Lajos Bárdos

Who was Lajos Bárdos?

Lajos Bárdos was a composer, conductor, music theorist, and professor of music at the Franz Liszt Academy of Music, in Budapest, Hungary, where he had previously studied under Albert Siklós and Zoltán Kodály. His younger brother, György Deák-Bárdos, was also a composer.

Together with Kodály, Bárdos laid the foundations of 20th-century Hungarian choral music. From 1928 to 1967 he was a professor at the Academy, where he reformed the syllabus––emphasizing the training of choral conductors, the teaching of church music history, and instruction in music theory and prosody. In 1931, along with György Kerényi and Gyula Kertész, he founded the publishing company Magyar Kórus, publishing 2,000 works of old masters and modern composers over the next 20 years, before being shut down by the communist regime in 1950. As the most active disseminator of sacred music in Hungary, Bárdos was targeted at the time with threatening criticism. The irony is that the rich supply of music provided by Magyar Kórus had allowed schools across Hungary to organize concerts based on those works. That same group of works also served as the basis for the "Singing Youth" movement, which Bárdos founded in 1934, and which encouraged young people across Hungary to join choral groups and learn the basics of music. And the impetus to promote choral music in the first place came largely from Kodály's observation––made when both he and Bárdos were young musicians––that whereas only a few of the elite had the privilege of having an education in instrumental music, on the other hand, "everybody has a voice".