The title alone says something of why this book is important, both composers having been generally regarded hitherto as isolated individuals, expressing themselves despite the very context here invoked. Kurtág's reputation outside Hungary, not made until the Cold War was almost over, located him, if retrospectively, as a dissident. As for Ligeti, even though he eventually published many works from his decade as a professional composer in Budapest, and even though he continued to set Hungarian texts in pieces as late as Síppal, dobbal, nádihegedűvel (With Pipes, Drums, Fiddles, 2000), his background has most often been ignored, or else viewed negatively. Hungary was somewhere to leave. Beckles Willson contrariwise invites us to wonder how much he really did so—how much he remained a Hungarian in spirit, shaped not only by the influence of Bartók but also by having been part of Hungarian music during the Cold War. She also shows how Kurtág's independence was established not by the latterday western mind but within Hungary, within a culture that had a place ready for the resistant genius—a culture, too, not always in opposition to the Soviet aesthetics foisted on it.
To take an example from early in the book, it is illuminating to discover how the elevation of Bartók's most straightforwardly diatonic works, such as the Concerto for Orchestra, was promoted by Bence Szabolcsi, Antal Molnár and other opinion formers in the immediate postwar years, before the local institution of socialist realism. We even have a note from Kodály saying he agreed with Andrey Zhdanov's attack on 'formalism' in music. It was easy to simplify Bartók's history as one of contradicting an Austro-German hegemony being continued in Schoenberg and his politics as robustly socialist. A strong strain in Hungary's recent past, and not only in its increasingly Sovietdominated present, encouraged composers to seek their models in folksong, their ideals in classical simplicity and their aims in engaging with the whole musical nation. One begins to understand why not just cynicism or constraint might have urged the infant Hungarian Musicians'

Union to hold a mourning ceremony in response to Stalin's death—or Kurtág to write Soviet-style mass choruses including "Üdvözlő ének Sztálinhoz" (Greeting Song to Stalin).
No doubt in response to widespread conceptions of Kurtág as an outsider, Beckles Willson stresses his distinctly insider status during this pre-1956 period, in explicit contrast with Ligeti's position. The younger composer's Korean Cantata, expressing Hungarian partisanship in one of the Cold War's test conflicts, "was far more in tune with concerns of the time" than the Cantata for a Youth Festival that Ligeti had written at roughly the same age, and two instrumental works of 1953–4 reveal another disparity, Kurtág's Viola Concerto being praised by senior colleagues and in the press while Ligeti's First String Quartet remained unheard. Without quite saying so, Beckles Willson suggests that Sándor Veress's emigration in 1949 may have given Ligeti, who had studied with Veress, the idea his future would lie abroad. Her illuminating reading of "Éjszaka" (Night) and "Reggel" (Morning), two choral settings of Sándor Weöres poems he made in 1955, finds him packing his creative bags.
After 1956, of course, everything was different. According to Beckles Willson: "Kurtág became strongly critical of the Soviet regime only at the time of the 1956 revolution, and became deeply self-critical thereafter in consequence"—though this remark, curiously relegated to a footnote, is somewhat countered by evidence that Kurtág's sense of his inferiority to Ligeti went back to the beginning of their friendship. In any event, after visiting Ligeti in Cologne in 1958, Kurtág felt himself almost hopelessly behind. Beckles Willson quotes a touching letter to Ligeti in which Kurtág says he wants to show his friend his new quartet pieces (to be published as his Op.1) even though "[y]ou certainly won't like them" and even though "I think it will be a long time before I am capable of writing an acceptable piece of music", whereas "I am not anxious about your future".
In this book, however, we find the two composers moving in tandem, though so widely separated.