György Kurtág: the vigorous hundred years of the final nice renovator of post-war music | Culture | EUROtoday

There are composers who’re outlined by the vastness of their catalog and others by the depth of every gesture. György Kurtág belongs to this second lineage. Over greater than seven a long time, the composer born in Lugoj (Romania) in 1926, in a Jewish household assimilated to the Hungarian language and tradition, has constructed a universe of fragments, tense silences and supplies subjected to excessive purification. His catalog barely exceeds opus 50, however every observe appears to have gone by a extreme trial earlier than being placed on paper.

Turning 100 years outdated, Kurtág isn’t solely the final survivor of the era that redefined music after World War II —Grove, Stockhausen, Boulez, Nono o Berio—, however a creator who continues to compose and premiere works. On February 7, the pianist Imre Antal Kocsis broadcast on YouTube sequences of a rehearsal of his second opera, The Stechardin.

The footage, filmed within the Great Hall of the Franz Liszt Academy in Budapest, reveals the composer supervising the check and interacting with soprano Maria Husmann and conductor András Keller from his wheelchair. The video opens with a close-up of his diary: below the date of February 19, a short observe in Hungarian reads: “I am one hundred years old.”

Kurtág studied composition, piano and chamber music since 1946 in that historic constructing on Andrássy Avenue. There he established two decisive hyperlinks: he met the pianist Márta Kinsker, his devoted advisor and life companion till her demise in 2019, and the composer György Ligeti, with whom he maintained an aesthetic affinity that in these early years had Bartók’s music as a mannequin. His commencement work confirms it, Movement for viola and orchestra (1953-1954).

But the turning level got here after his keep in Paris in 1957, after the failed Hungarian rebellion. Beyond his research with Olivier Messiaen and Darius Milhaud, the evaluation of Anton Webern’s miniatures and the invention of Boulez and Stockhausen, together with the influence of Samuel Beckett after attending End of sportredefined his inventive horizon. He additionally went by a disaster that he overcame with psychologist Marianne Stein, who suggested him to concentrate on the minute connections between a number of sounds, one thing decisive in his musical considering.

Upon his return to Budapest in 1959, the string quartet designated Opus 1 established the important options of his language. Its first motion, described as “a cockroach’s path to the light,” lasts barely a minute and focuses on particular person notes that make up quick cells mixed with strategies that produce whispers, tremors and crackles.

This brevity responds to an expressive ethic that rejects all pointless parts. Each gesture is subjected to verification and every sound fulfills a exact perform inside a fragile however managed structure. This perspective requires excessive consideration to timbre, articulation and agogic from the performer, and from the listener, concentrated listening.

His vocal manufacturing constitutes one of the vital related nuclei of latest music. Start with The sayings of Péter Bornemisza (1963-1968) and achieved worldwide projection with Messages from the late Miss RV Trusova (1976-1980), a cycle of contrasts and refined instrumental shade. They observe him Kafka Fragment (1985-1987) and works on texts by Akhmatova, Pilinszky and Hölderlin, which place the voice between singing and declamation, with an instrumental accompaniment that at all times acts as an lively counterpoint.

Another central axis is Gamesan open sequence of piano items began in 1973 after one other inventive block. Initially conceived with a pedagogical function, these miniatures perform as a everlasting laboratory: sound video games, tributes, quotes and transcriptions of Bach that reveal the direct relationship between musical thought and bodily gesture. The performances of György and Márta Kurtág established a mannequin based mostly on rhythmic precision and sound management as structural parts.

After a number of residencies as a composer – amongst them the one carried out in 1993 with Claudio Abbado and the Berlin Philharmonic, from which the orchestral work emerged Stele—, the general public fruits got here together with his first opera, Samuel Beckett: Endgamepremiered at La Scala in Milan in 2018 after eight years of labor. At the age of 92, Kurtág transferred the Beckettian theater of the absurd to the operatic subject with out betraying the literary supply or his personal musical model. In his glowing overview of its historic premiereLuis Gago predicted “a very long career for this fiercely anti-sentimental almost anti-opera” and the work has already seen 4 new productions, after its Spanish premiere, in October 2020, on the Palau de Les Arts in Valencia.

Although his music maintains a continuing presence within the repertoire, the centenary has promoted a world deployment. Budapest acts because the epicenter with a competition from February 15 to twenty-eight, 2026 which brings collectively concert events, premieres, conferences and exhibitions. The absolute premiere of his aforementioned second opera stands out, The Stechardina monodrama for soprano and orchestra composed between 2023 and 2025 based mostly on a libretto by Christoph Hein based mostly on texts by the German polymath Georg Christoph Lichtenberg. In it, his first nice love Maria Dorothea Stechard speaks from past. The dedication is clear: Kurtág misplaced Márta in 2019, after 72 years collectively, and this opera is, in his personal phrases, a farewell that conveys the great thing about life and love, and the acceptance of demise.

The competition consists of the premiere of the documentary Kurtág Fragmentsfilmed between 2021 and 2025 by director Dénes Nagy; a convention titled Kurtág Perspectives; and concert events with outstanding performers, together with Pierre-Laurent Aimard, who not too long ago dialogue between Games of Kurtág and the music of Bach inside his CNDM residence on the National Auditorium.

The celebrations unfold all through Europe and North America: and Birminghamthe CBSO and the BCMG have proposed an immersive live performance; in Londonthe Philharmonia will join the 2 concertante compositions of its Op. 27; in Amsterdamel Muziekgebouw ha programado Kafka Fragment con Anna Prohaska and Isabelle Faust; y Bard College in New York dedicates the seventh version of its Kurtág competition to its capability to dialogue with the music of Bach, Schubert, Schumann and Bartók.

Beyond the tribute, the centenary invitations us to rethink his legacy. In a panorama dominated by proliferation and spectacularity, Kurtág has defended composition as an act of sonic duty. Its affect isn’t measured a lot by stylistic imitation as by the moral demand it poses: that of constructing every sound—and every silence—have a selected weight and that music, in its highest expression, turns into an act of fact.