Budapest: Between East and West by Victor Sebestyen

Author:Victor Sebestyen [Sebestyen, Victor]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781474610025
Publisher: Orion
Published: 2022-06-01T16:00:00+00:00

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* Though this changed in the twentieth century after major development in parts of the Buda Hills and post-war housing estates in Óbuda. Pest in 2021 housed around 70 per cent of the 1.7 million or so population of the city.

* In 1945 Andrássy út was renamed Stalin Avenue, then in 1956 the Avenue of the People’s Republic, then in the 1980s it reverted to its original name. Landmarks along it changed too. A third of the way down the avenue there’s a square where eight roads converge, including the main Ring. That was called Oktogon until 1934, when it was renamed Mussolini Circus, and changed back after the war. Further down towards the People’s Park there’s a pretty circus where four roads converge, originally called the Körönd. In 1940 it was renamed after Hitler, then after 1945 had its original name back, but since the 1970s has been known as Zoltán Kodály Körönd, after the composer who lived in a house on the avenue until his death in 1967.

* Ybl was the fashionable architect picked by the aristocrats and the nouveau riche for their mansions in Pest and estates in the country. Count István Károlyi used him to rebuild his beautiful neoclassical palace in Pest, as did a host of the finance oligarchs of the period. But his public commissions included the Basilica, the new St Stephen’s Cathedral, a stone’s throw from the Opera House, and the near-complete rebuilding of the Royal Castle in Buda, including the Castle Garden, the Várket Bazár.

* Foreign performers who sang German, Italian or French parts in broken Hungarian, even when they misunderstood what they were singing, received enthusiastic applause and foot-stomping (and still do in the twenty-first century). Mahler was appalled that a professional singer would be so ill prepared. He hired Ede Újházi, an actor at the National Theatre, as language master to teach proper Hungarian pronunciation, not just to foreign stars but also to Hungarian performers who spoke with regional dialects.

* Mahler was not the last ‘foreign’ conductor to become musical director of the Opera House. After the Second World War the Communist regime appointed the great Otto Klemperer to the job. He had escaped Nazi Germany in the 1930s. He, too, was a brilliant success musically, who recreated the Opera House as an important venue with some exceptional musicians and singers. He established an excellent repertoire before he fell ill. He was hugely admired for his gifts but, as a Jew and a leftist, linked to a regime that was loathed, he was never a popular figure in Budapest.

* Bártók, on the other hand, disliked the works on musical grounds. ‘The Hungarian Rhapsodies, which should say the most to us, are his least successful … (perhaps that is why they are so generally known and admired),’ he said.

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