He was mentored by Ligeti, too shy to meet Beckett, and half of one of the greatest ever musical and romantic partnerships. As his opera arrives at the Proms, the avant garde master gives a rare interview
yörgy Kurtág is not speaking metaphorically when he says he is quite content to spend the time he has left “living on Ligeti street”. He is with a small crowd gathered outside the Budapest Music Centre – in which he also resides – for the renaming ceremony of the road on which it stands.
György Kurtág and Ligeti’s wife Vera, with her son Lukas at the renaming ceremony for György Ligeti street.Kurtág is the last survivor of an outstanding generation of postwar avant garde composers that includes Boulez, Stockhausen and Nono, but he emphasises how important Hungarian composers Bartók and Kodály also were to both him and Ligeti.
It was also in Paris that Kurtág met Marianne Stein, an art psychologist who helped him recover from a creative block. “This encounter really freed me,” he says. “It made me realise I should compose in the way that felt right to me, not to others, that I should seek the truth.
Víkingur Ólafsson, the star Icelandic pianist, became hooked as a boy, he says, listening to recordings of Kurtág that his father played obsessively. He marvels at his ability to extract new sounds out of instruments, “the kind of sonority that you really wouldn’t think is possible. He makes the violin play as if it were the whole orchestra, it becomes a kind of cosmic instrument.