‘My mother tongue is Bartók, and Bartók’s mother tongue was Beethoven.’ This is how György Kurtág once described his musical roots. A no less important guiding figure was arguably Anton Webern, who served as a model for the concentrated economy of expression that Kurtág achieves in his works. Few composers can draw on these giants so openly and with such natural clarity, yet not risk being eclipsed by them. The deeply self-critical and exacting György Kurtág homes in on the most delicate shades of feeling and transforms them into gestures and sounds with the precision of a miniature painter, giving them vivid form and colour. This meticulous­ness also makes him a revered – and de­manding – teacher: every note, no matter how small, must be imbued with heart and soul. But for all his intellect and inwardness – his compassion, humour, melan­choly and pain – there remains, even in the smallest cluster of notes, an essential and uninhibited joy in making music: a simple urge to share that makes it speak to us like a language of everyday life.

György Kurtág was born in 1926 in Lugoj (Hun­garian: Lugos), in Romania’s Banat region, a culturally diverse area home to Hungarian, German and Rus­sian ethnic groups. He discovered music as a school­boy in Timişoara (Hungarian: Temesvár), and gave one of his early piano pieces the title As If Someone Were Coming. In 1945, the young high-school graduate made his way to Budapest, hoping that Béla Bartók would return to his homeland and teach – in vain, as Bartók passed away that same year in New York. A decade later, during the 1956 uprising against Hungary’s Communist regime, he faced another cruel setback: unlike his friend György Ligeti, who managed to escape Hungary, Kurtág and his small family were unable to emigrate to Austria. Following a period of severe psychological crisis during a stay in Paris, he began composing in an entirely new way at the end of the 1950s and returned to Budapest. Behind the Iron Curtain, he emerged as one of the most significant composers of his generation, though it was not until the 1980s that the West finally took notice. Today, Kurtág’s miniature sound worlds – full of deeply felt gestures, perfectly realized fragments and poignantly vivid memories – captivate audiences around the world.

Walter Weidringer · Translation: Sebastian Smallshaw