Budapest

Nicholas Clapton first went to Budapest to record a mass by an obscure eighteenth-century Hungarian composer. That visit begun an ongoing love affair with the city, its culture, and its classical music-loving people. In Budapest: City of Music he takes the reader to concerts in old churches, a hidden away restaurant – where the last great gipsy violinist performs every night – and traditional Dance Halls, Táncház, established in the 1960s so that Hungarian folk dance heritage might be preserved.

In the footsteps of Liszt and Bartók, as well as less well-known Hungarian musicians and composers, Clapton recounts splendid and sometimes curious evenings in the Budapest Opera House and marvels at the opulent grandeur of Operett Színház, ‘Budapest’s Broadway’. This personal account of the Hungarian capital’s history ‘in music’ is an engaging and affectionate musician’s eye-view of a great European capital.

NICHOLAS CLAPTON is a singer, writer, broadcaster and teacher. He has sung in opera houses and concert halls across the world and is the author of Moreschi and the Voice of the Castrato.