Artist database

May 6, 1913 Budapest - March 14, 1977 Budapest

Like so many Hungarian composers of his generation Gyula Dávid studied under Zoltán Kodály (between 1933 and 1938). While studyng composition he also attained a high degree of proficiency on the violin. Encouraged by Kodály in the 1930s he collected hundreds of Hungarian folksongs. After completing his studies he became an orchestral viola player and from 1938 composed incidental music for the stage, for more than a hundred plays. Between 1945 and 1949 he was musical director at the Budapest National Theatre, and between 1950 and 1956, the artistic and musical manager of several Hungarian ensembles. From 1950 to 1964 he taught at the Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music and from 1964 at the Bartók Béla Conservatory. From 1967 until his death he was again at the Academy. A significant aspect of teaching was his basic work in the teaching of chamber music for wind instruments. In 1949 he became the first Hungarian composer to write a wind quintet, thus creating a genre which plays an important role in the new Hungarian music.
In style and timbre Dávid�s works have added individual hues to the typically Hungarian tenor of the generation of composers who followed Bartók and Kodály. Folksong, popular music and the spirit of the Hungarian musical tradition permeate his works, although he refrains from quoting folk material directly. Albeit his attention was transferred to other means of expression around 1960 he preserved his musical quallties and the freshness of his earlier compositions. His works are chiefly forms. Another determinant, as he repeatedly stressed, is his wariness of all kinds of dogmatism. He invariably kept the performers of his compositions in mind, and most of what he wrote seems to be tailor-made for the performers he selected, giving maximum consideration to their talents.