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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
László Lajtha (30 June 1892 – 16 February 1963) was a Hungarian composer, ethnomusicologist and conductor.
Born to Ida Wiesel, a Transsylvanian-Hungarian with some Saxon-German ancestry as the name Wiesel indicates and Pál Lajtha, an owner of a leather factory. The father Pál had ambitions to become a conductor,played the violin well and also composed. Lajtha studied with Viktor Herzfeld in the Academy of Music in that city and then in Leipzig, Geneva and finally Paris where he was a pupil of Vincent d'Indy. Before the First World War, in collaboration with Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály, he undertook the study and transcription of Hungarian folk song, heading up a project to produce a series of folk music recordings. Throughout the war he served at the front as an artillery officer, an experience recalled in his sombre Second Symphony (1938) – a work that remained unperformed until 1988. In 1919 he began teaching at the Budapest National Conservatory. (Among his pupils was the conductor János Ferencsik, who was later one of the principal champions of his music.) From 1928 he was a member of the International Commission of Popular Arts and Traditions of the League of Nations. He was also a member of the International Folk Music Council based in London.
After the Second World War, Lajtha was appointed Director of Music for Hungarian Radio, director of the Museum of Ethnography and of the Budapest National Conservatory. His symphonic piece In Memoriam was the first new work to be premiered in Budapest when concerts could be given there again. In 1947-48 Lajtha spent a year in London, having been asked by the film director Georg Hoellering to compose music for his film of T. S. Eliot's verse drama Murder in the Cathedral. Rather than providing a dedicated film score, Lajtha wrote three important concert works – his Third Symphony, Orchestral Variations and Harp Quintet No.2 - extracts from which were used in the film. On his return to Hungary his passport was confiscated for having stayed too long in the West and he was removed from all the aforementioned posts. In 1951 he was awarded the Kossuth Prize for his activities in folk-music research.
With his wife Rózsa Hollós whom he married in 1919 he had two sons.
Lajtha's international recognition as a composer began in 1929 with his String Quartet No.3, which was awarded the Coolidge Prize. From his time in Paris before the First World War Lajtha had many friends among French artists, such as the novelist Romain Rolland and the composer Henri Barraud, and from 1930 he had some of his works published by the Paris publisher Alphonse Leduc. He was the only Hungarian composer since Franz Liszt to be elected a corresponding member of the French Académie des Beaux-Arts.
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