In the 20th century, whilst new song forms emerged around the world, including genres such as jazz, rock and pop, the classical art song of the 19th century lost popularity.

A singer, a piano, poems of love and death, and a romantic tonal language: the leading art form of the bourgeois salon increasingly became a musical niche for lovers and afficionados. The heyday of the European art song, which began in the middle of the 18th century, came to an end at the beginning of the 20th century. However, the composers Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály took a different path: they renewed the art song by returning it to its folk origins.

The most fascinating thing about the work of these two musicians was not just their painstaking ethnomusicological field research. Whilst they preserved Hungarian folk music, recording (as best they could at the time) and notating this music, they also allowed it to inspire their own compositions. At this time, when many musicians appropriated folk music for political reasons, Bartók and Kodály created a genuine folk art that did not pander or simplify, but spoke of feelings that directly touched its listeners.