1000 Forint 1993, Hungary
in Krause book | Number: 176b |
Years of issue: | 16.12.1993 |
Edition: | |
Signatures: | Dr. Szapáry György, Dr. Bod Péter Ákos, Kovács Álmos |
Serie: | First Series |
Specimen of: | 30.10.1992 |
Material: | Cotton fiber |
Size (mm): | 174 x 80 |
Printer: | Hungarian Banknote Printing Corp. "Diósgyőri Papírgyár Zrt.", Miskolc |
* All pictures marked are increased partially by magnifying glass, the remaining open in full size by clicking on the image.
** The word "Specimen" is present only on some of electronic pictures, in accordance with banknote images publication rules of appropriate banks.

Description
Watermark:
Avers:
The engraving on banknote, presumably, is based on these photos of Bartók Bela and Pásztory Ditta (his second wife), (Bartók Béla és Pásztory Ditta). The copyright belongs to the photo studio Marian Reismann, Budapest I., Tigris u. 8/b. Currently, these photographs are in the collection of the Hungarian Museum of Photography, in Budapest.
Béla Viktor János Bartók (25 March 1881 – 26 September 1945) was a Hungarian composer, pianist, and ethnomusicologist. He is considered one of the most important composers of the 20th century; he and Liszt are regarded as Hungary's greatest composers (Gillies 2001). Through his collection and analytical study of folk music, he was one of the founders of comparative musicology, which later became ethnomusicology.
From 1899 to 1903, Bartók studied piano under István Thomán, a former student of Franz Liszt, and composition under János Koessler at the Royal Academy of Music in Budapest (Anon. 2018). There he met Zoltán Kodály, who made a strong impression on him and became a lifelong friend and colleague (Rockwell 1982). In 1903, Bartók wrote his first major orchestral work, Kossuth, a symphonic poem which honored Lajos Kossuth, hero of the Hungarian Revolution of 1848 (Stevens 2018).
The music of Richard Strauss, whom he met in 1902 at the Budapest premiere of Also sprach Zarathustra, strongly influenced his early work (Wilhelm 1989, 73). When visiting a holiday resort in the summer of 1904, Bartók overheard a young nanny, Lidi Dósa from Kibéd in Transylvania, sing folk songs to the children in her care. This sparked his lifelong dedication to folk music (Kory 2007).
From 1907, he also began to be influenced by the French composer Claude Debussy, whose compositions Kodály had brought back from Paris. Bartók's large-scale orchestral works were still in the style of Johannes Brahms and Richard Strauss, but he wrote a number of small piano pieces which showed his growing interest in folk music. The first piece to show clear signs of this new interest is the String Quartet No. 1 in A minor (1908), which contains folk-like elements (Rodda 1990–2018).
In 1907, Bartók began teaching as a piano professor at the Royal Academy (Anon. 1945). This position freed him from touring Europe as a pianist and enabled him to work in Hungary. Among his notable students were Fritz Reiner, Sir Georg Solti, György Sándor, Ernő Balogh, and Lili Kraus. After Bartók moved to the United States, he taught Jack Beeson and Violet Archer.
In 1908, he and Kodály traveled into the countryside to collect and research old Magyar folk melodies. Their growing interest in folk music coincided with a contemporary social interest in traditional national culture. They made some surprising discoveries. Magyar folk music had previously been categorised as Gypsy music. The classic example is Franz Liszt's famous Hungarian Rhapsodies for piano, which he based on popular art songs performed by Romani bands of the time. In contrast, Bartók and Kodály discovered that the old Magyar folk melodies were based on pentatonic scales, similar to those in Asian folk traditions, such as those of Central Asia, Anatolia and Siberia.
Bartók and Kodály quickly set about incorporating elements of such Magyar peasant music into their compositions. They both frequently quoted folk song melodies verbatim and wrote pieces derived entirely from authentic songs. An example is his two volumes entitled For Children for solo piano, containing 80 folk tunes to which he wrote accompaniment. Bartók's style in his art music compositions was a synthesis of folk music, classicism, and modernism. His melodic and harmonic sense was profoundly influenced by the folk music of Hungary, Romania, and other nations. He was especially fond of the asymmetrical dance rhythms and pungent harmonies found in Bulgarian music. Most of his early compositions offer a blend of nationalist and late Romanticism elements.
In 1909, at the age of 28, Bartók married Márta Ziegler (1893–1967), aged 16. Their son, Béla Bartók III, was born on 22 August 1910. After nearly 15 years together, Bartók divorced Márta in June 1923. Two months after his divorce, he married Ditta Pásztory (1903–1982), a piano student, ten days after proposing to her. She was aged 19, he 42. Their son, Péter, was born in 1924 (Vetter 2007, 22).
In 1911, Bartók wrote what was to be his only opera, Bluebeard's Castle, dedicated to Márta. He entered it for a prize by the Hungarian Fine Arts Commission, but they rejected his work as not fit for the stage (Chalmers 1995, 93). In 1917 Bartók revised the score for the 1918 première, and rewrote the ending. Following the 1919 revolution in which he actively participated, he was pressured by the Horthy regime to remove the name of the librettist Béla Balázs from the opera (Chalmers 1995, 123)[not in citation given], as he was blacklisted and had left the country for Vienna. Bluebeard's Castle received only one revival, in 1936, before Bartók emigrated. For the remainder of his life, although he was passionately devoted to Hungary, its people and its culture, he never felt much loyalty to the government or its official establishments.
After his disappointment over the Fine Arts Commission competition, Bartók wrote little for two or three years, preferring to concentrate on collecting and arranging folk music. He collected first in the Carpathian Basin (then the Kingdom of Hungary), where he notated Hungarian, Slovak, Romanian, and Bulgarian folk music. He also collected in Moldavia, Wallachia, and (in 1913) Algeria. The outbreak of World War I forced him to stop the expeditions; and he returned to composing, writing the ballet The Wooden Prince (1914–16) and the String Quartet No. 2 in (1915–17), both influenced by Debussy.
Raised as a Catholic, by his early adulthood Bartók had become an atheist. He later became attracted to Unitarianism and publicly converted to the Unitarian faith in 1916. Although Bartók was not conventionally religious, according to his son Béla Bartók III, "he was a nature lover: he always mentioned the miraculous order of nature with great reverence." As an adult, Béla III later became lay president of the Hungarian Unitarian Church (Hughes 1999–2007).
Bartók wrote another ballet, The Miraculous Mandarin, influenced by Igor Stravinsky, Arnold Schoenberg, as well as Richard Strauss. A modern story of prostitution, robbery, and murder, it was started in 1918, but not performed until 1926 because of its sexual content. He next wrote his two violin sonatas (written in 1921 and 1922 respectively), which are harmonically and structurally some of his most complex pieces.
In 1927–28, Bartók wrote his Third and Fourth String Quartets, after which his compositions demonstrated his mature style. Notable examples of this period are Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta (1936) and Divertimento for String Orchestra (1939). The Fifth String Quartet was composed in 1934, and the Sixth String Quartet (his last) in 1939.
In 1936 he travelled to Turkey to collect and study folk music. He worked in collaboration with Turkish composer Ahmet Adnan Saygun mostly around Adana (Özgentürk 2008; Sipos 2000).
In 1940, as the European political situation worsened after the outbreak of World War II, Bartók was increasingly tempted to flee Hungary. He was strongly opposed to the Nazis and Hungary's siding with Germany. After the Nazis came to power in the early 1930s, Bartók refused to give concerts in Germany and broke away from his publisher there. His anti-fascist political views caused him a great deal of trouble with the establishment in Hungary. Having first sent his manuscripts out of the country, Bartók reluctantly emigrated to the U.S. with his wife Ditta in October that year. They settled in New York City after arriving on the night of 29–30 October 1940 via a steamer from Lisbon. After joining them in 1942, their younger son, Péter Bartók, enlisted in the United States Navy where he served in the Pacific during the remainder of the war and later settled in Florida where he became a recording and sound engineer. His elder son, by his first marriage, Béla Bartók III, remained in Hungary and later worked as a railroad official until his retirement in the early 1980s.
Although he became an American citizen in 1945, shortly before his death (Gagné 2012, 28), Bartók never felt fully at home in the USA. He initially found it difficult to compose. Although he was well known in America as a pianist, ethnomusicologist and teacher, he was not well known as a composer. There was little American interest in his music during his final years. He and his wife Ditta gave some concerts, although demand for them was low.[citation needed] Bartók, who had made some recordings in Hungary, also recorded for Columbia Records after he came to the US; many of these recordings (some with Bartók's own spoken introductions) were later issued on LP and CD (Bartók 1994, 1995a, 1995b, 2003, 2007, 2008).
Supported by a research fellowship from Columbia University, for several years, Bartók and Ditta worked on a large collection of Serbian and Croatian folk songs in Columbia's libraries. Bartók's economic difficulties during his first years in America were mitigated by publication royalties, teaching and performance tours. While his finances were always precarious, he did not live and die in poverty as was the common myth. He had enough friends and supporters to ensure that there was sufficient money and work available for him to live on. Bartók was a proud man and did not easily accept charity. Despite being short on cash at times, he often refused money that his friends offered him out of their own pockets. Although he was not a member of the ASCAP, the society paid for any medical care he needed during his last two years. Bartók reluctantly accepted this (Chalmers 1995, 196–203).
The first symptoms of his health problems began late in 1940, when his right shoulder began to show signs of stiffening. In 1942, symptoms increased and he started having bouts of fever, but no underlying disease was diagnosed, in spite of medical examinations. Finally, in April 1944, leukemia was diagnosed, but by this time, little could be done (Chalmers 1995, 202–207).
As his body slowly failed, Bartók found more creative energy, and he produced a final set of masterpieces, partly thanks to the violinist Joseph Szigeti and the conductor Fritz Reiner (Reiner had been Bartók's friend and champion since his days as Bartók's student at the Royal Academy). Bartók's last work might well have been the String Quartet No. 6 but for Serge Koussevitzky's commission for the Concerto for Orchestra. Koussevitsky's Boston Symphony Orchestra premièred the work in December 1944 to highly positive reviews. The Concerto for Orchestra quickly became Bartók's most popular work, although he did not live to see its full impact. In 1944, he was also commissioned by Yehudi Menuhin to write a Sonata for Solo Violin. In 1945, Bartók composed his Piano Concerto No. 3, a graceful and almost neo-classical work, as a surprise 42nd birthday present for Ditta, but he died just over a month before her birthday, with the scoring not quite finished. He had also sketched his Viola Concerto, but had barely started the scoring at his death, leaving completed only the viola part and sketches of the orchestral part.
Béla Bartók died at age 64 in a hospital in New York City from complications of leukemia (specifically, of secondary polycythemia) on 26 September 1945. His funeral was attended by only ten people. Among them were his wife Ditta, their son Péter, and his pianist friend György Sándor (Anon. 2006).
Bartók's body was initially interred in Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, New York. During the final year of communist Hungary in the late 1980s, the Hungarian government, along with his two sons, Béla III and Péter, requested that his remains be exhumed and transferred back to Budapest for burial, where Hungary arranged a state funeral for him on 7 July 1988. He was reinterred at Budapest's Farkasréti Cemetery, next to the remains of Ditta, who died in 1982, the year after his centenary (Chalmers 1995, 214).
The two unfinished works were later completed by his pupil Tibor Serly. György Sándor was the soloist in the first performance of the Third Piano Concerto on February 8, 1946. Ditta Pásztory-Bartók later played and recorded it. The Viola Concerto was revised and published in the 1990s by Bartók's son, Peter (Maurice 2004,[page needed]); this version may be closer to what Bartók intended (Chalmers 1995, 210).
Concurrently, Peter Bartók, in association with Argentinian musician Nelson Dellamaggiore, worked to reprint and revise past editions of the Third Piano Concerto (Somfai 1996).
Centered is Hungarian coat of arms.
The current coat of arms of Hungary was reinstated on July 3, 1990, after the end of communist rule. The arms have been used before, both with and without the Holy Crown of Hungary, sometimes as part of a larger, more complex coat of arms, and its elements date back to the Middle Ages.
The shield is split into two parts:
The dexter (left side from the viewer's point) features the so-called Árpád stripes, four Argent (silver) and four Gules (red) stripes. Traditionally, the silver stripes represent four rivers: Duna (Danube), Tisza, Dráva, and Száva.
The sinister (right side from the viewer's point) consists of an Argent (silver) double cross on Gules (red) base, situated inside a small Or (golden) crown, the crown is placed on the middle heap of three Vert (green) hills, representing the mountain ranges (trimount) Tátra, Mátra, and Fátra.
There are many myth ans legends about curved cross on the top of St.Stefan crown. But here is one of them, mostly known.
"What could have caused this damage, and when? In studying the history of the Holy Crown, were found the following: When King Albert died in 1439, his wife was already pregnant with the boy who would become László V. To secure the Crown for her son, she instructed her lady-in-waiting, the wife of Kottaner János, to steal it from Visegrád, where it was kept. She arranged the theft, packed the Crown in a large red velvet pillow, and covered it with cowhide. Then they took the Crown to Komárom, and from there to Székesfehérvár, where they crowned the 3-month old infant with it. The Queen, however, still would not relinquish the Crown, and instructed the same lady-in-waiting to take it to Győr. As Kottaner Jánosné wrote in her journal:
“I took the Holy Crown, and wrapped it very well in a shawl, and placed it in the cradle, among straw, because his highness did not sleep on feathers yet, and I also put a large spoon next to him, with which one usually amuses children. I did this so that, should anyone reach into the cradle, he should think there was something there with which one amuses the noble king. At that time, no one knew of this, except my gracious lady and myself.”
The cradle was placed on a cart, and the little king was placed in it. On the way, the infant was often taken out and placed back in. An infant’s weight corresponds perfectly with the pressure estimated by Gyergyai. In addition, the first repairs made to the Holy Crown correspond to the methods used around 1440." (Magyar news)
The coat of arms of Hungary is surrounded by brown-red guilloche rosette.
Above and below each one waving framelath made of guilloche pattern with repeating values: 1000 - 1000 / EZER FORINT.
Denominations in numerals are on top double and big, on the left side. In words centered and lower.
Revers:
The sculpture "Breast-feeding mother" ("Szoptató anya") by Medgyessy Ferenc, 1932. The original is at the Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest (Magyar Nemzeti Galéria, Budapest).
The height of the sculpture is 100 cm.
The first version of the sculpture was made in 1917.
Ferenc Medgyessy (1881 in Debrecen, Hungary – 1958 in Budapest, Hungary) was a Hungarian sculptor and physician. After graduating in medicine he studied art in Paris, later he studied Michelangelo and the Etruscan art in Florence. His art was dominated by folk realism.
From this sculpture many copies were made, which were installed in different parts of Hungary. For example, one of them was installed on the southern slope of Gellert Hill (XI. District, Gellérthegy), in Budapest, in 1965.
Denominations in numerals are repeated four times. At the top and lower in words.
Comments:
Withdrawn from circulation: 1 of September 2000.
Obverse engraver and designer: Vagyoczki Karoly Del. Et.SC.
Reverse engraver: Füle Mihály SC.
Obverse designer: Vagyoczki Karoly Del. Et.SC.
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