Miksa Eisikovits's Hasidic Jewish folk music collection from Maramures

Max (Miksa, Mihály) Eisikovits (1908-1983), Romanian composer, conductor, musicologist and pedagogue; from 1946 associated with the Conservatory of Music in Cluj-Napoca. In 1938-1939 Eisikovits traveled to Jewish settlements in the Máramaros region of Transylvania (then part of Hungary; currently Maramures, Romania) to collect songs from the area's Hasidic population. Eisikovits sensed that these communities were threatened; today his field notations, comprising some 160 melodies, stand as unique documentation of the music traditions of a culture that was destroyed during the Holocaust. Resuming his career after the war, Eisikovits drew on his collection for a series of folk-based art songs and instrumental compositions; decades after his death his original transcriptions were published in the volume "És a halottak újra énekelnek ..." : Eiskovits Miksa Máramarosi haszid zsidó zenei gyűjtéses (1938-1939) (After all the dead sing again ..." (Miksa Eisikovits's Hasidic Jewish music collection from Maramureş (1938-1939)), edited by Elek Judit (Budapest, 2018).