Budapest's Musical Boulevard: Andrássy Avenue from the Opera to Heroes' Square

Ybl's opera house, Liszt's academy and last home, Kodály's circus, the oldest underground on the continent and the baths of City Park: a walk up the avenue where Budapest learned to sing

Budapest · 11 stops · 26 min audio · Generated October 2026

1. 1. Hungarian State Opera House

   Andrássy út 22, 1061 Budapest, Hungary

   Stand on the far pavement of Andrássy út and let your eyes climb the honey-coloured front of the Hungarian State Opera House: the arched carriage porch, the loggia, the balustrade crowded with stone composers. On either side of the door sit two seated statues, Ferenc Erkel and Franz Liszt. Remember both faces... this avenue will keep introducing you to them.

   The architect was Miklós Ybl, and the building went up between 1875 and 1884. It opened on 27 September 1884, with Emperor Franz Joseph in the royal box. He had paid for a large part of it, and the story goes that he set one condition: Budapest's opera must not be bigger than the Court Opera in Vienna. Ybl kept to the size. What he did not promise was to be less beautiful, and the legend says the emperor noticed.

   Inside, the horseshoe auditorium holds around thirteen hundred seats under Károly Lotz's ceiling, a painted Olympus floating above the chandelier. There is gold leaf everywhere, and a long restoration, finished in 2022, cleaned and renewed all of it. Singers love the hall for another reason: its acoustics carry a whisper to the top gallery.

   And look at who worked behind that door. Erkel, who wrote the music of the Hungarian national anthem, was the first music director. In 1888 a twenty-eight-year-old conductor from Bohemia took over the house: Gustav Mahler. He insisted on opera sung in Hungarian, threw out lazy habits, and lasted until 1891, when a new aristocratic intendant made his life impossible. After the Second World War, Otto Klemperer led the company for three seasons.

   Now turn round. The building facing the Opera, with its ornate facade, is the Drechsler Palace, an early work of Ödön Lechner, built in the 1880s for the pension fund of the state railways and named after a café on its ground floor. For decades it housed the state ballet school, so little dancers crossed this road to rehearse on the great stage. Walk north-east along Andrássy út, and after a few blocks turn right into the long, leafy Liszt Ferenc tér.

2. 2. Liszt Academy of Music (Zeneakadémia)

   Liszt Ferenc tér 8, 1061 Budapest, Hungary

   At the far end of Liszt Ferenc tér, past the café terraces and the bronze Liszt with his hair flying in the middle of the square, a building rises like a jewel box: green-gold mosaics, a deep entrance, and above it a seated statue of Liszt looking down at you. This is the Zeneakadémia, the Liszt Academy of Music.

   The academy itself was founded in 1875, and Liszt was its first president, with Ferenc Erkel as director. In those days it worked from Liszt's own building further up Andrássy út, which you will visit shortly. This palace came later. It opened in 1907, designed by Flóris Korb and Kálmán Giergl, at the height of the Hungarian Art Nouveau... and they treated it as a total work of art, down to the door handles.

   Inside, the Grand Hall seats around nine hundred people under a ceiling of gilded leaves and Zsolnay ceramics, with organ pipes rising behind the stage. The building was restored and reopened in 2013, and musicians from all over the world describe the sound as warm and almost unbelievably clear. Some say the hall itself plays along.

   Now think of the names who climbed these stairs as students or teachers. Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály both taught here. Ernő Dohnányi ran the place. Georg Solti, later one of the great conductors of the century, studied piano here, and so did György Ligeti before he left Hungary. Corridors that produced that list deserve a little reverence.

   And here is a detail most passers-by miss. The academy faces a quiet square, not the grand avenue, almost as if music preferred to keep a little distance from parades. When the windows are open in spring, you can sometimes hear students practising scales above the café chatter. Walk back up the square to Andrássy út, cross the great eight-sided Oktogon, and continue north-east until you reach a grey building with a black stone frame cut into its roofline.

3. 3. House of Terror (Andrássy út 60)

   Andrássy út 60, 1062 Budapest, Hungary

   Stop opposite number 60 and look at the roofline. A heavy black frame has been fixed to the top of an ordinary neo-Renaissance apartment block, and the word TERROR is cut right through it, so that on a sunny day its shadow falls across the facade. Along the pavement, small photographs of faces line the wall.

   In 1944 this building became the headquarters of the Arrow Cross, Hungary's fascist party, which seized power that October. Its members called it the House of Loyalty. In its cellars they imprisoned and tortured people, and during the winter of 1944 and 1945 Arrow Cross militias murdered thousands of Budapest's Jews, many of them on the banks of the Danube.

   Then, after the war, the cellars did not fall silent. The new communist political police moved into the same building, the organisation later known as the ÁVH, and used it to interrogate and break opponents until the mid-1950s. Two dictatorships, one address. That is the idea behind the museum that opened here in 2002, with a Soviet tank in the atrium and the reconstructed cells in the basement.

   The museum has always been debated. Critics argue that its displays give far more space to communist crimes than to the Holocaust and to Hungarian responsibility for it, and historians have argued about it in public for years. Visitors, meanwhile, keep coming. Whatever you think of the presentation, the building itself is the evidence: you are looking at the real door through which people were brought in.

   The avenue around you carries its own scars in its names. Laid out in the 1870s as the Sugárút, the Radial Road, it became Andrássy út after the statesman Count Gyula Andrássy. Under communism it was renamed Stalin Avenue, then Avenue of the People's Republic, and only in 1990 did it get its old name back. Just a few steps further on, on the corner of Vörösmarty utca, an old academy building waits, where Liszt spent his last winters.

4. 4. Liszt Ferenc Memorial Museum: Liszt's Last Home

   Vörösmarty utca 35, 1064 Budapest, Hungary

   Find the corner of Andrássy út and Vörösmarty utca and look at the handsome neo-Renaissance building with its row of tall first-floor windows. On the first floor, behind those tall windows, Franz Liszt had his apartment. The rooms are still there, with his pianos, his furniture and a few small objects that tell you more about the man than any portrait.

   This was the first real home of the Academy of Music, built in the late 1870s. Liszt, as president, was given a flat above the classrooms, and from 1881 he lived here during his Budapest months. He was born in 1811 in a village then in the Kingdom of Hungary, now in Austria, and he grew up speaking German and French. He never really mastered Hungarian, yet he insisted all his life that he was Hungarian.

   Inside, you can see several of his pianos, his desk and his books, and one object that sums him up: a silent keyboard for practising on the road. The greatest pianist of the century carried a dumb piano so that he could keep his fingers working in a carriage or a hotel room. Liszt called his late life a life split in three, between Rome, Weimar and Budapest, and he moved between them constantly.

   Picture an evening here in the 1880s. An old man in a cassock, for Liszt had taken minor orders in the Church, sitting at the piano while students crowded the room. He taught for free. He would listen, interrupt, sit down and play a passage himself, and the young pianists would remember those minutes for the rest of their lives.

   He left this flat for the last time in 1886 and died that summer in Bayreuth, where he had gone to hear his son-in-law Wagner's operas, and he is buried there, not in Budapest. The museum opened in his rooms in 1986, a hundred years after his death. Keep going up Andrássy út; the houses grow grander and the avenue widens into a circle framed by four curved palaces.

5. 5. Kodály körönd & Kodály Memorial Museum

   Andrássy út 89, 1062 Budapest, Hungary

   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.

6. 6. Millennium Underground at Bajza utca

   Andrássy út / Bajza utca, 1062 Budapest, Hungary

   Look for the small entrance sunk into the pavement, with its iron railing and a short flight of steps going down. Go down a few of them, if you like, and you will find yourself almost immediately on a platform: white tiles, wooden details, slim cast-iron pillars, and a little yellow train that looks like a tram that took a wrong turn.

   This is the M1, the Millennium Underground, opened in May 1896. London had its underground decades earlier, but this was the first on the European continent, and Budapest is very proud of that. It was built by the firm of Siemens and Halske in less than two years, in time for the celebrations of the thousandth anniversary of the Hungarian conquest.

   Why so shallow? Because the city did not want trams on its brand-new boulevard. Andrássy út was meant to be elegant, for carriages and strollers, so the solution was to dig a trench just under the street, lay the line, and cover it again. The trains run only a few metres beneath your feet. Emperor Franz Joseph rode it shortly after the opening, and for years it carried his name.

   The line runs about four kilometres, from the heart of Pest to the edge of City Park, with stations that have kept much of their original look. In 2002 the underground and the avenue above it were added together to the UNESCO World Heritage list. There is also a small museum of the old line inside Deák tér station, with a carriage from the first years.

   And here is the musical link. In 1896, while the trains were being tested, the whole city was preparing for the Millennium Exhibition in City Park, with pavilions, concerts and parades. Visitors from across the empire arrived, rode this little train, and came up into the light at the end of the avenue. Do the same, on foot: carry on up Andrássy út until the trees part and an enormous open square appears, with a column soaring at its centre.

7. 7. Heroes' Square & the Millennium Monument

   Hősök tere, 1146 Budapest, Hungary

   Walk out into the middle of the stone square and stop beneath the column. It rises some thirty-six metres, and on top stands the Archangel Gabriel, wings spread, holding the Holy Crown of Hungary in one hand and a double cross in the other. Below him, on horseback, ride seven wild-looking chieftains in furs and helmets.

   The horsemen are the leaders of the seven Magyar tribes who, at the end of the ninth century, rode into the Carpathian Basin. At the front is Árpád, founder of the dynasty that would rule Hungary for four hundred years. The monument was begun for the millennium of that conquest in 1896, designed by the architect Albert Schickedanz with sculptures by György Zala, but it took until 1929 to finish.

   Why an angel with a crown? Legend says Gabriel appeared to Stephen, the first king, in a dream and told him he would receive a crown from the Pope. So the angel is a sort of heavenly delivery man for Hungarian statehood.

   Behind him, two curved colonnades hold fourteen statues of kings and leaders. When the monument was planned, the last five places were reserved for Habsburg kings, including Franz Joseph. After 1945 they were replaced by figures of Hungarian independence, from Bocskai and Rákóczi to Lajos Kossuth. History here is literally rearranged in bronze. In front of the column lies a stone memorial to the heroes who died for the nation.

   And this square has its own soundtrack of history. On 16 June 1989, around a quarter of a million people gathered here for the reburial of Imre Nagy, the prime minister of 1956, executed in 1958. A young Viktor Orbán spoke and demanded that Soviet troops leave Hungary... months before the Iron Curtain fell. The coffins lay on the steps of the building to your right as you face the column. Walk over to it, the temple-like hall with the colourful mosaic in its pediment.

8. 8. Műcsarnok & the Museum of Fine Arts

   Dózsa György út 37, 1146 Budapest, Hungary

   Stand at the foot of the broad steps and look up at the Műcsarnok, the Hall of Art: a Greek temple front with columns, and above them a pediment glowing with a golden mosaic. Then turn your head across the square, to its twin, the Museum of Fine Arts, with an even bigger portico. Two temples facing each other across the heroes, like bookends.

   Both were designed by the same pair of architects, Albert Schickedanz and Fülöp Herzog, the men behind the monument itself. The Műcsarnok came first, finished for the millennium year of 1896. It has no permanent collection at all. It was built as a Kunsthalle, a hall for changing exhibitions, and it is still the city's great stage for contemporary art.

   The Museum of Fine Arts opposite opened in 1906 and holds one of the richest collections of old masters in Central Europe: Spanish painting, including works by El Greco and Goya, Italian and Dutch masters, Egyptian and classical antiquities. Its Romanesque Hall, damaged in the war and long used as a storeroom, was restored and reopened in 2018, and it is breathtaking, like walking into a painted medieval church.

   Now come back to these steps for a moment. On 16 June 1989, the facade behind you was draped in black and white, and the coffins of Imre Nagy and his fellow martyrs of 1956 were laid out here. A sixth coffin stood empty, for all the unnamed victims of the revolution. People filed past for hours, and the ceremony was broadcast live on Hungarian television. It is often remembered as the moment the old regime lost its grip on the country.

   Art, memory and politics have always shared this square. Behind the museums begins City Park, and there, a few minutes away among the trees, waits the newest temple in the city, one built entirely for music. Walk past the side of the Műcsarnok into City Park, and follow the path towards the lake and the striking white building with a roof full of holes.

9. 9. House of Hungarian Music

   Olof Palme sétány 3, 1146 Budapest, Hungary

   In front of you, among the trees of City Park, floats a roof. That is really the first impression: a huge, wavy white canopy resting on walls of glass so thin they almost vanish, and trees growing up right through holes in the roof, as if the building had simply been lowered over the forest.

   This is the House of Hungarian Music, designed by the Japanese architect Sou Fujimoto and opened in January 2022. Fujimoto said he wanted a building that felt like the forest itself, and the underside of the roof is decorated with a pattern of golden leaves. It is part of a vast and much-debated project to fill City Park with new museums, and this building ended up being the one that even many sceptics came to love.

   Inside, the story of music is told through sound rather than through glass cases. In the basement there is a sound dome, a hemispherical room where music and images surround you completely. Upstairs, the permanent exhibition walks you from the earliest instruments to Liszt, Bartók and Kodály, the three men whose homes and schools you have just passed, and on to the popular music of the twentieth century.

   And it is meant to be heard as much as seen. Concerts are held in its hall, and in good weather music spills out into the park around it. Musicians and acousticians worked on the rooms so that a single voice and a full ensemble could both sound right.

   Look around you once more. This park, the Városliget, has been a public pleasure ground since the early nineteenth century, often called one of the first public parks in Europe, made for ordinary city people rather than for kings. It hosted the great exhibition of 1896, and now music has moved into it for good. Walk north-west along the path to the lake, cross the little bridge, and you will find yourself in front of a castle that looks five hundred years older than it is.

10. 10. Vajdahunyad Castle

    Vajdahunyad sétány, 1146 Budapest, Hungary

    Cross the little bridge over the moat and walk into the courtyard. On one side, a Gothic castle with pointed towers; on another, a Romanesque church portal; then a Baroque palace, a Renaissance loggia... It looks like several centuries got into a fight and nobody won.

    That is exactly the point. Vajdahunyad Castle was built for the Millennium Exhibition of 1896 by the architect Ignác Alpár, as an encyclopaedia of Hungarian architecture. Each part copies or paraphrases a real building from the old Kingdom of Hungary, including the castle of the Hunyadi family in Transylvania, today in Romania, which gave the whole complex its name.

    And here is the surprise: the first version was temporary, made of wood and cardboard. Visitors loved it so much that the city decided to keep it, and between 1904 and 1908 Alpár rebuilt it in stone and brick. The Romanesque chapel copies the portal of the abbey church of Ják in western Hungary, carved apostles and all. Today the Baroque wing houses the Museum of Hungarian Agriculture, which might be the most unexpected tenant a fairytale castle ever had.

    In the courtyard, find the bronze figure sitting in a hooded cloak with no face visible under the hood. This is Anonymus, the unknown medieval chronicler who wrote the first history of the Hungarians and never signed his name. The statue is by Miklós Ligeti, from 1903. Students and writers rub his pen for luck, which is why it shines gold... notice it.

    In winter the lake around you becomes one of Europe's largest open-air ice rinks; Budapest has skated here since the 1870s, and the music played over the ice is part of the ritual. In summer, rowing boats glide where the skaters were. Leave the castle by the far side and walk a few minutes north to a yellow neo-Baroque palace with green domes, where steam rises from the pools all year round.

11. 11. Széchenyi Thermal Bath

    Állatkerti körút 9-11, 1146 Budapest, Hungary

    Walk up to the yellow facade with its green copper domes and listen. Behind the walls you will hear splashing, laughter, the hiss of jets... and, if you go in, you will see men up to their chests in steaming water, bent over floating chessboards as if nothing in the world mattered more than the next move.

    The Széchenyi Thermal Bath opened in 1913, built to plans by Győző Czigler, who died before construction started, so others completed his design. The outdoor pools were added in the 1920s. It is one of the largest bath complexes in Europe, with more than a dozen pools, and it bears the name of Count István Széchenyi, the reformer whose Chain Bridge became the first permanent bridge between Buda and Pest.

    The water comes from deep below. In the 1870s the engineer Vilmos Zsigmondy drilled a well in City Park nearly a kilometre deep, and hot water burst out. A second, even deeper well was drilled in the 1930s. The water emerges at over seventy degrees and must be cooled before anyone can sit in it, and it is full of calcium, magnesium and the minerals that Hungarian doctors have prescribed for generations.

    The chess players are a living institution. Some have come for decades, at the same time, to the same corner of the pool, with their own boards. Tourists photograph them; they ignore the tourists. Budapest has well over a hundred thermal springs, and it is no accident that the city calls itself a city of spas.

    So here you are, at the end of the avenue. You started at the Opera, where Mahler fought for Hungarian singing, passed Liszt's academy and his last home, the dark address at number 60, Kodály's circle, the little yellow underground, the heroes and the angel, and the new house of music among the trees. Andrássy út was built as a straight line from the city's heart to its playground. Now do what the people of Budapest have done for over a century at this point... take off your shoes and step into warm water.