Ferenc Farkas was one of the most eminent representatives of 20th-century Hungarian music, and the most significant teacher of the mid-century generation of composers. His person and work constituted a definite link between the generation of Bartòk and Kodàly and that of Ligeti and Kurtàg.
Farkas was born on December 15th, 1905 at Nagykanizsa and died on October 10, 2000 in Budapest. He studied at the Academy of Music under Leò Weiner and Albert Siklòs, and from 1927 on he worked at the Municipal Theatre as voice trainer and conductor. Between 1929 and 1931 he attended Ottorino Respighi's Masters' School in Rome. The years in Italy played a very special role in the acquisition of his remarkable culture and in his great interest in the shared European past and particularly Mediterranean culture. Farkas had a profound knowledge of music and a deep appreciation of the fine arts and literature. Up to the seventies Farkas was active in the writing of music for films, the stage and radio plays, and acquired in this way brilliant professional skills in composition.
The instruction of music became important for Farkas from 1935 on. At first he taught at the Budapest Municipal School of Music, and then in the Kolozsvàr (today Cluj, Romania) Conservatory. In the latter he was principal in 1943 and 1944. In addition Farkas functioned as the choral director of the Kolozsvàr Conservatory and starting with 1945, of the Hungarian State Opera House in Budapest.
Following the two years of 1946-48 when he worked as the principal of the Székesfehérvàr School of Music, Ferenc Farkas settled in Budapest for good and was for a quarter of a century a professor of composition at the Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music. The list of his finest students includes the names of Attila Bozay, Zsolt Durkò, Zoltàn Jeney, Miklòs Kocsàr, György Kurtàg, György Ligeti, Emil Petrovics, Sàndor Szokolay and Lajos Vass.The wide variety of his creativity is indicated by the numerous famous performers he worked with, and by the multitude of genres he was creative in. Operas, ballets, musical dramas, operettas and plays constitute Farkas's works for the stage. The Magic Wardrobe (1942), Wily Students (1949), the Kossuth Prize winning Csinom Palkò (1949) and A Gentleman from Venice (1978-80) are his most significant contributions to the stage. In addition, he wrote a large number of orchestral, solo and chamber pieces, concertos, cantatas and several Masses, more than two-hundred choral works, over one-hundred songs and folksong adaptations. As evidenced by his yen for the musical variations of verse (representing 13 languages and consisting of over 50 Hungarian poems alone), Farkas loved poetry. He drew inspiration for his music from a great variety of sources, ranging from medieval dances or Gesualdo to the immediate influence of Stravinsky. His characteristic individual style has its three main roots in Italian Neoclassicism, Hungarian folk music, and in dodecaphony (not the Schönbergian version, but the gentler Latin-style associated with Frank Martin and Dallapiccola). Out of these three fundamental factors always one comes to the fore.
