Hungarian composer, conductor, and educator Peter Eötvös will celebrate his 70th birthday on January 2nd. Ten years ago, on the occasion of Eötvös’s 60th birthday, we asked Claudio Abbado, György Kurtag, Helmut Lachenmann, and Karlheinz Stockhausen to comment. These were their statements.


Claudio Abbado:

"I met Peter Eötvös for the first time in 1988, but I already knew his work as an orchestral conductor, especially his important involvement with the Ensemble Intercontemporain.

The occasion for our meeting was the birth in Vienna of Wien Modern, the new cycle that aimed to present various aspects of contemporary art – music, painting, literature and cinema – as a unified project. For the opening season, I had programmed works by Boulez, Nono, Ligeti and Kurtág. With György Kurtág’s agreement, I invited Peter Eötvös to conduct the first Viennese performance of …quasi una fantasia… for piano and instruments. The pianist was Zoltán Kocsis, to whom, along with Peter Eötvös, Kurtág’s composition is dedicated.

I still remember the emotions aroused by that performance: Eötvös’s capacity to unite extreme rigour and imagination, underlining the significance of every sound and every pause. The poetic Hungarian spirit and the genius of Kurtág, Eötvös and Kocsis had created a miracle.

Since then, I have steadily followed Peter Eötvös’s evolving path from a conductor who also composes to a composer who also conducts – one of the very few who knows how to excel in both fields. His opera Three Sisters, in which he shows his dramatic sense in a comprehensive and original manner, remains a masterpiece of contemporary theatre, and I hope it will soon become known in Italy too. On his sixtieth birthday, I send Peter my affectionate greetings."


György Kurtág:

"Dear Peter – my young fellow combatant, now sixty years old! I salute you! Of course, you have been the combatant for so many of the twentieth century's most important composers – and for some of the younger, less wellknown ones as well.

In addition you have nurtured a new generation of conductors who carry the cause of contemporary music forward. But I also want to celebrate Peter Eötvös the composer and express my thanks for the great pieces you have written since Atlantis and Three Sisters.

I wish – for the enrichment of us all – that the driving force of your life's work will continue to increase and flourish.

Your faithful friend,

Old Gyuri Kurtág"


Helmut Lachenmann:

"Peter Eötvös: for a quarter-century I have been indebted to him – and I’m not the only one – for exemplarily shaped premieres and performances of my own music, and yet it is true that we ‘grateful ones’ – as if one could give thanks enough! – have also long been given the gift of his own music. In it, the ideological clamour comes to a stop.

Harakiri, Chinese Opera, Steine and Three Sisters have all electrified and stimulated me at one time or another, because their overwhelming technical mastery is engrained with a ritual cheerfulness, in which both beauty and unfathomable wisdom have a place.

He is one of the few absolutely independent minds in this country – ‘one of the few’, because he is also independent of himself. For all the rigour and discipline that one can sense behind his unique aural imagination and his exemplary humanity, he and his art subsist on the constant astonishment that arises from being willing to take a chance, to seek adventure. His ‘elder brother’ – as he characterized me not long ago – is happy to have such a relation, and continues to watch him with admiration."


Karlheinz Stockhausen:

"A few thousand joint rehearsals, hundreds of joint concerts in almost every country in the world, more than 10 years of collaboration in the Electronic Music Studio at the WDR in Cologne, countless meetings, at my place and his, sorrows in common and shared joys, and a deep friendship over 37 years with this unique comrade and musician. Thank GOD that he is alive and can continue his work. I am very grateful to him for our life together. "


This text is taken from the Ricordi brochure on Peter Eötvös. You can download it right here.

Photo: Kasskara / Deutsche Grammophon