Project Hungarica 2

Modern Hungarian music can be represented as a vast and clearly recognizable mountain range, whose three main peaks bear the names of Béla Bartók, György Ligeti, and György Kurtág. These three have taken the music of their country to hitherto unknown heights. The distinctive Hungarian musical idiom had already found its way into the style of the Viennese Classical period and reached the height of its popularity in the works of Franz (Ferenc) Liszt and Johannes Brahms. But it was only with the advent of modern musical language that composers succeeded in assimilating Hungarian music without stylistic “censorship,” bringing out its unruly, archaic modes and sharp rhythms (whose Polish counterparts are found only in the music of the Tatra Highlanders, who inhabit the former borderlands between Poland and Hungary). Hungarian folklore also drew its richness from the sheer vastness of the Hungarian part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire before the First World War. As in the case of Poland, where many leading artists were born in the so-called eastern borderlands, all three classics of 20th-century Hungarian music came from territories that were ceded to Romania by the 1920 Treaty of Trianon.