For more than three decades, Péter Lakatos has maintained close professional and emotional ties with the University of Debrecen. A pianist, he earned his teaching degree from the Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music in Budapest. He has been teaching music since 1992. In the beginning, he taught piano at a music school in the 2nd district of Budapest. Since 1995, he has been an instructor at the Faculty of Music of the University of Debrecen. Becoming an assistant professor after some time, he taught piano as his major subject, together with accompaniment and sight-reading. After earning his first degree, he studied for two additional years in the harpsichord program at Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music. For several years, he was the permanent continuo player of the Ferenc Erkel Chamber Orchestra. Therefore, in addition to teaching piano, he also taught harpsichord.
As a soloist and chamber music partner, Péter Lakatos has performed in a number of cities both in Hungary and abroad, while he also made radio recordings for Hungarian Radio. In his public life, he served as the chief organizer of several large-scale Christian-oriented events of high professional standard, while he was also the founding organizer of summer church music training programs for minor and major denominational and evangelical congregations throughout Hungary.
- Apart from vocational and professional considerations and tasks, emotional contexts and human relationships are also of great importance to me. These shape the work I do at the University of Debrecen as well, besides equally being consistently evident in my family life. I recall how one day last January, while I was giving my daughter a piano lesson, it dawned on me that I had been teaching at the faculty for thirty years then. Suddenly, I was overcome by the realization of just how much I had experienced and lived through here. It is incredibly rare for someone to stay and stick with one and the same job these days. I felt that this indeed had been a major challenge back then to embark on my teaching career under serious pressure and compulsion to prove myself. By now, however, my life has become completely intertwined with the university and the faculty. It is rather touching to be aware that my perseverance and diligence are routinely met with recognition and trust from colleagues and students alike. I moved to Debrecen from Budapest, when I was called to serve as a pastor in 1997. I struggled with a personal dilemma between choosing the vocation of a pastor or that of a university professor and, although at first my heart was leaning more towards the former, an unquestionable inner calling eventually emerged within me and it unambiguously turned me towards the university. I was forty when I earned my doctoral degree. I took a language exam at the same time and, following my final recital, I was invited to join the faculty’s leadership. Since then, leadership roles never failed to find me in almost every walk of life. The reason for this is perhaps because I have a fundamentally calm nature and I do not shy away from conflict resolution either. Nevertheless, leading an institution generally depends largely on the team surrounding the leader, and I am lucky because I have a pretty good team- said Péter Lakatos.
Althogh he has gained a lot of experience over the past thirty years, Péter Lakatos believes that it is important that the knowledge gained from routine and the responsibilities of leadership should never change who a person is.
As regards the institution, it is essential that its leader should carry out their work with unwavering integrity, dedication, humility and commitment. As a dean, Péter Lakatos has had to face quite a few challenges in recent years. At the very beginning of his tenure, he headed a faculty that was just undergoing a transformation because a lot of young colleagues were joining it. During the past couple of years, the same faculty has experienced numerous developments, investments and instrument acquisitions. ZK has funded the acquisition of instrument sets, and a unique, state-of-the-art studio has been established in the faculty building, all of which the dean considers spectacular and significant achievements.
- Our most important goal now is to complete the accreditation of the newly launched doctoral program, which we have been working on for years, and we are still fighting to establish it. The most crucial aspect of this is that it would ensure a steady supply of new faculty members. Moreover, this success would be a decisive asset for us in the market for higher education in music. In the past, we fought just as hard for a program in popular music and our plan now is to offer our students the entire musical spectrum within a single educational framework. A unique opportunity may arise to study either end of it at the University of Debrecen: early music and popular music. True, the number of students in secondary education is decreasing but, fortunately, this has not yet been experienced at our faculty. In fact, due to the present shortage of music teachers and musicians, university-level music education has significant prospects, in which international students may also play a major part in the future- added the dean of the faculty.
Péter Lakatos highlighted that, while the Faculty of Music at the University of Debrecen is adamant about expanding its musical repertoire, in a lot of other places and institutions the same scope is narrowing. Music education there is either transformed into arts faculties or merged with other art forms. The Faculty of Music at the University of Debrecen, however, views development and expansion as its chief mission. The dean also noted the following: although the Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music is currently Hungary’s strongest institution of higher education in music, the Faculty of Music of the University of Debrecen consistently ranks second every year. In fact, in some programs and majors, the Faculty of Music of the University of Debrecen is already ahead in terms of the quality of education, professional approach and philosophy.
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