2024-01-07 16:00:08
Peter Eötvös, during the rehearsal of his concert on Radio France with the Ensemble intercontemporain, for his 70th birthday, November 21, 2014. EIC
Renowned performers or apprentice composers, all musicians esteem him. Intended for modest groups or prestigious institutions, all his productions are of superior quality – often, even masterpieces. However, Peter Eötvös is not yet well known to the general public. No doubt because, naturally humble, this cosmopolitan Hungarian tends to fade behind the musical act. “When I order a piece from Kurtag, I also order one from Eötvös, entrusted to Monde Pierre Boulez, in 2000, after having directed the French creation of the magnificent zeroPoints that Eötvös had written for him. That way, I’m sure I’ll have one on the big day.”
If his compatriot György Kurtag, born in 1926, no longer composes, Peter Eötvös, who turned 80 on January 2, is still very active. His thirteenth opera (the first with a Hungarian libretto), Valuska, was created on December 2, 2023 in Budapest, and several recent pieces will be performed in Paris during a triple celebration of the anniversary: Wednesday January 10, at the Philharmonie, by the Ensemble intercontemporain (EIC), Saturday 13 at IRCAM [Institut de recherche et coordination acoustique /musique] (the day after a conference), then on Thursday 18 at the Maison de la radio et de la musique (including the world premiere of a harp concerto). Important concerts that Peter Eötvös will not come to conduct, due to health problems, but which will allow us to approach a personality capable, on many levels, of invalidating comparisons.
For example, regarding ties with the native country. Hungarian, Peter Eötvös is undoubtedly Hungarian by practicing, on the piano, from the age of 4, the music of Béla Bartok, his ” native language “. Hungarian, the 14-year-old teenager could legitimately think he was Hungarian when Zoltan Kodaly (1882-1967), the country’s other luminary, presided over the examination of his admission to the Franz-Liszt Academy in Budapest. Hungarian, the beneficiary, at the age of 22, of a scholarship to study in West Germany will remain on the other side of the Iron Curtain, unlike his elder, György Ligeti (1923-2006), dissident who had reached the same destination at the risk of his life in 1956.
Mystical transcendence
Settled in 1966 in Cologne, which represents for him “the mecca of new music”, Peter Eötvös does not fail to return regularly to Hungary, while he continues his activities in Germany with Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928-2007), as a copyist then as a pianist and percussionist within the ensemble dedicated to the spiritual master of the avant-garde, and that he also works as a sound engineer at the famous electronic music studio of the local radio station. In 1978, he went to Paris, at the invitation of Pierre Boulez, to become the first musical director of the EIC, a position he held until 1991.
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