Where do we start, if not the in the present? Today, composer György Kurtág is one of the wonders of the musical world. At the age of ninety, despite his physical frailty, he is working with unyielding creative energy on his first opera (libretto: Samuel Beckett’s Endgame).
Finis coronat opus. The end crowns the work. The signs indicate that Kurtág is on the right path to this. Each of us should choose an answer according to his conviction: “a god-given gift”, or “fate looked kindly on him”, or “all his life he’s been doing something right.” But what?
The first key word is suffering. To be born, as Kurtág was, a Hungarian in Romania in 1926, and to be Jewish among Hungarians and Romanians in the 1940s, were both formative life experiences. His mother, who was the source of his affinity for music, died when he was very young.
In 1945 Kurtág went to the Budapest Music Academy in order to study under Béla Bartók, but Bartók had left the academy with leukemia that proved fatal. Instead, he began a lifelong friendship with György Ligeti, and obtained a great education. He studied piano with Pál Kadosa, composition with Sándor Veress and Ferenc Farkas, and chamber music with Leó Weiner. Graduating from the Music Academy, however, never made anybody a composer.
Kurtág continued to suffer, then with the inability to compose. His life has been punctuated by creative crises, blocks, and periods of creative paralysis. He found the way out of his first big crisis in 1959, with treatment by the psychotherapist Marianne Stein in Paris. He considered this moment a tabula rasa - an opportunity to make a fresh start. He struggled bitterly for every single note, but of every single one of the notes written thereafter it can be said that only Kurtág could have written them. He himself said: “every note must be worked for.” His struggle created a particularly intensive, expressive musical idiom already demonstrated in his instrumental music of the 1960s–70s, and his first major work, The Sayings of Péter Bornemisza (1963–68), burns with an intensity of passion of Schütz or Monteverdi.
When Kurtág discovered small forms he resolved another creative crisis. The Játékok (Games) series is a collection of piano pieces, pedagogical in purpose, which invite children to discover the instrument and music free of constraint - giving them freedom - and also functions as Kurtág’s compositional workshop, an anthology of his musical idiom, and the most intimate musical diary, which he continues to develop to this day. The pieces in Játékok (Games) are linked in many ways to his “large” works designated with opus numbers.
Kurtág’s oeuvre has long been defined by his attention to small forms. Individual movements often condense an emotion, gesture, or a whole drama into a mere ten or twenty seconds. Kurtág is a poet of aphoristic brevity and he is attracted to fragments, because through their unfinishedness and plurality of meaning they nurture a closer relationship with the inexplicable, the mystic, the wondrous, the infinite, than the most perfect of classical masterpieces. In this respect Kurtág’s “ancestor” is not Goethe and especially not Schiller, but Novalis and Hölderlin; not Palestrina, but Schütz; not Mozart, but Schumann.
Kurtág believes that the finished poem often leaves little room for the composer’s imagination. A line or two, a few words from Attila József, Franz Kafka, Friedrich Hölderlin, or Samuel Beckett, is a fragment of such conceptual gravity that “concluding it” or “rounding it out” can be a life’s work. The main thread in the works of the poets mentioned is pain and madness. This is the gravity of the texts that make up Kurtág’s miniatures; from them cycles are built, and the large form is created. From these “fragments” Kurtág builds cathedrals such as the Attila József Fragments, or one of his main works, the Kafka Fragments, as well as the two cycles composed on Russian texts by Rimma Dalos, Messages of the Late R. V. Troussova (1981), which brought the composer international fame, and Scenes from a Novel (1982).
According to Kurtág “our entire life is nothing but a single pilgrimage, to regain the child lost within us.” The impartial curiosity, absolute openness, and ardent love that he nurtures for certain composers of the past imply that he has managed to find this inner child. As a result, among contemporary composers perhaps Kurtág’s relationship to the heritage of music history is least burdened. His knowledge of the musical literature is vast and encyclopaedic in its completeness. He taught chamber music repertoire for decades.
Many moments in his compositions echo favourite moments from the musical repertoire of the past, but in an unmistakably individual manner. His relationship to Hungarian and Romanian folk music is similar. His musical thinking is determined by the experience of folk music (some of his movements exist in many variants, like folksongs). Kurtág does not consciously continue the Hungarian idiom of Bartók and Kodály, though neither does he eschew this influence. In this way his music preserves to this day, unencumbered by any ideology, the imprint of Hungarian and central European folklore.
According to some analysts of Kurtág’s entire oeuvre demonstrates a struggle for a large form. In his later works he has come ever closer to the goal, as shown by the ...concertante... Op. 42 for violin, viola and orchestra, and the Op. 46 Colinda-Balada to a text in Romanian.
According to one Hungarian folksong: “Who would be a piper / must to hell go / and there he must learn / how the pipes to blow.” Kurtág has made this journey, and on his pipes he plays to us the melody of forgotten beauty. He has suffered for this beauty, so we believe him, and we believe him in particular: that such beauty still exists.
A portrait of Kurtág today is inconceivable without his wife Márta, to whom he has been married since 1947. She is another wonder. “Márta is my projected superego. She has a sense of proportion,” confesses Kurtág. She is the first critic of his works, and with him the congenial performer of his piano pieces. Anyone who has ever seen their four-hand concerts, how they play pieces from the Játékok (Games) series and Bach transcriptions, can say that they have encountered an inexplicable degree of human and artistic belonging. With the perfect harmony and unity of two people.
Zoltán Farkas
(translated by Richard Robinson)
published with permission of Budapest Music Center