Two highly anticipated Kurtág publications were released in March: Lebenslauf (1992) and Einige Sätze aus den Sudelbüchern von Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1999). Until now they could be performed only from the manuscripts and only by special permission of the composer. Now both works are published and freely available for performance.

Lebenslauf (1992)
The title of Kurtág’s Lebenslauf (Course of Life) comes from the Hölderlin poem of the same name. The work was composed in 1992 for the 85th birthday of Kurtág’s teacher, Sándor Veress. The instrumentation is unusual: two basset horns and two quarter-tone pianos (the well-known predecessor of the latter is Charles Ives’s Three Quarter-Tone Pieces for two pianos). The special tuning in this case is not to make an ultra-chromatic tonality, but rather to make the contours of the sound more nebulous, somewhat incomprehensible and dreamlike, which is further accomplished by the alignment of the two wind instruments with the normal pitch of the piano.

The broad spanning and highly ornamented cantilena of the two basset horns reflects the inspiration of folk music. In many respects the musical material links with Kurtág’s other compositions, for example the movements of the Games series, the reflections to colinda-like melodies, and the second piece of Three Old Inscriptions (op. 25).

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Einige Sätze aus den Sudelbüchern von Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Kurtág’s work Einige Sätze aus den Sudelbüchern von Georg Christoph Lichtenberg uses selected texts from Georg Christoph Lichtenberg’s posthumous collection of aphorisms, writings which embrace almost all the themes that concerned the thinkers of the time. For performances of the original version of Lichtenberg (1996), the performer would freely select from the collection of musical aphorisms. (This first version was withdrawn.)

The final version, however, composed in 1999, cannot be disjoined. It is a unified composition, although the much material remained almost unchanged. Some pieces are purely aphoristic snapshots that despite their brevity are movements of great form. Thus the work can be placed beside Kurtág’s major vocal cycles. It is akin to his Kafka Fragments, op. 24 and Attila József Fragments, op. 20 series, but perhaps is closest to Eszká-emlékzaj (Remembrance Noise), op. 12 duo for soprano and violin. Despite the short movements, the form is not fragmentary; the building blocks of the individual pieces within the cycle, even if in character are different, echo the shaping principles of the early instrumental pieces (op. 1-5) in Kurtág’s oeuvre.

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