György Kurtág (Transylvania, 1926) began studying piano in 1940 with Magda Kardos and composition with Max Eisikovits. In 1946 he moved to Budapest, where he studied composition with Sándor Veress and Ferenc Farkas, piano with Pál Kadosa and chamber music with Leo Weiner. From 1957 to 1958, he lived in Paris, in flight from the deprivations and censorship of the Stalinist regime. There he attended the classes of Olivier Messiaen and Darius Milhaud and met psychologist Marianne Stein, an encounter that, he says, changed his life.
These influences, and his contact with the Domaine Musical led by Pierre Boulez, imbued him with the techniques of the Second Viennese School – Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern – and particularly that school’s accent on concision. While stopping off in Cologne on his way back to Budapest, Ligeti introduced him to Stockhausen’s ‘Gruppen’ for three orchestras, a work that would profoundly shape his compositional thinking. Shortly after his return, he wrote the String Quartet he thinks of as his opus 1.
Professor of piano, then of chamber music at the Franz Liszt Academy in Budapest from 1967 until his retirement in 1986, he continues to pursues his pedagogical and concertante work. His passion for teaching and quest for a new pedagogical model resonates strongly in his collection of piano works Játékok (1973-1976), written for children and inspired by their games. At the core of Kurtág’s work is his fondness for small forms, as in his Microludes (1977-1978), a set of miniatures for string quartet. These short forms are often organized into cycles; the case of Messages of the Late Miss R.V. Troussova for soprano and ensemble (1967-1980) or Les Propos de Peter Bornemisza, op. 7 (1963-1968), both clearly post-Webernian in style.
Chamber music is where he feels most at home in his teaching and his composition, including frequent pieces for the cimbalom, a traditional Hungarian instrument. Duos (1960-1961) and Szálkák (1973) are examples of this kind of work. With the exceptions of Stele (1994) for large orchestra, a commission from Claudio Abbado, and his …concertante… op. 42, for violin, viola and orchestra (2003), Kurtág rarely writes for large ensembles, preferring to focus his energies on chamber formations, which offer a quicker route to the essence he is pursuing; the dramatic effectiveness he seeks.
Kurtág has just finished his first opera Fin de partie after Samuel Beckett, which premiered in November 2016 at the La Scala Theater in Milan.
Speech
Contemporary Music 7th edition
György Kurtág is a universal artist. His glance is all-encompassing, spanning the whole history of music, from Pérotin to Stockhausen, and all known styles and aesthetics. He is not, however, eclectic. He does not borrow idioms or effects from this or that style or this or that composer. Instead, he constructs his personal universe through elevation, overflying the pre-existing musical landscape. His works awake in the spectator a sense of wholeness or completion, however fragmentary or aphoristic they appear at times. It is as if his creative viewpoint is fixed in some exceptionally high or distant place; an impression that may owe to him having lived most of his life in Budapest, behind the Iron Curtain and remote from the avant-garde scene, or perhaps to his strong love of literature or the fact of having spent so much time on the practice and teaching of chamber music (“the truth of music” as Teresa Berganza calls it).
Legendary chamber artists like Zoltán Kocsis, András Schiff or the Takács Quartet number among his pupils. From that great reservoir of music that was, and is, the Liszt Academy of Budapest, György Kurtág has absorbed all the complexity of the musical 20th century and fashioned from it an original artistic project that resonates strongly through the 21st.
Kurtág’s biography combines firm Hungarian roots with an avid curiosity that made him a keen follower of events in Europe. Born in 1926 in Lugoj, then Romanian Hungary and now Hungarian Romania, he settled in Budapest at the age of twenty. There, at the Franz Liszt Academy, he studied piano with Pál Kadosa, chamber music with Leó Weiner and composition with Sándor Veress, Pál Járdány and Ferenc Farkas. He rose to be a professor at the Academy, of piano initially and shortly after, of chamber music, which he would teach for many years while exercising both specialties on the stage. In 1947 he married the pianist Márta Kinsker, whose views as a musical analyst he listens to closely when judging his own compositions. In Budapest, like his friend György Ligeti, he enjoyed only limited access to Western music scores.
His first journey of discovery was to Paris, where he studied with Olivier Messiaen, Darius Milhaud and Max Deutsch during the 1957-1958 academic year. There he became acquainted with Samuel Beckett and, specifically, his play Endgame, which would exert a lifelong fascination. In Paris, Kurtág analyzed from beginning to end the work of Anton Webern. The result of this investigation was his first acknowledged composition: the String Quartet, op. 1. His first major vocal work was the cantata for soprano and piano The Sayings of Peter Bornemisza, based on the sermons of a Reformation preacher in 15th-century Hungary.
It had its debut in Darmstadt in 1968, but was not well received. Indeed widespread recognition would not come until 1981, again in Paris, where Ensemble Intercontemporain, under Sylvain Cambreling, premiered his Messages of the Late Miss R. V. Troussova, a work characterized by a brand new lyricism and rare expressive intensity. Shortly before, in 1973, Kurtág had begun writing his Elo-Játékok (Pre-Games), which started life as an album for children, but eventually became a kind of compositional diary where for years he would set down his impressions and ideas, calling for a revival of the spontaneity and flexibility of the popular declamatory tradition, Gregorian chant or a child’s piano playing. Kurtág’s interest in the sung text was explored in numerous vocal pieces, like his songs to the works of Russian poets from Lermontov to Akhmatova. Having refused to learn Russian in his youth, when it was obligatory, Kurtág would later study the language in order to read Dostoyevsky.
The fame found with Messages allowed him to embark on a series of European visits, though without severing his Budapest links. These took him to Berlin (1993), where he became resident composer with the Berlin Philharmonic; to Vienna (1995), where he occupied the same post at the Konzerthaus; to Amsterdam (1996), at the invitation of the Royal Conservatory of The Hague; and to Paris (1998), this time to take up residencies with Ensemble Intercontemporain and the Paris Conservatory. Among the products of these stays in Europe were …quasi una fantasia…, op. 27, where Kurtág explores the concept of music in space; Grabstein für Stephan, op. 15c, with its focus on the guitar; Samuel Beckett: What is the Word, for narrator; and Stele, op. 33, premiered by Claudio Abbado and the Berlin Philharmonic.
Kurtág has received a number of major honors – among them, the Kossuth Prize, the Grawemeyer and the Gold Medal of the Royal Philharmonic Society – and has been resident in France since 2002. He is currently working on the opera ‘Fin de partie (Endgame)’, scheduled to be performed at the Salzburg Festival in 2016, the year of his 90th birthday. Kurtág admits that he is still processing the “shock” of his encounter with Beckett. “I’ve spent over four years on this opera and still don’t see an end. I may die before finishing, but I will strive until that final moment to be the interpreter of Beckett.” The one-time mentor of chamber musicians still approaches his writing from the standpoint of a performer, a man of the stage. “I can identify with all four characters in Fin de partie. I try to interpret what is going on in their souls before they even say a word.” Interpreter, also in the sense of a translator of himself and others, with a duty of faithfulness and accuracy. The Frontiers of Knowledge Awards jury affirms in its citation that “for Kurtág, the greatest difficulty is to find the right note, a note that carries within it a whole world.” And indeed the whole of his artistic enterprise can be read as a musical version of Spanish poet Juan Ramón Jiménez’s secular prayer: “Intelligence, give me / the exact name of things!”
