Hungary is a small country with an outsized place in music history. Liszt invented the piano recital, Bartók and Kodály put folk song at the heart of modern classical music, and Hungarian-born composers went on to shape Viennese operetta, Hollywood film scores and the postwar avant-garde.
Here are 13 of the greatest Hungarian composers, from a Renaissance lute virtuoso to composers working today, each with a piece to start with.
The short version
If you only explore three, start with Liszt, Bartók and Ligeti. Between them they cover Romantic piano music, folk-inspired modernism and the postwar avant-garde.
1. Franz Liszt
1811–1886 · Hungarian
Start with: “Liebestraum No. 3”
Liszt was born in Doborján in the Kingdom of Hungary (now Raiding, Austria) and became the most famous pianist of the 19th century. He is credited with inventing the solo piano recital, and his tours caused scenes of fan hysteria that the poet Heinrich Heine called “Lisztomania”.
As a composer he pushed Romantic music forward. He invented the symphonic poem, a one-movement orchestral work that tells a story or paints a picture, and developed thematic transformation, where a single theme is reshaped to suit different moods. His Liebesträume (Dreams of Love), a set of three piano pieces, are among his best-loved works.
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2. Béla Bartók
1881–1945 · Hungarian
Start with: “Concerto for Orchestra”
Bartók was born in Nagyszentmiklós, then in Hungary and now Sânnicolau Mare in Romania. He studied piano in Budapest with István Thomán, a former pupil of Liszt, and became one of the founders of comparative musicology, the field now called ethnomusicology.
With Kodály he traveled through villages collecting thousands of Hungarian, Slovak and Romanian folk tunes, and their rhythms and scales run all through his own music. His best-known works include six string quartets, Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta (1936), the Concerto for Orchestra (1943), written in the US after he fled the Nazis, and Mikrokosmos, a set of graded piano pieces first written for his son’s lessons.
Listen on SpotifyApple MusicRelated: 20 of the greatest 20th-century composers
3. Zoltán Kodály
1882–1967 · Hungarian
Start with: “Dances of Galánta”
Kodály began collecting folk songs in remote Hungarian villages in 1905, recording them on phonograph cylinders. He met Bartók soon after and introduced him to the work, beginning a lifelong friendship.
His breakthrough came with Psalmus Hungaricus in 1923, followed by the Háry János Suite and the Dances of Galánta (1933), which mix orchestral color with folk tunes. He is just as famous as an educator. The Kodály method, built on his principles that music is for everyone and that singing comes first, is used in schools around the world.
4. György Ligeti
1923–2006 · Hungarian, later Austrian
Start with: “Atmosphères”
Ligeti was born to a Hungarian Jewish family in Transylvania and fled Hungary in 1956 after the Soviet crackdown on the uprising. He settled in the West, became an Austrian citizen in 1968, and is widely regarded as one of the leading composers of the postwar avant-garde.
His orchestral piece Atmosphères (1961) has no melody or beat at all, just dense, slowly shifting clouds of sound, a technique he called micropolyphony. He also wrote the opera Le Grand Macabre and three books of fiendish piano études. Stanley Kubrick used his music in 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Shining and Eyes Wide Shut.
5. Ferenc Erkel
1810–1893 · Hungarian
Start with: “Hunyadi László overture”
Erkel is known as the father of Hungarian grand opera. Born in Gyula, he spent his career in Pest, and in 1844 he wrote the music for the “Himnusz”, which became Hungary’s national anthem.
His operas, mostly on stirring scenes from Hungarian history, are still staged in Hungary. Hunyadi László (1844) was his first big success, and Bánk bán (1861) is often thought of as the national opera of Hungary. He also led the Budapest Philharmonic Orchestra, founded in 1853, and became the first director of the Hungarian Academy of Music.
6. Bálint Bakfark
c. 1507–1576 · Hungarian
Start with: “Fantasia No. 1”
Bakfark was one of the great lute virtuosos of the Renaissance. Born around 1507 in Brassó (now Brașov, Romania), he was orphaned young and educated at the royal court in Buda. In the 1540s he went to Paris hoping for a post as the French king’s lutenist, only to find it taken.
In 1549 he became court lutenist to King Sigismund II Augustus of Poland and won fame across Europe. He settled in Padua, where he died in the plague of 1576. The belongings of plague victims were burned, so most of his manuscripts were lost. His surviving fantasias and lute arrangements of motets and chansons show remarkable polyphonic skill.
7. Karl Goldmark
1830–1915 · Hungarian
Start with: “Rustic Wedding Symphony”
Goldmark was born in Keszthely, the son of a Jewish cantor, and grew up in a large, poor family. He was largely self-taught as a composer, though he studied violin and harmony in Vienna, where he spent most of his life.
His opera Die Königin von Saba (The Queen of Sheba) premiered in Vienna in 1875 and stayed in the Vienna Court Opera’s repertoire until 1938. His Rustic Wedding Symphony (1876) and his first Violin Concerto, his most often played work during his lifetime, are the best places to start.
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8. Miklós Rózsa
1907–1995 · Hungarian-American
Start with: “Ben-Hur”🏆 3 Oscar wins
Rózsa was born in Budapest. His mother was a pianist who had studied with pupils of Liszt, and by the age of eight he was performing in public and composing. After studying in Leipzig he moved to Paris in 1931, where his Theme, Variations and Finale was taken up by conductors including Charles Munch and Bruno Walter.
A film score for Alexander Korda in London led him to Hollywood, where he wrote nearly 100 scores. He received 17 Oscar nominations and won three, for Spellbound (1945), A Double Life (1947) and Ben-Hur (1959). He kept writing concert music too, including a Violin Concerto for Jascha Heifetz.
Listen on SpotifyApple MusicRelated: 15 of the greatest film composers
9. Ernő Dohnányi
1877–1960 · Hungarian
Start with: “Variations on a Nursery Song”
Ernő Dohnányi, also known as Ernst von Dohnányi, was born in Pozsony (now Bratislava) and was one of the finest pianists of his day, as well as a conductor and teacher. He studied with his father and a cathedral organist, then at the Royal Hungarian Academy of Music in Budapest.
His style stayed close to Brahms, who admired his Piano Quintet No. 1 and helped promote it in Vienna. His most popular work is the Variations on a Nursery Song (1914) for piano and orchestra, a witty set built on the tune known in English as “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star”. He spent his last years teaching at Florida State University.
10. Emmerich Kálmán
1882–1953 · Hungarian
Start with: “Die Csárdásfürstin”
Kálmán, born in Siófok, was one of the leading composers of 20th-century Viennese operetta. He blended the Viennese waltz with the fiery Hungarian csárdás, and his big hit, Die Csárdásfürstin (The Csárdás Princess), opened in Vienna in 1915.
Gräfin Mariza (Countess Maritza, 1924) and Die Zirkusprinzessin (The Circus Princess, 1926) followed. Kálmán was Jewish, and after the Nazi annexation of Austria he refused Hitler’s offer of “honorary Aryan” status and left for Paris, then the US in 1940. He kept writing, including Marinka (1945), and died in Paris in 1953.
11. Franz Lehár
1870–1948 · Austro-Hungarian
Start with: “The Merry Widow”
Lehár was born in Komárom in the Kingdom of Hungary (now Komárno, Slovakia), the son of an army bandmaster. Antonín Dvořák advised him to concentrate on composing, but he first followed his father into military bands and became the youngest bandmaster in the Austro-Hungarian army.
Then came The Merry Widow (1905), one of the most successful operettas ever written. The Count of Luxembourg (1909) and The Land of Smiles (1929) followed, the latter with “Dein ist mein ganzes Herz”, a signature song for the tenor Richard Tauber. Lehár died in Bad Ischl, Austria, in 1948.
12. György Kurtág
Born 1926 · Hungarian
Start with: “Kafka Fragments”
Kurtág was born in Lugoj, Romania, in 1926 and studied in Budapest, where he became a lifelong friend of Ligeti. His music is famous for its brevity. Many pieces last less than a minute, yet pack in an extraordinary amount of feeling.
His Játékok (Games), a collection of piano pieces in many volumes, began as music for children and grew into a musical diary. The Kafka Fragments for soprano and violin and his only opera, Fin de partie (after Beckett’s Endgame), which premiered at La Scala in 2018, are major works. His honors include the Grawemeyer Award and the Royal Philharmonic Society Gold Medal.
13. Julius Dobos
Born 1976 · Hungarian-American
Start with: “Mountain Flying”
Dobos, born in Budapest, is known for blending orchestral and electronic music. His album Mountain Flying (1999) combines a 130-piece orchestra and choir with synthesizers to conjure snow-capped peaks.
He has also written music for films including You Don’t Mess with the Zohan, Paul Blart: Mall Cop and Zookeeper, and worked on the American soundtrack for the anime Dragon Ball Z while composer in residence at Faulconer Productions. In 2014 he launched Forgotten Future, a series of ambient electronic concept albums.
Which Hungarian composer is your favorite?
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Summing up
Hungarian composers have shaped almost every corner of music, from Liszt’s piano showpieces and Erkel’s national operas to Bartók’s folk-driven modernism, the operettas of Kálmán and Lehár, and Rózsa’s epic film scores. Folk music is the thread that runs through many of them.
Which Hungarian composer would you add to the list?
