GYÖRGY KURTÁG
Composer, pianist and teacher, the great artist defines, with the complexity and originality of his musical message, the fundamental coordinates of avant-garde music.
György Kurtág was born on February 19, 1926 in Lugoj, in a house at 15 (later 17) Honoriciului Street. The name of the street changed several times: Damjanich utca (1891-1920), Honoriciului (1920-30), G. Clemenceau (1930-64) and Smârdan (1964 – present). The Kurtágs only lived there for some two years, the future composer spending his last Lugoj years in the building at 25 (currently 19) Xenopol Street that his parents Zoltán and Bianca bought from Professor E. Peteanu in 1930. In Lugoj, Kurtág first studied at the Israelite Elementary School, also known as the Enrich Berdach Confessional Jewish Private School, went to middle school at the Coriolan Brediceanu High School for Boys, and studied music at the Conservatory, with Clara Peia-Vojkicza (piano) and Filaret Barbu (music theory).
In 1940, Kurtág settled in Timişoara, where he enrolled at the Piarist High School while taking private lessons with Magda Kardos (piano) and Max Eisikovits (composition). In 1945 he was admitted, based on the presentation of a Suite for piano, to the Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music in Budapest, to study composition. He had intended to train with Béla Bartók, the musician whom he admired the most, but some problems concerning his legal stay in Hungary constrained him to return to Timişoara, where he became an active contributor to the local musical life and where he was, for a few months, organist at the reformed church in Sfânta Maria Square.
After a year in the “Little Vienna”, as the city of Timişoara was known, in the fall of 1946 Kurtág found his home in Budapest, studying at the Liszt Ferenc Academy with Pál Kadosa (piano), Sándor Veress and Ferenc Farkas (composition), and Leo Weiner (chamber music). It was in those years that he befriended another great musician born on Romanian soil, György Ligeti, who would dedicate him his Étude no. 11 for piano “En suspens”. After graduating with a diploma in piano, chamber music and composition, he started on his musical adventure in Paris where, between 1957 and 1958, he pursued further studies in musical analysis under Olivier Messiaen, composition under Darius Milhaud and music psychology under Marianne Stein. As expected, Kurtág’s early works show the influence of not only Webern’s, but of Messiaen’s compositional methods too, as explained in the Frenchman’s Technique de mon langage musical. On his return to Budapest, György Kurtág was piano accompanist at the Béla Bartók Music School (1958-63) and at the National Philharmonia (1960-68), teaching piano and chamber music at the Liszt Ferenc Academy until his retirement in 1986.
A true European, Kurtág’s artistic call was recognized among others by the position of composer-in-residence with such important cultural centres as Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, the Berliner Philharmoniker (1993-95, 1998-99) and the Konzerthaus Vienna (1995-96). In 1995, György Kurtág marked the commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II with his participation in the collaborative work Requiem of Reconciliation, commissioned by Internationale Bachakademie Stuttgart and for which he wrote, in a serial manner, the Epilogue: Inscription on a Grave in Cornwall.
György Kurtág would next spend a couple of years in The Netherlands (1996-98), as guest of several prestigious institutions. A bit later, in 1999, he was awarded the Honorary Prize for Art and Science of the Institute for Advanced Study Berlin, the city he had visited as a grantee of a DAAD scholarship in 1971, and from 1999 to 2011 he lived in Paris, upon the invitation of Ensemble Contemporain, the Conservatoire and the Festival d’Automne.
A new stage in Kurtág’s oeuvre began with the revival of his spiritual ties with his native Lugoj: recalling the ambiance of his years in middle school, reading the excellent works of former colleagues (Gheorghe Alexandru Iancovici), meeting the Ion Vidu Chamber Choir and his conductor maestro Remus Taşcău were the impetus for new pieces. Indeed, Kurtág wrote in the Choir’s guestbook on April 1, 2008: “As a child I often listened to the Ion Vidu Choir, and I still remember that magical sound. I haven’t heard it now, neither in concert nor in rehearsal, but I know maestro Taşcău’s exceptional recordings, and I would like to try to write something worthy of this choir”.
In 2008, Kurtág completed his first piece ever to use the Romanian language – Colindă-baladă Op. 46 “in memory of our teacher Felician Brînzeu” for tenor, choir and an instrumental ensemble featuring the semantron, setting a carol collected by Béla Bartók in the village of Păucinești in Hunedoara County. The first performance took place on March 29, 2009 in Cluj, with Cornel Groza conducting the Transilvania Philharmonic Choir and Orchestra and with the participation of an elite chamber ensemble.
(Excerpts from Stan, Constantin-T. György Kurtág. Reîntoarcerea la matricea spirituală [György Kurtág. The Return to the Spiritual Matrix], Cluj-Napoca: MediaMusica, 2009)