Liszt is to piano playing what Euclid is to geometry.

Alan Walker

Liszt Academy improved its international ranking and is the only Hungarian university in the top 100

11 April 2024

The Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music has made significant progress in the QS rankings by subject: with its 22nd place in the performing arts category, it is the world’s highest-ranked Hungarian university.

The latest edition of one of the best-known higher education rankings, the UK's Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) World University Rankings by Subject 2024, compares almost 1,600 universities worldwide in 55 individual subjects across five broad subject areas.

The Liszt Academy of Music has made a huge leap forward in the long-established Performing Arts category. From last year's place in the 51-100 range, it has now come 22nd, making it the best of all Hungary’s universities: no other Hungarian university has done so well in its own field of study.

In the rankings, the Liszt Academy is featured alongside such universities as Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, the Norwegian Academy of Music and the Conservatoire of Lyon, and has outdone other prestigious universities such as the Leipzig and Berlin Universities of Music, King's College London, the Salzburg Mozarteum, and other music academies in Central and Eastern Europe.

Acting President Dr Csaba Kutnyánszky, Vice-President of Education, says the Academy's progress marks the culmination of many years of work in international cooperation and research thanks to its world-renowned teachers.

The Liszt Academy has also been ranked 15th in the newly introduced, more narrowly focused category Music.

Five criteria are taken into account in the subject-rankings: the prestige and reputation of the institution in the academic world, which is measured through interviews with some 130,000 professionals worldwide - in this the Liszt Academy scored a very high 82 out of 100 - and the reputation of the Academy as an employer, and its international cooperation projects. As the performing arts represent a specialised field, publications and citations are given less weight in this category than in others.

Research activities of the Liszt Academy (such as at the Central European Music History Research Group in the Musicology Department or at the Church Music Department) as well as at the Kodály Institute and the Liszt Ferenc Memorial Museum and Research Centre are internationally recognised as outstanding. Researchers at the Academy are regularly invited to work abroad, and staffers at the Liszt Museum play a leading role, for example in coordinating the work of the international network of Liszt memorial sites, while the Kodály Institute enjoys international fame on account of the Kodály Method and a variety of educational programmes based on it (Kodály Hub, Move mi Music, PRESTO). In addition, many of the Academy's teachers are also internationally renowned performers, and its students are much in demand and are accepted into prestigious ensembles both in Hungary and abroad.

The subject rankings in English are available by clicking here:

The rankings for performing arts can be found here

The Liszt Academy's page in the QS database can be found here, including rankings and scores.