page_title: Culture of Hungary
section_title: Music
hierarchical_section_title: Culture of Hungary / Music
caption_attribution_description: English: Béla Bartók in 1927
context_page_description: The culture of Hungary varies across Hungary, ranging from the capital city of Budapest on the Danube, to the Great Plains bordering Ukraine. Hungary has a rich folk crafts tradition, including for example embroidery, decorated pottery and carvings. Hungarian music ranges from the rhapsodies of Franz Liszt and folk music to modern songs influenced by folk music and Roma music. Hungary has a rich and colorful literature with many poets and writers, although not many are known abroad due to the limited prevalence of the Hungarian language. Noted authors include Sándor Márai and Imre Kertész, who have been gaining acclaim in recent decades. János Kodolányi was well known in Italy and Finland in the mid-20th century. Imre Kertész won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2002. Péter Esterházy is popular in Austria and Germany, Madagascar, Siberia, and Magda Szabó has recently become well known in Europe as well.
context_section_description: The music of Hungary consists mainly of traditional Hungarian folk music and music by prominent composers such as Ferenc Liszt (known in the West as Franz Liszt), Franz Schmidt, Dohnányi, Bartók, Kodály, György Ligeti and Rózsa. Traditional Hungarian music tends to have a strong dactylic rhythm, as in the Hungarian language the first syllable of each word is invariably stressed. Hungary also has a number of internationally renowned composers of contemporary classical music, including György Kurtág, Péter Eötvös and Zoltán Jeney, among others.
  Liszt spoke no Hungarian until 1870 when he started to learn the language, but he clearly identified himself as Hungarian and founded the Academy of Music. Bartók was also born in the former Kingdom of Hungary; György Ligeti was born in Transylvania, after its transfer to Romania; they both studied at the Liszt Academy then lived and worked outside of the Pannonian Basin.
  Hungary has made many contributions to the fields of folk, popular, and classical music. Hungarian folk music is a prominent part of the national identity and continues to play a major part in Hungarian music. Hungarian folk music has been influential in neighboring areas such as Romania, Slovakia, Poland, and especially in southern Slovakia and the Romanian region of Transylvania, both home to significant numbers of Hungarians.
  Broughton claims that Hungary's "infectious sound has been surprisingly influential on neighbouring countries (thanks perhaps to the common Austro-Hungarian history) and it's not uncommon to hear Hungarian-sounding tunes in Romania, Slovakia and Poland". It is also strong in the Szabolcs-Szatmár area, and in the southwest part of Transdanubia, near the border with Croatia. The Busójárás carnival in Mohács is a major Hungarian folk music event, formerly featuring the long-established and well-regarded Bogyiszló orchestra.
  Hungarian classical music has long been an "experiment, made from Hungarian antedecents and on Hungarian soil, to create a conscious musical culture [using the] musical world of the folk song". Although the Hungarian upper class has long had cultural and political connections with the rest of Europe, leading to an influx of European musical ideas, the rural peasants maintained their own traditions, so that by the end of the 19th century Hungarian composers could draw on rural peasant music to (re)create a Hungarian classical style. For example, Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály, two of Hungary's most famous composers, are known for using folk themes in their music. Bartók collected folk songs from across Central Europe, including Romania and Slovakia, whilst Kodály was more interested in creating a distinctively Hungarian musical style.
  During the era of Communist rule in Hungary (1944–1989), a Song Committee examined and censored popular music for traces of subversion and ideological impurity. Since then, however, the Hungarian music industry has begun to recover, producing successful performers in the fields of jazz such as trumpeter Rudolf Tomsits, pianist-composer Károly Binder, and in a modernized form of Hungarian folk, Ferenc Sebő and Márta Sebestyén. The three giants of Hungarian rock, Illés, Metró, and Omega, remain very popular, especially Omega, which, besides Hungary, has followings in Germany and beyond. Veteran underground bands from the 1980s such as Beatrice also remain popular.
caption: Béla Bartók
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