Kodály Körönd

Andrássy Avenue passes through a circle divided into four gardens and lined with concave façades. In the eighteen seventies, the planners of the avenue marked out here the boundary between two types of city. On the Oktogon side stretched apartment buildings, built almost wall to wall. Farther toward City Park, the buildings became lower, front gardens appeared in front of them, and then the villas began. The place was called Körönd—the Circle.

Kodály’s surname was added to the old name in nineteen seventy-one. Zoltán Kodály, a composer, researcher of folk songs, and professor at the Liszt Academy, lived in house number one from October nineteen twenty-four until his death in March nineteen sixty-seven. Four rooms on the lower floor served as his apartment, study, and a place where pupils and musicians came.

In nineteen fifty-one, Kodály summoned his young pupil Tamás Vásáry to this apartment. The young man’s parents had been exiled from Budapest as politically unreliable: his father had previously belonged to the Smallholders’ Party. Vásáry himself was also threatened with exile. He could have lost his studies, housing, and means of livelihood.

Kodály pressed for the talented pianist to be allowed to remain in the capital. Together with the director of the Liszt Academy, he managed to exempt his pupil from exile. But permission to stay still did not provide money for food or bring back his family. In the apartment on Körönd, Kodály seated Vásáry before examination assignments. When Vásáry finished, the professor handed him a bundle of one-hundred-ruble banknotes and advised him to keep a diary from that day on: in Kodály’s words, life was going to be interesting. He then helped his pupil continue his studies and get a job with an organization that arranged concerts.

Two years later, Vásáry graduated from the academy. He became a pianist and conductor, performed in the major concert halls of Europe and America, and called Kodály his second father. His diary, begun after that conversation, became a record of the musician’s life spanning many years.

After Kodály’s death, his second wife, Sarolta Péczely, preserved the apartment with its furniture, library, and two grand pianos, then turned it over for use as a museum. It opened in nineteen ninety. A bas-relief of Kodály now hangs by the entrance; behind this wall remain the rooms where the young pianist received money, work, and the chance not to give up music.