Saying as much as possible with as few notes as possible

A Conversation between Friedrich Spangemacher and Composer György Kurtág

On June 18, 1998, György Kurtág received the Ernst von Siemens Foundation Music Prize in Munich. The prize, worth 250,000 marks, was presented to the 72-year-old composer for his life’s work, and the laudatory speech was delivered by his Swiss colleague Roland Moser. To mark the occasion, the media-shy composer agreed to an interview, which was conducted in Amsterdam in February 1998.

Mr. Kurtág, in 1979 you wrote a choral piece as a tribute to Luigi Nono, and in 1983 Nono wrote his “Hommage à Kurtág” as a musical response. When and where did you first meet?

It was in Budapest in 1978. Rudolf Maros had invited both of us. Our friendship was at its most intense during the first half hour of our meeting. I was able to communicate with Nono more directly and freely than with almost anyone else. That same evening, the Hungarian premiere of my “Microludes” for string quartet took place. After the concert, Nono told me that, based on the quartet, he felt I should write for choirs. So my first major choral composition became an “Hommage à Luigi Nono.” During that conversation, Nono also asked me what I wanted to achieve with my music. At that time, I may have articulated it for the first time: to say as much as possible with as few notes as possible, and to say it as compactly as possible. In vocal music, I wanted to find something in which text and music are almost identical, much as I had experienced in the works of Monteverdi, Schütz, Mussorgsky, or Gesualdo.

Have you followed Nono’s development after the 1980 string quartet, which was probably already in progress at that time?

The Hölderlin Quartet was immensely important to me, as were his later works. However, I didn’t become familiar with most of his music – especially Prometeo – until after his death, at the Salzburg Festival.

One of Nono’s sayings from his later years is: “We have to find something, but not something certain.” Does this idea also resonate with you?

Yes, I think so. I had an experience not too long ago. We have a fantastic musicologist in Hungary, László Dobszay. He is the director of Schola Hungarica and the Folklore Institute at the Academy of Sciences. When we were in Budapest last December, we attended one of his classes at the Academy of Music, where he is also a professor. He spoke about the freedom in creating musical form in Viennese Classicism. Dobszay put it this way: A musical period is not something fixed; it is always emerging. There is always the question of how it will continue. With Haydn or Mozart, there is always a sense of adventure, as if the music could break new ground at any moment.

GYÖRGY LIGETI, TEACHER AND FRIEND

You began your studies with Sándor Veress. What were his lessons like?

My first lessons with Veress were quite unusual. He would play short pieces by Henry Purcell that we were expected to analyze immediately. Or he would play minuets from Joseph Haydn’s String Quartets, Op. 1, which was very exciting. Later on, however, I had quite a hard time with him. I studied three subjects: composition, piano, and chamber music. I majored in chamber music under Leo Weiner. He taught chamber music as a major only during the two years I was there. I was very happy with him back then. Otherwise, I would flee from composition to piano and from piano to chamber music. I was always late for everything, and I usually skipped my composition lessons. György Ligeti was already very important to me at that time. When I felt that I couldn’t truly understand Veress and, later, Ferenc Farkas, I regarded Ligeti as my real teacher. He didn’t see me as his student, though. For me, he was the only authority. He showed me all sorts of things.

Ligeti as a teacher? But wasn’t he actually your friend?

Yes, we were very close. I’ve mentioned before that we sang Mozart operas nearly every week. I was the orchestra at the piano, and my wife Márta, Ligeti, and our friend, the composer Franz Sulyok, sang the roles. I learned so much from Ligeti. He was the first person to give me a Webern composition, the Variations, Op. 27, and he also gave me Franz Kafka’s The Trial to read. I didn’t understand much of it at the time, though. Later, in Paris, I read The Metamorphosis, and that became my key to Kafka. Ligeti also told me to look into Girolamo Frescobaldi – in fact, all my major inspirations came from him. And after the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, he said to me, “If you want to compose, you can’t stay in Hungary.”

So it was Ligeti who gave you the impetus to flee Budapest, but you didn’t. The Ligetis left on their own. It was not until a year later that you were able to go to the West.

Yes, in 1957 I spent a year in Paris. There, too, I simply followed Ligeti. We had actually planned to flee together after the revolution, but that didn’t work out. Marta and I tried later but eventually gave up. Franz Sulyok ultimately helped us obtain French visas. He had been in Paris since 1948, studying with Nadia Boulanger and Darius Milhaud.

In Paris, I soon met psychologist and teacher Marianne Stein, who would prove crucial to my development. At the time, I wanted to work with Pierre Boulez, but I couldn’t show him my old viola concerto, which was composed with Bartók-like material but in the spirit of Brahms and Franck. I only dared to approach him with something new. At the time, I was working on a violin concerto for my friend, Stefan Romascanu, but I wasn’t able to finish it. And so I left Paris without seeing Boulez. However, I knew his students, and they told me about his brilliant analyses – for example, of Webern’s Symphony, Op. 21. And, of course, Olivier Messiaen was very important to me in Paris, especially through his analyses of Stravinsky’s Sacre, Debussy’s La mer, Mozart’s Symphony in G minor (K. 550), and his own Messe de la Pentecôte. I also attended many Domaine Musical concerts, including music by Stockhausen, Boulez’s Third Sonata, and music by Henri Pousseur – his quintet was particularly important to me.

Back then, I spent a great deal of time with the philosopher, historian, and Renaissance expert Robert Klein. I had already known him since my high school years in Romania, where he taught a philosophy course. Klein was friends with Celan. As soon as I arrived in Paris, he lent me Mohn und Gedächtnis, and I copied large portions of it by hand I kept wanting to compose the “Death Fugue,” but it wasn’t until last summer that I finally set a Celan poem to music – in memoriam Robert Klein. He appears time and again in my compositions, and there is also a piece in the “Kafka Fragments” dedicated to his memory. Every Sunday, Klein took me to a different museum and eventually introduced me to Beckett’s “Endgame.” I didn’t understand a single word. I asked him, “What is this?” He said, “A very powerful play.” And then I bought the play. Back then, Ligeti also wrote to me that “Waiting for Godot” was very important. I didn’t understand either play until much later.

Toward the end of my time in Paris, Ligeti invited me to Cologne. I didn’t realize then that he couldn’t really afford to do so. At least I was there for two days, and he showed me the electronic studio at WDR. He introduced me to his Artikulation which were still very new at the time. And I met Gottfried Michael Koenig and Karlheinz Stockhausen. At the time, Stockhausen was listening day and night with Cornelius Cardew to Gruppen für Orchester, which had also been performed shortly before. He handed me the score, but after just one page I lost track of where we were and gave up. Still, the memory of “Gruppen” and “Articulations” shaped my new beginning.

INSPIRATION, ILLUMINATION

And what about Béla Bartók? You once said, “My mother tongue is Bartók, and his mother tongue was Beethoven.” Bartók’s music has been important to you since your college days; does it still mean something to you today?

Yes, I find myself returning to Bartók’s music time and again; for me, it is a lifelong study. In recent years, I’ve taught Bartók’s Second, Fourth, and Fifth String Quartets on several occasions, yet each time I’ve realized that I actually know next to nothing about these works. To gain a deeper understanding of them, I recently wrote exercises based on the Fourth Quartet that focus on very specific structures in Bartók’s music, particularly its harmony. I wanted to clarify these aspects so I could get closer to them. I also wanted to highlight elements that you almost never hear, even in good recordings. I gave these exercises to a quartet I work with, but I haven’t gone through them with the group yet. They’re just for my own enjoyment.

So, more exercises for you than for the players…

Yes, they’re mainly intended for myself. I want to understand more. Only when I teach do I feel that living connection to music; only then do I truly understand it. If I only read it, I understand it halfway. This experience is also very important for composition. Actually, I’m dumb – I have to admit that. But then there’s this state where I can move freely. I don’t like the word “inspiration,” but perhaps the state I enter could be described as “illumination.” Apparently, there’s someone smart inside me.

Can you give an example of this state?

Yes. For me, the opening of my String Quartet, Op. 1, is a textbook example of how a composition can work without one having known it beforehand. It was in this opening that my new approach first came into play. There, I wrote a seven-measure exposition in which I set myself the following task: each sound should, in succession, have a new intervallic structure, a new playing style, and a new dynamic. Nothing was meant to be similar, like a patchwork quilt. It begins with major third intervals a minor second apart, followed by minor seconds, and so on. It was meant to end with tritone intervals. What I didn’t notice at the time – but only realized more than fifteen years later – was that the notes in the upper voice follow one another at tritone intervals from the very beginning. Back then, I hadn’t intended to delve into that. In other words, someone inside me was so intelligent that I had to say yes to my idea. I felt it was right. And it was right because someone knew it was the right thing to do.

GETTING STARTED

Do you need inspiration to compose, or are there specific prerequisites?

When I was younger, I always needed that build-up, like an airplane before takeoff. It was very important to me to play Bartók in order to immerse myself in the music. It’s very strange. While I was working on The Sayings of Péter Bornemisza, Beethoven’s late string quartets, late sonatas, and the Missa solemnis were always present. I played these works to myself; I sang them. The work on Bomemisza was probably the best. Strangely enough, when I played Bach, I couldn’t make any progress. I mention this only because some accounts of Stravinsky’s working method state that he would always play a few preludes and fugues from Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier for himself before returning to his compositional work, newly inspired.

How do you start a piece?

It’s always different. Sometimes it’s a single note, sometimes a cluster, sometimes a rhythm, sometimes just two words. There were often periods of stagnation. I composed my first piece, a piano suite, when I was seventeen, and I didn’t write anything else until I took my entrance exam at twenty. For a long time, that was the only piece I could show anyone. Later it was the same again: I took refuge in playing the piano, then I faced creative blocks that sometimes lasted months, sometimes years – especially after the revolution. After that, I couldn’t write for almost two years. It was a complete breakdown. Without Marianne Stein, I wouldn’t have gotten through it.

Whenever I decided in advance and knew too well how I wanted to compose something, it never worked out. That was the case with the 24 Antiphons for orchestra, Op. 10, which still do not exist to this day. For that piece, I knew exactly how the first movement – which was to consist of eight antiphons – should go. I even knew how I wanted to compose the whole piece. But that doesn’t work. The same thing happened with the piano concerto, which has strong material but has remained untouched to this day. I’m saving it for later – maybe it will come together someday.

For a very long time, it worked only with the very short form that Marianne Stein inspired me to create. She had given me exercises. She suggested that I connect two notes, and by that she probably meant a single-line, monophonic melody. I misunderstood this task, but that led to a form of my own. Eventually – without managing to finish composing anything in Paris – I came up with the material for the last three piano pieces from Op. 3. They were already completed there as part of a variation.

SINGING, LANGUAGE

What role does the vocal element play in your music?

When I turned fifty, I made two discoveries: the Russian language and László Dobszay’s Schola Hungarica. He invited a few composers to sing along. My whole life, I had sung out of tune. At the Academy of Music in Budapest, we also had lessons in Gregorian chant. There were two of us – Miklós Erdélyi and me – who sang completely out of tune. Erdélyi later became the director of the opera choir in Budapest and eventually the general music director and director of the Budapest Opera. Unfortunately, he has already passed away. But he couldn’t sing in tune, and neither could I. I don’t know how it happened. As a child, I had very keen, perfect pitch, but it disappeared when I sang. To this day, I still don’t know exactly why. Even now, I don’t have perfect pitch for singing, and my aural skills for instruments have regressed. I don’t hear things as accurately anymore; sometimes I just get them wrong.

But you’ve worked so extensively and intensively with singers – at the Trussowa with Adrienne Csengery, for example…

… but also earlier, when I was still working with Erika Sziklay, Alice Németh, and others. Until I started working on The Sayings of Péter Bomemisza, I was a vocal coach at a conservatory, a secondary music school. After my stay in Paris, that was my only job. I worked there seven or eight hours a week and learned a great deal, even though most of the students weren’t very talented. But my model for working with singers has always been the way I made music with my wife, Márta – the way she sang. She had a beautiful voice and a wonderfully lively interpretation. She sang a lot of Schubert and Schumann with me time and again.

From a certain point on, literature has played a central role in your life. Is your process of engaging with literature comparable to your process with music? You often say that you’ve read something and didn’t understand it at first.

That was the case with Hölderlin, for example, and I didn’t know why. At home I had a small volume of his, published by Reclam. I kept opening it, but it didn’t speak to me. During the first two or three years of our marriage, Márta and I read an enormous amount: Goethe, Thomas Mann, and Schiller as well – a great deal of German literature. That was certainly very important. Once, I was very sick. My illness lasted for months, and during that time she read to me “The Stories of Jacob” and “The Young Joseph” from Thomas Mann’s Joseph and His Brothers. And then Lotte in Weimar. Through Thomas Mann, we came to Goethe. And then Heine…

And today?

We spent our last vacation in Crete. While we were there, I memorized the first 52 lines of Homer’s Iliad. Even if we hadn’t been in Crete, I would have done it anyway because it was its turn. I’m currently studying Ancient Greek. When I was confined to the hospital for a few days last year, I read Sappho’s Hymn to Aphrodite and a bit of the Iliad in the original, as well as Beethoven’s Op. 127, poems by Hölderlin – including his prose poem In lieblicher Bläue – and Paul Celan. I set Celan’s Tübingen, Jänner to music last summer. Looking back, those days in the hospital now seem almost the happiest of my life.

You clearly go through periods when you immerse yourself very deeply in certain things, whether it’s Russian or, now, Ancient Greek, whether it’s a language or music.

That was also true for Russian, which I started learning twenty years ago. It was completely new to me. As with Greek, I started with the alphabet. I copied a lot of Russian literature, mainly poetry. I’m not exactly sure why, but I find myself copying and transcribing things over and over; perhaps I do it to rework, process, and then analyze them.

Is that part of your learning process?

Yes. In Paris, I copied a great deal of Webern’s music, though I did not understand any of it. To this day, I don’t hear much unless I have a sensory experience of the sound. That’s also why I’ve never taught composition. I almost always compose at the piano. I have always needed that auditory experience, even when I was faced with unfamiliar Beethoven works or pieces, I hadn’t yet taught. However, when I hear interpretations, even bad ones, I can form my own conception of the piece.

Were there any external acoustic influences on your music?

A chance occurrence came into play with Grabstein für Stephan. One Sunday afternoon, Zoltán Peskó conducted Verdi’s Luisa Miller at La Scala in Milan. We came out after the performance, and the whole city was abuzz with these alarm horns. The Milan football team had just beaten the Neapolitans, including Maradona. The “concert” lasted until midnight. Later, Peskó bought me three of these instruments, which were used in Grabstein für Stephan; in the score, they are called “Peskó bagpipes.”

As I mentioned, my first encounters with music were always rather problematic. As a boy, I had read so much about Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony that I was disappointed when I finally heard it for the first time. Based on what I’d read about the symphony, I had imagined the music would be completely different. The only pieces I understood right from the start were Bartók’s Cantata Profana and his Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta. I always need to familiarize myself with a composition. Sometimes that means studying a few pages of the score very thoroughly, and then I have the key to understanding the entire piece.

Were there any specific external circumstances that helped you understand certain things?

Yes, take Bruckner, for example. Until I turned sixty, I simply hadn’t paid any attention to him. As early as 1971, I owned a recording of Bruckner’s Ninth Symphony conducted by Furtwängler, whom I loved dearly. I hadn’t listened to it in a long time, but then I discovered Furtwängler’s interpretation of the second movement of Bruckner’s Fourth – the most beautiful “Schubert interpretation” I had ever heard. I wondered if there was something in Bruckner’s music that was comparable to Schubert. We had just moved into our house in the Hungarian countryside. Until then, I had always worked in a very small, cramped room. But for listening to music, I had a large room in Verőce with a magnificent panoramic view that stretched all the way to the bend in the Danube. That was important for listening to music. And suddenly, Bruckner appeared. After that, I listened to Haydn for another year and then moved on to Mahler. That, however, was already in Berlin. For half a year, beginning with Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, I attended all the rehearsals with the Philharmonic. That was crucial.

(Translated by Gergely Fazekas)

Original publication: Friedrich Spangemacher, „Mit möglichst wenig Tönen möglichst viel sagen. Ein Gespräch mit dem Komponisten György Kurtág”, Neue Zürcher Zeitung (June 13–14, 1998), 65–66.