A Basel Dialogue with the Kurtágs

By Helena Winkelman

No one can have as much to say about a composer’s œuvre as the creator himself. And nothing I could say about my encounters with Kurtág – all of which shaped me as an interpreter and composer (from the master classes in Prussia Cove to rehearsals of Stele with the Gustav Mahler Jugendorchester in Spain, all the way to instrumentation exercises with his work Játékok in Roland Moser’s composition class) – could convey as much truth as what he and his wife Márta (who has known him the longest, and the best) said to me in person in a conversation that took place on June 10, 2000 at the City of Basel Music Academy.

You’ve just concluded a rehearsal. How many hours did it last?

GYK: Today, it lasted from 9 to 1, and then from 4 until just now, altogether nine hours.

Nine hours! That’s quite a lot. What is most important to you when musicians perform your works?

GYK: I’ve already formulated this (with variations) a couple of times as follows: I’m not at all interested in concerts of my music. Perhaps the real reason for my composing activity is to disseminate my ideas about interpretation. I once said exactly that to a journalist, and the next day, I read in his Amsterdam newspaper: “Kurtág says ‘I don’t give a crap how my music is performed, I want to be a musical prophet.’” (all laugh).

He must have been insane!

GYK: That’s been my experience with journalists, it’s always the same.

Have musicians ever performed your works better than you actually expected?

GYK: That has happened, too. With Hansheinz [Schneeberger], things turned out quite differently, but so authentic, with so much humor, I had to laugh. The piece was the Duos for Cimbalom and Violin. The same was true with Scenes from a Novel.

In general, do you believe musicians and the public understand your music?

GYK: It always amazes me when people understand something. Actually, I give my recordings away as gifts, but as objects, it hardly occurs to me that they might be listened to. In Budapest, at the academy, it was quite normal that my students – who were quite eager to work with me – never came to my concerts.

MK: … Because for them, he was a chamber music instructor, not a composer.

When you compose a piece, are you pursuing a specific intention? Are you composing for someone in particular? Or do instead work from inner necessity?

I don’t know. It was very nice to have discovered Poppea for myself before it became common knowledge. I harbor the rather faint hope that someone like that will come along, that my music will say something personal to him. There doesn’t necessarily need to be a performance. At the moment, I’m working on a number of Greek texts: Heraclitus, Epicurus, Sappho, Plato…

Are they songs?

GYK: Yes and no, songs with nothing. Without accompaniment. Perhaps simply prosody exercises. That was also my original intention with the Hölderlin songs. Today, I prize them perhaps the most highly. I began setting Hölderlin and Beckett simultaneously. I composed the first Beckett song as an homage to Roland Moser. When I heard a recording of his piece Lebenslauf for the first time, I also got to know the singer who sang the work so fantastically, Kurt Widmer.

MK: Roland Moser was one of the first to discover György. Back then, he visited us in Budapest. György was still completely unknown, and we were very poor… That was a long time ago…

GYK: What connects all of us is that Moser was a Veress student, like Heinz Holliger, which I had been as well – if only for a brief period, because Veress left Hungary.

Can you tell us in what respect Nono’s serialism differs from that of Boulez?

GYK: I believe they are two quite different things. In Nono’s Canto sospeso, I feel that the music is somewhat expressionistic. With Boulez, that’s never the case.

Isn’t there a connection between you, Abbado, and Boulez?

GYK: Not in that way, actually… I inherited Abbado from Nono. With Nono, I had a very sudden friendship, it was strongest during our first conversation, which lasted half an hour. Back then, after a performance of my Microludes, he said to me that I should write something for choir. My first composition for choir was automatically an homage to Nono. But actually, without any affiliation with his music. Earlier, all of a sudden, this wonderful exchange of ideas, which however never occurred again in the same way…! But afterwards, all of his friends were my friends [laughs].

Does the search for new paths in composition make you feel alone as a composer? Or is there still a group of composers with whom you cultivate an exchanges of ideas? With whom you feel a connection?

GYK: My connection to Ligeti is absolute. But I can’t imitate him, because I’m not smart enough.

I don’t believe that.

GYK: No, it’s true.

I recently listened to a recording of a movement from your early Concerto for Viola and Orchestra. I found it astonishing that a composer could alter his stylistic manner of expression so utterly. Of course, that’s also the case with Webern and Schoenberg. I’d like to ask you now: what might the background for such a transformation have been? One often hears the explanation: “He heard the music of a colleague, and was influenced by it.” I don’t believe that could be the sole reason…

GYK: No. It is true, however, that Ligeti influenced me strongly, when he said – and this is documented – that there was nothing more to be discovered in the traditional direction of tonal music. Then too, there was the revolution in Hungary. Back then, an entire world, in which I had believed, which I had considered right, collapsed. Within a period of two weeks, I saw my entire political and sociological perspective become completely uncertain. I needed a new beginning. The result was my preoccupation with Webern.

Which perspectives of society were transformed in this period?

GYK: No, they didn’t change. Because I come out of the war still convinced by socialism, and now, everything was suddenly called into question, I no longer wanted to have any political convictions at all.

Do you regard yourself as a Hungarian composer, or does that no longer play any role for you?

GYK: Certainly! I consistently want to set Hungarian texts. My musical thought remains bound up with the rhythm of Hungarian (or at least eastern European) prosody. I think in Hungarian.

But your case is different from Bartok’s, for example, with his direct references to folk melodies?

GYK: Not directly, but at times, nonetheless! Particularly in one of my most recent compositions. An homage to Peter Eötvös. I heard a piece by him, the use of fifths was very close to my own. So then, I composed my own fifths piece, which is dedicated to him. At the same time, I heard a performance of Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra, so it too played a role when I was composing. From Bartok’s fourth movement, I took the Transdanubian pentatonic scale with C–D–F-sharp–G instead of C–D–F–G. Ligeti used it quite often in his early compositions. Appearing at the end of my composition, also, is a literal citation from the popular song Szép vagy, gyönyörű vagy, Magyarország (Hungary, You are Beautiful), used in the same form by Bartok in his fourth movement. Suddenly, I decided to give the piece the subtitle “Homesickness”. I learned that I also suffer from it. That’s just how it is.

MK: I’d like to add my own associations. A psychologist once said to me: You should pay attention to what you’re doing, because from it, you might find out what you want.

Has your attitude toward music and toward composing changed very much during your lifetime?

GYK: I think it has changed continually. For example, I was preoccupied very seriously with Webern. Bartok was always present. Perhaps Stravinsky as well. Actually, Schoenberg and Berg have always remained foreign to me. I also found roots in the Passions of Schütz, in Monteverdi and Mussorgsky. Important as well was the new influence of the American School in Hungary. I became aware of it through my son.

Who were the representatives of the American School for you?

GYK: Cage and Christian Wolff, the composers at the New Music Studio. My son was also a member there. At least at first, they practiced a kind of collective improvisation with extended pauses using very simple basic elements. On the one hand, I owe them the basic idea for my Jàtekok piano pieces, and on the other, I owe it to Lukas Ligeti. When he was still a child, he invented an entire encyclopedia for an imaginary planet, with its own geography, literature, history – he also composed the music history of his planet himself.

He wanted to be completely free?

GYK: Well, I myself renounced all systems, began with the c at the middle of the keyboard. For me, that meant enormous freedom. But ultimately, it was unsatisfactory. The results were simply too primitive.

What rules do you give yourself?

GYK: They are the rules of the organic. What might come after a series of scales? I have found various answers to this question. The directions in which the music can progress are very important to me, in early music as well.

MK: He refers to it as geography.

Is that why you hardly ever play without humming along, in order to feel things better?

GYK: Yes. And when for example I have many descending scales, something needs to come that reestablishes equilibrium.

It’s like the statics of a building…

GYK: Yes. Again, something Palestrina was very conscious of. Nothing new.

MK: And the gestures as well…

GYK: Yes. They were always present. Already in my Op. 1.

Do you still recall the premiere of your first piece?

GYK: What was it?

MK: I played your little piano pieces.

You already knew one another?

GYK: She was already my wife.

That must have been a long time ago…

GYK: Yes, around 1948.

MK: We’ve been married for 54 years.

The world has changed a lot in 54 years. At the beginning of the century, for example, the horse was still an important means of transport. Rapid, physically understandable changes between rhythms based on two, three, or four were readily comprehensible to everyone. For many listeners today, the greatest problem with contemporary music is that the meter is either completely absent, or else the rhythms and melodies no longer have any connection with one another. That’s never the case with your music. How do you manage that?

GYK: I don’t manage it, I can’t do anything different.

That’s a simple answer.

GYK: I am simple. I hear music with old ears.

Your way of listening, it doesn’t change?

GYK: No… I don’t know… I always search for traditional resources in order to find my place. Always more scales, only scales, Alberti basses….

MK: But that’s an exaggeration.

GYK: [quoting an Alberti bass with brief pauses] On the contrary…

MK [to him]: It’s one side of the truth, what you say.

GYK: And the other?

MK: To give the old formulas new meaning and a new radiance… Unfortunately, my German is not that fantastic…

A new context?

MK: You must always give them a new validity.

GYK: You need to reconquer them.

Do you still play often together as a duo?

GYK: Not often – but that’s the only time when I still perform as a pianist…

MK: He still plays constantly. Beethoven quartets and everything.

GYK: Yes, but!

MK [to him]: You certainly play the piano when you show your students a Rasumovsky quartet. Which is much more difficult than the usual piano literature. [To Winkelman] In this regard, he’s quite unique. I don’t know anyone else who can play a string quartet on the piano, and it’s a real interpretation – not just notes. It’s difficult to believe if you haven’t heard him.

I often asked myself why this tremendous idealistic aspect is missing in music today. Beethoven’s desire to bring people together through music is something I barely sense at all with younger composers. Are we so cynical and disillusioned?

GYK: I don’t know. Stravinsky’s neoclassical periodic was really hateful to me, I was completely oriented toward works like Historie du Soldat and Sacre. To me, they seemed cynical. Then, however, Stravinsky performed his Symphony of Psalms in Budapest. It was one of the most important interpretations.

MK: Yes, it remains unforgettable.

GYK: And Boulez can say what he likes: that Stravinsky was a dilettante as a conductor, that the Symphony of Psalms was a catastrophe, completely falling apart. But there was such a human greatness there. Until then, it was the work by Stravinsky I disapproved of the most… Now, I took the score with me to Amsterdam to read.

Have you ever composed a piece as a declaration of love?

GYK: Yes! A number of times.

Which ones are they?

GYK: Kedves, a piece for piano; the choral work Klárisok based on Attila József, for Márta’s birthday. Nearly all of the recent compositions are dedicated to someone, or are entitled Homage to… Without feeling something for these people, joy or sadness, I would never have composed them.

They’re about relationships?

GYK: Yes. And actually, they’re only pretexts. I compose a piece, for example, instead of sending a letter of condolence. Perhaps it’s not too reckless to say that I’m always writing my own autobiography.

Do you make a lot of sketches?

GYK: Not always. Recently, I sometimes compose a piece very quickly. Later, I rework it. And then once again. There are also pieces that are composed in two minutes, and will never change. They are absolute. What can change is the way they are played. I wrote a piece for piano two hands, Flowers We Are, and then shaped it for us to perform in such a way that both Márta and I had to play in the most uncomfortable positions. Sometimes, I choose the least comfortable positions for the hands, it generates the greatest tension. When the two of us play in this way, it’s called something else: “embracing tones.”

 

Original publication: Helena Winkelman, »Gespräch in Basel«, in: Für György Kurtág: »…denn inniger ist, achtsamer auch…«, hg. von Robert Ehrlich (Berlin: Hochschule für Musik Hanns Eisler, 2015), 22–27.