“I’m starting to dare to do almost anything”

A Conversation Between Bálint András Varga and György Kurtág

The following conversation took place on February 17, 2016, in Budapest, two days before György Kurtág’s 90th birthday. The celebrations – including daily concerts, special events, and newspaper and radio interviews – ran continuously from February 14 and kept both the composer and his wife, Márta, busy until February 21. I consider myself lucky that we managed to find a time when I could ask my questions. The meeting, however, was not entirely undisturbed: the phone rang again and again as musicians from all over the world called to congratulate Kurtág. Leaning on his cane and my arm, he struggled to stand so he could walk slowly – very slowly – to the phone. Visitors arrived, whom Márta kept at bay; eventually, she even had to leave the room to act as a gatekeeper, fending off the congratulations.

I had never been so tense during an interview; after every call, I had to pick up the receiver again, and once, out of sheer nervousness, I even dropped it. It was obvious to me that an occasion like this would rarely come again. At the same time, Kurtág was stressed and exhausted; I couldn’t take advantage of his patience for too long. When Márta finally opened the door and came back in, we had just finished the interview. “So, how did it go?” she asked. “I didn’t say anything interesting,” Kurtág replied. He said the same thing weeks later when I called him from Vienna to ask whether he’d received the edited transcript. “It’s too short, full of misunderstandings – there’s no reason for it to be published.” However, Kurtág was willing to answer the questions I had posed in the cover letter and clarify the misunderstandings. In doing so, he tacitly permitted us to publish the conversation. It truly was a stroke of luck.

Some thirty-odd years ago, you said you weren’t sure whether you wanted to be a composer. Márta played a few of your pieces for Szervánszky, and…

She didn’t play them for Szervánszky. It was a student concert for composers at the Academy of Music, and Márta played my four little trifles (one of which has survived and is included in our piano program, titled “Almavirág” – it didn’t have a title back then), and I played Ligeti’s Sonatina.¹  That was actually his Capriccio No. 1, which I didn’t understand at all, and his Chromatic Invention, which I also didn’t understand, because for some reason it didn’t help me learn it.²  The two Weöres songs were performed at the same concert, and they were already considered masterpieces at the time. Edit Gáncs³ sang them in a soft voice, rather weakly. She later became quite a good singer.

When was this concert?

Sometime in 1948.⁴

Was Szervánszky also in the audience at that concert?

Szervánszky was there as the music critic for Szabad Nép,⁵ and he wrote an article in which he lamented that Ligeti had written such abstract music. But this music was abstract primarily because I played it in a chaotic way. Márta, on the other hand, played my pieces beautifully, and Szervánszky really appreciated that. From then on, I was taken seriously in the profession, and later, thanks to this, I even received a scholarship-type grant.

So is it possible that this article encouraged you to see yourself as a composer after all?

Well, to be honest, I still don’t consider myself one!

What I’m really asking is this: do you need courage to compose?

Very much so. It takes a great deal of courage.

Courage toward yourself?

First and foremost, I basically have no courage in my everyday life. Márta takes it pretty badly that I’m often downright cowardly. It’s also not true that I’m uncompromising. Not in the least.

And what about composing music?

Not in composing, either. Not in anything. General taste definitely mattered. For a very long time, I wanted to write music that was currently in vogue. I even went to Paris to study the music that was popular at the time, from Boulez and others. But I realized that without knowledge of mathematics, I wouldn’t get anywhere, so I gave it up. Still, I always wanted to do that kind of thing. Then…

Then you wrote a string quartet that András Mihály had to rehearse fifty times before he got it right.⁶

Kadosa said that one would need a hundred rehearsals for that…

I just wanted to say that you wrote a string quartet that posed a serious challenge even for the musicians, and you wrote the Bornemisza Concerto, which remains incredibly difficult to this day for both performers and listeners alike. We can’t say that you intended to cater to popular taste with these works.

No. But I always wanted to live up to something. Part of it was that I wanted to be a “good student.” Marianne⁷ always told me to seek out who I truly am, and she praised the Ariel songs from The Tempest score,⁸ saying I was already on the right track.  [The conversation was interrupted at this point by a phone call. When I turned the phone back on, we returned to the example of the string quartet and the Bornemisza Concerto.] That took quite a while; these days I’m finally getting to the point where I’m breaking the basic rules. For example, I use octaves.

This is also characteristic of the birthday piece you wrote for Boulez; in it, you use octaves even though you knew Boulez didn’t like that interval.⁹

This is also characteristic of the birthday piece you wrote for Boulez; in it, you use octaves even though you knew Boulez did not like that interval.

With respect to whom do you “dare” to cross boundaries? Are you referring to boundaries that have become ingrained within you?

What I’ve learned: I’ve developed a few personal rules regarding Schoenberg and Webern, and I more or less stick to them. As for prosody, I follow quite strictly what I learned from Bárdos.¹⁰ This applies in the same way in every language.

It’s interesting what you say about Schoenberg and Webern. In March 1999, during an intermission at a concert at the Berlin Philharmonic, I remarked that the name Alban Berg had not once passed your lips. At that moment, almost as if ashamed (as I wrote in my diary), you confessed, “May God forgive my sin – because it’s almost like that,” referring to Elgar’s Violin Concerto, which had been performed in the first half of the concert. “God knows my soul,” you said; you don’t like Schoenberg, though his “edginess” captivates you, nor do you like Berg, because you fear that your own music might have too much in common with his; only Webern is close to your heart – his oeuvre is “the purest music.”

That’s true. But Schoenberg established certain rules for dodecaphony, such as prohibiting octaves.

So now you no longer want to be a good student, and you’re consciously breaking this rule.

Yes, but it’s not just about that. I’ve only been writing my own music for a very short time.

So your composing is essentially a struggle against your own limitations – the ones you’ve set for yourself?

Limits that are always there.

Did your academic training instill these limitations in you?

That’s for sure. Ferenc Farkas is still very much present at every single moment.¹¹

In what way?

In the sense that there must be order in a composition. And he was right.

All of this is interesting because the many limitations you’re now trying to break down didn’t prevent you from creating a very distinctive world that is instantly recognizable as Kurtág; it doesn’t sound like Schoenberg, and it doesn’t sound like Webern. So the struggle was successful.

I don’t know. Bornemisza is still full of such things… Webern’s Five Canons, especially the first one, had a very strong effect on me.¹² The “mattock” section was the first part of Bornemisza to be completed.¹³ It’s a type of canon like Webern’s. Of course, I choose from the models the ones I like anyway.

What’s the difference between “choosing a motif” and – using your own words – “stealing” from Stravinsky or Wagner?

If I take something over verbatim without adapting it, I call that theft. Those are usually phrases. I can’t listen to Troussova anymore because it’s full of such clichés: everything is a major seventh, a minor ninth, or a minor second. Of course, that’s not entirely true either, because Люби меня is different.¹⁴

And “Autumn Flowers Fading”.¹⁵

Schoenberg has hundreds of them. “Autumn Flowers Fading” is a tribute to Pierrot. God only knows. Pierrot was recently performed in Péter Eötvös’s conducting course as a required piece – it’s very, very powerful music.

Did it take courage to take on the opera? In our 2007 conversation, you still expressed doubts about whether Beckett would even allow his work to be set to music, because, as you said, he had too many specific musical ideas about his plays. “I’d have nothing else to do,” you said, “but fill out a crossword puzzle.” By the way, Márta mentioned three short scenes back then: Footfalls, Play, and Rockaby.

Yes, when Pereira¹⁶ commissioned it, I had three short scenes in mind at the time, but since Fin de partie was my starting point, I decided on the spur of the moment: let’s give it a try. Even then, I still didn’t know exactly what the challenge was. It took five years of work before anything became clear. The first two years went into the first two major monologues, and those still aren’t finished – I’m just about to complete them now. The finale is almost finished. I have the entire trash-bin monologue; I’ve even rehearsed it with the singers. A week ago, the lead actors – the performers playing Hamm and Clov – were here. Hamm is definitely going to be good; he was Astradamors in Le Grand Macabre¹⁷, a very fine bass. Clov isn’t a sure choice yet – he’s full of operatic clichés. He lives near the répétiteur in Berlin; I hope they’ll be able to work well together.

So, like Boulez, you too are looking for something entirely new that has nothing to do with the established conventions of musical theater.

Not necessarily. Pelléas and Poppea are closest to my heart, especially Monteverdi. I don’t leave anything out of the libretto. It’s probably silly, because it makes the piece boring.

If the music is good…

But spoken dialogue is something in between, and it can’t convey musical information. In any case, it’s a decent attempt, even if it fails.

 

NOTES

1 Almavirág is the first piece in Volume IX of Games.
2 Ligeti dedicated the 1st Capriccio (1947) and the Invention (1948) to Márta and György Kurtág. The 1st Capriccio (Allegretto capriccioso) is in sonatina form.
3 Edit Gáncs (1927–2012) later married the conductor István Kertész and became an opera singer in Cologne under the name Edith Kertész-Gabry.
4 Thanks to the research of Louise Duchesneau, who served as Ligeti’s assistant for many years, I was able to determine the exact date of the concert: it took place on May 22, 1948.
5 Endre Szervánszky was the music critic for Szabad Nép from 1945 to 1949. In his string quartet Officium breve in memoriam Andreae Szervánszky, Op. 28 (1989), Kurtág quotes from Szervánszky’s String Serenade, written in 1947–48.
6 Kurtág composed his String Quartet, Op. 1, in 1959, following his return from Paris. Thanks to András Mihály’s tireless rehearsal efforts, the work was successfully premiered.
7 Psychologist Marianne Stein (1913–1994) worked primarily with artists and musicians, including Kurtág, in whose life she played a key role. During the year he spent in Paris, she helped Kurtág find his way back to composing. She continued to support him with important advice later on as well.
8 In 1961, Kurtág wrote the incidental music for The Tempest for László Vámos, who was directing the play at the Madách Theater at the time.
9 Octave is the title of a poem by Samuel Beckett. Kurtág set this and other Beckett poems to music in a work titled …pas à pas – nulle part… poèmes de Samuel Beckett, op. 36 (1993–98), for baritone, string trio, and percussion. The version of Octave. Message à Pierre Boulez for solo baritone was premiered on March 26, 1995, in Berlin, on Boulez’s seventieth birthday.
10 This refers to Lajos Bárdos.
11 Ligeti and Kurtág were students of Ferenc Farkas at the Budapest Academy of Music.
12 Webern: Five Canons, Op. 16 (1924), for high soprano, clarinet, and bass clarinet, based on Latin texts.
13 The Sayings of Péter Bornemisza’s, Op. 7. Kurtág refers to section 10 of the “Sin” movement (“This sermon cutteth like whetted, edged spiky mattocks such as were employ’d by John to till your arrogant, wicked and stubborn, stiff impenitence, to make you aware of youd inward, inveterate and vicious corruption.”).
14 “Люби меня” (Love Me…) is the tenth piece of Part III of Messages from the Late R. V. Troussova, Op. 17.
15 The sixth piece of Part III, in which the chromatic downward movement of the instruments accompanies the singer’s dreamlike, half-spoken, half-sung glissando, which also tends downward.
16 Alexander Pereira, an Austrian cultural manager, has been the artistic director of La Scala in Milan since 2014.
17 Le Grand Macabre (1974–77, revised version 1996), an opera by Ligeti.

Original publication: Muzsika 61 (2018)/2, 17–20.