György Kurtág
György Kurtág was born in 1926 in Lugoj, Romania. Kurtág wanted to study under the hungarian master composer Béla Bartók in Budapest in 1945. However Bartók died this year in the USA. Kurtág studied piano, composition and chamber music under other teachers at the Budapest Academy of Music. His first works, composed in the early 1950s, were written as a protest to the Stalinist regime in Hungary. After studying in Paris in 1957-58 under composer Olivier Messiaen, among others, he went back to Budapest with a renewed attitude towards composing. Among his sources of inspiration, he has mentioned composer Anton Webern, the plays of Samuel Beckett and French architecture and nature. His first work after returning to Hungary, a string quartet from 1959, was labelled Opus 1 to demarcate a distance to his earlier works.
His international break came with Messages of the Late Miss R.V. Troussova, opus 17 for soprano and chamber ensemble. The work had its world premiere in Paris in 1981. “..quasi una fantasia…”, opus 27 nr 1 for piano and instrument groups, was written to a concert series dedicated to the composer during the Berlin Festival in 1988. This was the first occasion where an audience saw and heard him realise his ideas about spatial music, where the music comes from several places inside the concert hall.
Until writing opus 33, Stele, for the Berlin Philharmonic and conductor Claudio Abbado in 1995, Kurtág had only written chamber music, from solo pieces to works for chamber ensembles.