Melody Pressed Like a Flower

György and Márta Kurtág in Conversation with Bálint András Varga Vienna, September 25, 1996

 

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Back in 1982, my first question was whether you had had an experience similar to Lutosl/awski's in that an encounter with a piece of music radically transformed your musical thinking. Over the years, it has become clear to me that you simply need to listen to music all the time; as if you absorbed some creative juices from listening. So I could rephrase my question and ask you why you listen to music; what is it that other composers' music gives you? Unlike Lutosl/awski, you do not protect yourself against outside influences.

Four days ago, we turned on the television. Márta wanted to see a thriller. All of a sudden, they announced a concert by a young singer, Erika Miklósa. We had never heard her name before. Let's see how she is. The concert began with the overture to Les vepres siciliennes. János Kovács conducted. It had a completely overwhelming effect on me. First of all, he turned out to be exactly the kind of performer I like; if something new happens in the music, he immediately responds. I had rarely heard such precision in music-making except from the great Italian conductors in the vein of Toscanini. I liked the singer, too: she and József Gregor performed Verdi, Donizetti, Bellini, Meyerbeer, Gounod. János Kovács conducted the overture to Don Pasquale, again fantastically. Meanwhile, Márta looked at me and said: "Now you're composing."

MK That's not what I said. I looked at him and felt that he was learning.

Would it be possible to say what exactly you were learning?

These are awfully simple things. I'd say question and answer. He just puts some things there: a tremolo on the timpani and an E-minor chord. And what's going to happen now? I'm talking now about the overture to La forza del destino. In Pasquale, the crazy idea is that he throws into the potpourri all kinds of materials that don't fit together, and lets them rot in that pot.

In other words, you stand behind the composer's back and watch him.

Nothing of the sort! I feel it under my skin. I feel I ought to look this up, but I know I never will, I'd be too lazy to look for a score. Getting it out of the library is out of the question; it is too complicated to go there. Nor would I ask someone to get it for me from home- though it does interest me a lot. I shall retain whatever I remember from listening to it this once. Even that I'm going to forget, but years later, it might come back to me again.

MK But when he teaches, he delves right inside the music and illuminates it from within.

I know that you do get out a lot of scores. You were reading Mozart on the train from Verőce to Budapest. Were you exploring the decisions he had made in particular contexts?

Yes. Or, in Bartók's Violin Concerto I was struck by the fantastic economy of his orchestration. I had heard Mátyás Seiber's17 analysis of the piece in a British radio broadcast. I didn't retain much of it. But then, in 1946, I sat through all the rehearsals of Doráti and Menuhin in Budapest; then I learned to play the piano reduction, and for years I may have been the only one able to accompany the piece. Later, when I heard the Doráti/Menuhin recording, I was terribly disappointed by how thin the sound was, after what I had become used to from playing it myself. Bartók's piano reduction suggested a different orchestration from what he ended up choosing, in order to avoid covering the violin.

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Now let's get on to the second question I put to you in 1982: are you affected by the sounds that surround you? I sometimes try to follow Cage's example: when walking in the woods, I will stop so as not to hear my own footsteps, and listen to whatever sounds are around me. Small noises, birds, the wind, an aeroplane in the distance- all this finally emerges from behind a veil, providing a memorable experience of sound. I think it was also Cage who said that all these sounds almost add up to a composition: the birdsong is the introduction, the wind is the development, and so on.

This is closely linked to the question as to when do I deserve to listen with full concentration to Beethoven or Bartók, or to read a poem by Attila József. For years it was a tremendous experience for me to hear the first song of the blackbird in spring. Then that passed; I was in a state where I couldn't really respond to it- either because I was totally absorbed in my work or because I didn't deserve that sound. Maybe I will be able to listen to it this coming spring. Generally, I live on extremely brief impressions- three minutes or five at the seashore or on the cliffs of Prussia Cove. That was all I had before I had to go to teach. But those three minutes- those were real.

So you do have a desire to listen to nature.

I'd love to, but then I don't have the opportunity. What I hate about travelling nowadays is that the cities become rehearsal rooms and concert halls, and nothing else.

For Paul Méfano, even the rumbling of the underground can be an inspiration.

Anything can be an inspiring experiece if you are in the proper receptive state. As long as there is such an experience. The underground can make a strong impression, and even the really ugly outskirts of a city can be beautiful- if you are open.

I can understand what it's like when you're open or when you're not. But what do you mean by deserving something or not deserving it? I remember when you were awarded the Bartók-Pásztory Prize, Béla Bartók Jr. said something to the effect that this prize had to be earned. You couldn't get that comment out of your head, you kept returning to it over and over again.

That's something else: that's deserving something extraneous. That I didn't take seriously. But deserving from within- that's life itself. Life or apparent death.

I have the impression that what you really mean is that you did something which prevents you from deserving something.

That is now a recurrent phrase in my teaching: you have deserved this decrescendo if you managed to carry the previous crescendo to a point where it could no longer be continued. Or, you've got to earn this sforzato. If you get it for nothing, if you just hit the note, that's not it. Whether you die for it or not- that's what deserving really means.

But this now is about you. Isn't this business of not deserving a kind of self-torture, a self-flagellation, something like what medieval monks practised?

It is, but not quite as intense. Gyuri Maros calls it "brain fog".

In other words, you only deserve to listen to Beethoven if you are in a receptive state that enables you to grasp the piece in its entirety.

I can't grasp anything in its entirety even if I am in a receptive state. My natural state is to sit and stare. Márta will ask me what I'm thinking about. Nothing. I'm not in the habit of thinking. I like to teach because it forces me to think, or rather, it sets off a mechanism and I learn some very interesting things about my own thoughts. I never think if I have free time. I will study or do something, but I can't just think. I can, though, when I teach or when composing is going really well.
That's when that one point to focus on, the red apple on the stairs in Judit's photo, becomes important.

When I said "self-torture", what I meant was that you listen to a quartet by Gubaidulina on the radio and you feel ashamed because it is so good- now this is self-torture, or monastic humility.

All it means to me is that "it's a shame I can't do this." It's a shame my musicmaking isn't this flexible.

MK You already had this self-flagellant streak when I first met you.

GyK Of course!

MK But this has become less marked, and I don't think it's characteristic anymore. He has shed it, partly by growing older and partly through psychoanalysis. I don't see him as a self-torturer any more.

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You are past it. Which leads me to my third question, about individual style and self-repetition. How relevant is this question to you today?

I'm just beginning to perceive it as a problem. This winter I've beeen doing some very good work on the Lichtenberg settings. On the Beckett songs, too. Márta thinks I shouldn't allow the Becketts to be performed at all. I don't want them to be performed either, I don't miss hearing them. Husman performed the Lichtenbergs and it was a very bad feeling because the pieces don't come across. Maybe they should just be shown in score. I would like to see them, even in the order I wrote them, but I don't wish them to be performed. They are pieces to be read. Some of them are fresh, of course. I don't think "Einschläfriger Kirchstuhl" (Fallasleepy Pew) has been completely resolved; I tried to do it over in Verőce. "Columbus" and "Touropa", particularly where it plays on C major, are pretty good.
The Hölderlin songs are a different case...

MK ... very different...

GYK Yet there, too, there are a few pieces that should only be read, not sung. There are a few where I said: it's a good thing I'm forgetful. Since I no longer remember having written a certain passage, it stays fresh in spite of being literally repeated. But I'm not so sure any more, even of this. Maybe it doesn't stay fresh. I don't know.

To give a specific example: Memory of a Winter Sunset begins the same way as Messages of the Late Miss R.V. Troussova.

That's a certain type of motion, a Gigue. In the string pieces, too, it often happens, that... What I see these days is that some pieces are almost good, which makes them not good. They start well, end beautifully, but there is something that's not right.

MK In the memorable words of Rimma: the trouble is that I'm not writing my selected poems, but my collected poems. You write an occasional piece that is almost good and therefore not good, and then you write an occasional piece like the one for Zsigmondy which is incredibly good.

Perhaps composing is no longer a private affair. There are so many people waiting for the pieces, there are so many expectations...

Composing is strictly a private affair. What matters is that Judit Horváth went and played the piece for Józsa Blum. It's a message... It has struck me that in the title of the piano version, even the Beckett has been turned into a message: Beckett Sends Word Through Ildikó Monyók. That is most important. The letters of Mme de Sévigné. It may have to do with old age: there is no impatience in me. Now I'm writing this. And then I shall see. The piece only counts the next day: if it still interests me, then at least it's not bad. If there is too much doctoring to do, then it begins to look suspect.

And how can you tell how good the piece is? You look at what you've written, you hear it inside...

I play it through for myself.

In other words, you detach yourself from it.

No. I also play it through when I am writing the piece. These playthroughs vary a great deal, because there are a lot of works that were true the way I played them when I wrote them, but I can never show that quality in them again. It's like a dream: I dream a beautiful piece, and when I write it down it's not so beautiful any more. But there are some pieces that endure.

Most of your compositions transform extraordinary emotional tension and shatteringexperiences into music. Thunder and lightning. You probably experience all this intensity at the time of writing. No wonder you unwind later, take a break from thinking. The clouds must gather, and you have to wait until the electric charge is ready to explode again.

That sounds very beautiful. I don't know.

I barely dare to ask the next question: Do you consider yourself blessed or cursed by these emotional earthquakes? Do you think those are what make you an artist?

I don't know. When I am listening to good music, I feel ashamed that I may be moving in the same direction in my own work, but I can't quite carry it through to the end. In the Wahrer Weg (The True Way) movement of the Kafka Fragments, I wrote "Persevere!" into the score for myself. And I did.

MK Can't it be that you feel your pieces are bad when you hear them badly played, but like them when the performance is good?

GyK I don't think so, because we went over the Lichtenberg songs with Husman in Davos and decided they didn't work. Perhaps seven or eight pieces out of twenty- two are worth keeping.

To change the subject, sometimes I feel that you are suggestible. You told me about Péter Eötvös's comment that it was time you wrote a longer, cohesive piece- and you decided to give it a try. And what if I said it would be a good thing you composed a three-hour piece?

I would love to write one. Rückblick was meant to be like that. I thought I would just get down to it and make it a single long work.
This year I studied Bartók's Fifth String Quartet on two occasions. Like the Third and the Fourth, it is made up of the same kind of microludes. It formulates something, and then there comes something completely different. All the while, something ensures the connection. This idea of sonata form- or form in general- is what I would like to experiment with. But I can't bring it off. Perhaps some day it will allow itself to come. Until that happens, I can't.

 

 

Bálint András Varga
has spent most of the past thirty years in music publishing, first in Budapest and, since 1992, in Vienna, where he works for Universal Edition. He has published a number of books, all of them interviews with musicians. His conversations with Lutosl/awski, Berio and Xenakis have been published in English, German and Greek, as well as Hungarian.