Gyorgy Kurtag: Three Interviews and Ligeti homages.

Gyorgy Kurtag: Three Interviews and Ligeti Homages. By Balint Andras Varga. (Eastman Studies in Music, v. 67.) Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2009. (xi, 166 p. ISBN 9781580463287. $75.) Music examples, illustrations, bibliography, discography, index.

Balint Andras Varga is a master at interviewing composers. His book-length conversations with Witold Lutoslawski, Luciano Berio and Iannis Xenakis are classics of the literature on those composers, and his interview collection 3 kerdes, 82 zeneszerzo (3 Questions, 82 Composers [Budapest: Zenemukiado, 1986]) have set new standards 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 Budapest before joining Universal Edition, he has been promoting Gyorgy Kurtag's music since the 1970s and has considered his fellow countryman Kurtag 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 required a friend with uncommon patience, sensitivity, and a deep devotion to, as well as familiarity with, Kurtag's work--a combination 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 Kurtag (b. 1926) was one of the eighty-two composers to whom Varga addressed his three questions. Those questions were revisited in 1996, when Kurtag gave new (and sometimes startlingly different) 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 collection of the composer's statements ever published in English.

Kurtag 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 indications that Kurtag, 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 "organicity" (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 intimately. Also a legendary coach of chamber music, Kurtag 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 Kurtag'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 finally 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 government functionaries, benevolent and otherwise, and, like the proverbial fly on the wall, we catch glimpses of what Kurtag calls his "personal mythology" as the private becomes public. Kurtag's wife of more than sixty years, the pianist Marta Kurtag, with whom the composer has frequently appeared in piano-duet recitals, plays a crucial part in these conversations; she offers many important insights, amplifying, completing, 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 where and by whom Kurtag'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 colleagues, and the book provides invaluable information on a number of them, often revealing new layers of meaning in the music. The music is discussed in considerable analytical detail besides, with numerous facsimile 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 Balint Andras Varga, ed. Werner Grunzweig [Hofheim: Wolke, 2006].) Kurtag'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 Kurtag's most recent work, the Colinda-Balada (2009), a choral cantata written on a Romanian folk test. It also discloses a great deal of personal 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 Kurtag speak, in his characteristic "stuttering mother tongue," about his lifelong friend Gyorgy Ligeti. Here, too, some of the material, such as Kurtag's eulogy on the occasion 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 Kurtag's musical works that nevertheless reveals details that a more conventional expose would miss. The new narrative, about Ligeti's final 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 selective bibliography completes the volume, a true labor of love by one of Kurtag's oldest and most indefatigable champions.

PETER LAKI

Bard College