In the spring of 1936 the lord mayor of Budapest invited Kodály to write a piece to commemorate the 250th anniversary of recapturing Buda Castle from the Turks. The Te Deum of Buda Castle received its world première on 2 September 1936 in the Church of our Lady (better known as Matthias Church) under the baton of the church’s choral conductor Viktor Sugár.
The work became instantly successful and within a few years it was performed around Europe and even overseas. Because it calls for a larger number of performers than most churches can cope with, it is usually a part of concert programmes. The setting faithfully renders the atmosphere of the text by means of sacred and secular compositional techniques, 19th-century Romantic gestures and Hungarian folk-music elements from pathos through church-music counterpoint to fanfare. The entire work is bound together by the experience of Hungarian folk music whose latent influence can be felt in almost every melody.