Artistic director: Iván Fischer

A joint event of the Budapest Festival Orchestra and Müpa Budapest.

  The BFO and Müpa Budapest established the tradition in 2008. Music fans and experts alike consider the annual marathon a red-letter day, when everybody has the chance to indulge in the music of their favourite composer. The marathon attracts almost ten thousand people every year, and there is a considerable contingent of the gluttonous who sit through every concert. After featuring Tchaikovsky, Bach, Beethoven, Bartók, Mozart, Schubert, Dvořák, and Stravinsky, the 31 February 2016 marathon will, by way of a change, feature not one but two protagonists. The day’s programme will comprise music by Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy and Robert Schumann. The oeuvres of these two great German romanticists are connected in many ways, yet they also provide numerous contrasts; while Mendelssohn poured his romantic feelings into classical forms, Schumann, at the beginning of his career, cast away traditional forms and was more the innovator, not clinging on to the classicist heritage. They were literally contemporaries; Mendelssohn was born in 1809 and died in 1847 while Schumann, born in 1810, had a longer but much harder life and lived out his final years in the asylum at Endenich, where he passed away in 1856.