Pál Budai (1906–1944/45)

Pál Budai was born in Budapest in 1906. He studied violin and composition at the Budapest Music Academy from 1922 to 1928; during his final two years there his composition teacher was Zoltán Kodály. In the early 1930s he moved to Paris, where he spent three and a half years leading the orchestra faculty at the École Normale Supérieure. While in Paris he published two sets of compositions: a Rondino for piano and a collection of Six Short Pieces for Children, both issued in the early 1930s. The children's pieces, dedicated to Albert Neuburger and published by his firm, Edition Senart, in 1933, drew on Jewish melodies and were likely intended for listening rather than amateur performance.

Budai also wrote music for Yiddish vaudeville productions and worked as a cantorial musician. His commitments to Jewish liturgical culture were not merely practical: in 1937 he published an article in the Hungarian Jewish journal Libanon calling for the development of a distinctly Jewish musical culture and for proper training for cantors. The Libanon journal, which ran from 1936 to 1943, was an important platform for Hungarian Jewish intellectual and cultural debate during the years of mounting antisemitic pressure.

Between May 1938 and 1939, the Hungarian Parliament passed two major antisemitic laws. The first restricted Jewish participation in the professions and cultural life to a quota of twenty per cent; the second defined Jews in racial terms and excluded them from a wide range of economic and public activities. Under these laws, Jews were barred from serving as theatre directors, artistic leaders, or stage directors. For Jewish musicians and performers in Hungary, the effect was swift and severe.

In response, Budapest's Jewish community leaders organised an Artistic Enterprise under the aegis of OMIKE (Országos Magyar Izraelita Közművelődési Egyesület, the Hungarian Jewish Education Association) to provide employment and income for actors, singers, musicians, conductors, composers, writers, and other artists who had been shut out of public cultural life. The OMIKE Artist Action (Művészakció) received permission to give performances, though without public advertising and restricted to Jewish audiences. Its opening performance took place on 8 January 1940. Between 1939 and 1944, activities were centred in the Goldmark Hall beside the Dohány Street Synagogue in Budapest. Hundreds of artists from across Hungary took part in around a thousand performances, including plays, concerts, cabaret, ballet, operas, and operettas.

Budai became involved in OMIKE's cultural activities after the 1939 restrictions came into force. The organisation provided one of the few remaining outlets for Jewish artistic life in Hungary during this period.

By 1940 his earlier compositions had attracted the attention of the respected Hungarian musicologist Antal Molnár, who briefly analysed Budai's Rondino and forecast a significant future for the composer. Fifteen years later, in 1955, Molnár returned to Budai's work at greater length, identifying him as particularly well suited to comic opera and ballet. He analysed and praised the ballet Babadoktor (Doll Doctor), the Two Pieces for violin, the Burlesque for piano, and what he considered Budai's most popular work, the Elegy and Scherzo for string orchestra. Molnár also noted that Budai's gift for comic opera style was evident in his Divertimento cycle for string orchestra.

Budai was killed during the persecution of Hungarian Jews in 1944; the exact date of his death is recorded as 1944 or 1945. The last OMIKE event took place on 19 March 1944, when German soldiers entered during a dress rehearsal of a Molière comedy in Szeged and shut the theatre permanently.

Most of the music that Molnár described has not been recovered. Only three works are currently known to survive: the Rondino, the Six Short Pieces for Children, and excerpts from the piano version of the ballet Doll Doctor, published posthumously in Budapest in 1966. A suite of short dances from Doll Doctor arranged for two pianos was included on the 2008 Hungaroton album In Memoriam: Hungarian Composers, Victims of the Holocaust.

Sources

Kory, Agnes. 'Remembering Seven Murdered Hungarian Jewish Composers.' OREL Foundation, 2009. https://orelfoundation.org/journal/journalArticle/remembering_seven_murdered_hungarian_jewish_composers

Lévai, Jenő, ed.; Bondy, Frederick, ed. The Writers, Artists, Singers, and Musicians of the National Hungarian Jewish Cultural Association (OMIKE), 1939–1944. West Lafayette, Indiana: Purdue University Press, 2017. ISBN 978-1-55753-764-5

Haas, Michael. Forbidden Music: The Jewish Composers Banned by the Nazis. London: Yale University Press, 2013. ISBN 978-0-300-15431-3, p. 273

Laczó, Ferenc. 'Models of Culture and Historical Changes: The Hungarian Jewish Journal Libanon, 1936–1943.' Jahrbuch des Simon-Dubnow-Instituts, 2011, p. 492

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. 'The Holocaust in Hungary.' Holocaust Encyclopedia. https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-holocaust-in-hungary

In Memoriam: Hungarian Composers, Victims of the Holocaust [CD]. Budapest: Hungaroton Classic, 2008

Wikipedia. 'OMIKE.' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OMIKE