapest in 1956
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Picture 10-39: The Prime Minister of the Revolution, Imre Nagy in 1956
Retribution was carried out by Hungarian authorities, led by János Kádár (1912–1989), prime minister for a time, and until May 1988 the head of the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party, as the Communist Party now called itself. Over time, Kádár became “King János”, the folkloric good old king, accepted by an overwhelming majority of Hungarian society and beloved by many Western democratic leaders, too, referred to him as “Hungary’s political chess master”, which alluded to both his clever political manoeuvring and his love for the game. He succeeded in making Hungary the most prosperous and tolerant country in the Soviet bloc, the only one of the Warsaw Pact countries in which limited travel to the West was permitted, all the while retaining the confidence of the Soviet Union. As the decades passed, it became evident that “goulash Communism” had no fanatics. Neither the vast majority of the population nor the new generation of state-party elite believed in the ideals of the previous generation. By the second half of the 1980s, when it had become evident that the Soviet Union had lost the race against the West in science, technology and the economy and had abandoned its claims to power over Eastern and Central Europe, barely anyone in Hungary was sorry to see the political transition to democracy.
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The idyllic soft dictatorship began to dissolve in the mid-1980s. At first only intellectual opposition groups issued “samizdat” publications, stencilled, illegal political texts, but soon there emerged larger groups who demanded the political and economic transformation of the regime.
On June 16, 1989, with the ceremonious reburial of the murdered revolutionaries of 1956, and the declaration of the new constitution on the anniversary of the revolution on 23 October, regime change began. Two months later, on August 19, 1989, a Pan-European picnic was organized at Fertõ Lake near the Austrian border. The Hungarian border guards made no attempt to prevent many hundreds of East German tourists escape through the temporarily opened border to Austria. On September 11, 1989, the borders were officially opened and the barbed wire fences of the Iron Curtain were ceremoniously torn down. Those who gave the command to “open the gates” renounced solidarity with dictatorial powers and once again felt the importance of following the European standards of human rights: that people are born free and should not be forcibly restricted in their movements or choice of where they want to live. After a long detour, Hungary was back on the road to Europe, which it had joined already a thousand years before.
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The transition of political system brought free elections in 1990. After one and a half decades, the military and political integration of Hungary is complete. In 1997, Hungary joined NATO and on May 1, 2004 became a full member of the European Union. The spiritual and moral road back towards the European community is a slower, more uneven path – but if we were not to take that journey, we would be unfaithful to the most important legacy of our one thousand year old history.
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Map 10-07: Hungary at the turn of the Millennium
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http://mek.oszk.hu/02000/02085/
The origins of the hungarian language
The Hungarian language is of Finno-Ugric origin and belongs to the Ugrian branch of the Finno-Ugric group of languages in the Uralian language family. There are various hypotheses for the whereabouts of the Finno-Ugric land of origin. The ancestral land is supposed to have been somewhere on the western slopes of the Ural and the place of an even earlier common home with other branches (the Samoyedic) could have been in Western-Siberia. The ancient language of the Finno-Ugrians was the Finno-Ugric basic language spoken with dialects by the peoples living together in the 3 rd millennium B.C. Later these peoples wandered to different lands. The individual languages of the Finno-Ugric ethnic groups (that moved away from each other both in space and in time) developed from this basic language.
We cannot understand the languages of the related peoples because five thousand years ago we cut the ties with those to whom we are linguistically related. The Finno-Ugric origins of the Hungarian language were verified by the findings of comparative linguistics.
The proofs can be found in regular differences rather than in exact homologies. Among phonetic proofs there are regular phonetic differences, e.g.:
-the initial sound ‘p’ changes into ‘f’ (Hungarian: ‘fej’ – Vogoul: ‘pen’ – Zyrian: ‘pon’ – Votyak: ‘pun’ – Finnish: ‘pää’)
-the initial ‘k’ changes into ‘h’ before a deep vowel sound (Hungarian: ‘hal’ – Finnish: ‘kala’, Hungarian: ‘három’ – Finnish: ‘kolme’).
-Certain words are synonymic, e.g.: Hungarian: ‘lúd’ (goose) – Finnish: ‘lintu’ (bird).
-There are similarities in the grammatical systems, e.g.: our ancient non-suffixes with adverbial meaning are also of Finno-Ugric origin (-n, -t, -tt, -l, -vá, -vé), the Hungarian possessive endings and the verbal personal suffixes (‘házam’, ‘házad’, ‘háza’, ‘nézem’, ‘nézed’, ‘nézi’) developed from the Finno-Ugric personal pronouns, the three directions of postpositions can be found in the related languages, the mark of plural (Hungarian: ‘k’) is also of Finno-Ugric origin.
The basic vocabulary of the Hungarian language consists of approximately 700 words. It includes pronouns (I, you, he/she, we, you, they, this, that), simple numbers (one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, twenty, hundred, half, first, second), parts of the body (head, mouth, tongue, tooth, shoulder, heart, bile, liver, vein, blood, hair, finger), words for relationship (father, mother, son, orphan, daughter-in law, son-in law, father-in law, mother-in law, sister-in law), words in connection with nature (sky, lighting, star, autumn, winter, spring, water, frost, moor, fire, hill, flora, fauna, minerals), home, tools, weapon, clothes, diet, condition, verbs, features, quantity.
The ancient body of beliefs and the ancient manner and environment explored by auxiliary sciences are also clear proofs. (e.g. shamanism, fairyland, the characteristic features of food-gathering, fishing, hunting and the geographical position, such as: a hunter, a quiver, wilderness, lying in wait, a ship, a fox, a ferret, soul, etc.
The Hungarians represent the largest population among the Finno-Ugric peoples. The closest related people to the Hungarians are Ob-Ugrians (Vogouls and Votyaks) living in the northern part of Siberia near the Ob in a relatively large area. Their population is very small, almost dying out.
Permian peoples (Zyrians and Votyaks) and the peoples near the Volga (Cheremissian and Mordvinian peoples) live mostly in the European part of Russia. The Finnic group (Karelians, Estonians, etc.) live in the Baltic area and also in Scandinavia (Finnish people and Laplanders).
The Hungarian language in the uralian group of languages
The family tree of Uralian languages shows when and which peoples abandoned the larger community and started their independent lives. The approximate current number of each population is shown in brackets.
The beginnings of Hungarian literature – like the literature of all other nations – are lost in the mists of time. Lacking written records, we can only attribute the artistic merit of the creation of words – a part of which is present in our vocabulary today – from what has been passed down by word of mouth throughout the ages. Stories of centuries of nomadic wandering and encounters with other peoples can be found in old tales and sayings. The Magyars’ 9 th century conquests and settlement in the Carpathian Basin were recorded in historical accounts only much later.
Writing and literature spread gradually after the foundation of the state of Hungary. Priests and monks were the first representatives of written culture but they used Latin, the common language of erudition in Europe. The oldest remaining fragment of a text written in the Hungarian language is the Founding Document of Tihany Abbey (1055). The first complete text in Hungarian literature is the Funeral Oration and Prayer (circa 1180) which remains in the Pray-codex.
In the centuries that followed, the development of literature in Hungary was determined by the course of European culture, from which sprung an abundance of court literature, chronicles and medieval stories. The first great poets were born during the Renaissance. Janus Pannonius (1434–1471) is considered the first Hungarian poet, though he wrote his verses in Latin. In his time he was known throughout Europe as a leading figure in Hungarian literature. The greatest poet to write in Hungarian during the Renaissance, however, was Bálint Balassi (1554–1594), who surpassed his age by creating a tradition of poetry, which inspired poets of later generations.
The Renaissance-Reformation was followed by Baroque literature. The first epic poet of this period was the soldier, politician and poet Miklós Zrínyi (1620–1664). The life and career of the writer of The Peril of Sziget is an integral part of European baroque culture.
Hungarian literature for a long time imitated and adopted the artistic and literary trends of the great European cultures. The Age of Enlightenment, however, saw the blossoming of Hungarian poetry with similar styles emerging simultaneously with West European tendencies. This period thus marked a revival in the Hungarian language and culture.
By the beginning of the 19 th century, Hungarian literature developed from traditions that allowed for novel and original works to be produced. Not surprisingly, the first time a Hungarian poet (Sándor Petõfi) was accepted into the vaults of world literature was during the Romantic Age.
Sándor Petõfi (1823–1849) grew up in the Great Hungarian Plain between the Danube and Tisza rivers. His childhood years were formative in that they stoked the passion and patriotism evident in his life and poetry. He studied much and with apparent ease, though he constantly changed schools. He tried his hand at several things during a difficult youth, travelling across Hungary by foot amid a life of privation. From the age of 21, he published several volumes of predominantly lyrical and epic poetry every year. He soon became well-known and popular, one of the leading figures of literary life. He charmed his readers with an emotional directness and simple folk style, which flew in the face of poetic conventions at the time.
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Picture 10-43: Sándor Petőfi (Drawing by Miklós Barabás)
For Petõfi was undeniably a rebel. As a student, he resisted the authority of his teachers. As an adult, he revolted against tyranny and social oppression. The history of the French Revolution was his bible, his daily prayers were in the name of equality and freedom. For him, freedom was the most basic, universal principle and ultimate hope for mankind, which is reflected in his work as a subject for poetry and for love: “Liberty, love, / These two I need. / For my love I will sacrifice my life, / For liberty I will sacrifice my love.” He was every inch a poet of Romance and a man who lived according to his ideals.
In the spring of 1848, revolutions swept across Europe. On March 15 th, a revolution broke out in Pest in which no blood was shed and which led to the possibility of Hungary’s independence within the Habsburg Empire. As writer of The National Song and key figure of the events of March 15 th, Petõfi’s name is synonymous with the Hungarian Revolution. He fought, incited and chastised, and his calls for a Republic state set him against some of his earlier comrades.
The real battle for Hungarian independence began in the autumn of 1848. To counter the successful offensive of the Hungarian troops, Emperor Franz Joseph requested and received the aid of the Russian Tsar in 1849. Petõfi left his beloved young wife and newly born son and entered the army. He proved to be a good soldier and rose to the rank of Major before his fall on the battleground. He was buried in an unmarked mass grave.
His early death put an end to a promising career but his life’s work does not seem incomplete and his path in life seems whole. Petőfi wrote poetry as other men breathe, he was the subject of his verses. He was disarmingly honest, passionate, curious of everything, a rough diamond but a gentle soul, blessed with joy and humour, all of which qualities are expressed in his poems and which no doubt account for his wide appeal.
Petõfi’s poetry was translated in his lifetime, mostly into German. In the hundred years following his death, 700 of his poems were published in 50 languages, with a total of 20,000 translations. His popularity was greatest in the second half of the 19 th century but to this day he remains the most representative figure of Hungarian literature in the world’s eyes.
Petõfi’s friend from school days was Mór Jókai(1825–1904), the other great talent of the age and one of the most popular European novelists of the second half of the 19 th century. His book The Man with the Golden Touch was one of Queen Victoria’s favourite novels and members of the Emperor’s family in Vienna were always impatient for his latest book to be translated.
Jókai was born to the gentry. Like his father before him, he studied for law degree. He published prose writings as a student and his success led him to Pest in 1847 to work as an editor. Together with Petõfi, he was one of the leading figures of young revolutionaries and took part in the events of the 1848 Revolution, drafting and reading out the 12 points of the Charter of the Revolution on March 15 th. During the struggle for independence, he supported the government in a journalistic capacity and was fortunate in avoiding reprisal following the defeat of the Hungarians. From the early 1850s onwards, he wrote unflaggingly and became a hugely popular and much published novelist and prose writer. A 100 volume, special edition of his works was issued to mark the jubilee of his fifty years of writing in 1894.
Jókai wrote with legendary ease, but paid great attention to the style of his prose, which is rich with nuances, colour, diversity, and a vocabulary to match any of the greatest writers. His imagination was inexhaustible, the intricacies of his plots are worthy of his greatest influence, Victor Hugo. His amazing knowledge and material provides a solid base for his novels, which often play out in diverse and exotic places and different periods in history. His most important books brought to life the recent past of Hungary and his stories embodied the recollections of a nation. The Baron’s Sons is the heroic, epic tale of the historical events of the Revolution and struggle for independence. Several of his novels are set in the Reform period, which stoked the fuel of national pride in the two decades prior to the Revolution (Zoltán Kárpáthy, Eppur Si Muove). He also worked over the inspiring ideas of the time (The Dark Diamonds) and in the lengthy and futuristic Novel for the Next Century successfully combined the idea of a political utopia with science fiction.
Like Petõfi, he was in every sense a Romantic, but was unafraid of adopting new techniques in his prose. His contemporary attitude to writing is demonstrated by his realism. Yet his characters are extreme, his heroes idealized so as to border credibility while their enemies are utterly mean and abject figures. Jókai is responsible for awakening a love of novels in the Hungarian reading public. Generations grew up on his writings and unconsciously mastered his style. 1557 of his works are known to have been translated into 32 languages, including Burmese, Chinese, Latin and Armenian.
Born in the same year as Petõfi, to a middle gentry family with a long history, ImreMadách (1823–1864) was the third outstanding literary figure of his age, although their paths never crossed. Madách remained a recluse and devoted all his time to writing and reading.
Written in 1860, The Tragedy of Man was not only his most important work but unprecedented in Hungarian literature. A philosophical poem in dramatic form, it became an important, literary event when published in 1861, similar in subject and spirit to Dante’s Divine Comedy, Milton’s Paradise Lost or Goethe’s Faust. Its hero is Adam, the biblical father of mankind who is expelled from the Garden of Eden and is led by Lucifer in a long dream through the ages. The Lord’s adversary shows him the constant failure of man’s endeavours and noble ideals, in the hope of swaying Adam from his pledge to carry out the will of God. When Adam wakes from his dream, he is ready to throw his life away but hearing Eva tell him that she is expecting their child, he takes responsibility for his future. God sends him on his path with little reassurance: “Man must struggle and have faith!” which echoes Adam’s own conclusions: “The purpose of life is to struggle!”
Madách was influenced by the Bible, Milton, Byron and Goethe but his work is ingeniously original. He searched for answers to the important questions of his time, including the fate of his country.
The Tragedy of Man was written to be read as a book but it was considered to have enough dramatic force to be presented on the stage. The first production was in 1883 and has since been staged in one form or another in Hungarian theatres without a break. The first translation was not till the 20 th century, however. To date it has been translated into 20 languages in 80 different versions. (http://mek.oszk.hu/02000/02085/)
The Conciliation of 1867 brought about a dual Austro-Hungarian State, which ensured more favourable conditions for the development of Hungary. In 1873 three towns, Pest, Buda and Old Buda were joined to form the official capital, Budapest. Development was swift and by the end of the century Budapest had become the indisputable centre of Hungarian intellectual life. This change was only later reflected in the themes of Hungarian literary works, however, as the main inspiration for poetry, novels and dramas in the second halt of the 19 th century was still rooted in peasant and provincial life and the rural gentry.
The real revival of literature and culture at the turn of the century began with the literary journals and in the coffee houses of the capital. From 1908, the literary and critical journal West became the intellectual workshop of modern Hungarian literature. The greatest figure to rise from the West generation of writers was Endre Ady, the prophet of modern Hungarian literature.
Endre Ady (1877–1919) was born in Érmindszent, Transylvania, descended from impoverished, landed gentry. He broke with the conventions of his time, dropping out of university to become a journalist. He soon became known for his committed, often radical articles. The great change in his life came by way of a secret love affair with Adél Brüll (Léda), a married woman with wealth and connections that brought new perspectives for the young publicist-poet. He went to Paris, then considered the capital of the modern world. It was there that his poetic voice found its true form. His volume of poetry New Verse caused an outcry when it was published in 1906. The conservative, literary critics attacked him for his themes, motives, poetic style, tone and whole way of thinking. But those who sought progressive, new approaches saw him as the apostle of modern Hungarian poetry.
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Picture 10-44: Endre Ady (photograph by Aladár Székely)
New Verse was just the beginning. A new volume of Ady’s poetry, based usually on a different theme, was published every year until Word War I broke out (Blood and Gold, Elijah’s Wagon, I Want to be loved, Poems of all Secrets, A Life of Escape, Margita Wants to Live, Our Love, Who Has Seen Me?). A collection of his work was published in 1918, entitled Leading The Dead and the final volume came out posthumously in 1923 (The Last Boat).
In Ady’s poetry everything was different to what had been written before. His love poetry to Léda is full of subjective and erotic motives. His critical voice on what it means to be Hungarian was also new. In his poems of war and revolution, his social sensitivity and political radicalism unveils the hypocritical world of the ruling classes. His lyrics on the gods are a powerful manifestation of the individual. His conscious efforts to rejuvenate the visual landscape and language of poetry led to his trademark symbolist-impressionist-secessionist styles.
Ady’s poems have been translated into almost every European language. His name is still synonymous with modern Hungarian poetry.
One of the first writers to grow up in the capital and portray it as his natural environment in his writings was Ferenc Molnár(1878–1952). Blessed from birth, he came from a prosperous, middle-class family, was endowed with great charm, an agile and lively mind and a writing talent which brought him early and lasting success. A fashionable journalist by twenty, he was a popular figure among his colleagues and writers in the lively, bohemian world they inhabited. But he was acutely aware of what life was like in the poor neighbourhoods of the suburbs and not just the well to do, middle-class circles he revolved in. In 1907, he wrote The Paul Street Boys, a story of adolescent boys from the suburbs who fight for the possession of the symbolic fortress of a timber yard, in which the fallible gain the upper-hand over violence and intrigue. Molnár wrote with romantic nostalgia and his moving tale became a world classic in youth literature and has been translated into thirty languages and adapted to film several times.
By the time Molnár was twenty-four, his first stage play Liliom had become an instant success. Inthis drama, of the extraordinary ascent of a rough hoodlum from the slums, as in many other of his early plays, Molnár combined symbolic elements with impressionist and naturalist features. The Devil reveals the spirit of Freud, while in The Guardsman the writer skirts the borders of the real and imagined, preceding Pirandello in the opinion of many. Molnár knew every trick in the book on how to create dramatic effect; he built up his stories from brilliant ideas and thickened the plot with a sure hand. He was master of creating suspense and knew how to blend surprising twists with witty and sparkling dialogue dry humour and subtle emotions.
One of the most important figures in Hungarian bourgeois literature – the term bourgeois here used to define a middle-class which held a broad, European vision and respect for intellectual freedom and human values – was Sándor Márai(Sándor Grosschmid, 1900–1989). He was born in Kassa (now Kosice in Slovakia) to an influential, conservative, middle-class family with its roots in the Saxon nobility. Márai chose to write using his family’s noble predicate as his artist name. He went to a Hungarian school but studied at a German university. He later lived in Paris as well, while working as correspondent for Hungarian and German newspapers. In 1928, he returned home and earned his living in journalism for a long time, first at a radical, middle-class newspaper where he embraced liberalism and denounced the advance of Fascism.
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From the early 1930s, he published one book after another. He received his greatest acclaim with Confessions of a Bourgeois, an autobiographical recollection of his childhood and youth. This book condenses his strongest skills in its mercilessly accurate observations, tight structure and captivating style – a refreshingly elegant blend of impressionist strains and delicate musicality. His boldest undertaking was the trilogy of novels The Offended, the story of the Garren family, a portrayal of past and present Hungarian middle-class life. One of the most successful books from the 1940s is Embers. Compact and suggestive, it renders a belated and pragmatic account of the break up of a strong friendship. This novel has attracted great interest throughout Europe in recent years.
Márai left Hungary and impending Communist rule in 1948. He became an American citizen but spent many years in Italy too. One of his most important forms of expression was his autobiographical writing; the diaries he wrote from 1943 until his death were subsequently published in book form.
The darker side of city life was already a subject of prose writing at the turn of the century. But the life of the working classes only became an integral part of universal poetry through the work of Attila József(1905–1937), who was born and raised in a proletarian environment. His father abandoned the family very early in József’s life. His mother tried to make a living washing for others but it was hardly enough with which to bring up three children and the strenuous work soon sapped her weak constitution. József was the youngest child. Immensely strong willed, he fought his way out from the depths of squalor and with his brother in law’s help, completed his secondary school education and went on to study at the university.
His first volume of poetry was published when he was just sixteen. Even then he used the entire range of poetic tools of his contemporaries and predecessors with amazing confidence. Very soon, he developed his own sure style. His tough, rebellious tone resulted in his having to leave university. He became acquainted with Marxist principles and joined the illegal workers’ movement and communist party. Out of conviction for the cause of the movement, he accepted the role of poet-agitator, a thankless task and difficult genre, which nevertheless produced some noteworthy work.
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Picture 10-46: Thomas Mann and Attila József in Budapest, 1937
He lived in poverty until his death but in the early 1930s, particularly after the publication of a collection of poetry Bear Dance (1934), he was recognized as an outstanding talent. He later received support; after a long stint of intellectual but routine work, he became the editor of a new, high quality, progressive art periodical (Szép Szó) in 1936. In the mean time, however, his mental health deteriorated. Neither psychoanalysis nor any other medical treatment could help him. He committed suicide one late autumn evening at the age of 32.
József’s poetry began in the spirit of Parnassus and after a revolutionary, expressionist period reached its maturity in his last years, with an emphasis on classical forms. He was still passionately concerned about social and political issues but finally, his poetic voice reached more contemplative depths. He revealed more of himself, his inner wounds and loneliness, grappling either with the fear of losing his reason or passion with the lover’s hope. His fame abroad is comparable to Petõfi’s.
The dark period of the Communist dictatorship started in 1949 and continued till the uprising of 1956. Several brave writers and leading intellectuals played a key role in shaping events but after the defeat of the Revolution many were arrested, thrown into jail or forced into silence.
One such writer was István Örkény (1912–1979). Born to a well-to-do middle-class family and a pharmacist and chemical engineer by profession, his first important short story was published by Attila József. His own peculiar brand of grotesque humour was already a characteristic of his writings, which were published in 1941 (Sea Dance). After the labour draft and four years as a prisoner of war, the Socialist policies on literature embittered his life. At first he made great efforts to fulfil these demands but he did not manage to avoid the painful ordeal of being silenced as a writer. Ten years of silence were imposed on him following his active part in the 1956 Revolution. During this time he wrote his One Minute Short Stories, a collection of condensed studies of the absurd which he likened to a mathematical equation: “On one side the writer’s minimum publication requiring the maximum imagination of the reader on the other.” He also wrote two short novels at this time: the amusing but bloodcurdling idyll (The Tóths) and a grotesque comedy about three old people (Cats Play) which deals with jealousy, passion and frailty. He later adapted these into stage productions and they have since been presented on stages worldwide. Örkény’s later writings make fun of the distorted features of the Hungarian national character.
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In 1975, Imre Kertész (1929) wrote a book called Fateless, which had taken many years to ripen into a novel and sold few copies when first published. In 2002, it won him the Nobel Prize for Literature, making him the first Hungarian to be crowned with the prestigious literary laurels. Kertész was fifteen years old when he was taken to the concentration camps of Auschwitz, thence to Birkenau. He survived the terrible ordeal and returned home two years later. He worked in a factory and as a journalist and from 1953 managed to earn a living from translating the works of Sigmund Freud, F. W. Nietzsche and Elias Canneti into Hungarian. The experiences of his adolescence took twelve years to write but he had to wait several more years before the book was first published.
Kertész consciously avoids seeking effect by accumulating the atrocities that took place, preferring to ‘provoke’ the reader through indirect methods and irony. The story is told in the first person by the teenage György Köves. As a form of self defence, he employs the tactic of remaining an uncomplaining figure amid the growing horrors and accepts life in the death camp as one variation of normal life. He succeeds in doing so to such an extent that when he finally returns home he hardly knows what to do with his new found freedom. To quote Kertész, he “trusts that the reader’s sense of morals will be insulted by the book’s apparently immoral impassivity, and enraged by the things that the narrator seemingly accepts without reproach”.
http://nobelprize.org/literature/laureates/2002/index.html
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Picture 10-48/B: Imre Kertész receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2002
Failure (1988), set in the 1950s, not only portrays the genesis of adversity in Fateless embedded in a fictive story, but also presents a parable for every form of totalitarian existence. The hero of Kaddish for the Child Not Born (1990) is also a victim of a lost fate, whose analysis of history brings him to the stark realization that his life cannot be lived, even indirectly, through his successors. Galleon diary (1992), the result of thirty years of private memorandums, outlines a life which is summed up with the bitter lesson that: “Until now the lies here were the truth, but today even the lies are not true.”
The Holocaust remains the central theme of his essays and presentations, which Kertész claims to be a state of being, the greatest trauma of European culture and the individual since the crucifix. He also believes that the roots, cause and ‘reason’ for the Holocaust can only be understood by open discussion and facing the past. The point of this, he adds, is not to remove the memory of what happened but to understand: the scandal of the century was not an irrational phenomenon but very much a part of human nature. A sad truth indeed, but one which nevertheless fortifies our moral reserves.
One of the most important figures in contemporary Hungarian literature, Péter Nádas (1942), has also had his books published since the late 1960s. He worked in various publications in the fields in which he studied. His life was not particularly eventful; he spent some years in writing scholarships in East- and then West Berlin but long ago withdrew to a quiet life in the country.
The essence of the atmosphere he creates in his novels are attributable to the discipline of his classical style, the well structured build-up of multiple complex sentences, the accuracy of form which allows for the polyphonic quality of his work and a tight narrative which unites unsparingly sharp observation with passionate confessions.
His first significant prose work The End of a Family Story (1977) is the story of a Jewish boy whose father is sentenced in the political trials, bringing a harsh end to the story of a family with a long history spanning several generations. Nádas spent over a decade writing his most significant work to date, Book of Memories (1986), lengthy volume containing three memoirs. Two of these carve out separate periods – the 1950s and 1970s – from the life of a young Hungarian; the third is the biography of a fictive character, a young German, at the turn of the 20 th century, whose life is connected though strange, spatial coincidences with the young Hungarian’s. The three interwoven periods of time, the style, intensity and constant change in the tone of the narrative provide a tour de force and complex portrayal of Eastern Europe’s recent past.
Nádas’ stories, essays and experimental dramas have been translated into a dozen languages. His foreign readers are mostly from German language territories but Book of Memories was well received in the USA with many critics declaring it one of the best novels in recent decades.
A critic of Péter Esterházy (1950) jokingly gave him the title of “post-modern lord”. Esterházy was born to one of the oldest and greatest family of Hungarian aristocrats, but at a time when the new Communist system was set on liquidating the old ruling classes. After a difficult childhood, he became absorbed in his studies and had the opportunity of getting a university education as a mathematician. During this time he published a few volumes of short stories, which introduced a new style of writing.
In 1979, he burst into the literary scene with A Novel About Production (A Short Novel), which heralded the beginning of post-modernist Hungarian literature. The multi-layered skit contained in the title alone prepares the reader for the full arsenal displayed in the new trend. His “novel” – though an obsolete and inappropriate term in this case – is an autobiography of sorts, interwoven with an ironic and labyrinthine system of notes, making it a ‘novel of the origin of the novel,’ with somersaults in language and style, quotes from the most diverse sources – including text from his own works – playing an important role.
In 1986, he published An Introduction to Literature, a collection of seven separate writings in different genres, including pictorial and text montages, the novel, a series of anecdotes, automatic writing, style imitations, linguistic experiments, articles, an entire novel copied onto one page in pencil and Helping Verbs of the Heart, a tragic but astounding confession following his mother’s death. The Book of Hrabal (1990) recounts the one-sided, imagined conversation between the writer’s wife and the famous Czech author.
His lengthy novel Harmonia Crelestis attracted a lot of attention in Hungary and abroad when it was published in 2000. In his usual ironic, ambiguous style, the writer combines the chronicles of his historical family with the declining fortunes of his parents’ generation of the Esterházys. As history often rewrites itself, so he rewrites the events of the past and his family history. At practically the same time he completed this book, he was officially notified that his request to examine records (‘informer’ reports) pertaining to him had been granted. This resulted in the diary/novel Revised Edition, a shattering document for a whole age, relating his father’s past as a Communist informer.
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Picture 10-49: Péter Eszterházy
Esterházy is a productive, versatile writer who constantly experiments with new forms of artistic expression. He declares battle on traditional and convenient reading, where the writer leads us by the hand from the first page to the last, in a world whose boundaries lie in sharp contrast to the reader’s own experiences. The writer keeps us constantly alert and forced to take a standpoint. In return for our efforts, he compensates us with the joy of being able to take an active pleasure in art.
Esterházy’s work is popular primarily in German language areas but his books are now being published in several European countries.
The destructive forces of history have left little besides the memory of the rich legacy of medieval Hungarian art, but even the fragments that survive are of exceptional quality. Even in the period following the Turkish conquest of 1541, Hungary was not in short supply of talent. But the wretched conditions that prevailed compelled many of Hungary’s most gifted artists – such as the Saxon Court painter Ádám Mányoki (1673–1757) and Jakab Bogdány (circa 1660–1724), who later became a British citizen – to seek their fortunes abroad.
The conditions for the development of an autonomous Hungarian culture were gained through a slow and painful process. Art schools and institutions were only established at the end of the 19 th century. Until then, those who wanted to devote their lives to art had to study in Vienna and Munich or in most cases, in Italy. Károly Markó Senior (1771–1860), who worked in the Villa Appeggi near Florence and Károly Brocky (1807–1855), who made a successful career in England, were erudite European artists from Hungarian stock, although they still represented the genre of history painting. Markó’s landscapes recalled the classicism of Claude Lorrain while Brocky evoked mythological tales using the lively colours of Venetian paintings.
Their younger contemporary, MihályMunkácsy (1844–1900), came from much more humble beginnings but rose to greater heights. With his captivating genre pictures steeped in the world of realism, he remains the most symbolic figure in Hungarian painting. His fame and popularity was attributable in most part to the events of his life (having risen from poverty and obscurity to become a member of the social elite in his time) and his style – an almost photographic realism produced with perfectionism and dramatic appeal which enthrals even the modern eye.
Munkácsy was still very young when he became orphaned. Distant relatives sent him to be a carpenter’s apprentice (recorded for prosperity in Yawning Apprentice). The only comfort he had in this degradation was in his drawings. Although aided by a painter who had studied at an art academy, he mastered his art on an instinctive and autodidactic level. He abandoned his trade and earned his living by painting portraits. Later, he expanded his horizons, going first to Pest, thence to Vienna, Munich, Paris and Düsseldorf.
In 1870, he became an instant success in the French capital, winning a Gold Medal Prize at the Paris Salon with his painting Condemned Cell (The Convict). This was his first large-scale composition which depicts in allegorical form the tragic outcome of the 1848–49 Hungarian Revolution and Struggle for Independence. This picture also brought him recognition in Hungary. But he did not return to Hungary and the subjects of his paintings gradually changed: the realist genre paintings depicting everyday life in Hungary (Woman with Brush-Wood, Churning Woman) were succeeded by more high-minded compositions.
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Picture 10-50: Mihály Munkácsy: Condemned Cell (The Convict)
Munkácsy settled in Paris and was soon married. He also went to Barbizon near the French capital, which was then a learning centre for great artists such as Camille Corot. It was here that his first natural landscapes were produced. He was no doubt aware of what the impressionists were aspiring to in the mid 1870s. When he returned to Hungary for a brief spell, he made a few paintings from the memory of his journey using the colours and luminescent sketchy style of the impressionists. He took another direction, however, conforming with the tastes of the elite and producing historical, drawing-room pictures, portraits, biblical and religious works (Ecce Homo, Christ before Pilate) in the styles of previous periods with the thoroughness and professionalism of an academic master. This may partly be attributable to the fact that from the mid 1880s, he was entrusted with painting the ceiling of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. In 1889, he was commissioned by the Hungarian government to paint the symbolic scene of the Hungarian Conquest in the Parliament building then under construction, where the painting remains to this day.
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Picture 10-51: Mihály Munkácsy: Crist before Pilate
Not all of Munkácsy’s contemporaries followed his example. Pál Szinyei Merse (1845–1920) turned his back on an illustrious career and social recognition, preferring to serve the moral demands of the artist’s integrity. For many years, he cut a lonely figure struggling for his misunderstood principles but lived to enjoy the just rewards of his exceptional talent and ideals.
Munkácsy may be the most popular and well-known of Hungarian painters but Szinyei is the greatest personality in Hungarian art. His career took an entirely different course, not having had to struggle to get a good art education. He enrolled at the Munich Academy but left in 1869 and continued to work in the Bavarian capital until 1873.
Until the mid 19 th century, the Biedermeier school of Vienna attracted Hungary’s talented artists. By the end of the century, Munich became the main destination of aspiring artists, primarily due to its acceptance of modern trends. The works of painters such as Jules Bastien-Lepage, Édouard Manet and Gustave Courbet, which were exhibited at the Glaspalast, had a great influence on Hungarian art. The openness towards new styles influenced Szinyei in his famous painting Picnic in May (1872), which marked the dawn of a new era. Its subject, a company of young people enjoying a picnic, not only pays tribute to the immortal art of his contemporaries (eg. Édouard Manet’s masterpiece Breakfast Outdoors), but with its loose blend of colours, makes it a direct precursor of impressionism. This painting, modern both in subject and style, was followed by a series of similar works. Szinyei holds an important place in the history of Hungarian art with his vision of depicting nature in an unaffected way in a style well ahead of his time. But this was also the tragedy of his fate: he was not recognized for his innovative approach.
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Picture 10-52: Pál Szinyei Merse: Picnic in May
In 1873, he married and withdrew to his estate where – feeling misunderstood by his contemporaries – he eventually abandoned painting. He only began to paint again in 1894, when painting out of doors in direct sunlight, an idea he had initiated, was an accepted art form. By then, his style had changed and he produced less interesting work. His inspiration waned in his old age but was compensated by the admiration of his professional contemporaries and the public. All his important works – from the dignified, seated woman in Lady in Violet to the late winter scene of Thawing Snow, from the murmur of Spring in Lark to the giddy heights of the new world depicted in Balloon – were later much praised. In 1905, Szinyei’s career was crowned when he was appointed director of the School of Design (later the College for Fine Arts).
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Picture 10-53: Pál Szinyei Merse: Lady in Violet
The new generation of the fin-de-siecle were able to become directly involved in the modern movements during a revolutionary period of the arts. The career of József Rippl-Rónai (1861–1927),who started out in Paris, illustrates the close connection between Hungarian and international art.
A graduate and member of a middle-class, provincial family, he was willing to give up his security when he decided to become an artist in 1884. After studying in Munich, he received a scholarship to Paris in 1887. But he chose an unusual approach to study: he became an assistant to Munkácsy, preparing variations and copies of his successful works which were later signed by the old master and consequently sold. After three years he was able to stand on his own feet. Demonstrating the most progressive aspirations of the age, he created a world of symbolic and secessionist elements in his paintings. His dark tones, oblong pictures of slender figures indulging in reveries allude to the poignant secrets of life: desire and hope. Rippl-Rónai was influenced by the similar post-impressionist styles of the Nabis art group. His acquaintance with the art nouveau patron and art dealer Siegfried Bing led to the portrait of the sculptor Aristide Maillol and illustrations, which Bing exhibited. At this time, he also met Lazarine Boudrion, who became his model and later, his lover and life-long partner.
The paintings he produced in the early 1890s were welcomed with interest in Paris but his later work, though more individual and striking, received less attention. In 1895, he met Count Tivadar Andrássy in Budapest and painted his portrait. The Count also had him design the dining room of his palace in Buda. Influenced by Van de Velde’s design of Bing’s gallery, the secessionist style interior (with furniture, ceramic objects, glass objects windows and textile wall hangings), was completed in 1898 and represented the peak of achievement in Hungarian applied arts (but was unfortunately completely destroyed during the Second World War).
After a short sojourn in Russia, Rippl-Rónai finally resettled in Hungary in 1902 and established his family home near Kaposvár. From this time onwards, he gradually changed his painting themes: which became dominated by the intimate scenes of the patriarchal representatives (relatives and friends) of the provincial lower middle-classes in their everyday occupations. He also began to use more oil colours and subtle tones in a style which suited the public taste. This resulted in a large exhibition of his work in 1906, which brought him long awaited recognition and financial security. For the most part, he spent his remaining one and a half decades painting likenesses of well-known personalities and tender female portraits.
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Picture 10-54: József Rippl-Rónai: My Father and Uncle Piacsek with Red Wine
At the beginning of the 20 th century, the Mecca for artists gravitated from Munich to Paris, where an exhibition of Paul Cézanne’s retrospective was held in 1907 and the post-impressionists, Paul Gauguin and Vincent Van Gogh provided the inspiration for even more daring initiatives. Gauguin’s attraction towards the exotic and Van Gogh’s fascination with light was equally important to their Hungarian contemporary Tivadar Csontváry Kosztka (1853–1919). Csontváry, as he is known, travelled extensively in Europe and the Middle East. It was only a long time after his death that he was ‘discovered’: when in 1958, his works were shown at the Hungarian Pavilion of the World Expo in Brussels.
Csontváry’s career made him one of the most unconventional figures in Hungarian art. In Brussels, many compared him, not surprisingly, to Henri Rousseau, as both men were drawn to the exotic. But the French painter was a self-taught, naïve artist, while Csontváry was obsessed, perhaps literally, and did everything within his means to master his profession. He worked as a pharmacist in a small provincial town when – as he later wrote in his memoirs – he had a prophetic vision that he would be “the world’s greatest painter, – ‘pathfinder to the sun’ – greater even than Raffael.”
He began to draw and paint systematically, went to Rome to see Raffael’s work, thence to see Munkácsy in Paris. His early works – animal portraits in vivid colours – proved he was an industrious novice and careful observer. In 1894, he enrolled at the private school of the reputable Simon Hollósy in Munich, where he drew models and acquired basic skills. He learned about the role of direct sunlight in the plein-air manner, which drew him to develop his art on his life-long travels abroad.
At first, he searched for motifs with which to elaborate his spiritual experiences in his homeland, in the Carpathians, the Hortobágy and Budapest. Then he travelled south in search of his ‘path to the sun’. In the mid 1890s, he went to the Balkans several times, to Italy and North Africa, Lebanon and Mecca. His most important oeuvres were produced between 1903 and 1910 (Wailing Wall, Coaching in Athens at New Moon, The Ruins of the Greek Theatre at Taormina, Baalbek, The Solitary Cedar, Pilgrimage to the Cedars in Lebanon, Mary’s Well in Nazareth, Riding on the Seashore), in which he depicted the rituals of a still unspoiled world as an alternative to the present. The places portrayed in the visions of this pure and romantic soul represent the past to us, but to those who lived there a reflection of a reality in which humanity and beauty have credibility. His visionary pictures were foreign to the culture of his time and his eccentricity was the harbinger of the illness which gradually took hold of him and condemned him to loneliness.
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Picture 10-55: Tivadar Csontváry Kosztka: The Solitary Cedar
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Picture 10-56: Tivadar Csontváry Kosztka: Mary’s Well in Nazareth
Philip Alexius De Laslo (Fülöp Elek László [1869–1937]) was the famous Hungarian master of virtuoso portrait painting. He studied in Budapest and Munich. He started with genre-painting but soon excelled with his dazzling portraits. Within a short time, he received commissions for portraits from emperors, kings, presidents, government heads, church leaders and artists and thus immortalised the renowned figures of his time (Leo XIII, Cardinal Rampolla, Francis Joseph, Emperor of Austria, William II, German Emperor, Roosevelt and others). He visited many countries in Europe and finally settled in England, becoming professor at the Royal Art School in London from 1914 onwards. Between 1897 and 1937, successful exhibitions of his work were shown in several European cities as well as in New York.
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Picture 10-57: Philip Alexius De Laslo (Fülöp Elek László): Portrait of Pope Leo XII
Lajos Kassák (1887–1967), who became the leading figure of the Hungarian avant-garde, gained his first experiences in modern art in Paris when he arrived in the French capital in 1909 as a young, aspiring poet. He was not only a poet, writer and literary editor but also a political publicist and artist. Restless and curious already in his childhood, he gained insights into the world of the proletarian factory worker as an apprentice locksmith. This experience defined his later career path. He joined the trade union movement and encouraged his associates to educate themselves with literary activities to break out of their proletarian existence. In 1915, he established his first journal, The Deed, which upheld the same ideals as the German activists. But it was banned for one year because of its anti-war stance and internationalism. Kassák then published Today in 1916, which became the central Hungarian avant-garde organ for a new, young generation ofwriters and artists. Beginning his career as an expressionist poet, Kassák emigrated to Vienna for political reasons in 1920 and continued to publish Today until1925.
In a German language environment, his literary work lost its significance. He began to paint. With his geometric, abstract, ‘architectural’ form of painting he became the main Hungarian representative of constructivism. In 1922 he joined forces with László Moholy-Nagy to write and publish Book of New Artists, which summarises the development of modem art and which provides what is still considered an almost complete and credible panorama of the leading avant-garde figures of the age.
In 1926, Kassák returned to Hungary where he produced many advertisements and photomontages. He began to concentrate his main energies towards literature again, writing his remarkable autobiography (A Man’s Life) and publishing novels and volumes of poetry. In addition to this, he edited a journal entitled Work between 1928 and 1939, which became the organ for working class arts, sociophotography and surrealist art.
As the leading figure of the Hungarian avant-garde, Kassák’s main objective was to bring Hungarian culture closer to universal art. He helped provide the intellectual environment and launching pad for the career of several famous artists such as László Moholy-Nagy (1895–1946), who started out in Today and became one of the greatest masters of modern art.
Like many of his contemporaries, Moholy-Nagy enrolled at university to study law. After the experiences of the First World War – where he made animated, expressionist drawings of his fellow soldiers on the front – he decided to change the course of his life and career and become an artist. After demobilization, he went to Szeged in Southern Hungary where his first exhibition was held. In 1920, he went to Vienna, where he personally met Kassák. Afterwards he settled in Berlin, which in the early 1920s was the centre of Central and East European – particularly Russian – avant-garde art and constructivism.
Moholy-Nagy, who until then had painted traditional portraits and landscapes using his own unique blend of cubist and futurist styles, was immediately drawn to the romantic ideology which heralded global redemption. He quickly adopted the technique of building on non-figurative elements. As Kassák edited Today in the same spirit of the modern age, it is hardly surprising that Moholy-Nagy regularly submitted his work to the journal.
When the Bauhaus director, Walter Gropius searched for a replacement following the departure of Johannes Itten, one of his leading teachers, it was the Hungarian painter whom he entrusted with the task of giving the preparatory course. His choice proved to be a good one as Moholy-Nagy was a genuine experimentalist. He attempted new methods not only in painting but also researched the possibilities in new mediums (photography and film) and believed that an industrialized civilization required new forms and genres in art. He taught at the Bauhaus in the spirit of this approach. The Bauhaus upheld principles, which differed radically from those offered in traditional, academic instruction and were defined in Moholy-Nagy’s book From Material to Architecture. He headed the ‘metal workshop’, edited the famous series of Bauhaus publications on the works of the greatest artists of the age, such as Paul Klee, Vaszilij Kandinszkij, Walter Gropius, Kazimir Malevics and Théo van Doesburg. He continued his creative work but in a completely different form of expression, for example his Light-Space-Modulator made in the early 1930s, the first mobile (moving plastic model). He acknowledged that the industrial designer was gradually replacing traditional art in the creation of everyday objects. He followed this route himself: when he left the Bauhaus in 1928, he continued his constructivist paintings but also designed stage sets, wrote articles and worked with applied graphics. In 1937, he went to the USA and established the New Bauhaus in Chicago, where he carried on the work he had started in Germany: training designers.
The 20 th century turned out to be a history of the isms, brought to life by organized groups within art circles. An exception to this rule was op-art, created by one man, VictorVasarely(Győző Vásárhelyi, 1908–1997). Though several constructivists could be considered his precedents (from Moholy-Nagy to Josef Albers) and many more succeeded him (from Bridget Riley to Yacov Agamon to Jesus-Rafael Soto), it is undoubtedly his name, work and theory that is linked to development of this style.
Vasarely began his studies in Budapest and continued in the graphic studio of Sándor Bortnyik (1893–1976), who was familiar with the Bauhaus methods taught in Weimar. He arrived in Paris in 1930 as an employed graphic artist reared on constructivist aesthetics. Although he applied eye-provoking graphics in his early advertisement designs, it was not till the 1950/60s that he realized the latent opportunities in playing with motifs based on optical laws. Thus he simplified oval and pebble forms into regular geometric forms (squares, circles, ellipses etc). He replaced black and white contrasts with a system of bright kaleidoscopes of complementary colours, which he described as planetary folklore. He claimed that works of art could be produced using the visual laws he had discovered in infinite numbers and scales. Furthermore, the original ‘picture’ could be multiplied many times over in the same high quality and – as a generally applied democratic method – be capable of aesthetically improving the environment.
Vasarely’s art was striking, colourful and easy to understand. When he exhibited his work in a specially established museum in Aix-en-Provence, he became very successful and for a time even inspired modern fashions. In1971, a retrospective exhibition of his work in Budapest’s Mõcsarnok Art Gallery drew a great many more visitors than usual for a contemporary artist.
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Picture 10-58: Victor Vasarely (Győző Vásárhelyi): Bowler Hat
After World War II, Europe was divided by the Cold War and opposing ideologies, forcing representatives and values of Hungarian culture into isolation. Few artists were able to develop in harmony with their own, distinct styles under such circumstances. One of these was ImreVarga(1923), the greatest virtuoso Hungarian sculptor of the last few decades. His work was exhibited in Paris when he was still in his teens but his best work could only be seen in public places in Hungary from the late 1960s and abroad from the 1970/80s. His emphasis and care in choosing the right environment for his sculptures has made them more directly accessible to the public.
As in literature and architecture, the first centres of musical culture in Hungary were to be found in royal courts, homes of the ruling classes, bishops’ residences, monasteries and schools. Creative expression among the populations of towns and cities only came much later. Royal minstrels performed court poetry recitals as well as being entertainers in the Age of Chivalry. Heroic songs preserved the spirit of heroism. The Pope’s Ambassador, on a visit to the Court of King Mátyás, praised his choral singers to the heavens. Following the death of Mátyás, the country was divided into three parts and thus its culture developed in three directions. The style and function of music also branched out: to mark the passing of different stages of the day, in salute of special celebrations and as a form of entertainment. The maestro would compose music for both secular and ecclesiastical functions, such as Joseph Haydn did at Esterháza and Kismarton from 1761 over a period of three decades. Many of his compositions include Hungarian dances, of ten inspired by the characteristic strains of gypsy music.
From the early 1700s to the mid 1800s, recruiting music flourished in Hungarian musical culture. Whether the popular, well-known dance rhythms were written expressly for recruiting soldiers, or simply adopted by them as a means of calling men to battle is hard to tell. The first star of gypsy music, however, was a woman called Panna Czinka.
The pulsating, dotted rhythms of recruiting music were most effective when played by the triumvirate of virtuosos led by the famous lead violinist János Bihari (1764–1827). Leaving his small country town for Pest, he remained a favourite among the gentry of Buda and aristocracy of Vienna from 1802 until his death. The other two members of the trio were János Lavotta (1764–1820), who also studied law, and the younger Antal Csermák (1774–1822). Their worthy successor Márk Rózsavölgyi (1789–1848) was creator of the enduringly popular Klezmer music.
Franz (Ferenc) Liszt (1811–1886) was an admirer of the virtuosos and considered a genius in the universal history of music. His career path is described by one historian as being paved with shining success but marked by shadows.
His father ran the estates of Prince Miklós Esterházy, was fond of playing the piano and was personally acquainted with J. N. Hummelt and Joseph Haydn. He soon recognized his son’s outstanding musical talent and took him to the best instructor, Karl Czerny. In one and a half years Czerny helped lay the foundations for the brilliant technique of the future piano virtuoso. Like the Mozarts, father took son to Paris – without the aid of a patron – in the autumn of 1823.
The French capital always aroused mixed feelings in Ferenc Liszt. Of failure: being a foreigner, he was not accepted into the Conservatoire but also of the memory of love, friendship and glittering successes. Within one year, he had become everybody’s favourite. In later years, he preferred to talk and write in French, although he always considered himself a Hungarian.
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Picture 10-59: Ferenc Liszt (Painted by Miklós Barabás)
Musical piece I: Ferenc Liszt: Les Preludes
A romantic at heart, he was easily moved or impassioned, yet longed to be alone. He shone as a piano virtuoso but increasingly grew to hate this role. Aware of his genius, however, he desired recognition. Although he yearned for a peaceful life of quiet reflection amid the serenity of nature, he could not yet give up his career as a virtuoso: Pest-Buda was also waiting to hear “this world famous musician”. Of his concert given in January 1840, it was written that “The famous artist finally appeared… clad in Hungarian garments: a red Zrínyi dolman, blue breeches with gold braiding and cordovan leather boots with spurs. Of his performance it would be futile to comment, words cannot express the rapture… one can only listen and be utterly in awe.”
Liszt was a man of peerless solidarity and social conscience throughout his life. In the 1840s, Liszt gave charity concerts in Hungary and throughout Europe. He supported Chopin and Berlioz and was an untiring advocate of Richard Wagner, who later became his son-in-law.
Liszt formulated his large-scale, dramatic musical ideas in his piano pieces (Years of Pilgrimage, E flat major, Piano Concerto in A Major, Hungarian Rhapsodies, Dance of Death, Mephisto-Waltzes, Sonata in H-Minor), grandiose works, symphonic compositions (Tasso, Les Préludes, Mazeppa, Hungaria, Die Ideale), symphonies (Dante, Faust), oratoriums (The Legend of Saint Elizabeth, Christus) and ecclesiastical pieces (Esztergom Mass, Coronation Mass, Requiem).
Although drawn to his homeland, he travelled the world even in his old age. In 1875, his hard work and efforts paid off: the Budapest Academy of Music was established, albeit in his own apartments at Hal Square. Five years later the institution moved to the Grand Boulevard. Liszt was the Academy’s first president and Ferenc Erkel, creator of the Hungarian romantic opera and the Hungarian Himnusz (National Anthem), was its first director. Liszt eventualIy retired from giving concerts but continued to teach even in his final years. His students from all around the world flocked after him to Budapest. In the twilight of his life, he visited only Rome and finally the Bayreuth Festival, where he died and was buried by his daughter, Cosima Wagner.
Musical piece II: Ferenc Erkel: László Hunyadi, Palotás (a Hungarian royal dance)
Together with Liszt, the most successful Hungarian and internationally renowned composer in the 19 th century was Karl (Károly) Goldmark (1830–1915). A self-made man, his life resembled that of a hero in a Dickens novel. The son of a Jewish choir-master who reared twenty one children, Goldmark achieved fame at a high price, following a difficult youth filled with hardship and privation. His extraordinary career spanned many different historical events. He was a child during the denouement of the Reform Period: his youth was marked by the rebellious atmosphere of the Revolution of 1848–49 which ended in tragedy and in his adult years he witnessed the break up of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy.
The story of his career is characterized by his passion towards his professional calling and ceaseless self-improvement. Although he completed only the first three years of primary school, and this through private endeavour, the style and aesthetic merits of his publications earned him the worthy title of Honorary Master of Arts in his old age. At the age of eleven, he started to play the violin under the tutelage of the village chorister. Barely three years later he was studying in Vienna, paying for his lessons from his own earnings. He was still an adolescent when he began to compose and was already working as theatre violinist when he heard of the 1848 Revolution and entered the National Guard.
After this brief but dramatic interlude, he devoted all his energies to his art. He taught himself to play the piano, gave lessons and published articles on music. By the age of 27 he had organized a recital of his own works. Real success, however, only carne in 1865, following the presentation of Sakuntala-Overture,and a scholarship award from the Hungarian government. A decade later – thanks to the effective intervention of Franz Liszt – his grand opera The Queen of Saba was first staged, thereafter captivating audiences from Vienna to New York, from the National Theatre in Pest to the Teatro Colon in Buenos Aires. Adapted from a biblical story, the opera was shown in thirty opera houses in nine different languages within a short time, although it was not well received and labelled as eclectic by critics at the time.
This is hardly surprising in view of the fact that all of Goldmark’s work was influenced by the masters of romance, particularly Wagner, whom he admired and praised in his critical works and in whose honour he established a Society in Vienna. But with its elementary dynamism, sensual Oriental atmosphere, its poetry and passion, the score of Sába captivated the likes of Gustav Mahler, Richard Strauss and Bruno Walter, who were all conductors of sensational Saba performances.
Goldmark continued to work even in old age, when he drafted the Piano Quintet and wrote his memoirs, a credible chronicler of a great period in the history of European music.
The first violin instructor at the Budapest Academy of Music, Károly Huber quickly recognized his son’s talent. From 1873, Jenő Hubay (1858–1937) was the student of the greatest violinist of the age, József Joachim, at the Berlin Music Academy. He formed a friendship with Liszt, with whom he performed in concerts on several occasions. On the advice of his friend, he went to Paris and soon became a popular guest at musical salons. It was here that he made many acquaintances, including that of the Belgian Henri Vieuxtemps who was known as the “French Paganini”. Vieuxtemps entrusted Hubay with the scoring of his Seventh Violin Concerto and appointed him as his successor as head of violin studies at the Music Academy of Brussels.
Hubay returned to Budapest in 1886 and some years later established one of the most renowned violin schools in Europe, rivalled only by Auer Lipót’s in St. Petersburg and Ottakar Ševcik’s in Prague during that time. Jelly Arányi, Endre Gertler, Stefi Geyer, Jenő Ormándy, Zoltán Székely and József Szigeti were among those who studied under Hubay. Several of them provided Béla Bartók with the inspiration for his compositions with their brilliant performances.
Hubay did several European concert tours every year. He was accompanied on the piano by great talents such as Eugen d’Albert, Wilhelm Backhaus and Ernst von Dohnányi. Hubay and Dávid Popper formed a string quartet, which they performed in several Brahms premieres in which Brahms himself was present. Hubay became Director of the Budapest Academy of Music from 1914 and for twenty years was a central figure in Hungarian musical life.
Following in the footsteps of Franz Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsodies and the French and Spanish virtuosos of his time, Hubay tried to find a Hungarian voice using Hungarian gypsy and folk music. The fruits of his efforts brought him great success in the music salons of Paris. He composed several romantic character pieces (Scenes from the Csarda). Later he turned towards grander forms and drafted nine operas. One of these was The Violinist of Cremona and its famous violin solo was an outstanding hit at the time. The opera was shown in nine different opera houses and was the first Hungarian operatic piece to be staged outside Europe (in New York, 1897).
Ernst (Ernõ) von Dohnányi, (1877–1960) was one of the romantics of his time. Although he did not seek new forms of expression or create ‘great’ works, his compositions were excellently crafted, beautiful, impressive and genuine. Employing the refined harmonies so characteristic of the late romantic period, he dressed his light, melodious music in classical forms in the mould of Brahms.
Dohnányi was the first student at the Budapest Academy of Music to win worldwide acclaim. He was barely nineteen when he composed his Piano Quintet in C-Minor, which is still regularly performed and of which Brahms said he himself could not have written better.
Dohnányi lived in Berlin for ten years and from 1915 became one of the central figures of musical life in Budapest. He taught at the Budapest Academy of Music, took over as conductor of the capital’s only professional orchestra and performed in piano recitals. He was one of the most outstanding performers of the first half of the 20 th century. In the meantime, he drafted orchestral pieces (Variations on a Nursery Song, Ruralia Hungaria), chamber music, piano pieces, operas and ecclesiastical music. Béla Bartók wrote of him in the 1920s as “the one man in Budapest whose name is synonymous with the music of our age”.
He was removed from his duties as head of the Budapest Academy of Music for political reasons, but this meant that he was able to go on longer concert tours and resulted in his finally settling in the USA in 1944. Many of his students became world famous, including Annie Fischer, Géza Anda, Andor Földes and the young George Solti, who studied music composition under his tutelage. He made several recordings for various music publishers. These documents preserve his remarkable musical skills and make him the “Last Mohican” of Liszt’s music of romance.
The most important and far-reaching Hungarian composer of the 20 th century, Béla Bartók (1881–1945), came from a family of teachers. Being well versed in music, his parents were able to tell that he had a good ear for music. After his father’s death, the family moved to Bratislava, where Bartók was a student of László Erkel, son of the composer of the Hungarian national anthem.
Muscial piece III: Hungarian Pictures I. Eveneing with the Székelys (Magyars of Eastern Transsylvania)
Bartók began to study music at the Budapest Academy of Music on the advice of Ernõ Dohnányi. By this time, the former students of Liszt were heads of the Academy of Music and the Opera House and the Ybl Palace was a citadel for Wagner’s music. To mark the occasion of Liszt’s 90 th birthday, Bartók played the famously difficult Sonata in H-Major, which attracted great attention in the contemporary press.
The freshly graduated composer’s Kossuth Symphony – a reflection of his strong love of freedom and patriotism – was presented in Budapest in 1904 and then in Manchester, England with the highly respected János Richter conducting. (Richter was the first conductor at the Bayreuth Festival of Music).
Bartók writes in his autobiography: “In 1905 I began to research the hitherto unknown world of Hungarian folk music. To my great fortune, I gained a colleague in this pursuit, an outstanding musician by the name of Zoltán Kodály. With his sharp vision and judgement in every branch of music, he helped me on several occasions with his inestimable advice.” Kodály stood by his brother in arms throughout Bartók’s lifetime and after his death. In 1906, they presented their jointly drafted Hungarian Folk Songs.
Bartók’s 1 st Orchestral Suite (1906) marked the beginning of a period of style with close links to folk music. Synthesis also became an increasingly integral part of instrumental music. When Bartók submitted his opera Bluebeard’s Castle in a competition at the Lipótváros Casino, the unusual sounds and expressive symbolism in his work was received by uncomprehending ears. Since then this work has been produced in the world’s most important opera houses, always in the Hungarian language. Bartók’s bright career path was not without its shadows. His ballet The Wooden Prince was a success but his pantomime The Miraculous Mandarin was not staged for a long time, although nowadays it offers a role which ballet dancers can only dream of.
Bartók was applauded as a virtuoso pianist but rejected as a composer and for his role in musical life. This fact prompted him to concentrate his energies on research and teaching. He did not stop composing, however, and his string quartet series, I. Violin-Piano Sonata as well as I. Piano Concerto were the ornate fruits of his efforts during this period. In 1923, he married Ditta Pásztory, herself a scholar of the piano. Together they travelled across Europe.
In the 1920s and 1930s, Bartók composed Dance Suite, Hungarian Sketches, The Mikrokozmos and II. Piano Concerto in addition to the orchestral choral pieces Cantata Profana, Music for String Instruments, Percussion and Celesta, Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion and Divertimento.
Bartók’s travels brought new friendships but also made him see that war was approaching. In 1940, he emigrated to the United States. He was already ill when the Koussevitzky Foundation asked him to write an orchestral piece: the Concerto. This was followed by the Violin Solo Sonata, which he composed for Yehudi Menuhin. In 1943, in New York, he played the Sonata for Two Pianos with Ditta Pásztory, conducted by Frigyes Reiner. He was just a few bars short of completing his III. Piano Concerto which he dedicated to his wife. Although he survived the war, he was not able to return to Hungary and died on September 26, 1945.
Zoltán Kodály (1882–1967) fulfilled three callings in his long and illustrious career. Along with Béla Bartók, László Lajtha, Leó Weiner and Ernõ Dohnányi, he was the most influential Hungarian composer of the 20 th century, untiring in his discovery, research and recording of Hungarian folk music.
He was born between the Danube and Tisza rivers in the town of Kecskemét but spent much of his childhood in the cultured – German, Latin, Slovak and Hungarian speaking – environs of Nagyszombat. He began his further education in Budapest, studying Hungarian and German at the Péter Pázmány University and simultaneously taking lessons in composing and the piano at the Budapest Academy of Music. He lived in the famous Eötvös College, where 20 th century Hungarian avant-garde, intellectual life flourished. Among the writers, aesthetes and social researchers around him, he saw the connections between different aspects of modern intellectual endeavours.
In 1907, Kodály completed his studies and began to teach at the Budapest Academy of Music. He composed, wrote essays and musical criticisms and travelled the country to collect folk songs. His growing familiarity with folk music fundamentally defined his style of composing. But he was also influenced by the impressionistic styles of Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel and the memory of meeting Debussy personally in Paris during the six months he spent there left an enduring mark.
After writing chamber music and having composed pieces for string instruments and the piano, Kodály began to focus on songs accompanied by the piano, symphonic and large-scale vocal works, including Psalmus Hungaricus, Budavári Te Deum, and stage productions of János Háry and The Transylvanian Spinning Room. Assessing the appalling situation in school music instruction, he found the role of singing and choral music increasingly important. He composed choral music for children’s, male, female and mixed choirs, developed the tonic sol-fa system, attempted to teach children and music students Hungary’s thousand year old folk song culture and wrote pedagogical works on music.
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Picture 10-61: Zoltán Kodály by picture of Bartók
Musical piece IV: Zoltán Kodály: Evening Song
He maintained connections with several important figures of contemporary musical culture, including Arturo Toscanini and Pablo Casals. Kodály’s works are performed throughout the world. His system of music teaching methods continue to be developed on an institutional level by Kodály scholars and their students in association with other progressive music schools all over the world.
According to Pierre Boulez, the universal art of music composition at the turn of the 20 th and 21 st century can be characterised by the genius of three Hungarians: György Kurtág, Péter Eötvös and György Ligeti.
György Ligeti (1923) began to study composing as the student of Ferenc Farkas at the Kolozsvár (Cluj, in Romania) Conservatory. During the years of Fascism, he was forced to go on the labour draft. On his return, he enrolled at the Liszt Ferenc College of Music where he was taught by Sándor Veress. From 1950, he taught composing and counterpoint methods at the Budapest Academy of Music but recognized that what he could teach or compose was behind the times. In 1956 he left Hungary.
In Vienna, Ligeti made the acquaintance of Karlheinz Stockhausen, Gottfried Michael Koenig and Herbert Elmert, who invited him to join them at the Westdeutscher Rundfunk Studio of Electronic Music. He worked there between 1957 and 1958 and developed his own musical style. His style is polyphonic, or what he describes as micro-polyphonic. Between 1963 and 1965 he composed Requiem and Lux Aeterna. The former won him the Beethoven Prize and the latter was adapted for the sound track of the film Space Odyssey 2001.
In 1978, Ligeti presented his opera Le Grand Macabre at the Stockholm Opera House. This work is permeated with the same wit, self-mockery and irony that is displayed in his small scale compositions.
The composer and pianist György Kurtág (1926) began his studies in Temesvár (Timisoara in Romania). From 1946, he studied at the Liszt Ferenc College of Music in Budapest where he was taught piano by Pál Kadosa, chamber music by Leó Weiner and composing by Sándor Veress and then Ferenc Farkas. It was in Kadosa’s class that he met his later wife, the pianist Mária Kurtág, who to this day gives the most inspired performances of her husband’s works.
Kurtág is a brilliant teacher. Those world-famous Hungarian musicians – particularly instrumental and vocal performers – who are at the pinnacle of their careers today, have him to thank for their knowledge and awareness of style. Since Kurtág, Bach and Beethoven can never be played in the same way as before. He went to Berlin in 1971 and has since lived abroad.
Kurtág holds regular master classes in chamber music and composition and is often invited to teach at the Bartók Seminars in Szombathely. But the mastering of a musical piece is equal to taking one of his courses: with his active participation in rehearsals and insistence on the interpretation being perfect before allowing the performer onto the podium. What will happen to Kurtág’s music without Kurtág? – any anxious analyst of his work might ask.
In the 20th century, several Hungarian operetta composers achieved worldwide acclaim, particularly those who studied at the Budapest Academy of Music from the masters Dohnányi, Bartók and Kodály. Imre Kálmán, Albert Szirmai and Viktor Jacobi were preceded, however, by the quintessentially Monarchian personality, Franz Lehár (1870–1948).
Lehár grew up in a musical family. His father, an army conductor in the days of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, was sent to Budapest in 1880. In this way young Lehár was able to enrol at the National School of Music before going on to study at the Prague Conservatory. Later he too earned his living as a conductor in a military band and in the mean time composed a series of military marches, songs and dances in addition to operas. Recognition for his talent as a composer finally came with his Name Waltz, which was performed at Prince Metternich’s Gold and Silver Ball in Vienna.
Lehár joined the Theater an der Wien where he immediately discovered the key to success: he met some experienced Viennese librettists and together they composed his first two operettas, Viennese Women and Der Rastelbinder. In 1895, his most enduringly successful The Merry Widow was presented in Vienna, which he conducted in its subsequent European tour and which won him acclaim as the uncrowned king of operetta music. Lehár was an extremely productive composer, but not all his creations became permanent fixtures in the repertoires of Europe’s opera houses. The Count of Luxembourg, Gypsy Love and Éva were among those that have endured the course of time.
With Paganini, Lehár captivated audiences in Berlin. He revised his less successful pieces, which resulted in the transformation of Yellow Coat, which had received a frosty reception, into the international hit The Land of Smiles.
Among the pupils at Budapest’s famous Lutheran Grammar School, which produced many Nobel Prize winners, was Imre Kálmán (1882–1953). He went on to study law as well as music and learned musicology and composition at the Budapest Academy of Music. He was still very young when he composed his symphonic orchestral pieces and tunes. In 1907, he was awarded the Franz Joseph Prize in Budapest for a series of tunes.
It was in Vienna that he wrote his first successful operettas: Csardas Fuerstin, Miss Zsuzsi and The Gypsy Princess, which brought him instant recognition. These were followed by Countess Maritza and The Circus Princess. Kálmán was a withdrawn character. It was his wife, the aristocrat Russian émigré, Vera Makinszka, who built up his network of contacts. In 1940, they emigrated to America, where Kálmán composed Marinka and Arizona Lady.
His work is testimony to his intentions to raise the level of the operetta, often to the heights demanded of opera. He gave the choir an important role and reduced the dancing interludes. His richly nuanced and diverse orchestral sections created effective, sparkling and beautiful melodies. He also employed elements of gypsy music and csárdás rhythms.
Not only Hungarian film directors and producers but music composers have captivated Hollywood, including Miklós Rózsa (1907–1995), who drafted the music for films such as The Thief of Baghdad (194), The Jungle Book (1942), Madame Bovary (1949), Quo Vadis? (1951), and Ben Hur (1959). He received three Oscars for his film soundtracks. In addition to film work, he remained faithful to traditional music genres. His piano and cello concertos were presented in the world’s most prominent concert halls.
Rózsa was still a child when he became acquainted with the rich cultural life of the capital. He was influenced particularly by the music of Bartók and Kodály. In 1926, he went to Germany to study at the University of Leipzig. In 1931, he went to Paris and met the outstanding musicians of Parisian cultural life, including Arthur Honegger. It was on Honegger’s encouragement that he began to compile film music scores. In London, he met the Korda brothers, Sándor and Zoltán and in 1940 they all settled in Los Angeles. His exclusive contract as film music composer with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer film studios lasted fourteen years. Rózsa drafted many of his legendary soundtracks in this period.