Budapest
City of Music
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2.0 • 1 Rating
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- £13.99
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- £13.99
Publisher Description
Singer Nicholas Clapton first visited Budapest to record a recently discovered mass by an almost unknown eighteenth-century Hungarian composer. There, he discovered a striking sense of otherness in spite of Hungary’s central geographical and cultural position within Europe. And with that, a deep passion for the city was born. Budapest offers an engaging and affectionate look at this beautiful capital from the perspective of a musician who lived and worked there for many years.
With rich musical traditions, both classical and folk, and possessing a language like almost no other, Hungary is in the process of abandoning the trappings of its communist past while attempting to preserve its culture from creeping globalization. Clapton delights in the fact that certain old-fashioned attitudes of courtesy, at times stemming from the very structures of the Magyar tongue, are still deeply ingrained in Hungarian society. At the same time, despite its association with world-famous composers such as Bartók, Liszt, and Kodály, music is far from an activity enjoyed only by the elite. Including plenty of tips on food, drink, and sites of interest, Budapest describes the capital in uniquely melodic terms and will delight lovers of travel and music alike.
Customer Reviews
Proof Travel Doesn’t Always Broaden The Mind
Written in a competent but dry and humourless style. The author covers his subject adequately but along the way makes frequent throw-away remarks which are gratuitously opinionated, contentious, offensive. He sounds like a bitter, grouchy, old man who hates the present age and longs to live in some sort of fantasy version of the past - somewhere like Rupert the Bear’s home village, but in Hungary, with classical music. Somewhere where there are no threats to a cosy parochial existence. Well, ‘cosy’ as long as one ignores the constant drone of chauvinism - I mean the book is written with an authorial stance which is never explicitly racist, misogynist or fascist but seems to implicitly share the same ugly rightwing worldview. It is fascinating as a character study of someone who sounds like the Rees-Mogg of music. The sort of person I would pay ££££s to avoid suffering as a fellow traveller but whom I believe I must read in order to understand phenomena like Brexit or the return of Fascism to European political life. For me, this reads as a sort of horror story disguised as a travelogue and will be useful to future historians trying to reconstruct the deep causes of WW3.