György Kurtág: Three Interviews and Ligeti Homages (review)

Bálint András Varga is a master at interviewing composers. His book-length conversations with Witold Lutoslawski, Luciano Berio and Iannis Xenakis are classics of the literature on those composers, and his interview collection 3 kérdés, 82 zeneszerző (3 Questions, 82 Composers [Budapest: Zeneműkiadó, 1986]) have set new standards of breadth and depth in writings on contemporary music. With this new book, Varga has truly "come home." A Hungarian long associated with Editio Musica Budapest before joining Universal Edition, he has been promoting György Kurtág's music since the 1970s and has considered his fellow countryman Kurtág a primary musical reference for decades. For many years, the Hungarian composer refused to give any interviews and acquired the reputation of a notoriously difficult person to get close to; the compilation of the present volume required a friend with uncommon patience, sensitivity, and a deep devotion to, as well as familiarity with, Kurtág's work—a combination of qualities that very few writers possess.

The interviews contained in the book cover a time span of more than twenty-five years. The conversation began in 1982, when Kurtág (b. 1926) was one of the eighty-two composers to whom Varga addressed his three questions. Those questions were revisited in 1996, when Kurtág gave new (and sometimes startlingly different) answers to them. It is very helpful to see both sets of answers, printed separately in publications now hard to find, reunited in a book that offers the most complete collection of the composer's statements ever published in English.

Kurtág was the recipient of the 2006 Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition. His Kafka Fragments conquered Carnegie Hall in a spectacular dramatization by Peter Sellars a few years ago. These are indications that Kurtág, who has long been revered in Europe, is finally beginning to receive his due in the United States as well. His music combines the ideal of "organicity" (where everything derives from a single musical premise) with a rare expressivity and communicative power. He is also one of the most literary and polyglot composers active today. He has set to music texts in seven languages (Hungarian, German, Russian, English, French, ancient Greek, and Romanian), all of which he knows intimately. Also a legendary coach of chamber music, Kurtág has an exceptional ear for nuance that also informs his compositional work—in his music, every single note seems to be a matter of life or death.

The pages of the book reveal a life marked by World War II and Communism in Kurtág's native Romania as well as in Hungary, where he resettled in 1945. Yet Western Europe has loomed large on the horizon ever since an early year of studies spent in Paris (1957–58); in the 1990s he finally moved to the West and now makes his home in southwestern France). We are treated to an impressive portrait gallery of teachers, colleagues, friends, and government functionaries, benevolent and otherwise, and, like the proverbial fly on the wall, we catch glimpses of what Kurtág calls his "personal mythology" as the private becomes public. Kurtág's wife of more than sixty years, the pianist Márta Kurtág, with whom the composer has frequently appeared in piano-duet recitals, plays a crucial part in these conversations; she offers many important insights, amplifying, completing, and sometimes even contradicting her husband's thoughts.

For a book of composer interviews, the volume is remarkable for its concentration on the internal rather than the external. That is to say, it is not primarily a listing of where and by whom Kurtág's music has been performed in the world or the awards and prizes he has received. The focus, rather, is on the feelings behind the works, the literary and musical associations...