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György Ránki

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Name
  
Gyorgy Ranki


Role
  
Composer


Died
  
May 22, 1992, Budapest, Hungary

Children
  
Andras Ranki, Katalin Ranki

Music director
  
Merry‑Go‑Round, Sweet Anna, The Pendragon Legend, Spring Shower

Similar People
  
Zoltan Fabri, Frederic Chopin, Johannes Brahms, Richard Wagner, Gyorgy Revesz

Ránki: The Tragedy of Man (excerpts from the opera)


György Ránki (November 30, 1907 – May 22, 1992) was a Hungarian composer.

Contents

Life

Born in Budapest, he studied composition with Zoltán Kodály at the Budapest Academy of Music from 1926-1930. He became interested in folk music and ethnomusicology, working with László Lajtha at the Museum of Ethnography in Budapest and later further studies in Asian folk music in London and Paris (at the Musée de l'Homme). He directed the music section of Hungarian radio in 1947–8, after which he gave his attention to composition.

György Ránki wwwirodalmiradiohufemiszenekszerzormenuran

Ránki not only employed authentic folk melodies and musical idioms in his music but also pulled on jazz elements. He possessed a gift for the grotesque and unusual, the colourful and humorous, which may be traced in part perhaps to his studies of non-Western music.

Works

His greatest successes have been stage works, above all the opera Pomádé király uj ruhája (‘King Pomádé’s New Clothes’, based on the Andersen story), which draws most of its material from Hungarian folk music. He also wrote a two-act mystery opera, Az ember tragédiája (The Tragedy of Man), based on the eponymous play by Imre Madách. South Asian influences are particularly evident in Pentaerophonia for wind quintet, which imitates gamelan effects. In some works he makes use of the Fibonacci series, following (presumably) Bartók; an example is the fantasy 1514 for piano and orchestra, which was based on wood carvings by Derkovits. He also composed incidental music for the theatre and music for films.

Selected filmography

  • The Pendragon Legend (1974)
  • References

    György Ránki Wikipedia