2024-04-05 11:49:10
Only last month he received the Kossuth Prize, Hungary’s highest award for artists. This Sunday, composer and conductor Péter Eötvös died after a long illness. He was 80 years old, said the MTI agency, which describes him as one of the world’s most famous personalities of Hungarian music.
Eötvös stood with Pierre Boulez at the beginning of the famous contemporary ensemble Ensemble intercontemporain. As a conductor, he focused on modern works, but already at the end of the last millennium, he began to be increasingly appreciated as an author as well. He composed operas, madrigals, symphonic and chamber works on commissions from Berlin, Vienna and New York.
Among his best-known works are the opera Three Sisters on a Chekhov theme, whose world premiere was conducted by Kent Nagano in 1998 and which was later included in the repertoire of the Vienna State Opera, as well as the opera about illegal migration The Golden Dragon, which was later conducted by Petr Popelka at the Semperoper in Dresden, and the Chinese an opera from 1986. It has no singers and “is meant to be listened to visually,” Eötvös said of the piece, which paid tribute to directors from Jacques Tati to Peter Brook to Robert Wilson.
The author’s last opera Valuska was an adaptation of the novel Melancholy of Resistance by the contemporary writer László Krasznahorkai from 1989. It had its world premiere in Budapest last December and its recording can be seen online, reports the MTI agency.
Eötvös’s operas were not performed in the Czech Republic. But the listeners here knew the conductor and composer. His work was presented at the Hradec Králové Music Forum, Ostrava Days of New Music and Prague Spring festivals, which he visited in 2006 with the Ensemble intercontemporain. The program featured a chamber cantata by Pierre Boulez and a melodrama by Arnold Schönberg.
In 2018, Eötvös celebrated his 75th birthday at the Moravian Autumn festival, where two of his compositions were conducted by the head of the Brno Philharmonic, Dennis Russell Davies, and Peter Eötvös, for a change, took the baton for three others that influenced him – these were works by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Béla Bartók.
Peter Eötvös promoted modern music all his life. | Photo: Szilvia Csibi
“Eötvös follows Bartók in a certain direction, but from the position of an author with experience in the musical achievements of the second half of the 20th century. Although Eötvös’ music has a much more pluralistic and cosmopolitan impression, it also reflects the imprints of Hungarian folklore,” said the dramaturg of the Brno orchestra at the time Vítězslav Mikeš.
In 2016 and 2019, Eötvös also collaborated with the Czech Philharmonic, when he presented his percussion concert Speaking Drums for the first time in the Dvořák Hall of the Rudolfinum. For the second time, the orchestra under his baton played, in addition to Miroslav Srnka’s composition, Eötvös’ own composition Jet Stream for solo trumpet.
In addition to the principles of air flow, this work was inspired by memories of childhood in socialist Hungary, where listening to shortwave radio was forbidden. Tuning in western stations on the receiver thus brought the danger of tipping off. Through the noise, whistling and sound of jammers, however, sometimes music that could not otherwise be heard – such as jazz, to which Eötvös often referred – would be heard.
He stayed abroad
Péter Eötvös was born in 1944 in Transylvania, also known as Transylvania, which is a historical territory located in today’s Romania. From here, however, he and his family fled from the Soviet army to Hungary after about a year.
Peter Eötvös also performed several times in the Czech Republic. | Photo: Szilvia Csibi
From an early age, Eötvös played the piano and tried to compose. As a fourteen-year-old, he was accepted at the Liszt Music Academy in Budapest by pedagogue and composer Zoltán Kodály, who recognized his talent.
In 1965, Eötvös first took part in respected contemporary music holiday courses in Darmstadt, Germany, and a year later, thanks to a scholarship, he went to Cologne to study conducting at the University of Music. He began working at the local opera house and joined Karlheinz Stockhausen’s classical avant-garde ensemble as a keyboard player.
In the early 1970s, following the example of his better-known compatriots, the composers György Ligeti and György Kurtág, he decided to stay abroad. As a worker at the Cologne Conservatory, he had access to, among other things, the electroacoustic studio there at the West German Radio.
In 1978, he conducted the inaugural concert for the opening of the Parisian research institute for electroacoustic music Ircam founded by Pierre Boulez, after which he became chief conductor of the Ensemble intercontemporain, one of the most famous ensembles focused on modern and contemporary music. He was chosen directly by the founder of the ensemble, Boulez, to lead it. Eötvös then held the role until 1991, before handing it over to David Robertson.
See into the future
By that time, composition had already begun to predominate in the work of the Hungarian native. At the same time, he had the role of principal guest conductor with the German Ensemble Modern, the Budapest Festival Orchestra or the BBC Symphony Orchestra.
In the new millennium, he held the same positions in Gothenburg, Sweden, with the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra or the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra.
He promoted modern music everywhere. “In the 1970s and 1980s, contemporary works were mostly played by radio orchestras, while the traditional repertoire was the domain of philharmonic orchestras. But about twenty years ago, these orchestras began to expand their repertoire. I was among the first to be invited by major orchestras for 20th-century music ,” he told the Czech Philharmonic magazine in 2016.
He considered music both a means of communication and a science. According to him, avant-garde creators see something that will be possible in the future. “Part of their proposals will catch on and be implemented, some will not,” he stated in 2006 at the Prague Spring.