Jews and Hungarians in Modern Hungarian Musical Culture

Collection title: Studies in contemporary Jewry. IX (1993): Modern Jews and their musical agendas In Hungarian: Journal of the Society of Hungarian Jewish Culture (Sept, 1992), 31-36. In the domain of bourgeois life and culture there has been a real alliance between Jewish and non-Jewish Hungarians. Beyond the incidental - though socioculturally explicable - fact that a disproportionately large number of Hungarian performers who became internationally famous were Jewish, assimilated Jews played a crucial part in the creation and perpetuation of modern musical life in Hungary. Initially, much of Kodaly's and Bartok's public and most of their early performers were Jews. Jewish enthusiasm for Hungarian musical culture created a cultural symbiosis and fostered a specific conceptualization of music, in whose creation the composer and pedagogue Leo Weiner played an important role. In spite of the decimation of Hungarian Jewry in the Holocaust, the spiritual ideal of the Hungarian Jewish bourgeoisie of the early 20th c. survived its creators: It has remained an important ingredient of the Hungarian cultural consciousness - indeed identity - to this day.