Bauer & Seiber: Remarkable Parents & Their Artistic Circles

György Buday, Lilla, woodcut

Talk

Zoom Event organised by Cambridge Szeged Society

Julia Seiber Boyd

“Much is written about Mátyás Seiber by musicologists, but I knew by age of 5, that I was not going to be a musician, he was just my father. He said virtually nothing about his early life – so I have had to put much of that together and find documents and records. These had all been donated to the British Library in the 1980-90. He was killed when I was 11 so this has been a voyage of discovery in many ways.

2020 marks the 60^th Anniversary of his death, and although covid-19 destroyed many plans for that, it has still been marked by the Royal College of Music – broadcast with help from the Hungarian Cultural Centre as part of the Insiders Outsiders Festival in November 2020. This looked at the wide span of his musical output – from Liszt Academy, to Frankfurt as Professor of Jazz, to London and establishing his reputation as the best teacher of composition.

In 1946, in London, he married my mother, (Lilla Bauer), a dancer with the Modern Dance Ballet Joöss & then lecturer at Goldsmith’s College, London. She survived until she was 99 and told me rather more about her upbringing and my architect grandfather. Her life in the 1930s was pretty colourful – travels with the company of Kurt Joöss & choreographer Rudolf Laban, her long relationship with wood cut artist György Buday, ending in 1938 – and her move to London. They never met again, but ended up living less than 10 miles apart.

In 2019, quite by accident I discovered the British Museum held 2 folders of Buday’s work. On examination these included 14 portraits of his muse, Lilla Bauer – on and off stage from 1933-38. Their lives were far from ordinary & provide good subject matter for talks & further research.”

To register for this event, email Rowland or Szylvia