A Life Torn Apart. György Kurtág

Abstract

This article is devoted to the life and music of György Kurtág (*1926). In the centre of the topic is the most important aspect of Kurtág’s work: philosophical or more precisely – existential and religious issues. Although it takes on a defeatist tone, Kurtág’s pessimism is far from a typical kind of resignation. In search for the sources of his pessimistic spiritual predisposition I examine the biographical dimension of his development which, like a kind of leitmotif, determines the consecutive stages of his output.
In the following subsections I examine the events of Kurtág’s life that had a decisive influence on his pessimistic disposition: his mother’s death (chapter 1); a moral crisis associated with his own political views and the tragic Hungarian Revolution of 1956 (chapter 2); the creative crisis and therapy with psychologist Marianne Stein (chapter 3), as well as his awareness of being alienated from the European contemporary music scene of the 1960s (chapter 4). In subsequent chapters I analyze the impact of these events on his selected compositions through the prism of the creator’s pessimistic attitude (chapter 5–9). At the end of the article I abandon the biographical perspective and try to answer the question about the religious dimension of existentialism in his music.