‘I compose to seek the truth’: György Kurtág on depression, totalitarianism and his 73year marriage
György Kurtág is not speaking metaphorically when he says he is quite content to spend the time he has left “living on Ligeti street”. He is with a small crowd gathered outside the Budapest Music Centre – in which he also resides – for the renaming ceremony of the road on which it stands. Formerly Imre Utca (street), it is now György Ligeti street, to mark the centenary of the Hungarian composer who was Kurtág’s longtime friend and mentor.
Kurtág, whose intense, intimate and often brief music could hardly be more different to Ligeti’s, spent years in the latter’s shadow; international recognition only came in the 80s. But even 17 years after Ligeti’s death, he can scarcely contemplate a conversation or a composition without referring to him. He rarely gives interviews, but has made an exception to mark his friend’s anniversary and the UK debut of his first opera.
He makes no secret of his insecurities, episodes of mental illness which sometimes paralysed – his word – his creativity for years at a time. Now 97, he wants to use his remaining years to concentrate on his music.
In the BMC he attends a rehearsal of the piece he has written to commemorate his friend. As Concerto Budapest performs Ligeti’s Century – Roaming in the Past, Kurtág sits behind its music director, András Keller, shadowconducting from the score which quivers in his hands, and making the sounds he thinks the instruments should be making. “Yo-reee, not yo-ri”, he says. “Pa-DAL!”, he shouts, his elbow pushing into the arm of his wheelchair.
“The sound should be shredded, not whole,” he instructs the orchestra, or, he urges the cellists, who are playing pizzicato, to “enjoy the resonation more”; at another moment, “here you should convey a kind of doubt, and not be so confident”. A clarinet is admonished for allowing a horn to muffle its sound. There is much banter and laughter. It is pure entertainment to behold.
Kurtág is the last survivor of an outstanding generation of postwar avant garde composers that includes Boulez, Stockhausen and Nono, but he emphasises how important Hungarian composers Bartók and Kodály also were to both him and Ligeti. While Kurtág largely stayed in Communist Hungary, Ligeti escaped and settled in western Europe, though the two managed to remain closely connected.
Sitting in a wood-panelled rehearsal room at the BMC, Kurtág, speaking in German, clad in his house slippers and a tailored jacket, recalls their first meeting as being “like a lightning strike”, during the entrance exam for music school in September 1945.
“I read his scores and I could see that this was no student, but a fullblown musician. From that moment on, I was his follower, I was his satellite and orbited around him, and that was how our lifelong relationship was,” he says. “Even after his death I feel the connection to him, to his undiminished curiosity.”
The time Kurtág spent in Paris with his wife, Márta, a concert pianist, almost immediately after the Hungarian uprising in 1957-8, was vital to his creative development. It also helped him escape the stifling atmosphere under a dictatorship. “It was like a liberation. I remember suddenly noticing how Márta and I spoke to each other on the street, and that we no longer had to lower our voices. That was when I understood how scared we had been.”
It was also in Paris that Kurtág met Marianne Stein, an art psychologist who helped him recover from a creative block. “This encounter really freed me,” he says. “It made me realise I should compose in the way that felt right to me, not to others, that I should seek the truth.” His sense of gratitude towards her is embodied in the string quartet he wrote and dedicated to her in 1959 after his return to Budapest, which he said marked a crucial turning point; he refers to this piece as his Opus 1.
“She had told me I should concentrate on Einzeltöne, single notes,” Kurtág says. “She told me to bring two notes together in conjunction with each other. She meant I should create a melodic unity, but I had understood her to mean that I should write pieces beginning with one note, like a C, and ending with, say, an A. The misunderstanding triggered a new thought process in me about how I should compose.”
The result was a distinctive style in which Kurtág’s compositions became like laboratories in which he experimented with sounds and expressions. They are typically fragmentary, condensed, crystalline and intensely personal; when asked to describe his method, he takes a pen, holds it tightly and concentratedly and produces a heavy black whirling dent on the page, so compressed that on first glance it resembles a squashed fly. There is a brief glint of mischief in his eye.
The concentrated brevity of Kurtág’s output means that his entire published works could be heard in approximately 10 hours. He has a reputation for being uncompromising and difficult, but musicians who follow him, disciple-like, rhapsodise about his versatility, as well as the challenges he sets them.
Cellist Steven Isserlis describes him as a benevolent but intensely demanding father figure. “He is so critical, and I love it. He stretches me, he makes demands of me and it’s great.” His music, Isserlis says, has a vulnerability to it, and information in every moment. “You have to be absolutely convinced when you play it. What he’s taught me above all is just how much intensity there can be in each note.”
Víkingur Ólafsson, the star Icelandic pianist, became hooked as a boy, he says, listening to recordings of Kurtág that his father played obsessively. He marvels at his ability to extract new sounds out of instruments, “the kind of sonority that you really wouldn’t think is possible. He makes the violin play as if it were the whole orchestra, it becomes a kind of cosmic instrument. He transcends and redefines the piano and leads me to question myself and whether I do indeed actually know the piano.”
This week, Endgame, his first and only opera, whose libretto is taken from Beckett’s play, comes to the Proms with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and Ryan Wigglesworth. “It was Ligeti who had led me to Beckett – he had written to tell me I should see Waiting for Godot,” Kurtág says. “I saw Fin de Partie [Endgame] on the stage in Paris in 1957, though back then my French wasn’t good enough to understand it.” A shared love of Beckett was also part of the lifelong bond he held with Márta. “That’s why he has remained so important to me my whole life,” he says.
He might even have met the Irish writer, he admits, had his shyness not got in the way. “We were in Berlin at the same time [in the 1970s]. But I avoided a meeting because I knew I didn’t have any intelligent questions to ask him.”
The opera commission came in 2010, and he spent the next two years, “just studying the text. From there I began working on the composition. In all it took me over seven years.” At his side, sitting next to him at the piano, was Márta. “I called her my Muse Gendarme,” he says with a smile. “She recognised that I had a kind of depression so she made sure I sat there and worked on it. Every day. And that’s the only reason I was able to finish it.” The work was premiered at La Scala, Milan, in 2018.
He insists however it is still not actually finished. “Important elements are missing,” he says. They include Hamm’s toy dog, his “bon objet”, which he later discards. “When Clov hits him with the dog, this is the strongest and most tragic moment in the piece. I’ve yet to set it to music, but without it it’s lacking.” Asked if he might complete it in time for its UK premiere, he raises his eyebrows. “Perhaps.”
But his greatest desire, he says, is to “lay down next to Márta,” who died in 2019 aged 92. “Márta and I were married for 73 years, but it feels like no time at all. I’m simply waiting until we can be together again.”
The couple’s performances on stage were legendary, literal embraces at the piano, their hands interlocking over the keys, the intimate interactions reflected in the scores – dotted lines dancing between the notes like their arms around each other. Their collaboration amounted to one of the longest and most meaningful relationships in the history of music.
He still talks to her, he admits. “I still hear her chiding me for being too pompous and priest-like, too polite.”