Zum Tod des Komponisten Péter Eötvös | EUROtoday

MWhen he was seventeen, below the impression of man's first area flight, he wrote the piano piece “Kosmos” in 1961, and a few years later Péter Eötvös wrote a narrative about it: “It wasn't a big bang, but a rebirth. The universe is continuous. A transition.” On the empty floor – you possibly can see it in a video – he attracts a couple of spots and attracts connecting strains: the galaxies, the celebs, the planets, the earth. “And here comes Transylvania and a melody by Bartók. And then it begins again.” Before the eyes of the viewer, the cosmogony of an adolescent emerges in just some strokes, informed from the attitude of the mature composer.

The outlines of an inventive self-portrait could be seen there. All the traits that will form the pondering of the later composer of nice live performance and stage works are already current right here on the core: curiosity and openness, the narrative energy of music, self and world, galaxy and Béla Bartók.

“Psychokosmos” for cimbalom and orchestra, the primary large-scale work by the composer born in Transylvania in 1944, can be a self-portrait. Here the view isn’t in the direction of the starry sky, however inwards. When in the beginning the solo voice of the cimbalom, enveloped in quiet timpani and cymbal noises, rises from the depths after which dissolves into luminous factors of sound in a quasi-improvised method, hidden worlds seem earlier than the listener's internal ear. Rarely has the Hungarian folks instrument been made to talk in such an idiomatic approach.

The Hungarian tone, which can’t be separated from Eötvös' music, articulates a cosmopolitan angle to nationwide heritage that’s averse to any nationalism and exaggerated into the poetic. Bartók performs an vital position on this, and his contemporaries Ligeti and Kurtág additionally change into musical reference factors.

When Eötvös got here to Cologne to check conducting on a DAAD scholarship in 1966 after coaching on the Budapest Music Academy, these conventional references weren’t but so pronounced, however his penchant for exploring sound worlds outdoors the slender canon of the German avant-garde was. Also his delicate humor and his playful curiosity for every type of music, not least jazz.

Karlheinz Stockhausen grew to become his mentor

Karlheinz Stockhausen grew to become his mentor in Cologne. He promoted his creative improvement, gave him entry to the WDR digital studio and included him in his ensemble as a keyboard participant. With him he gave lots of of concert events world wide, together with months-long performances on the World's Fair in Osaka in 1970.

The encounter with Japanese tradition broadened his horizons. It was mirrored not solely within the experimental works of the early Nineteen Seventies, but additionally in later operatic works, together with the one-act play “Lady Sarashina”, primarily based on the notes of a Japanese courtroom woman from the eleventh century, and “Tri sestri” (“Three Sisters “) primarily based on the drama by Anton Chekhov. This work, which premiered in Lyon in 1998 in a manufacturing by Japanese director Ushio Amagatsu and has since been carried out in over thirty theaters, marked Eötvös' breakthrough as an opera composer. A substantial variety of stage works adopted, for which Maria Mezei, the composer's spouse, typically wrote or organized the libretti.

Pierre Boulez had him conduct

A complementary exercise of the extremely productive composer Eötvös was conducting. In 1978, Pierre Boulez appointed him conductor of the Paris Ensemble Intercontemporain. Here he acquired an enormous repertoire of latest works and developed a method that was distinctive in its mixture of precision, pleasant composure and excellent musical competence.

For him, conducting was a extremely developed type of communication. “It is fundamentally based on the ability to establish this contact through personality – through the look, the gesture, the reaction,” he as soon as defined in an interview. “You could also call it charisma. If someone does not have this gift, then he is not a conductor.”

During his 13 years in Paris, Eötvös fully abstained from composing, however they served as preparation for a brand new creative and academic apply. In 1991 he based the International Eötvös Institute for Young Conductors and Composers in Budapest and made it an vital heart for a brand new music training outdoors of music universities, which are sometimes caught of their programs. In his programs, alongside the musical and technical points, organizational points performed an equal position.

He himself deliberate his working life and rehearsal procedures with meticulous precision. Composing, conducting, music training and organizational planning got here collectively in a formidable approach in his apply. An enormous workload that he managed with iron self-discipline and with out sacrificing creative sensitivity. The public thanked him with quite a few worldwide honors. On March twenty fourth, in his eightieth 12 months, he died in Budapest after a severe sickness. But his creative and institutional legacy lives on.