Breaking his silence

Arriving in Budapest, I receive a summons I cannot refuse. Gyorgy Kurtag wants to see me. Famously elusive, the last of the living avant-gardists is about to present his first opera at La Scala Milan this month and, if past form is anything to go by, he’s unlikely to utter much about it beyond a cryptic Magyar aphorism.

Kurtag is 92 and his Scala opera — Fin de Partie, after Samuel Beckett’s Endgame — is a hefty 450 pages long, which may be as much music as he has written in half a lifetime. So why is this master miniaturist — famous for compressing his ideas down to a few chords — submitting a vast opera to the unforgiving glare of an Italian first-night audience? It’s a bit like Beckett turning up at the Folies Bergère with a two-act cabaret.

I meet him that evening at the Budapest Music Centre, a corner house with two concert halls where the composer and his wife Marta live as guests of Laszlo Goz, a jazz musician who couldn’t bear to see them struggling up three flights of stairs to their old flat. It’s a Sunday and the centre is shuttered and silent as we take the lift up to the third floor. Kurtag is seated at a light-wood upright piano.

‘I want to play you my new piece,’ he says, after introductions.

‘How new?’ I ask.

‘I wrote it yesterday. For Marta. For her birthday.’

What follows is four minutes of unblinking concentration underpinned by an acute awareness that I am hearing a great composer play his music while it is still wet. The piece has a punning French text by Attila Jozsef, a suicidal Hungarian poet — Je n’ai point de thème/ excepté que je t’aime (I have no view, except that I love you) — quavered by Kurtag in a voice that barely breaches the pauses between his piano notes.