Composer in residence: György Kurtág
He shares not only his forename with Ligeti who is three years older: György Kurtág is, besides Ligeti, the most renowned composer of the region where he comes from; their places of birth are only a few kilometres apart in the multi-peopled state where Hungarians, Germans and Romanians lived together for centuries. Kurtág, born in 1926, also studied at the same music academy as Ligeti in Budapest. The lasting friendship between the two composers began in the corridors of the academy, where they heard the shattering news about the death of Béla Bartók. Like Ligeti, Kurtág also went to the West so as to escape the Communist dictatorship, however, he stayed only for a short time. In the years 1957 and 1958 he worked in Paris with the Hungarian psychologist Marianne Stein and attended courses given by Olivier Messiaen and Darius Milhaud.
György Kurtág
Kurtág’s encounter with music by Anton Webern, whose scores he copied out for himself, with plays by Samuel Beckett, with French architecture and nature brought about an intensive change in Kurtág’s musical thinking. The most visible result was the String Quartet op. 1, composed after his return to Budapest in 1959, in which Kurtág extended his earlier style close to that of Bartók, yet without subjecting himself completely to serial techniques. He approached what was rather a freely atonal music, systematic in its economy and which finds traditional anchorage in the counterpoint of Bach or in the Renaissance.
Up until his opus 33, dedicated to Claudio Abbado and the Berlin Philharmonic, the orchestral work Stele, which Kurtág created during his two-year stay in Berlin as the orchestra’s composer in residence in the years 1993/95, he concentrated almost completely on chamber music, from solo pieces to works for smaller ensembles. His Botschaften des verstorbenen Fräuleins R. V. Troussova, from 1981 for soprano and chamber ensemble brought him international renown. … quasi una fantasia … for piano and groups of instruments, written for the Berlin Festival in October 1988, was the first work in which he was able to realise his long treasured ideas of music that spatially encompasses the listener. Kurtág was composer in residence of the Vienna Konzerthausgesellschaft in the 1995/96 season; in 2004 he is awarded this honour in Salzburg.
Jörg Rothkamm