GyörgyKurtág

Kurtág was eleven or twelve when his parents named the symphony coming from the radio: Schubert’s “Unfinished”. He was astonished that anyone could recognise such music. When he heard it again alone, he recognised it himself. “I asked for and was given the score,” he told Bálint András Varga in their 1982–⁠85 interview; he then learned the piano arrangement. At home he and his mother played Beethoven symphonies four hands, sometimes far beyond their abilities, and read on regardless.

He was born in Lugoj in 1926, in the Banat, where Hungarian, Romanian and German were everyday languages. In nearby Timișoara his piano teacher Magda Kardos entrusted him with younger pupils, so he began teaching while still a teenager. At the Budapest Academy’s entrance examinations in September 1945 he met György Ligeti, whose scores he already regarded as the work of a fully formed musician. Both young men had grown up with Bartók as their great example.

Kurtág began his studies in Budapest in 1946. He studied composition with Sándor Veress and then Ferenc Farkas, piano with Pál Kadosa and chamber music with Leó Weiner. He qualified in piano and chamber music in 1951 and in composition four years later. The pianist Márta Kinsker became the first reader and critic of his new pieces, and he trusted her ear through every later crisis. They married in 1947.

Paris, 1957–⁠58Paris and Marianne Stein

After the suppression of the Hungarian uprising, he went to Paris. Walking there with Márta, he realised they had stopped lowering their voices in the street. He attended classes with Messiaen and Milhaud and heard Boulez conduct at the Domaine musical. He found composing very difficult. Marianne Stein, a psychologist who worked with artists, gave him small tasks to attempt.

“She told me to bring two notes together in conjunction with each other,” he recalled to Kate Connolly in Budapest in 2023. Stein meant a melodic connection. Kurtág took it to mean that a piece might begin on C and end on A, and the misunderstanding set him thinking again.

1963–⁠73The Sayings of Péter Bornemisza and Játékok

He had wanted to make an opera from Péter Bornemisza’s Hungarian version of Electra. Instead, the sixteenth-century preacher’s sermons provided the text of The Sayings of Péter Bornemisza, composed between 1963 and 1968. The work is for soprano and piano, in twenty-four short movements grouped as Confession, Sin, Death and Spring. The piano begins by repeating C, then adds D♭, and the voice enters on B♮, so the opening notes lie a semitone on either side of C. Erika Sziklay and Lóránt Szűcs gave the première at Darmstadt in September 1968.

The collection included pieces addressed to particular people: bells for Stravinsky, a birthday greeting for the publisher Alfred Schlee, and homages to Ferenc Farkas and to Márta. Husband and wife played these pieces in concert alongside his four-hand Bach transcriptions. Their 1996 recording places the Sonatina from Actus tragicus among pieces lasting less than a minute. The two players share one keyboard.

1981–⁠89Troussova and Kafka-⁠Fragmente

Rimma Dalos entered his life as the Russian translator of the Bornemisza texts for a record booklet. Her own poems became Messages of the Late Miss R. V. Troussova, twenty-one brief accounts of loneliness and desire, sung in Russian. Adrienne Csengery, the Ensemble intercontemporain and Sylvain Cambreling gave the Paris première on 14 January 1981, and the work brought Kurtág international recognition at fifty-four. The instrumental ensemble includes mandolin, harp and cimbalom. In one song the woman asks why she should not squeal like a pig, and the soprano sings unaccompanied.

The work also commemorates the dead. Officium breve (1988–⁠89) names the composer Endre Szervánszky in its title, and other friends are commemorated within its fifteen movements. A canon from Webern’s Second Cantata is transcribed for the four strings. At the end comes a melody from Szervánszky’s Serenade for Strings, in an older, more flowing style. Kurtág cuts it off on a held chord.

1994–⁠2026Beckett at La Scala

His Berlin Philharmonic residency produced Stele (1994), a thirteen-minute work for a very large orchestra, dedicated to Claudio Abbado and his players. One of its three movements is a lament; the keyboard instruments include a concert piano and a small upright. …concertante… (2003) was written for the violinist Hiromi Kikuchi and the violist Ken Hakii, who gave the première in Copenhagen as soloists with another large orchestra.

Kurtág had seen Beckett’s Fin de partie in Paris in 1957, when he had too little French to understand it properly. Sixty-one years later his operatic setting reached La Scala, conducted by Markus Stenz and staged by Pierre Audi. The characters are Beckett’s Hamm, Clov, Nagg and Nell; Hamm’s parents live in rubbish bins. Márta had sat beside Kurtág at the piano while he composed and insisted that he work every day. In his 2023 interview with Connolly he called her his “Muse Gendarme”.

Márta died in 2019. “I still hear her chiding me for being too pompous and priest-like, too polite,” he told Connolly four years later. He turned one hundred on 19 February 2026. The next evening in Budapest, Maria Husmann sang the première of his second opera, Die Stechardin, with András Keller conducting. In the opera a woman waits beyond death for the man she loved. At the end of the performance a photograph of Márta appeared at the back of the stage.