Hungary

F

Way of Life

Despite large-scale urbanization in the area surrounding Budapest, Hungary is best characterized by its rural nature. Fewer than ten cities have a population of more than 100,000, and many of these cities have maintained a rural character. Cities are surrounded by village-type settlements with scattered multilevel apartment buildings. Most Hungarian city-dwellers live in apartments, while single-family housing is the norm in the countryside. Hungary has an unusually high number of commuters who travel from rural areas to jobs in the cities. Some Hungarians continue to farm in addition to their main occupation.

During the Communist period, Hungary had a higher standard of living than most countries in the Soviet bloc. In the early 1990s, after the fall of Communism, living standards fell for most of the population as a result of the country’s economic transition to capitalism. While life for many Hungarians revolved around finding the resources necessary to raise a family, a distinct upper class emerged that lived in large houses with swimming pools and tennis courts. Hungary made a fairly rapid transition from state-owned to privately owned businesses, and wages rose in the late 1990s, as did the standard of living.

IV

Culture

The ancient Magyars had a rich folk culture, which incorporated Eastern themes into its folktales, art, and music. Following the Hungarian conversion to Christianity in the 10th century, pagan and Eastern cultural elements were replaced by Western cultural and social patterns, and Latin, the language used by the Roman Catholic Church, became the official and literary language. This meant, especially during the Middle Ages, that the overwhelming majority of chroniclers, scholars, and educators in Hungary were priests.

During the 15th century Italian artists and scholars flocked to the court of King Matthias Corvinus and introduced the humanistic Renaissance into Hungarian culture. In the 16th century, during the Reformation, the Hungarian language replaced Latin. From the 15th through 17th centuries a politically based cultural idea developed of Hungarians as the “protecting bastion of Western civilization” against the Ottoman imperialism. This idea survived into the 20th century. In the 18th and 19th centuries Hungary absorbed the ideas of the Age of Enlightenment and of Western European liberalism. New movements arose as a result. The Hungarian Academy of Sciences, founded in 1825, was highly influential in assimilating these ideas into Hungarian culture. In the last quarter of the 19th century Hungarian Jews also greatly influenced Hungary’s cultural life.

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The early 20th century saw the rise of the Nyugat (“West”) school of Hungarian intellectuals, who favored the integration of Hungarian cultural elements with modern Western culture. After World War II the Communist regime made efforts to pattern Hungarian culture after that of the USSR. The demise of Communism in 1990 reopened the floodgates to Western culture in Hungary. American films, books, music, and plays became extremely popular.

A

Literature

Literature was a major influence in Hungarian history, and the spiritual prelude to uprisings in 1848 and 1956 was provided by poets and writers. The comedies of Ferenc Molnár were translated into several languages and achieved international popularity during the first half of the 20th century. The Rogers and Hammerstein musical Carousel (1945) was based on Molnár’s play Liliom (1909). In 2002 Imre Kertész became the first Hungarian to win the Nobel Prize in literature. His semi-autobiographical works concern themselves primarily with the World War II Holocaust, which he experienced when he was sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp at the age of 14. Another 20th-century Hungarian writer whose works have been translated into English is novelist Sándor Márai. See Hungarian Literature.

B

Art

Only a few Hungarian artists have achieved international renown. Hungarian painting reached the peak of its development during the romantic period in the 19th century. Notable painters included Mihály Munkácsy, Viktor Madarász, Pál Szinyei Merse, and Mihály Zichy. The Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts, which offers training in the visual arts, was established in Budapest in 1871.

László Moholy-Nagy was a leading 20th-century sculptor and photographer who taught at the Bauhaus, an avant-garde design school in Germany, and in 1937 came to the United States, where he founded the New Bauhaus in Chicago, later known as the Institute of Design of the Illinois Institute of Technology. Architect and furniture designer Marcel Breuer, also born in Hungary and a student and teacher at the Bauhaus, came to the United States in 1937 and helped develop the school of architecture at Harvard University. Other important 20th-century artists born in Hungary include the photographers Brassaï, Robert Capa, and André Kertész. During the Communist period, the cultural movement known as socialist realism predominated in Hungarian art. Hungarian art films began winning prizes at international festivals in the 1960s. The best-known Hungarian filmmaker is István Szabó, whose Mephisto won the Academy Award as best foreign-language film in 1981.

C

Music

The introduction of Christianity into Hungary in the 10th century brought with it the use of sacred music from Western Europe. The music consisted of Gregorian chants and, after the Reformation, of Protestant chorales. Secular music was largely influenced by styles from the East. A new instrumental and vocal style was brought into Hungary during the 15th century by the Roma. Hungarian folk music also absorbed harmony styles from the Ottomans, who occupied the country in the 16th and 17th centuries.

During the 17th and 18th centuries princely courts in Hungary often had orchestras and opera companies of their own, in which foreign musicians were employed. The best-known example is the Austrian composer Joseph Haydn, who worked for 30 years for the Esterházy family.

In the 19th century Hungary produced its first important native-born composer, Ferenc Erkel, who composed the Hungarian national anthem and the first Hungarian opera. Erkel’s opera Hunyádi László (1844) recounts the exploits of 15th-century Hungarian military hero János Hunyadi. Composer and pianist Franz Liszt, although born in Hungary, spent most of his life in other countries. Composer and conductor Ernst von Dohnányi, like Erkel, was greatly influenced by German composers. Franz Lehár, Emmerich Kálmán, and others attained fame for their operettas, notably the former’s The Merry Widow (1905) and the latter’s Countess Maritza (1924).

German music continued to be the dominant influence on Hungarian music until the 20th century, when the music of Béla Bartók and Zóltan Kodály began to gain national acceptance. Beginning in 1905, Bartók and Kodály collected, transcribed, and published thousands of Hungarian folk tunes and used them or their characteristic features in their own music. In the late 1950s, however, younger Hungarian composers began to reject this folk-based style and to explore more contemporary approaches to composition. Foremost among the late 20th-century avant-garde composers are György Kurtág and György Ligeti. See Folk Music; Music, Western.

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