Dedication: To the City of Witten
Commissioner: Wittener Tage für neue Kammermusik
Premiere location: Witten
Premiere date: 1978.04.21.
Premiere performers: Éder Quartet: Pál Éder, Erika Tóth (violin); Zoltán Tóth (viola); György Éder (violoncello)
Hungarian premiere location: Liszt Academy of Music - Chamber Hall (Budapest)
Hungarian premiere date: 1978.10.01.
Hungarian premiere performers: Éder Quartet: Pál Éder, Erika Tóth (violin(; Zoltán Tóth (viola); György Éder (violoncello)
Composition end location: Budaliget
Composition end date: 1978.01.31
Genre: Chamber Music
Instrumentation: 2 violins, viola, violoncello
Duration (minutes): 9
Year of publication: 1979
Publisher: Editio Musica Budapest
Publication number: Z. 8716 – ISMN: M-080-08716-9

1 [quarter note = 20]
2 (quasi allegretto)
3 [quarter note = 125–115]
4 Presto
5 Lontano, calmo, appena sentito
6 [whole note = 20–30]
7 [without tempo marking]
8 Con slancio
9 Leggiero/ Pesante, con moto
10 Molto agitato–Più presto
11 [whole note = 20]
12 Leggiero, con moto, non dolce

It is an instrumental work with no text.

To the best of our knowledge, no critical review was written about the work’s premiere in Witten (Germany).

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Reviews of the Hungarian premier

György Kroó's review of the Hungarian premiere
(Élet és Irodalom, October 14, 1978)

The conversation about György Kurtág’s Hommage à Mihály András (12 Microludium for String Quartet), dedicated to the city of Witten and recently premiered in Budapest, turned to short-breathed microstructures and their sequences as a common compositional technique in contemporary Hungarian music that seeks to replace traditional large forms (fugue, sonata allegro, variation, etc.). None of us missed the rhetorical eloquence of the Baroque, the agitational lyrical pathos in music that began with Beethoven, or the missionary zeal of the 19th-century total art movement; rather, we simply reflected on the exclusivity of the aphoristic character. While in literature this form of expression or attitude spans a vast tradition from Hippocrates to Montaigne and Pascal, and from Aurelius to Nietzsche, in European music it is a characteristic product of our century, which – though seemingly dismissive of musical Romanticism – in its tendencies, in the case of Webern just as in that of Kurtág, were inherited primarily from Novalis, the poet of Fragments. As my thoughts wandered further through Kurtág’s oeuvre in the wake of the conversation, I recalled maxims and jokes (the musical settings of texts by Bálint or Tandori), but even this did nothing to explain why I feel such complete emotional and intellectual satisfaction after listening to one of his series, or why even his most recent piece fills me with that profound, harmonious silence with which we receive nature’s gifts.

The material he works with is incredibly simple: two- or three-note melodic seeds, fragments of scales, acoustic fifths, intervals heard a thousand times over, major thirds, major triads, ostinato formulas, the “giusto” character of folk music filtering through, and a range of playing styles, timbres, and effects that have been native to this land for 50–60 years. The “tools” and basic principles of craftsmanship are also traditional: this is still the same artisanal workshop as that of Frescobaldi or Debussy. The finished work, however, though it can be read, played, and heard like any piece from Europe’s 800-year-old polyphonic musical tradition, is distinctly contemporary; it is a distillate, an essence that condenses its message much as a code condenses information. In these minutiae – crafted with meticulous care and self-criticism – there is not a single superfluous note or pause, nor any filler or packaging. Every moment communicates, and it does so through the historical inflections of European music – from the chorale, through Bartók, to Gregorian chant; we are all familiar with these codes. But these are not classical-romantic miniatures or genre pieces. These “shorties” are entire universes unfolding before us under a microscope. And although their immeasurable vastness – and, at times, their visionary quality, soaring on the border between night and day – justified my mention of Novalis’s name as an association a moment ago, the atmosphere of the Microludiums, their ethereal lightness, polished refinement, flawless crystalline structure, and the way they arrive from afar and, after they have faded away, continue to resonate within us – reminds me, more than anything else, of the poetry of the haiku.

The spiderweb-like network of connections among the “three-line pieces” (the longest piece in the series is no more than twenty measures), the story of their growth into groups and then into a single whole – and, thereafter, a creation that rejects all literary analogies and can be understood only through music, within music. Arranging according to the ascending degrees of the scale is really only a superficial principle. Even the allusions, rhymes, and echoes pale in comparison to the series’ poetic logic. Even the first 40 seconds form a single organic entity, with the four voices – under the motionless surface – each offering their own melodic sighs and tremors, and the silhouette of a chord quietly piling up on the opening note, almost unnoticed. The rustling, deep forte C-sharp of the violas at the beginning of the second movement, the shifting bowing patterns, and the more expansive gestures bring momentum to the cycle. The movement, built around the note D, shapes its melodic phrases to highlight a triumphant ostinato. The sweeping gestures and wide register of the gripping presto already encapsulate and conclude a full movement’s worth of material. In place of the slow section, a similarly resonant “Lontano” melody filters in through the veil of time spanning distant centuries, and the tender, lyrical tone of a dolce movement in F major signals our era’s nostalgia for Schubert. A scherzo movement certainly begins with a playful scale passage: a grand prelude, a shy, stuttering aria, then… curtain. This is followed by a boisterous fifth chord and a noble pesante dance scene; finally, a fantastic rush (with the baton at the foot: molto agitato) brings the imaginary third movement to a close. The final movement begins with a stirring chorale that recapitulates the scale motif of the entire cycle once more. The final piece (Leggiero) almost begs for interpretation: the poet speaks. The series bears the number Op. 13. It is the spiritual successor to Játékok (Games), Kurtág’s Microcosmos album, having emerged from its Hommage- and Microludium-series. But it is not a transcription; it is an original work for András Mihály, the great mentor of Hungarian string quartets: 12 Microludiums for string quartet. Kurtág composed it for his composer’s evening in Witten between November 6, 1977, and January 31, 1978. The rest of the information is contained within the music.

(„Kurtág György kódjai”, Élet és Irodalom 22 [1978]/41, 13.)

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Tibor Tallián's review of the Hungarian premiere
(Muzsika, December 1978)

György Kurtág’s Op. 13, Twelve Microludiums for String Quartet (Hommage à Mihály András, premiered by the Éder String Quartet), embodies a model of fragmentary forms strung together into a series; yet this series, despite its brevity, constitutes a true cycle. It is not primarily dramatic, but systematic (in the spirit of Játékok); it does not develop directly into a large-scale work with a central, focused dramaturgy (like the classical and expressionist cycles), but instead explores the world in a “quasi-extensive” manner, following a sequential pattern. In the Twelve Microludiums, the ascending twelve-step scale serves as the objective, systematic organizing principle. By employing it, the composer preserves the dramatic character of the cycle while simultaneously dissolving it. Through the interweaving of these non-autonomous small forms, the cycle is naturally more tightly knit than similar prelude series in the musical canon based on the same principle. The structure is closed, but not in the manner of traditional, free architectural forms; instead, it follows a path that is both more rigorous and, at the same time, a detour, through a microcosmic, study-like approach. In Kurtág’s case, the solution is so logical and rich, and it restores primary musical expression along the lines of the system so effectively that, in connection with this work, one can wholeheartedly draw a parallel to Bartók – who was around fifty years old at the time – and the constructivism of his Mikrokosmos, which ensured a new quality and potential for expression. What does the prelude principle, transformed into a cycle, offer Kurtág, and what does he offer in this form that, however much it may align with the aspirations of others, still stands alone in contemporary Hungarian composition? Here, as in Játékok, the study-cycle form aids in recreating musical character. “Character” is a comprehensive concept; it signifies moral content, pictorial musicality, and the arrangement of pitch, dynamics, playing techniques, and grouping. In this form, while a good portion of the characters constitute “music about music” due to the peculiar refraction of intonations, the musical world once again becomes all-encompassing. In the microludiums, the character studies break through – with the force of a striking bullet – the everyday, superficial alienation of musical character and figurative representation, which plagues most music composed in the traditional character style today. These studies strike at the original content, condensed into a point, into an atom. There is nothing in this condensation of expressionist World War-era anxiety; the smallness of the forms reveals the individual characters in the act of being born, yet in the incredibly sharp light of the optimism of the entire lives that lie before them. This cycle does not shy away from the grand form but grows toward it, though it does not traverse the dramatic stages of psychological depiction that can be shaped from small forms. Rather, it arranges its very own, by no means micro world between neo-euphony and the barbaric, primal ostinato on the East-West axis, between harmonics and wild cello pedal tones on the North-South axis in a non-novelistic yet distinctly structured manner. Here we encounter Bartók-esque wild sonorities, Stravinsky-esque ostinatos, ethereal chorales, and gesture-based music that roams through the dream world of a new harmony, all evoking – within the framework of a physically romantic invocation and an intense, lyrical epilogue – a sense of wholly possible wholeness.

(„Korunk zenéje 1”, Muzsika 12 [1978]/12, 8–9.)