2024-07-09 20:25:45
Leading Hungarian composer and pianist György Kurtág, who celebrated his 98th birthday in February, has been awarded this year’s Wolf Prize for the Arts. It was announced by the Hungarian agency MTI, according to which the award-winning avant-garde artist and master of small forms joined the side of respected laureates such as singer Plácid Domingo, cellist Mstislav Rostropovič or conductors Claudio Abbado and Sir Simon Rattl.
The award, named after former Israeli diplomat Ricardo Wolf, has been awarded by a private foundation since the late 1970s. In addition to music, he appreciates contributions to architecture, painting, but also physics and chemistry. Previous recipients of the Wolf Prize for Art are photographer Cindy Sherman, artist Olafur Eliasson and architect David Chipperfield. The award is associated with a reward of 100 thousand dollars, converted to about 2.3 million crowns.
This year, the organizers chose György Kurtág in the field of music, who, along with the now deceased György Ligeti and Péter Eötvös, belongs to the most important Hungarian composers of the 20th century.
“He has indelibly influenced contemporary music all over the world. Kurtág’s compositions are loved by both performers and listeners. They are intense, penetratingly introspective and describe a person in a condensed but emotional form,” reasoned the jury, according to which Kurtág’s music deals with existential questions and urgently expresses basic emotions such as love, fear or anxiety.
György Kurtág was born in 1926 in what is now Romania to Hungarian Jewish parents. He played the piano from the age of five, after the Second World War he began studying piano and composition at the Liszt Academy in Budapest. He composed at first under the influence of Zoltán Kodály and Béla Bartók, with whom he also shared a relationship with Hungarian folk music. But at the same time he wanted to belong to the modernists.
After Soviet troops bloodily suppressed the Hungarian revolution in 1956, he spent two years in Paris, where he studied with, among others, Olivier Messiaen and discovered the music of Anton Webern and Arnold Schönberg at concerts conducted by Pierre Boulez. She inspired him. “From the isolation of communist Hungary, Kurtág suddenly moved to the center of Western musical modernism,” wrote the New York Times.
György Kurtág is one of the world’s most recognized composers. | Photo: Christoph Egger
From the 1960s to 1986, Kurtág taught piano and chamber music at the Liszt Academy. For a long time he was appreciated primarily as an accompanist, his international career as a composer was adversely affected by the fact that he lived in isolated communist Hungary.
Collaboration with the famous Parisian group Ensemble Intercontemporain helped him break through. Only after the fall of totality did his works, ranging from large orchestral compositions such as Stele to several-second miniatures like Kafka’s fragments intended for soprano and violin, fully take hold in the world repertoire. For example, in the mid-1990s, the author was already composer-in-residence of the Berlin Philharmonic.
Among his best-known works is the piano cycle Játékok, translated as Games, which has been continuously updated since the 1970s. Originally, these were intended to be compositions for children that would offer a liberating approach to the piano. However, the series of puns and games working freely with graphic notation became a showcase of a wide range of creative procedures and experimental techniques even for Kurtág himself. With them, he pushed the sound possibilities of the instrument and sometimes just expressed the simple joy of a creative mood unfettered by conventions or rules.
The composer recorded some of these expressive compositions four-handed on the piano with his wife Márta Kurtág for the ECM publishing house. They played them live together, for example, in 2009 in New York’s Carnegie Hall.
The author remains active even in his nineties, in 2018 he composed his long-delayed first opera, which had its world premiere at Milan’s La Scala in the presence of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. It is called Fin de partie after End of the Game, a one-act play by Irish playwright Samuel Beckett from 1957. At the time of the opera’s premiere, La Scala director Alexander Pereira called Kurtág “probably the most important living composer”.
Video: A sample of György Kurtág’s choral compositions
A set of György Kurtág’s compositions for orchestra and choir was recorded in 2017 for the ECM label by the Asko|Schönberg chamber orchestra with a radio choir. | Video: ECM Records