Description
Hungarian modern music may be represented in the form of a vast and clearly distinguishable mountain range, whose three main summits bear the names of Bela Bartok, Gyorgy Ligeti, and Gyorgy Kurtag. These three took music in their country to previously unknown heights. The characteristic Hungarian musical idiom had in fact already found its way into the Viennese classics' style, reaching the peak of its popularity in the works of Franz (Ferenc) Liszt and Johannes Brahms. It is, however, only in the modern sound language that composers have succeeded in assimilating Hungarian music without stylistic 'censorship', in bringing out its unruly, archaic modalities and sharp rhythms (whose Polish counterparts can only be found in the music of the Tatra highlanders, inhabiting the former borderland between Poland and Hungary). Hungarian folklore also derived its wealth from the sheer vastness of the Hungarian part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire before World War I. As in the case of Poland, many of whose leading artists were born in the so-called Eastern Borderlands, all the three classics of 20th-century Hungarian music came from the territories which the 1920 Treaty of Trianon gave to Romania. Marcin Trzesiok (tranls. Tomasz Zymer)
