Endre Szervánszky (b. 1911) is one of the outstanding figures on the Hungarian musical scene since Bartók and Kodály. He had his first notable success with his first string quartet. When this was performed by the Végh Quartet in Budapest in 1943, the distinguished music critic Dénes Bartha wrote: “The quartet must be considered by far the best, most original, forceful and mature creation of contemporary Hungarian chamber music”. Completed five years earlier, in 1938, it was Szervanszky's first work of significance, and although he modestly described it in the printed programme as an “essay on Bartók”, it already gives clear evidence of his creative individuality. For various reasons however, including of course the war, he did not go on to any comparable achievement until after 1945, although he did write a number of minor works for piano (Sonatina, Little Suite), as well as a Sonata for violin and piano (1945), of somewhat atonal character.

The composers in Hungary who have come to maturity after the mid-1950s have been more fortunate than their seniors in several respects. Not only are they farther out of the shadow of Bartók and Kodály, but their formative development has not been interrupted or impeded either by war or by the ideological problems that faced composers in the early 1950s. At the upper end of this group is György Kurtág (b. 1926), who after completing his studies in Budapest, and writing a number of successful prentice works, spent a year in Paris (1957–58), and put ‘Op. 1’ only to the string quartet which was the outcome of his experience there. Of autodidactic inclination, he was influenced less by particular major figures than by the general creative atmosphere around him, but became a disciple of Webern, not so much in technique as in his asceticism and self-discipline, his concentration on intensity of content and creative effort rather than on its extent. He has never been prolific, and his output since 1958 is remarkably slender—five works in ten years. Besides the string quartet these consist of a wind quintet, a series of piano pieces, a set of duos for violin and cimbalom, a piece for unaccompanied viola, and most recently an extended cantata for solo voice and piano, on texts by the 16th-century Hungarian writer Péter Bornemisza, which was performed at Darmstadt last year. This is a taxing virtuoso work for both performers, of exceptional range and force of expressive utterance. At the opposite extreme stand the delightful duos for violin and cimbalom, terse and unassuming, yet absorbing in content and distinctive in character, brilliantly exploring the possibilities of the unusual medium without any reliance on curiosity value or striving after effect.

There is no strong opera tradition in Hungary. The founder of our national opera literature, Liszt's contemporary Ferenc Erkel, clung chiefly to the ‘verbunkos’ style as a characteristic Hungarian element in his attempts to form a national operatic style. He succeeded in fusing this with the style of his Italian models, and this was his great merit as a composer. But he left unsolved the crucial problem: the creation of a melodic style arising out of the characteristic accentuation of Hungarian speech, out of the spirit of the language. From this point of view Bartók was the epoch-making master. Bluebeard's Castle was the historic event in the rise of new Hungarian opera. As Kodály wrote after the première: “Bartók has taken the road to liberating the language, transforming its natural inflexions into music, thereby greatly furthering the emergence of a Hungarian recitative style. This is the first Hungarian operatic work in which the singing is consistent from first to last, free from all jarring prosody”. But Bartók's opera had no successors. The two stage works of Kodály, whose feeling for drama and theatre was not strong, were more in the nature of experiments, and were so intended by their composer. The following generation could hardly have made any progress in the direction indicated by them—though there was much that later opera composers could learn from his other vocal music, the songs and the choral works.

Sándor Veress, who was born in 1907 at Kolozsvár, a major town of Transylvania (now Cluj, Rumania), studied at the Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest, with Kodály for composition, Bartók for piano, and Lajtha for folksong research. From the age of twenty he was a prolific composer, of marked individuality—already strongly evident in the works of his first period, written in a very distinctive neo-classical contrapuntal idiom with strong national inflexions. By 1939 he had produced an impressive body of works, including two powerful and concentrated string quartets, a series of witty chamber-music sonatinas (1931–33) and the more expansive Violin Sonata No.2 (1939), a Partita for small orchestra (1936), the lyrical and poetic two-movement Violin Concerto (1937–39), a ‘Transylvanian Cantata’ for mixed chorus (1935), anda ballet The Magic Flute(1937).

György Ligeti (b. 1923), who is now an Austrian citizen, left Hungary in 1956 and his links with his native country are now extremely tenuous. Nevertheless, as far as any nationality may be ascribed to him as a composer, it must still be Hungarian rather than anything else, and it may be enlightening in several ways to consider him alongside his contemporaries who remained behind. When his orchestral piece Apparitions at the ISCM Festival in Cologne in 1960 sensationally introduced a quite new compositional thinking in the post-Webern era, he was known only to a few ‘insiders’, and then only as a remarkably original talent in the electronic field. His Artikulation (1958), the last of three compositions for the electronic medium, still remains one of the peaks in this admittedly still experimental genre. It is also a key work in Ligeti's output, pointing far ahead, to Aventures, the Dies Irae movement in the Requiem and the opera Kylwiria now in progress.

Gábor Darvas (b. 1911) emigrated to Chile soon after completing his composition studies under Kodály, where he worked with Erich Kleiber. He returned to Hungary in 1958, and has since held numerous administrative positions. His development as a composer came unusually late. After his early pieces in the manner of Kodály and Bartók he was unproductive for many years, occupying himself with writing musical textbooks, and orchestration of piano works by Liszt and others. The continuation of his own creative work, after much preparatory thought, experiment, and study of many major contemporary works, came only in the 1960s. His ‘Improvisations symphoniques’ for piano and orchestra (1963), performed in 1966 at the Stockholm ISCM Festival, is virtually his Op. 1, an attribute that shows in the extremely varied and sometimes conflicting means it employs. But it has one distinctive feature which seems to be characteristic of the modern musical movement in Hungary generally: musical continuity. This does not necessarily mean thematicism, indeed it is perfectly reconcilable with post-Webernian abandonment of theme and development in the classical sense. It is more a matter of contrast. One of the weaknesses of much music today is the absence of contrasts of tempo, and the abandonment of the principle of construction by movements or sections of opposed character. What Darvas has sought in this work is to use contrast again as one of the means of sustaining continuity.

The personality of Kodály over a period of forty years was a decisive factor in the development of new Hungarian music. In 1925, when works by a group of his pupils were first performed, his composition teaching was harshly attacked in the press. Kodály replied with a famous article, ‘Thirteen Young Composers’, in which he wrote: “we have to bring up not only European but at the same time Hungarian musicians … Only by the fusion of European and Hungarian traditions can we arrive at anything that will mean something to Hungary too”. Several of those thirteen played and still play a prominent part in Hungarian musical life, if not primarily as composers.

Within the last ten or twelve years music in Hungary, as in most east European countries—has undergone radical changes in technique and thought, and is now, for the first time since the 1930s, making an important contribution within the fairly broad framework of the avant-garde. This change having taken place out of earshot, as it were, and now presenting itself as a fait accompli, the significance of its results is not easy for the English or American listener to assess—particularly as gramophone records are still not readily available and performances are rare.

• Birtwistle's ‘Verses for Ensembles’ (Michael Nyman)

• Musgrave's Clarinet Concerto (Anthony Payne)

• Rawsthorne's ‘Prelude, Fantasia and Postlude’ (Norman Kay)

• Lutyens's Novenaria (Niall O'Loughlin)

In his editorial for the 50th Anniversary Issue of Music & Letters, Sir Jack Westrup regrets the journal's lack of articles on contemporary music: “so many people who write on contemporary music are guilty either of mere propaganda or analytical demonstrations, often accompanied by mathematical formulae and diagrams, which show quite clearly what has been done but do not explain why it was worth doing.”