Buda stands on the site of the Roman settlement which was the capital of the province of Lower Pannonia. At O-Buda, on the same side, which, by the way, is the right bank of the river, are found Roman remains, including a Roman amphitheatre, aqueduct, baths, and dwelling-houses, and excavation is still going on. In O-Buda there are numbers of one-story houses, built irregularly, and at certain places it is possible to get quaint peeps. One might linger long here before passing over to the more modern side.
In great contrast is the town of Pest, which, though in its origin almost as old as Buda, has nothing left to carry back its date. It is in all ways a large and splendid town, with wide streets enlivened by beautiful sculpture, fountains, and trees; it has magnificent buildings, and the streets show splendid vistas, especially where they lead down to the bridges. Everywhere run electric trams, and there are electric railways underground. The principal street is that of Andrassy, a name honoured in Hungary’s political life. Here is the National Opera House, subsidised, as are also the theatres. The public buildings will bear comparison with the most up-to-date of modern cities. Among them is the National Academy of Science, founded by the same Count Stephen Széchenyi who is mentioned above. His statue stands in front. The building is designed to encourage science and literature. There is in it a room devoted to Goethe. Another most interesting building is the Museum of Fine Arts at the entrance to the Town Park. Here specimens of architecture and sculpture are found, as well as paintings. One of the best known of present-day artists outside his own country is Philip Laszlo, lately ennobled as De Lombos, a rare honour for the exclusive Austrian ruler to give to one who has made his name by work!
A museum, quite peculiar to Hungary, and very appropriate, as many of her sons live by agriculture, is the Agricultural Museum. This stands by a lake in the Town Park and is built in imitation of a Transylvanian fortress of the Middle Ages.
We have not yet mentioned the Academy of Music, a very important place to such a music-loving people. It was opened in 1875, and the first director was Franz Liszt.
Liszt was born in 1811 at Raiding in Hungary. His father was a steward of the Esterhazy estates and had himself considerable musical talent. Young Liszt played in public at the age of nine, and attracted so much attention that his musical education in Vienna was paid for by patrons. He soon visited France and England and Switzerland, and everywhere his playing was well received. When he was only sixteen his father died. It was the young man’s great admiration for the violinist Paganini which fired him with the ambition to do for the piano what Paganini had done for the violin. At the age of twenty-four he formed a connection with Mme la Comtesse d’Agoult, friend of George Sand, and herself a literary woman, who wrote under the pseudonym of Daniel Stern. Of the three children resulting from this association, one became the wife of Von Bülow and afterwards married Richard Wagner.
Liszt is equally well known as a performer, conductor, and composer, but in the latter rôle he takes a lower place than the Austrian musicians of the Mighty Quartette. As will be seen by comparison of dates, he was contemporary with Beethoven and Schubert. Liszt died in 1886, leaving behind him an immense mass of work, songs, cantatas, oratorios, pianoforte pieces, etc., which are of unequal merit.
The Opera House at Budapest has been mentioned. There are also the concerts of the Philharmonic Society every second week from November to March.
There are numbers of theatres, besides the National one, and the collective life of the people is gay and bright.
The town is particularly rich in libraries, chief among them is that in the Hungarian National Museum, already mentioned. This contains over a million and a quarter volumes, and among them many Corvin codexes from the library of King Matthias Corvinus, which was rifled by the Turks and the contents carried away to Constantinople. It is to the credit of Turkey that a good many have been restored as a graceful act of courtesy to the nation from time to time. The University library, a splendid building in Franciscan Square, owns 300,000 volumes, and the library of the Academy of Sciences, 200,000.
The University has departments for theology, law, political science, medicine, and philosophy.