Manuscript by György Kurtág Discovered at Kodály Institute
Staff members at the Kecskemét-based institute of the Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music have discovered the original manuscript of the composer’s Op. 2, Wind Quintet, written in 1959, among the literary estate of the musicologist László Eősze. The centenarian composer himself shared details about the historically significant document.
Kurtág’s alma mater, the Liszt Academy, is celebrating the world-renowned composer with the recent award of an honorary doctorate as well as with several concerts. In collaboration with the Budapest Music Center (BMC), a concert on 25 February and the closing event on 28 February of the Kurtág100 festival will also take place at the Academy.
The exceptional manuscript likewise marks the jubilee. The archive of the Kodály Institute primarily preserves the estates of scholars researching the Kodály legacy, as well as those of composers, performers, and teachers dedicated to keeping it alive. In September 2021, the heirs of musicologist László Eősze donated his estate to the Institute. It was within this collection that the Institute’s research fellow, Dr. Zsuzsanna Polyák, recently identified the manuscript of Kurtág’s eight-movement Wind Quintet, Op. 2. Its authentication was carried out in person with the composer by the Institute’s director, Dr. Judit Rajk, who as a singer has premiered several of Kurtág’s works.
“The large-format, 21-page manuscript, written in blue ink and supplemented with pencil markings, extensively corrected, with precise pasted-over sections, painted-out passages, and red-ink annotations, bears the unmistakable marks of a stubborn and consistent creative hand. Anyone familiar with Kurtág’s notation can see that the manuscript differs very little from works written 50–60 years later,” said Rajk, adding that Kurtág received the document with surprise and deep emotion at the meeting.
Dated 1959 and dedicated on the manuscript to Ferenc Sulyok, the composition, as Kurtág recalled during the discussion, was written in fulfilment of a vow he had made in Paris in 1958. At the time, he was experiencing a profound creative crisis. After the suppression of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, he left Hungary in 1957 and moved to the French capital, where he studied with Olivier Messiaen and Darius Milhaud. Yet he was unhappy and tormented by doubts. In this period of searching, he was aided by the art psychologist Marianne Stein and by his former Academy classmate Ferenc Sulyok, who was also living in Paris.
Sulyok—who had emigrated as early as 1948 and was by then using the name Franz—was indeed one of Kurtág’s closest friends. During their Academy years, he sang bass in a quartet alongside György Ligeti and the Kurtág couple; the group frequently gathered to make music together for pleasure in their spare time.
When, in the summer of 1958, Kurtág decided to return to Hungary after completing his studies and to create a new musical language in his works, he promised Sulyok that he would write two compositions: a string quartet (which became the emblematic Op. 1) and a wind quintet. The appearance of opus numbers is significant, for from this point onward we may truly speak of a distinctly “Kurtágian” oeuvre—although it is well known that he has since assigned opus numbers to only a very small number of works.
The Wind Quintet was premiered in Budapest on 17 November 1963 by the quintet of Zoltán Jeney, and it first appeared in print in 1964 by Editio Musica Budapest.
As part of the Kurtág100 series of events, the composition was recently performed at the Liszt Academy at the Doctoral Concert 5 on 10 February, and again on 22 February at a conference held at the Budapest Music Center, where it was performed by the students of Mátyás Antal.