Leo Weiner created a unique synthesis between German/French Romantic traditions and the Hungarian musical language at the beginning of the 20th century. The Ballade, admired for it's beautiful dreamlike lyricism, was one of his most successful works. Weiner took inspiration from folk music as an escape from the 20th-century rise in modernism - his Suite integrates dance melodies into a work of symphonic scale and structure. The Second Violin Concerto is a defiantly Romantic post-war masterpiece in which darkness and light co-exist as an expression of humanity in an age of violence.