György Kurtág

György Kurtág, born in 1926 in Lugoj, in the Romanian Banat, is one of the most concentrated and singular voices in contemporary music, a composer for whom brevity is not a limitation but a discipline. He moved to Budapest in 1946 to study at the Liszt Academy, where he formed a lifelong friendship with his near-contemporary György Ligeti; the two would remain the twin poles of post-war Hungarian modernism. A crisis of confidence in the 1950s preceded a year in Paris in 1957 and 1958, where work with the psychologist Marianne Stein, and exposure to the music of Webern and the plays of Beckett, helped him rebuild his language from the smallest possible units. The result was a music of aphoristic miniatures (gestures, sighs, fragments) assembled into larger cycles such as the open-ended piano collection Játékok (‘Games’), the song cycle Messages of the Late Miss R. V. Troussova, and Kafka-Fragmente for soprano and violin. Trained also as a pianist, he and his wife Márta performed Játékok together for decades, often alongside his Bach transcriptions. Kurtág writes slowly, revises endlessly, and distrusts grandiloquence; even his rare orchestral works retain the intimacy of chamber music. His first opera, Fin de partie, after Beckett, reached the stage at La Scala in 2018, when he was 92. He is widely regarded as one of the essential composers of his time.