2000 Forint László Lajtha

László Lajtha occupies an oddly marginal place in the Western musical canon despite a career that ran parallel to Bartók and Kodály and drew on the same Hungarian folk-music fieldwork tradition. His relative obscurity outside Hungary owes much to the postwar period: the communist cultural apparatus classified his output as formalist and effectively suppressed his work domestically for years, while his international connections withered under the Iron Curtain. He died in 1963 largely unrecognized at home.

This commemorative was issued on the 125th anniversary of his birth.