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The most important class, however, for me and for hundreds of other Hungarian musicians, was the chamber-music class. From about the age of fourteen, and until graduation from the Academy, all instrumentalists except the heavy-brass players and percussionists had to participate in this course. Presiding over it for many years was the composer Leó Weiner, who thus exercised an enormous influence on three generations of Hungarian musicians.
Sir Georg Solti

Liszt Academy on the leaderboard of the world’s arts universities

2 April 2016

The 2016 top list of the QS World University Rankings, reckoned as one of the foremost global education surveys (released in late March), shows the Budapest Liszt Academy (Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music) ranked as the 30th best performance arts university in the world.

When looking purely at institutions with a music profile, the Liszt Academy in Budapest can actually be ranked among the top 15, the latest 2016 global survey by Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) reveals. This is the first time the organization has surveyed and evaluated the field of performing arts. According to the list published at the end of March, the Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music is the world’s 30th best institute of higher education in the performing arts, and within Europe it comes an even more noteworthy 17th (the research methodology favours the multi-profile mega-universities not only offering courses in the arts). The survey found that the three best universities of the performing arts are the Juilliard School of New York, the University of Music and the Performing Arts of Vienna and the Royal College of Music, London. The Liszt Academy comes ahead of such prestigious institutions as the Salzburg Mozarteum, the Hochschule für Musik und Theater Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy Leipzig, and the St. Petersburg State Conservatory; no other Hungarian institutions of higher education appear in the ranking of performing arts courses.

“The result is an unexpected pleasure and somewhat of a sensation,” said Imre Szabó Stein, Communications Director of the Liszt Academy. “As a consequence of the nature and methodology of the sampling, we had no idea that the survey also covered the Liszt Academy. Clearly, this result is partly due to the quality of the teaching of music and musicology of our unquestionably significant, 140-year-old university, as well as, perhaps, the concert life conducted at international level, marketing-communication developed since the reopening in 2013, as well as the successfully completed reconstruction project,” he added.

Until 2009, education and career consultancy firm Quacquarelli Symonds compiled international university listings for the higher education supplement of The Times newspaper of London. However, since 2010 they have published the results of their global surveys independently. They examine factors such as the proportion of foreign teachers and students, they weight the results of the representative student questionnaire surveying nearly 45,000 individuals in higher education, and the citation indices of teachers are also taken into account. The Liszt Academy’s favourable international appraisal is further boosted by the fact that approximately 20% of students come from abroad, in fact from more than 40 countries around the globe, two-thirds of the courses are also available in English, teachers of the arts lecturing at the university are active participants in international music life, and as organizer of major international music competitions the Liszt Academy has been a popular target destination for young musicians since 2013.

MTI/lisztacademy.hu