Orchestral Music

Géza Frid
“The well-known Hungarian Dutchman” was how Géza Frid was described by the press after his death. This was correct, for he had once been one of the key figures of post-WW2 Dutch musical life, although he had never renounced the musical language of his homeland. His music is characterised by a melodic imagination that was rooted in Hungarian music and folklore.

Géza Frid was born on 25 January 1904 in the town of Máramarossziget in north-eastern Hungary, a region that is now part of Romania. He began piano lessons with his mother at the age of four, and later from the director of the local music school; he was able to copy almost everything faultlessly by ear. He gave his first piano recital at the age of seven. He and his parents moved to Budapest two years later in 1913 so that he could continue his piano studies at the renowned Franz Liszt Academy of Music. In 1924, Frid was the only pupil in the history of the Academy to sit his final examination in two subjects in the same year: piano and composition.

He naturally owed much to his teachers Béla Bartók (for piano) and Zoltán Kodály (for composition), not only because of the unique pedagogical qualities of these two great musicians, but also through their counterbalance to and personal support against the National Socialist and anti-Semitic regime of Admiral Horthy. The universities at that time were required to limit the numbers of Jewish students to a particular quota; it was thanks to such dictatorial measures and his own hopeless and desperately poor living conditions as a Jewish musician that Frid soon came to decide that he could no longer live in his homeland. He nonetheless remained friends and kept in contact with both Bartók and Kodály until their respective deaths in 1945 and 1967.