Budapest

The Franz Liszt Academy of Music is a concert hall and music conservatory in Budapest, Hungary, founded on November 14, 1875. It is home to the... Liszt Collection, which features several valuable books and manuscripts donated by Liszt upon his death, and the AVISO studio, a collaboration between the governments of Hungary and Japan to provide sound recording equipment and training for students. The Academy was named after its founder only in 1925. Initially christened the "Royal National Hungarian Academy of Music", it was also called "College of Music" from 1919-1925. It was founded in Liszt's home, and relocated to a three-story Neo-Renaissance building designed by Adolf Láng and built on today's Andrássy Avenue between 1877 and 1879. That location is referred to as "the old Music Academy" and commemorated by a 1934 plaque made by Zoltán Farkas. It was repurchased by the academy in the 1980s, and is now officially known as "the Ferenc Liszt Memorial and Research Center.
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Vigadó is located on the right-hand side of the Danube in Budapest, Hungary. Although the acoustics of Budapest's second largest concert hall... are lacking, the building itself, designed by Frigyes Feszl in 1859 makes a bold impression along the Pest embankment. Built to replace another concert hall on the same site Feszl's Vigadó was also badly damaged, this time during World War II. The post-war reconstruction, which took some thirty-six years to complete, remains faithful to his original design and continues to attract leading conductors and performers from around the world. The facade of the Vigadó was cleaned and restored in 2006. The Budai Vigadó is the home stage of the Hungarian State Folk Ensemble The group having started in 1951 with Hungarian traditional dance and music.
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The Hungarian State Opera House is a neo-Renaissance opera house located in central Budapest, on Andrássy út. It is home to the Budapest... Opera Ball, a society event dating back to 1886. Designed by Miklós Ybl, a major figure of 19th century Hungarian architecture, the construction lasted from 1875 to 1884 and was funded by the city of Budapest and by Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria-Hungary. The Hungarian Royal Opera House opened to the public on the September 27, 1884. Many important artists were guests here including Gustav Mahler the composer who was director in Budapest from 1887 to 1891 and Otto Klemperer who was music director for three years from 1947 to 1950. In the 1970s the state of the building prompted the Hungarian State to order a major renovation which eventually began in 1980 and lasted till 1984. The reopening was held exactly 100 years after the original opening, on the September 27, 1984. It is a richly-decorated building and is considered one of the architect's masterpieces. It was built in neo-Renaissance style, with elements of baroque.
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Buda Castle is the historical castle and palace complex of the Hungarian kings in Budapest, first completed in 1265. In the past, it was also called... Royal Palace and Royal Castle . Buda Castle was built on the southern tip of Castle Hill, bounded on the north by what is known as the Castle District , famous for its Medieval, Baroque and 19th century houses, churches and public buildings. It is linked to Clark Ádám Square and the Széchenyi Chain Bridge by the Castle Hill Funicular. The castle is part of the Budapest World Heritage Site, declared in 1987. The first royal residence on the Castle Hill was built by King Béla IV of Hungary between 1247 and 1265. It is uncertain whether it was situated on the southern tip of the hill or on the northern elevation near the Kammerhof. The oldest part of the present-day palace was built in the 14th century by Stephen, Duke of Slavonia, the younger brother of King Louis I of Hungary.
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The Hungarian National Museum is the national museum of Hungary. The museum building is in Budapest VIII and was built in the Classical style... 1837-47 by the architect Mihály Pollack. The Hungarian National Museum is said to have been founded in 1802 when Count Ferenc Széchényi set up the National Széchényi Library. This would then be followed a year later by the donating of a mineral collection by Széchényi’s wife. This led to the creation of the Hungarian National Museum as being a natural history museum, and not only a library. In 1807 the Hungarian National Parliament passed legislation on the new institution and asked the nation to help donate to the museum. The Hungarian Parliament of 1832- 1834 helped with the growth of the museum as well. This parliament voted in favor of giving half a million forint to help with the construction of a new building for the museum. During this time the Hungarian National History Museum was officially set up under the Hungarian National Museum. Later in 1846, the museum moved to its current location of VIII. Múzeum krt. 14-16.
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The Ferenc Hopp Museum of Eastern Asiatic Arts, located in Budapest, was founded in 1919 by world traveler and art collector Ferenc Hopss . The... museum holds within its collection about 20,000 items, including Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Nepalese, Tibetan, Mongolian, Indian, South-East Asian and Near-Eastern objects.
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Memento Park is an open air museum in Budapest, dedicated to monumental statues from Hungary's Communist period . There are statues of Lenin, Marx,... and Engels, as well as Hungarian Communist leaders such as Béla Kun, Endre Ságvári, or Árpád Szakasits. The park was designed by Hungarian architect, Ákos Eleőd, who won the competition announced by the Budapest General Assembly in 1991. After the fall of the Communist regime in Hungary in 1989, many of the Communist statues and monuments were immediately removed. These formed the basis for the current collection in statue park. On June 29, 1993, the second anniversary of the withdrawal of the Russian troops from Hungarian territory, the park celebrated a ribbon cutting and grand opening as a public an outdoor museum. In 2006 marks a new chapter in the history of Memento Park. A life-sized copy of the tribune of the Stalin Monument in Budapest was built in the Statue Park with the broken bronze shoes on top of the pedestal. This is not an accurate copy of the original but only an artistic recreation by Ákos Eleőd. In 2007 a new exhibition hall and a small movie theater was opened in Memento Park.
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Zsa Zsa Gabor  /ˈʒɑːʒɑː ɡəˈbɔər/ is a Hungarian-born American stage, film and... television actress. She acted on stage in Vienna, Austria, in 1932, and was crowned Miss Hungary in 1936. She emigrated to the United States in 1941 and became a sought-after actress with "European flair and style", with a personality that "exuded charm and grace". Her first movie role was as supporting actress in Lovely to Look At. She later acted in We're Not Married! and played one of her few leading roles in Moulin Rouge , directed by John Huston, who described her as a "creditable" actress. Besides her film and television appearances, she is best known for having nine husbands, including hotel magnate Conrad Hilton and actor George Sanders. She once stated, "Men have always liked me and I have always liked men. But I like a mannish man, a man who knows how to talk to and treat a woman—not just a man with muscles." Born as Sári Gábor in Budapest , the middle of the three daughters of Vilmos Gábor , a soldier, and Jolie Gábor .
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Ágnes Szávay is a professional tennis player from Hungary. She is the country's highest ranked tennis player. She was the WTA Newcomer of... the Year in 2007. She achieved her career high ranking of World No. 13 on April 14, 2008. Szávay was born in Kiskunhalas, Hungary and grew up in Soltvadkert, Hungary. She started to play tennis at the age of six, with her parents acting as her first coaches and managers. Her previous coaches were Zoltán Újhidy, Levente Barátosi, Miklós Hornok, József Bocskay, Zoltán Kuharszky, Karl-Heinz Wetter and Gábor Köves. She has a younger sister, Blanka, who is five years younger than her and currently plays on the junior circuit. In 2006 she made it to the final of the Ashland Challenger tournament, but lost there to Aleksandra Wozniak 6–1, 7–6 . Szávay won her first career WTA-level tournament in singles in Palermo, Italy in July. The win caused her ranking to rise to World No. 37, which was the first time she had been included in the top 40. She also won one doubles tournament, the Tier III Budapest Grand Prix, with Vladimíra Uhlířová.
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Michael Curtiz was an Academy award winning Hungarian-American film director. He had early credits as Mihály Kertész and Michael... Kertész. He directed more than fifty films in Europe and more than one hundred in the United States, many of them cinema classics, including The Adventures of Robin Hood, Captain Blood, Dodge City, The Sea Hawk, Angels with Dirty Faces, Casablanca, for which he won the Academy Award for Best Director, Yankee Doodle Dandy, and White Christmas. He thrived in the heyday of the Warner Bros. studio in the 1930s and '40s. He was less successful from the late 1940s onwards, when he attempted to move from studio direction into production and freelance work, but he continued working until shortly before his death. Curtiz was born Kertész Kaminer Manó to a Jewish family in Budapest, Hungary . He claimed to have been born December 24, 1886.
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Éva Gábor was a Hungarian-born American socialite and actress. She was widely known for her role on the 1965 to 1971 television sitcom,... Green Acres as Lisa Douglas, the wife of Eddie Albert's character, Oliver Wendell Douglas. She portrayed Duchess in the 1970 Disney film The Aristocats, and Miss Bianca in Disney's The Rescuers and The Rescuers Down Under. Gábor had success as an actress in film, Broadway and television; she was also successful in business, marketing wigs, clothing, and beauty products. Her elder sisters, Zsa Zsa Gabor and Magda Gabor, were also American actresses and socialites. Born in Budapest of Jewish descent, Gábor was the third and last daughter of Vilmos Gábor , a soldier, and Jolie Gábor , a jeweler. She was the first Gábor sister to emigrate to the United States. She moved with her first husband, a Swedish osteopath, Eric V. Drimmer in 1939, shortly after they married in London. Her first movie role was in the United States, a bit part in Forced Landing at Paramount Pictures. She acted in movies and on the stage throughout the 1950s.
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Harry Houdini was a Hungarian-born American magician and escapologist, stunt performer, actor and film producer noted for his sensational escape... acts. He was also a skeptic who set out to expose frauds purporting to be supernatural phenomena. Harry Houdini was born as Erik Weisz in Budapest, Hungary, on March 24, 1874. His parents were Rabbi Mayer Samuel Weisz and his wife, Cecelia . Houdini was one of seven children: Herman M. ; Nathan J. ; Gottfried William ; Theodore "Theo" ; Leopold D. ; and Carrie Gladys . Weisz arrived in the United States on July 3, 1878, sailing on the SS Fresia with his mother and his four brothers. The family changed the Hungarian spelling of their German surname into Weiss and Erik's name was changed to Ehrich. Friends called him "Ehrie" or "Harry". They first lived in Appleton, Wisconsin, where his father served as Rabbi of the Zion Reform Jewish Congregation.
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Edward Teller was a Hungarian-American theoretical physicist, known colloquially as "the father of the hydrogen bomb", even though he claimed he did... not care for the title. Teller made numerous contributions to nuclear and molecular physics, spectroscopy , and surface physics. His extension of Fermi's theory of beta decay provided an important stepping stone in the applications of this theory. The Jahn–Teller effect and the BET theory have retained their original formulation and are still mainstays in physics and chemistry. Teller also made contributions to Thomas–Fermi theory, the precursor of density functional theory, a standard modern tool in the quantum mechanical treatment of complex molecules. In 1953, along with Nicholas Metropolis and Marshall Rosenbluth, Teller co-authored a paper which is a standard starting point for the applications of the Monte Carlo method to statistical mechanics.
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Miklós "Mickey" Hargitay was an actor and Mr. Universe 1955. Born in Budapest, Hungary, he was married to Jayne Mansfield, and the father of... actress Mariska Hargitay. During their marriage, Hargitay and Mansfield made four movies together, Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? , The Loves of Hercules , Promises! Promises! , and L'Amore Primitivo . Growing up in Hungary, he performed in an acrobatic act with his brothers. He also played soccer and became a champion speed skater. An underground fighter during World War II, Hargitay fled Hungary after the war and moved to the United States. He settled in Cleveland, where he met and married his first wife, Mary Birge , and worked as a plumber and carpenter. He was inspired to begin bodybuilding after seeing a magazine cover of Steve Reeves, famed for playing Hercules. He became NABBA Mr. Universe in 1955. After winning Mr. Universe, he joined Mae West's muscleman revue at New York's The Latin Quarter, where he met Jayne Mansfield, his wife from 1958 to 1964.
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Szőke Szakáll , known as S.Z. Sakall, was a Hungarian film character actor. He was in many films including In the Good Old Summertime,... Lullaby of Broadway, Christmas in Connecticut and Casablanca in which he played Carl, the head waiter. Chubby-jowled Sakall played numerous supporting roles in Hollywood musicals and comedies in the 1940s and 1950s. His rotund cuteness earned Sakall the nickname "Cuddles," and he was often billed as S.Z. "Cuddles" Sakall in his later films, though he was never happy with the name. He was famous for using the phrase "everything is hunky dunky." Szőke Szakáll was born Gerő Jenő in Budapest, Hungary to a Jewish family. During his schooldays, he was writing sketches for Budapest vaudeville shows under the pen-name Szőke Szakáll , which he affected when at the age of 18 he turned to acting. The actor became a star of the Hungarian stage and screen in the 1910s and 1920s. At the beginning of the 1920s, he moved to Vienna, where he appeared in Hermann Leopoldi's Kabarett Leopoldi-Wiesenthal.
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