Kodály körönd & Kodály Memorial Museum
Why is it significant?
You are standing in a circle of four curved palaces, each with its facade bent to follow the round, and in front of each a statue of a warrior from the long wars against the Ottomans. Their names are Bálint Balassi, János Bottyán, György Szondi and Miklós Zrínyi.
Key Facts
| Place | Kodály körönd & Kodály Memorial Museum |
|---|---|
| Address | Andrássy út 89, 1062 Budapest, Hungary |
| Geo Coordinates | 47.50990, 19.07090 |
| Part of Walk | Budapest's Musical Boulevard: Andrássy Avenue from the Opera to Heroes' Square |
| Generated | Generated |
You are standing in a circle of four curved palaces, each with its facade bent to follow the round, and in front of each a statue of a warrior from the long wars against the Ottomans. Their names are Bálint Balassi, János Bottyán, György Szondi and Miklós Zrínyi. Some of the facades are faded, some freshly restored... the square has the slightly worn grandeur of an old opera set.
Today this place is called Kodály körönd, after the composer Zoltán Kodály, who lived in the corner building for more than four decades. He moved in during the 1920s and died here in 1967. His flat on the first floor is now the Kodály Memorial Museum, with his study, his piano and his collections of folk art exactly as he left them.
Kodály and his friend Béla Bartók did something extraordinary at the start of the twentieth century. In the first decade of the twentieth century they began travelling into villages with a phonograph and wax cylinders, and recorded peasant songs that had never been written down. Thousands of melodies were saved this way. They discovered that real Hungarian folk music was older and stranger than the gypsy-band tunes the cities called Hungarian.
Then Kodály turned it into a mission. His Psalmus Hungaricus, written in 1923 for the fiftieth anniversary of the union of Buda, Pest and Óbuda, made him a national figure. His comic opera Háry János followed. And his teaching method, built on singing, hand signs and the folk songs children already knew, spread to schools across the world. If you ever learned to sing do, re, mi with hand gestures, you met a little piece of this apartment.
There is a tender detail, too. In his late seventies Kodály married a young student, Sarolta Péczely, and the two lived here together until his death. Look for the memorial plaque on the corner house. Then continue up the avenue, where the villas begin to stand in their own gardens, and watch the pavement for a small iron railing leading down to an underground station.