Happy Birthday György Kurtág! Legendary Hungarian composer hits 100

Euronews · Feb 20, 2026 · Collected from RSS

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The life, times and of course the music of György Kurtág is being celebrated across his native Hungary with the capital Budapest leading a series of events. Festivities began on Thursday with the screening of a documentary at the Palace of Arts (MÜPA). Directed by Dénes Nagy, Kurtág Fragments captures the painful process of creation, doubts, grief, loneliness in old age, and the composer's personal and professional struggles. "It took patience, I think, and perseverance to be behind him for hours on end and not to waver. Humbly, but not giving in to the fact that we were taking something very seriously here and wanted to record it, and he was very open to that," said Nagy. "He really appreciated our persistence. We shot for four years, we spent a lot of days with him. It took 300 hours of raw footage to make the two hours that ended up being the film itself," added Nagy, speaking before the MÜPA premiere. Icelandic pianist Víkingur Ólafsson - described by The New York Times as Iceland's Glenn Gould - says that an encounter with Kurtág is as momentous as an encounter with Robert Schumann, from a bygone era. "Go into the quiet space inside yourself and let go of everything. You just have to start listening. His music says so much in so few voices,," said Ólafsson. "For me, that is the essence of music, the essence of life. It's very different from anything else. So if someone doesn't know Kurtág's music, just go on Spotify or any other music player and press play. You won't regret it," added Ólafsson. Ólafsson met György Kurtág in 2022 and invited him to Budapest to play the piano of his late wife Márta at the Budapest Music Centre. It was an encounter which also inspired the Icelandic artist. "He told me that Márta had listened to my recordings. It was a very touching moment. I played all kinds of music, Bartók, Icelandic folk songs, Bach, Mozart, Haydn. I always thought there was some kind of beautiful connection between Icelandic and Hungarian music. I don't know what it is, maybe the language, the rhythm of our language is a bit similar, even if the languages themselves are completely different," he said. German star baritone Benjamin Appl told Euronews it was a special gift to live in an era with a composer like György Kurtág. "This is music, but also the experience of humanity. It is an interaction in which there is little speech, but a lot of thought, a lot of emotion. It is an immersion into a depth that we can never experience otherwise," explained Appl. "The moments I get to share with him, with Kurtág, are special because I don't know anyone who offers such deep insight, who is so searching, so self-critical. And in this day and age, when no one retreats into silence to think inward, when everyone wants to make a splash, this is something very precious and a great gift. "Kurtág's songs are very strange for the listeners, you have to shout a lot, you have to sing very badly, very low or very high... You would think that would ruin the sound. It often happens that when I go back to my own composers after Kurtág, Schubert, Schumann and others, I sing them more easily. My voice just works better, it's more flexible. It is a phenomenon for which I have not yet been able to find out why this is so," he added. An inescapable figure on the contemporary music scene, Kurtág lives in the attic of the Budapest Music Center. His days are still full of work.