Music Matters

Kate Molleson travels to Budapest to meet Hungary’s greatest living composer, György Kurtág, now 97 years old. Kurtag talks to Kate about the musical homages that he has made to friends, his early focus on the clarity of single notes at the time he wrote his Op.1 String Quartet, the influence of languages on his compositional style, and his new opera, a work based on the life of the German mathematician, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg. Above all, he talks about his Marta, his wife of over 70 years, with whom he performed piano duets, and he reveals to Kate why he stayed in Hungary in 1956.Kurtag once said that his mother tongue is Bartok, and Kate visits the Bela Bartok Memorial House where she talks to the curator, Zoltán Farkas, about the composer’s relationship with Hungary and the folk traditions that he collected both at home and in neighbouring countries. During a break in a busy rehearsal schedule, the conductor Ivan Fischer also shares his views on Bartok and the distinctive sound of the Budapest Festiv