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György Kurtág: Three

Interviews and Ligeti Homages
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Article in Notes · January 2010

DOI: 10.1353/not.0.0357

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764
critics, who, over the years, have offered
various explanations to account for it. I
contend that the answer to this question
is of great importance, not only for un-
derstanding Bernstein but also for under-
standing the culture in which he was a
leading figure. (p. 168)
After making short shrift of knowing cri-
tiques by Mstislav Rostropovich, Leon Bot-
stein, and Wilfrid Mellers, Seldes argues
that what Bernstein really needed, to com-
pose his “masterpiece,” was a “a libretto or
a program that narrated” the “loss of liberal
faith and loss of civic ethical life” during
the post-Vietnam era and “an audience that
would respond to his ethical challenge”
(p. 174). This leads to a consideration of
the presumed “dissolution of the progres-
sive imagination” as evidenced in the post-
1948 work of Arthur Miller and Norman
Mailer, seen as analogous to Bernstein’s
own decline—one caused first by
McCarthyism; then, in the 1960s, by a
“shifting economic structure” (p. 182) that
lessened class conflict; and then, by the
1970s and 1980s, by the growing conser-
vatism of the American public. “In sum,
Bernstein’s compositional frustration had
its roots more in the evolving American so-
cial fabric, from the beginnings of the Cold
War to his death in 1990, than in his sup-
posedly limited talents, his idiosyncrasies,
his habits, and his psychological disposi-
tions” (p. 191).
Does Seldes mean to argue that Bern-
stein fulfilled his compositional potential in
the years prior to 1948, but not afterwards?
In any case, the whole argument seems
tendentious, based as it is on Bernstein’s
despair over the fact that he failed to write
“a masterwork of lasting importance.”
Bernstein was the brooding type, often crit-
icizing not only himself, but lamenting the
presumed failures of others, speaking, for
instance, of Blitzstein’s “long chain of beau-
tiful work-failures” (Leonard Bernstein,
Findings [New York: Simon and Schuster,
1982], 224–26). It seems questionable to
evaluate his achievement on the basis of
such self-disparagement.
True, Bernstein had his fair share of
flops. But his accomplishment was extraor-
dinary: he wrote a series of ballets and mu-
sicals of enduring appeal, plus a number of
choral and concert works, including such
Notes, June 2010
late works as the Chichester Psalms (1965)
and Songfest (1977) that continue to win
friends around the world. And this does
not mention his complementary achieve-
ments as educator, lecturer, pianist, and,
most spectacularly, conductor. We could
use more commentary to help us better un-
derstand not just how Bernstein reflected
his times, but how he helped shape and
enliven them.
Howard Pollack
University of Houston
György Kurtág: Three Interviews and
Ligeti Homages. By Bálint András
Varga. (Eastman Studies in Music,
v. 67.) Rochester, NY: University of
Rochester Press, 2009. (xi, 166 p. ISBN
9781580463287. $75.) Music examples,
illustrations, bibliography, discogra-
phy, index.
Bálint András Varga is a master at inter-
viewing composers. His book-length con-
versations with Witold Lutosławski, Luciano
Berio and Iannis Xenakis are classics of
the literature on those composers, and his
interview collection 3 kérdés, 82 zeneszerző
(3 Questions, 82 Composers [Budapest:
Zeneműkiadó, 1986]) have set new stan-
dards of breadth and depth in writings on
contemporary music. With this new book,
Varga has truly “come home.” A Hungarian
long associated with Editio Musica Buda-
pest before joining Universal Edition, he
has been promoting György Kurtág’s music
since the 1970s and has considered his fel-
low countryman Kurtág a primary musical
reference for decades. For many years, the
Hungarian composer refused to give any
interviews and acquired the reputation of a
notoriously difficult person to get close to;
the compilation of the present volume re-
quired a friend with uncommon patience,
sensitivity, and a deep devotion to, as well as
familiarity with, Kurtág’s work—a combina-
tion of qualities that very few writers possess.
The interviews contained in the book
cover a time span of more than twenty-five
years. The conversation began in 1982,
when Kurtág (b. 1926) was one of the
eighty-two composers to whom Varga ad-
dressed his three questions. Those ques-
tions were revisited in 1996, when Kurtág
Book Reviews
gave new (and sometimes startlingly differ-
ent) answers to them. It is very helpful to
see both sets of answers, printed separately
in publications now hard to find, reunited
in a book that offers the most complete col-
lection of the composer’s statements ever
published in English.
Kurtág was the recipient of the 2006
Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition.
His Kafka Fragments conquered Carnegie
Hall in a spectacular dramatization by Peter
Sellars a few years ago. These are indica-
tions that Kurtág, who has long been
revered in Europe, is finally beginning to
receive his due in the United States as well.
His music combines the ideal of “organic-
ity” (where everything derives from a single
musical premise) with a rare expressivity
and communicative power. He is also one
of the most literary and polyglot composers
active today. He has set to music texts in
seven languages (Hungarian, German,
Russian, English, French, ancient Greek,
and Romanian), all of which he knows inti-
mately. Also a legendary coach of chamber
music, Kurtág has an exceptional ear for
nuance that also informs his compositional
work—in his music, every single note seems
to be a matter of life or death.
The pages of the book reveal a life
marked by World War II and Communism
in Kurtág’s native Romania as well as in
Hungary, where he resettled in 1945. Yet
Western Europe has loomed large on the
horizon ever since an early year of studies
spent in Paris (1957–58); in the 1990s he fi-
nally moved to the West and now makes his
home in southwestern France). We are
treated to an impressive portrait gallery of
teachers, colleagues, friends, and govern-
ment functionaries, benevolent and other-
wise, and, like the proverbial fly on the
wall, we catch glimpses of what Kurtág calls
his “personal mythology” as the private be-
comes public. Kurtág’s wife of more than
sixty years, the pianist Márta Kurtág, with
whom the composer has frequently ap-
peared in piano-duet recitals, plays a cru-
cial part in these conversations; she offers
many important insights, amplifying, com-
pleting, and sometimes even contradicting
her husband’s thoughts.
For a book of composer interviews, the
volume is remarkable for its concentration
on the internal rather than the external.
That is to say, it is not primarily a listing of
765
where and by whom Kurtág’s music has
been performed in the world or the awards
and prizes he has received. The focus,
rather, is on the feelings behind the works,
the literary and musical associations that
gave rise to them, and the associations the
works in turn evoke in the listener. Many
works were inspired by friends and col-
leagues, and the book provides invaluable
information on a number of them, often
revealing new layers of meaning in the mu-
sic. The music is discussed in considerable
analytical detail besides, with numerous fac-
simile reproductions of music examples in
the composer’s handwriting.
A special feature is the group of drawings
that arose from another project of Varga’s
where he asked numerous composers to
provide visual representations of their own
music. (These drawings were published in
Die Sammlung Bálint András Varga¸ ed.
Werner Grünzweig [Hofheim: Wolke,
2006].) Kurtág’s ink sketches are fascinating
commentaries from a composer for whom,
by his own admission, words have never
come easily. (However, he is capable of the
most startling verbal formulations, such as
“Stuttering is my mother tongue,” p. x.)
The 2007–08 interviews, much longer
than the earlier ones, cover Kurtág’s most
recent work, the Colindă -Baladă (2009), a
choral cantata written on a Romanian folk
test. It also discloses a great deal of per-
sonal information previously known only to
the composer’s closest friends. Indeed,
what the book does best is to invite the
reader to be (or at least to feel like) a close
friend, a member of the “inner circle,” and
to approach the music from an insider’s
vantage point. This is probably the best way
to get into the composer’s unique world,
even if Varga’s commentaries sometimes
read almost like hagiography.
In the final section of the book, Varga
steps aside completely and lets Kurtág
speak, in his characteristic “stuttering
mother tongue,” about his lifelong friend
György Ligeti. Here, too, some of the mate-
rial, such as Kurtág’s eulogy on the occa-
sion of Ligeti’s Siemens Prize, has been
published before (though not in English).
This is a remarkable text, a collection of
fragments like many of Kurtág’s musical
works that nevertheless reveals details that
a more conventional exposé would miss.
The new narrative, about Ligeti’s final
 766
illness and his death, is even more moving
and once again makes the reader feel like
family.
A complete list of works and a good se-
lective bibliography completes the volume,
a true labor of love by one of Kurtág’s old-
est and most indefatigable champions.
Péter Laki
Bard College
Cornelius Cardew (1936–1981): A Life
Unfinished. By John Tilbury. Harlow,
Essex, UK: Copula, 2008. [xxiv, 1070
p. ISBN 9780952549246. £30.] Illustra-
tions, appendices, bibliograpy, works
list, index.
Cornelius Cardew: A Reader. Edited
by Edwin Prévost. Harlow, Essex, UK:
Copula, 2006. [xviii, 390 p. ISBN
9780952549222. £22.] Illustrations,
music examples, bibliography, index.
“I have an insane desire to be an un-
solved mystery” (A Life Unfinished, p. 1019),
wrote Cornelius Cardew in his journal at
age seventeen or eighteen. Given his re-
markable life, with its dramatic changes in
course, passionate engagement, and the
distressing circumstances of his untimely
death, that statement strikes the reader as
eerily prophetic. Copula Press, an imprint
of Matchless Recordings (noted for consis-
tently excellent recordings of experimental
improvisatory music), provides rich mate-
rial for readers interested in the intersec-
tion of experimental music and Marxist-
Leninist activism as manifest in Cardew’s
life and work.
Cardew grew up in a middle-class family
involved in the arts; his father, Michael
Cardew, was a noted potter. His early edu-
cation included choral training at the
Canterbury Cathedral School (relocated to
a village in Cornwall during World War II).
He chafed at the authoritarian structure,
and, coming from an atheist family, was not
at all at home in the ecclesiastical environ-
ment. He entered the Royal Academy of
Music (RAM) in 1953, further developing
his performance skills as a pianist and em-
bracing serialism as a composer. He found
serialism easy to embrace, enjoying the ex-
ploration of conceptual links between serial
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Notes, June 2010
composition and Wittgenstein’s philosophy
(especially the Tractatus logico-philosophicus),
in which he had already immersed himself.
From 1957 to 1961 he studied and
worked with Karlheinz Stockhausen at the
electronic music studios in Cologne. His
close association with Stockhausen ensured
connections with the European avant-
garde. Cardew’s journal entries show his
ambivalence in the competitive atmosphere
and orthodoxy of integral serial practice.
Encounters with John Cage, David Tudor,
Christian Wolff, Earle Brown, and Morton
Feldman opened a pathway of freedom
from the integral serialists. Cardew re-
turned to London, trained in graphic de-
sign, worked in the book design industry,
and established himself in the forefront of
the musical avant-garde in the United King-
dom. Further study in Italy linked him to
musical and political developments there,
and in Buffalo, New York, he grew closer
yet to American Experimental lineages.
He brought his passion for experimenta-
tion and empowerment of performers to
creation in his masterful graphic score
Treatise (1963–67) and involvement with
the seminal free improvisation ensemble
AMM. Developing from his composition
teaching at the RAM and Morley College,
he cofounded (with Michael Parsons and
Howard Skempton and others) the Scratch
Orchestra. That ensemble combined demo-
cratic organizational principles with various
modes of experimental music making.
Cardew’s expansive setting of the Con-
fucian text The Great Learning stands out
from that period for that ensemble.
Keith Rowe, of AMM and the Scratch
Orchestra, led initiatives for study of the
works of Mao Zedong. In a fairly short
time, the formerly relatively apolitical
Cardew embraced Maoism with exceptional
vigor, reminiscent of religious conversion.
The Maoist activists transformed the
Scratch Orchestra into an ensemble di-
rectly supporting the work of the Com-
munist Party of England (Marxist-Leninist).
That Maoist faction denounced the revi-
sions of Khrushchev and, influenced by
Canadian Maoist Hardial Bains, hewed to
Stalinism in the Sino-Soviet split. Friend-
ships and musical associations ruptured
in this turmoil, as the charismatic Cardew
denounced his former experimental/
avant-garde music as counter-revolutionary.