György Kurtág (Hungarian: [ˈɟørɟ ˈkurtaːɡ]; born 19 February 1926) is a Hungarian composer of contemporary classical music and pianist. According to Grove Music Online, his style draws on "Bartók, Webern and, to a lesser extent, Stravinsky", and "his work is characterized by compression in scale and forces, and by a particular immediacy of expression". In 2023 he was described as "one of the last living links to the defining postwar composers of the European avant-garde". Kurtág was an academic teacher of piano at the Franz Liszt Academy of Music from 1967, later also of chamber music, and taught until 1993. For decades, Kurtág and his wife Márta gave recitals on one piano of selections from his ten-volume collection Játékok and his Bach transcriptions.
Life and career György Kurtág was born on 19 February 1926 in Lugoj, Romania, to Jewish Hungarian parents. He spoke Hungarian, Romanian, and German early. From the age of 14, he took piano lessons from Magda Kardos and studied composition with Max Eisikovits in Timișoara. He moved to Budapest in 1946 and became a Hungarian citizen in 1948. There, he began his studies at the Franz Liszt Academy of Music, where he met his wife, Márta Kinsker, as well as composer György Ligeti, who became a close friend. His piano teacher at the academy was Pál Kadosa. He studied composition with Sándor Veress and Ferenc Farkas, chamber music with Leó Weiner, and theory with Lajos Bárdos, and graduated in piano and chamber music in 1951. He married Márta in 1947 and their son György was born in 1954. He received his degree in composition in 1955, with a viola concerto that received the Erkel Prize. Following the Hungarian uprising in 1956, Kurtág planned to emigrate, like Ligeti, but was hindered by circumstances. He was able to live in Paris between 1957 and 1958, a time of critical importance for him, studying with Max Deutsch, Olivier Messiaen, and Darius Milhaud, discovering the plays by Samuel Beckett and scores by Anton Webern. He suffered from severe depression, saying: "I realized to the point of despair that nothing I had believed to constitute the world was true", and that he "felt like a cockroach trying to become human". Kurtág received therapy from art psychologist Marianne Stein, who encouraged him to work from the simplest musical elements, extremely small tonal connections arranged in mosaic-like patterns, musical gestures like a breath or a sigh, using "economical, compressed, essential" cells. The encounter revivified him and stimulated his artistic development.
Travelling home, Kurtág listened in Cologne to Ligeti's Artikulation and Stockhausen's Gruppen. The string quartet he composed in 1959 after his return to Budapest marks a crucial turning point; he calls it his Opus 1. Kurtág worked as a répétiteur at the Bartók Music School (1958–63) and at the National Philharmonia in Budapest (1960–68). In 1967, he was appointed professor of piano and later also of chamber music at the Franz Liszt Academy, where he taught until 1993. During this time his students included Zoltán Kocsis and András Schiff. Kurtág's first international opportunity for recognition was in 1968 when his largest work to date, The Sayings of Peter Bornemisza, was performed by Erika Sziklay and Lóránt Szűcs at the Darmstadt Summer Courses for New Music. The critical response was not positive, and it was overshadowed by Stockhausen's Musik für ein Haus. Kurtág's international recognition began to grow in 1981 with the premiere in Paris of Messages of the Late Miss R.V. Troussova for soprano and chamber ensemble. Kurtág has written a few orchestral works, such as Stele for the Berlin Philharmonic and Messages, but his primary forms of expression are fragments, bagatelles, moments, games, and splinters. He composed an opera, Fin de partie to a libretto he derived from Beckett's Endgame, which premiered at La Scala in Milan on 15 November 2018, eight years after the original commission. Kurtág has held master classes in chamber music. Since the early 1990s, he has worked abroad with increasing frequency: he was composer in residence at the Berlin Philharmonic (1993–95) and the Vienna Konzerthaus Society (1995). He then lived in the Netherlands (1996–98), again in Berlin (1998–99) and upon invitation by Ensemble intercontemporain, Cité de la Musique, and Festival d'Automne, in Paris (1999–2001).
Kurtág and his wife lived near Bordeaux from 2002 to 2015, when they moved back to Budapest. They performed together for 60 years, in concert, for radio, and in recordings. The couple played a selection of pieces for two- and four-hand piano from Kurtág's ten-volume collection Játékok and Bach transcriptions. They appeared in 2004 when Kurtág was the featured composer of the Rheingau Musik Festival. When he received the gold medal from the Royal Philharmonic Society in London in 2013, they played at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London. A reviewer for The Guardian wrote:
Some of Kurtág's duets interlace the players' hands so that one person must stretch across the other in a game of musical Twister; in this familiar embrace, husband and wife played them with beautiful understatement. They included some of Kurtág's duet transcriptions of Bach which, often underpinned by bass lines chuntering quietly at the extreme bottom of the keyboard, sounded affectionate, quirky and wholly delightful. Márta died in October 2019.
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