György Kurtág
One of the most highly regarded composers of the past half-century, György Kurtág was born in 1926 in Lugos, Transylvania (present-day Romania), not far from his close contemporary and fellow Hungarian György Ligeti (1923-2006). The two future composers met at the entrance exam at the Budapest Academy of Music in 1946 and formed a life-long friendship. Kurtág studied in Paris with Olivier Messiaen and Darius Milhaud in the late 1950s and experienced a period of crisis in that city (“it [was] impossible for me to compose. . . . I sank to terrible depths of despair”), from which he emerged with the help of psychologist Marianne Stein.
Only at the age of 33 did Kurtág feel sufficiently satisfied with his compositions to begin giving them opus numbers; his string quartet Opus 1 is a work that bears traces of Bartók and Webern, [...]
One of the most highly regarded composers of the past half-century, György Kurtág was born in 1926 in Lugos, Transylvania (present-day Romania), not far from his close contemporary and fellow Hungarian György Ligeti (1923-2006). The two future composers met at the entrance exam at the Budapest Academy of Music in 1946 and formed a life-long friendship. Kurtág studied in Paris with Olivier Messiaen and Darius Milhaud in the late 1950s and experienced a period of crisis in that city (“it [was] impossible for me to compose. . . . I sank to terrible depths of despair”), from which he emerged with the help of psychologist Marianne Stein.
Only at the age of 33 did Kurtág feel sufficiently satisfied with his compositions to begin giving them opus numbers; his string quartet Opus 1 is a work that bears traces of Bartók and Webern, influences which continue to mark his music. It has been described as possessing an “undistracted intelligence,” a quality common to all Kurtág’s music, along with a marked economy of means and rigorous concentration. “One can make music out of almost nothing,” Kurtág has said. The first quartet is available on an ECM recording of Kurtág’s music for strings by the Keller Quartet.
Kurtág taught for many years at the Ferenc Liszt Academy of Music, Budapest, first as a professor of piano (his pupils included András Schiff and Zoltán Kocsis) and then of chamber music. Meanwhile he pursued his rigorous compositional path, producing works such as Játékok (Games) for piano and settings of texts by Hölderlin and Samuel Beckett, all of which are available on ECM.
ECM marked György Kurtag's 80th birthday in 2006 by releasing its fifth full album of his music, the austerely beautiful cycle for soprano and violin Kafka-Fragmente, one of his most personal, and longest, works to date. Characteristically for this master aphorist, it comprises 40 short movements, with texts drawn from Kafka's private writings, diaries and letters. As a whole they form a mosaic of existential intensity. Richard Whitehouse has described this work as an “intense soundscape for the listener to wander through,” a metaphor that holds true for all Kurtág’s oeuvre.
In 2013 György Kurtág was honoured with the Royal Philharmonic Society Gold Medal in London and in 2015 he received the BBVA Foundation “Frontiers of Knowledge Award”.
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