I hope I am not being unjust to the memory of the composer András Mihály in saying that I believe he would now be largely forgotten if it were not for György Kurtág’s Hommage à Mihály András. Twelve Microludes for String Quartet, Op. 13 (1977/78), and several other homages. They include Kurtág’s highly regarded orchestral work Stele, Op. 33 (1994/2006), which is based on a piano piece in memory of the composer in the sixth volume of the piano series Játékok. Also, a few notes from Mihály’s early Cello Concerto helped Kurtág to find a fitting ending to Stele.

However, after World War II, András Mihály was a highly respected and influential figure in Hungarian musical life—perhaps not so much as a composer but as founder-conductor of the Budapest New Music Ensemble, which (in addition to programming music by contemporary Hungarian composers) presented to Hungarian audiences whatever was new and important in the world of contemporary music on an international scale. He was a peerless professor of chamber music at the Budapest Academy, a successful director of the State Opera House, and his television programs in which he talked about and conducted some of the pivotal compositions of the past century had some of the quality of Leonard Bernstein’s programs of a similar nature.

He was one of those Hungarian intellectuals who after the war engaged themselves in rebuilding cultural life in the country. He sincerely believed in the ideals of socialism and in the interests of its noble goals he was for a time ready to close his eyes to the malfunctioning of the system, indeed, to the crimes committed by the Stalinist puppet regime. Mihály was led by the idea that classical music should be brought to the people (the “masses” to use a term much in currency in the 1950s). That could only be achieved if new music being composed was simple and drew its inspiration from folk music. That is also why he wished to suppress Bartók’s abstract, “modern” works and restrict performances to the composer’s folk music arrangements. (Paradoxically enough, he referred in our interview to those very compositions as having been of particular significance in his development). The result was a plethora of pocket Kodály pieces produced in Hungary en masse.

In 1983, I spent a few weeks in Paris on a French government scholarship to meet some of the major composers living in the city and record interviews with them for the three-questions project. My mastery of the language was shaky to say the least but I was helped by an interpreter. Her presence gave me confidence but I only asked her to translate when I did not understand a particular word or sentence. I was anxious not to interrupt the interview if I could help it. This explains why the conversations with French composers are mostly monologues; I only asked questions when absolutely necessary, since the three basic ones were known anyway.

A contemporary of Milton Babbitt, Henri Dutilleux has chosen a different path in that his music is rooted in the tradition of twentieth-century French music, mainly Debussy, Ravel, and Roussel. His output is not large but what he has produced in the way of orchestral music is played with some regularity, especially Timbres, espace, mouvement ou “La nuit etoilée” (1977/78) and the cello concerto Tout un monde lointain (1967/70).

I.

No, frankly, I do not think that my evolution would have ever been determined by the shock caused by listening to any particular composition. Of course, since reaching the age when I was able to write music, that is, since I was fifteen, there have been some works which have impressed me a great deal, but my style has developed gradually, without any reverses, I should think.

I must say: on hearing Pierrot lunaire, I met with a world which struck me as wholly alien and new, unrelated to anything else. All in all, I think I must have felt very much like musicians well before my time (like Stravinsky or Ravel) when they encountered Pierrot lunaire for the first time: it was for me, just as it must have been for them, a veritable mirage.

As it was indeed also for Dallapiccola and Puccini.

Indeed. If we think of the musicians of the Second Viennese School, the pupils of Schoenberg, like Berg (especially Wozzeck which impressed me no end), possessed an idiom that influenced me through its novelty. Webern also, but in a different fashion: it was, I think, his rarefied sound world and the rarefied form of his music that left a trace on my thinking.

I am grateful for all the thought and time Gunther Schuller invested in revising the transcript of our interview, recorded at his house at Newton Centre, Massachusetts, sometime in the early 1980s.

Here is an excerpt from the composer’s letter of April 15, 1985:

“The interview is now in quite good shape, and represents my views and thoughts on your questions accurately. I had to amplify some answers a little, because as I answered them ‘live’ to you, they were not entirely clear. I have also answered your additional questions in your January 7 letter. All best wishes for your project.”

I feel that Gunther Schuller’s text is an important historical document, an eye-and ear-witness account of a pivotal phase in postwar music history. Beyond its immediate autobiographical significance, it sheds light on the way an American composer would respond to the spirit of the Darmstadt Summer Courses in the 1950s, a kind of witches’ kitchen of new music in the making. As a European, I personally find his comments on the American scene of tremendous interest. For one thing, he looks at Aaron Copland from a different angle than I who had met him in Budapest in 1973, having translated his book The New Music into Hungarian. I found him a jovial and friendly old man; nothing hinted at the dictator he appears to have been considered by some people back home.

While American composers had no ready access to scores of the Second Viennese School because of historical circumstances, their Hungarian counterparts were deprived of them for ideological reasons (which were of course also rooted in history: the division of the world after 1945), whereas in Austria after the Anschluss, ideological considerations of a different color banished Arnold Schoenberg and his pupils from public musical consciousness (see the interview with Gerhard Wimberger).

With regard to the plates of the scores of the twelve-tone composers that Schuller mentions: they were not hidden by Universal Edition during the war, since the publisher had been taken over by the Nazis who installed one Johannes Petschull as its director. It was Alfred Schlee (1901–98) who buried the plates in his garden, thereby saving them for the future. (He had joined the firm in 1927, only to retire as its director some sixty years later.)

I am indebted to Wladimir Vogel for the trouble he took to reply to my questions. Surely, he must have been in poor health: he passed away a few months after posting the envelope.

Easily the oldest of the composers in this book, he represents a generation that heard Scriabin play the piano and had Busoni for a teacher. His was a searching and adventurous spirit as demonstrated, among other things, by his works for speaking chorus.

A summary of his idiom is offered by Baker’s Biographical Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Classical Musicians:

“Gradually, he approached the method of composition in 12 tones as promulgated by Schoenberg, while Busoni’s precepts of neo-Classical structures governed Vogel’s own works as far as formal design was concerned; many of his polyphonic compositions adhered to the Classical harmonic structures in 4 parts, which he maintained even in choral pieces using the Sprechstimme. Serial procedures were adumbrated in Vogel’s music through the astute organization of melodic and rhythmic elements.”62

Alone among the composers contributing to this book, Wladimir Vogel decided to reply to all three questions in one continuous block.

The first major experience of my youth was linked to Alexander Scriabin. Both his music and his personality made a deep impression. I attended his piano recitals in Moscow between 1912 and 1914 where he played some of his own compositions as well. I was also influenced by his ideas regarding the background to his works, especially those of his last sonatas and orchestral pieces, because I was close to the Russian Symbolists.

Scriabin’s influence was felt also in my first years in Berlin. The pieces I composed then bear traces of his piano technique. Later, when I became acquainted with Schoenberg’s music of his middle period, I amalgamated his musical idiom with Scriabin’s style and technique.

Meanwhile I became a pupil of Ferruccio Busoni. It was not so much his music that impressed me but his broad cultural horizon, his aesthetic and his stance as a composer. I was convinced that I could learn from him more about the cultural heritage of the West (I had serious gaps there) than I would if I joined the new German school.

“I’ve now reached nine minutes fifty-seven seconds,” Johannes tells me on the telephone. He keeps me posted on the progress of whatever he is writing, true to what he told me some years ago about the way he keeps track: “Like a bookkeeper.”

What really impressed me about his music when I first heard it some time in 2000, was the sensitivity and musicality of it: the delicacy of the sounds he imagined for the few instruments accompanying the soprano, in his Vielleicht zunächst wirklich nur [To start with, perhaps really not more than] (1999), premiered in Vienna by the Ensemble Modern. The music touched a chord in me; I responded with my instincts.

The piece made me happy, for I felt that I was visiting a landscape I had never seen before and yet where I was at home. It was wonderfully reassuring to find a young man of such talent: creating new within the familiar. It was sheer pleasure to hear tiny details within the overall soundscape, so that you sat up and savored, say, the sound of a harp, like the glint of light on a painting—tiny but absolutely essential.

For Staud, the idea for a piece is more often than not suggested by extramusical impulses: the writings of the ancient Greek philosopher Anaximander as well as Leonardo da Vinci inspired Apeiron (2004/5) for large orchestra (a commission of the Berlin Philharmonic), a work by the American artist Bruce Nauman (1941) produced Violent Incidents (2005/6) for saxophone solo, winds, and percussion, the incomparable atmosphere of the novels of Bruno Schulz (1892–1942) captured the young composer’s imagination to create two large-scale orchestral pieces which attempt to conjure up Schulz’s world: On Comparative Meteorology (2008/9) for the Cleveland Orchestra and Über trügerische Stadtpläne und die Versuchungen der Winternächte [On Deceptive City Maps and the Temptations of Winter Nights] (2009) for string quartet and orchestra. The titles are taken from Schulz, a remarkable Polish-Jewish writer shot dead by the Gestapo in the middle of a street in Drohobycz, a small town in Galicia.

Literature, philosophy, the arts—Johannes Maria Staud is remarkably well-versed in all, but he is just as sensitive to natural beauty, coming as he does from the most mountainous region of Austria, Tyrol.

I worked for and with Wolfgang Rihm between 1992 and 2007, the fifteen and a half years I spent in the promotion department of Universal Edition, Vienna. I got to know him in a wide range of situations: visiting him in his spacious apartment in Karlsruhe, where he showed me the score he was currently working on, comparing it to the previous one, which was derived from the same root; listening to some of his earlier pieces he himself had not heard for some time (he was pleasantly surprised by one and was sensitive enough to detect my uneasiness caused by the other, stopping the machine without a moment’s hesitation). On another occasion, he attended a performance of his La lugubre gondola/Das Eismeer, a work for two pianos and orchestra. The title is of course a reference to Franz Liszt’s eponymous piano piece and the painting by Caspar David Friedrich. He was visibly moved, even upset by the piece. If I remember correctly at a distance of seventeen years, he described it as a requiem; walking with him in the streets near the Salzburg Festspielhaus prior to the world premiere of a cello concerto (he was extremely nervous and worried, for the conductor did not seem to have an antenna for his music—in the end, the performance was a triumph. However, I experienced at the closest possible range the extent to which a composer is helpless once he has dispatched his score on its way); addressing a public before a concert (Rihm is a superb speaker, his mastery of the German language and of course his tremendous intellect make sure he puts his message across lucidly), giving an interview (we only did one, at the very beginning of our work together—his sentences were print-ready); at the prize-giving ceremony in Munich where the prestigious Ernst von Siemens Music Prize was awarded to Wolfgang Rihm (in his tribute, the speaker addressed a question that is raised time and again in connection with the composer: his awe- and suspicion-inspiring prolificacy. The speaker recalled Luigi Nono’s admonition: “Wolfgang, you need a crisis!”

When we met in Budapest in 1980, Gerhard Wimberger was a prominent figure in Austrian musical life: a professor of conducting and composition at the Mozarteum in Salzburg, he was also associated with the festival, sat on important committees, received major prizes, and was elected a member of the Munich Academy of Fine Arts. His music was also broadcast regularly on Austrian Radio; I remember in particular his Ausstrahlungen W. A. Mozart’scher Themen (1978)—in English: Radiations of W. A. Mozartian Themes—under his baton.

In the three decades that have passed since, Wimberger has more or less disappeared from public life and concert programs. He is not the only composer to have been forgotten in his lifetime but of course one never knows: we may just be experiencing a lull to be followed by a renaissance of his music.

I.

I belong to the ill-fated generation whose youth was overshadowed by Hitler’s Reich. My musical development was likewise determined by history. I remember, around 1940, my piano teacher locked the door of his studio and under promise of secrecy produced a score from his cupboard: it was a viola piece by Paul Hindemith who had been blacklisted by the Nazis. Another teacher told me of Stravinsky: it was as if he had evoked a mirage—distant and unattainable.

After the war when traveling was free, I was not yet in a position to do so. That is why Ernst Krenek made such a deep impression: in 1952 or 1953, in the Salzburg Mozarteum, he delivered a lecture on twelve-tone music. I had until then composed in an angular Hindemith style, tonal music with many fourths and fifths; it was Krenek who made me realize that there was another way of selecting tones as well. By the time I visited Darmstadt in 1955 (that was the only time I attended the Summer Courses), the music I heard there did not hold much interest, since I was also composing with twelve tones.

After a time I bade farewell to that technique but I owe it to Krenek that he liberated me from the world in which I had lived until then. Under the influence of that experience I composed differently in a harmonic and melodic sense—the rhythmic aspect of my thinking, however, remained unchanged.

After a concert at London’s South Bank where Sir Charles Groves conducted a symphony by Michael Tippett, I was rather embarrassed to find the composer standing next to the conductor in the artist’s room. I cannot now see why I should have been surprised but my embarrassment was due to the fact that the symphony had made no impression on me whatsoever. On entering the room, both of them looked at me expectantly and I was rather hard put to know what to say. Luckily, I had recently read Tippett’s introduction to a volume of Bartók’s selected correspondence in English translation and rather than say something polite about the symphony, I congratulated the composer on his piece of writing.

A few years later, at the Bath Festival, I was genuinely taken with his opera, The Knot Garden (1966/69) and was happy to tell him so afterward. He must have been in his eighties, but had a boyish air about him, slim as he was, with a naughty smile in his eyes.

For many years, I used to receive a newsletter in the post devoted entirely to performances of Tippett’s music. At one point, the flow came to an abrupt stop, I fear because there was not enough material to fill it. Unlike Benjamin Britten, Tippett seems to have remained a national rather than an international figure.

I.

In the sense which you describe what Lutosławski told you concerning a piece of John Cage, I had something almost exactly the same when I was listening to a concert of modern music of some kind at the Edinburgh Festival and my vague recollection, not absolutely accurate, is that I heard a piano sonata played by some pianist that was Boulez. I am not dead sure this is correct—it would be very difficult to find out exactly what it was—nevertheless, what happened was a sudden understanding of something of this kind of piece which was extremely static, seemed to me to mean: start this process of invention by polarity. That is, I realized I could only use such a technique if I was able to put against it something very energetic and rapid.

With Edison Denisov and Alfred Schnittke, Sofia Gubaidulina was a black sheep of Soviet cultural life. Her position was aggravated by her faith and a mystical approach to music, evidenced by her replies to my questions.

When I contacted her, she was still living in the Soviet Union; by the time we met, briefly, in the 1990s, she had settled in Germany. I think it must have been at a concert in Innsbruck, Austria, that I went up to her, instinctively slowing down my steps, softening my voice and bending my back. It is not that she looked frail: she has a round baby face, pretty even in her sixties. It was the vulnerability in her eyes that made me hesitate about whether I should go ahead and introduce myself. She struck me as extremely shy, anxious to protect her privacy. When I did address her, it was her publisher, sitting next to her, who replied; Gubaidulina looked almost frightened and beat a hasty retreat.

I was full of admiration for her wonderfully intense violin concerto Offertorium 1980–86), which had taken my breath away when I heard it on the radio, with Gidon Kremer as soloist.

For many years I did not know much else but was aware of her fascinatingly mixed background, which no doubt influenced her outlook: one of her grandfathers was a mullah, her father was a Tartar (in fact, she was born at Chistopol in Tatarstan), her mother had Russian, Polish, and Jewish blood. No wonder she is on record as saying “I am the place where East meets West.”

Sofia Gubajdulina was kind enough to revise her contribution for a publication of the Academy of Fine Arts, Berlin. Her Russian text was translated into German by Hans-Ulrich Duffek, director of the composer’s publisher, Sikorski.

Your questions have induced me to ponder on these things which are actually self-evident. In reality, however, they turn out to be extraordinarily complex— especially the third question. But let us consider them one after the other.

I.

It has never happened in my life that the encounter with a work by another composer would have made me realize that I could compose basically in a different way.

I would like to refer you to Emil Petrovics’s comments in the following interview on the music of his younger colleague, László Vidovszky. There you have one aspect of the composer’s personality in a nutshell. He does not mince words, never mind the sensibilities he might be hurting. He may have indirectly been addressing his words to Vidovszky spurred by his pedagogical instincts—Petrovics was for many years a respected professor of composition at the Budapest Academy of Music—but it might just as well have been an expression of his irascible character. Recently, he published a two-volume autobiography, which beyond demonstrating his flair for writing (in his youth, he had planned on making fiction his profession) has also managed to enrage many people in the music profession, including those of the generation of his erstwhile pupils.

Emil Petrovics has been a major figure in Hungary, both as a composer and as a public figure. He is credited with two successful operas, both of which count as significant achievements of postwar Hungarian music: C’est la guerre, 1961 (with influences of Puccini and Alban Berg), and Crime and Punishment, 1969 (where he takes a step further along the thorny path of adapting the inflection of spoken Hungarian with its accents on the first syllable to the requirements of music that had departed from the idiom developed by Zoltán Kodály: in his vocal works, such as Psalmus hungaricus or his a cappella choruses, Kodály proved a master of prosody, he had found an ideal solution to setting Hungarian texts to music. That solution, however, could no longer be applied to a more advanced musical style).

In addition to teaching at the Academy, Petrovics also directed the Hungarian State Opera House and was a leading light of Artisjus, the national copyright agency.

In 2009, he looked at our interview and decided it needed no change.

I.

I have had no experience of a similar nature.

Let us examine this question from a wider angle. You see, I did not decide to become a composer from one moment to the next: the decision was the outcome of a slow process. And, unlike most of my colleagues, I did not approach music through Beethoven, Mozart, Bach, or Tchaikovsky.

In his late twenties, Ladislav Kupkovic was one of the leading avant-garde composers in Slovakia. He conducted the Philharmonic Orchestra, founded a new music ensemble in 1963, and composed experimental pieces, such as Ad libitum (1969), which he defined as a “happening.” Between 1965 and 1980, his works were published by Universal Edition. They include his Souvenir (1971) for violin and piano (or string orchestra), which was for several years on the repertoire of Gidon Kremer. It is no longer “new music” but a witty evocation of salon music fashionable in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. (Kupkovic also has a K.u.K. Musik33 for orchestra written in 1978.)

He left Slovakia for Germany in 1969 and was appointed professor of composition at the Hannover Academy in 1973. It was in Hannover that I met him some years later. By that time, he had turned his back on his avant-garde past. The pieces he played for me in his apartment were, if I remember correctly, in a mock-Handel style. A few years later, on another visit, he had gotten as far as Schumann.

It was all done impeccably but I could not help wondering if it had any raison d’être. Why write music à la Schumann and company, why should musicians play copies if they have access to the original? I could not convince the composer, of course, and I was quite depressed at the prospect that his oeuvre post-Bratislava would fall into oblivion. I wish I were wrong.

Ladislav Kupkovic is an extreme representative of a number of composers who early on in their careers deluded themselves that if they were to be noticed, if they wanted to be performed, they needed to adhere to the lingua franca of the international avant-garde. Eventually, some of them realized that they had voluntarily donned a straitjacket and they went out of their way to shed it—in many cases with the sad result that they surrendered instead to the straitjacket of bygone musical aesthetics without any relevance to our age. What they lacked was a strong personality which would have lent validity and, yes, a raison d’être to their compositions. Kurtág’s bon mot comes to mind: “Was this piece worth getting up for?” You can, of course, easily substitute “day” for “piece” and you are faced with a fundamental existential question.

“Dear dedicated (to the cause) Mr. Varga”—Lukas Foss wrote me on an aerogram, on June 1, 1979 (see fig. 5). “And thank you for your persistence.” Yes, I was persistent, otherwise the three-questions book would never have come into being. And with Lukas Foss I needed to be stubborn, for he was so busy conducting that while at home, he never had any time to write. He continued to send me aerograms, scribbled onboard planes that were taking him to yet another concert, or in hotel rooms. On June 1, 1979, he was en route to South Korea; in 1982 when he did eventually reply to my questions, he happened to be in the Embassy Hotel in Kansas City. “I came across your letter of September 30,” he wrote me on November 22, “just as I left for a tour. Not wishing to keep you waiting for an answer, allow me to jot down a few sentences in reply.”

Here are his “loose, improvised jottings”:

I.

No—I have never had Lutosławski’s experience—or, to put it another way—that is the experience I have whenever I hear other music. If it is music I love, it gives me ideas: how to apply some of my own ideas to what I have just heard. It is like a love-relationship. You immerse yourself in a love and you find yourself.

In my Baroque Variations—notably No. 2, the Scarlatti one (Nonesuch record)—I turn other music into dreams of mine.

When I listen to music I do not care for (sometimes my colleagues’) I say to myself: “wait a moment—why didn’t he do it this way, or that way, it could have been wonderful”—then I feel that I have discovered something like a scientist who thinks of a “better way” (to solve a problem).

II.

Sounds, noises (such as “white noise” that has no “human” associations) mean nothing to me. Music is sound + noises, but it is not born out of sounds and noises, it is born out of silence. It is sounds and noises that have meaning. Would meaningless chatter suggest a poem to a poet? No. Sounds with meaning don’t come from sounds void of meaning.

I first met Witold Lutosławski briefly at the Warsaw Autumn Festival in 1972 and a few weeks later in Graz, at the world premiere of his Preludes and Fugue for Chamber String Orchestra. I was much taken with the work even though I was still very much a newcomer to contemporary music. Spontaneously, as if moved by an instinct, I went up to the composer and asked him if he would be willing to give me a book-length interview. I really had no business doing so, for I had never consulted with Editio Musica Budapest (EMB), the Hungarian music publisher I had joined the year before, about whether such a book would be published. I just went ahead and posed the question as if publication were a foregone conclusion.

Lutosławski’s face assumed the expression I came to know so well in the years to come: he raised his eyebrows so that only the ends closest to his nose rose, the rest slanting downward toward his temples. The result was an expression of anxiety, of hesitation, which coupled with his slightly nasal and high voice augured ill for my request. But the reply that did eventually come was positive. It was only a question of timing: he was a busy man, dividing his time between composing and conducting.

EMB readily agreed to cover the costs of my travel to Warsaw and publish the book: my director, László Sarlós, not only had faith in me, he was also aware that releasing a book on a composer coming from a socialist country would be a feather in his cap in his dealings with the Ministry of Culture. (Indeed, the music critic of the communist party’s daily was to welcome the interview on ideological and political grounds.)

When I eventually turned up at Lutosławski’s beautiful villa in the ul. Śmiała 39 on March 12, 1973, there was tacit agreement between us that our interviews would be devoid of any political connotation.

Let me quote from my introduction to the English edition of the book, Lutosławski Profile, published by Chester Music:50

An exact contemporary of Olivier Messiaen, Elliott Carter is thankfully still with us, providing a living link to the first decades of the twentieth century.

As a pupil of Nadia Boulanger in Paris as of 1932, he may well have heard Ravel play the piano (he was to write a moving obituary upon the French composer’s death in 1937 for Modern Music, a magazine for which he had begun to contribute articles beginning in 1936). His summaries of the New York concert seasons in the late 1930s afford a telling glimpse of performances of music which was then new (such as Webern’s recent arrangement of Schubert’s German Dances of 1824), by composers who were still active and counted as his older contemporaries: beyond Webern also Bartók and, most significantly, Charles Ives. In the book he sent me (see below), he marked several articles in the collection of his writings published in 1977 by Indiana University Press—articles from the 1930s onward, all to do with the music of Ives.

I first encountered a work by Carter in Budapest in the 1970s when Charles Rosen played his Piano Concerto with the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Pierre Boulez. I was rather nonplussed by what I heard but was nevertheless aware of its being a substantial and significant piece of music.

In subsequent years I continued to hear compositions by Elliott Carter at infrequent intervals and my impressions never changed: I found them too abstract to move me but always interesting as an intellectual challenge. The change came as late as 2007 or so when the orchestral piece Soundings, composed when Carter was well into his nineties, fascinated me with its mellowness and echoes of traditional inflections.

I was in London in the late 1980s, attending a concert which had John Cage in the audience. In the intermission, I accompanied a friend to his car, to find Elliott Carter getting out of one parked right next to it. On greeting him, I suggested he might want to meet Cage, who was conveniently nearby in the concert hall and was perplexed by the vehemence of his rejection: no, he was busy, he had an appointment to keep. Back in the hall, I told the American pianist Yvar Mikhashoff (1941–93) of my exchange with Carter.

When he cofounded the Budapest New Music Studio at the age of twenty-seven (for more details on the studio, please see László Sáry, chapter fifty), Zoltán Jeney was something of a rebel. He rebelled against officialdom, the all-pervasive ideology of the party and the kind of music he was expected to compose. He had been allowed to breathe some fresh air in Rome where he studied with Goffredo Petrassi in 1967/68. Today, he is an establishment figure: head of the Department of Composition at the Budapest Music University and winner of several major prizes awarded by the Hungarian government for artistic merit.

Of the former composers of the New Music Studio, he is perhaps the most cerebral in his approach to composition. It follows that his works are rather abstract in character, with processes carried through to their logical ending before another process is allowed to get under way. This fundamental feature does not wholly apply to Jeney’s chef d’oeuvre, much admired in Hungary: Halotti szertartás (Funeral Rites), a large-scale oratorio composed between 1987 and 2005, a setting of Latin, Hebrew, Greek, and Old Slavic texts as well as twentieth-century Hungarian and Italian poetry. The world premiere on October 22, 2005, under Zoltán Kocsis was a major triumph.

I.

I think Wittgenstein’s statement is true beyond his own book also on a more general level. For instance, it is valid for interpreting and understanding musical phenomena as well. To my mind, it provides the only way for us to understand Lutosławski’s case: his encounter with Cage’s piano concerto made him conscious of a change in a certain direction that was already taking place in his mind.

My own inverse case also bears out Wittgenstein, perhaps even more unequivocally. In 1964, at the Warsaw Autumn Festival, I saw Merce Cunningham’s ballet to music by John Cage. The choreography appealed to me just as little as did the music. In fact, the latter irritated me no end.

Before meeting Christian Wolff in person, some time after 2000, at the Donaueschingen Festival, I had heard his voice. I was visiting György and Márta Kurtág in Berlin in March 1999; they were guests of the Wissenschaftskolleg (Science College)—something of a privilege also accorded to people like Walter Levin of the LaSalle Quartet or Gérard Mortier, director of major opera houses and festivals, whom I was also to meet there on other occasions.

Kurtág told me how Christian Wolff had, at his request, recorded on tape extracts from the Iliad in Ancient Greek, and proceeded to play a few minutes. It was quite an experience to hear the American composer’s voice, imbued with emotion, reciting the text with its many diphthongs and sibilants. Kurtág could follow every word and Márta also understood most of it. The composer said: “I have just written another Hommage à Wolff.”

Like some of his contemporaries, Christian Wolff was fascinated by the classics as much as by music. At Harvard, he pursued a training in classical literature and went to Florence to study Italian and classical literature. On returning to Harvard, he obtained his PhD in comparative literature, teaching there, and later at Dartmouth College, music, the classics, and comparative literature.

He was a pupil of Grete Sultan in piano and of John Cage in composition, later to become a member of the New York Group. (“I have a wonderful pupil. He is sixteen and his favorite composer is Webern. He has great intelligence and sensitivity. What’s more, he was born in France. His name is Christian Wolff.”)

In Donaueschingen, we happened to be staying at the same hotel. He was checking in when I arrived and I introduced myself straightaway. My enthusiasm was dampened by his reserve (in the ensuing correspondence he claimed he had not been aware of any aloofness on his part) and sadly it never came to a proper conversation.

I was all the more impressed by his music. The rehearsal gave me an idea of Wolff’s total dedication to his work and the importance he attributed to every detail in performance; the concert opened a window onto his world—one that was closed after a tantalizingly short time.

The Argentine composer was sixty-five years old when I met him in Budapest but he looked considerably older. He spoke slowly and haltingly, perhaps because he found it difficult to express his ideas in English. His wife, the cellist Aurora Natola-Ginastera (who had played the world premiere of Ginastera’s Second Cello Concerto that very year, in Buenos Aires) was sitting next to us, watching over her husband with a motherly, anxious look in her eyes. Perhaps he was no longer in good health: he died two years after our interview. He would like to have checked the transcript of the conversation—sadly, he passed away before he could have done so.

I.

An aspect of a work by another composer may set my fantasy in motion: I imagine the way I would approach it. This is of common occurrence among composers. I think this is one explanation for the presence of so many different styles in contemporary music, in contrast with the past.

When I was young, Bartók and Berg influenced me in this way. What struck me about Bartók was the way he incorporated imaginary folk music in his Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta as well as in his string quartets. Something similar is present in my own string quartet as well. When I was feeling my way toward dodecaphony, I was gripped by the expressive power of Berg’s music. My first opera, Don Rodrigo, bears traces of the influence of Wozzeck, especially in its structure, in the use of closed forms.

Lutosławski’s style did indeed undergo a radical transformation. My own development toward a personal idiom was much slower. Today, we have one thing in common: a kind of extended tonality. It characterizes his double concerto for oboe, harp, and strings, just as my piano sonata which I completed recently. In both pieces, you will find a new folklore. In his case, it is the polonaise. This particular work of his did not influence me: I heard it on the radio on the day I completed my sonata.

Changes in musical structure are to be found the world over. Composers like Lutosławski, Dutilleux, Petrassi, myself, and others are moving toward a much clearer kind of music. My new cello concerto, for instance, may not be easy but it is very pure music.

During the eight years of collecting material for this book (1978–85), it became something of an obsession for me to seize whatever opportunity presented itself to interview composers of international standing. I forget how I learned of Morton Feldman’s impending visit to Vienna. In any case, it proved quite easy to organize an appointment and I duly turned up in the Austrian cellist’s house where the composer was staying. I drove there from Budapest with the three questions and not much else on my mind.

For I must plead guilty to having known precious little at the time about Feldman and his music. All I knew was that he was considered an important composer and that was enough for me to reach for my microphone. It will not be difficult to imagine my acute embarrassment in meeting this unique man face to face. I felt hopelessly European, hopelessly bourgeois, hopelessly underinformed. However, I made a brave effort to conceal my uneasiness and to conduct a conversation with Feldman as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

By 1983 when Feldman and I met in a leafy suburb of Vienna, I had had some experience with interviewing composers; my conversations with Lutosławski, Xenakis, and Berio had already been published. But in their case, I had had no difficulty following their train of thought; I was at home with the way they reacted to my questions. Feldman, on the other hand, seemed to have come from another planet (as indeed Cage had done when I first met him in Warsaw in 1972). In replying, he would let his thoughts and associations roam freely—with me always behind, doing my best to keep pace. As you will see, at one point I gave up: for try as I might, I could detect no connection at all between what he was saying and my question that he was supposed to be answering. It turned out that he had forgotten all about it. (As I was to learn later, it was not unusual for him to let the thread drop.)

For a few years early on in his career, Krzysztof Penderecki was a symbol of pioneering new music, with composers in the so-called socialist countries avidly listening to his music and studying his scores. György Kurtág, for one, acknowledges to this day his indebtedness to Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima (1959/60) for 52 strings—the lessons he drew from the piece were put to use in his The Sayings of Péter Bornemisza, Op. 7, a “concerto” for soprano and piano of 1963/68.

To quote from Baker’s Biographical Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Classical Musicians: “After a few works of an academic nature, he developed a hyper-modern technique of composition in a highly individual style, in which no demarcation line is drawn between consonances and dissonances, tonal or atonal melody, traditional or innovative instrumentation, an egalitarian attitude prevails toward all available resources of sound.”54

Like Kupkovic but far less drastically, Penderecki at one point turned his back on his avant-garde past and set out instead on a path which seems to run parallel to (or cross) that of Gustav Mahler. I must have been the umpteenth interviewer to have pried into the background of his volte-face, nevertheless, the composer replied without any sign of impatience. Sadly, however, he never responded to my request that he look again at the text of our conversation for the purposes of this book.

There is an episode I would like to record here which throws light on his tremendous popularity in the 1970s when his name seemed to stand for new music as such. Actually, it concerns Witold Lutosławski and his wife Danuta, who spent some time in Budapest in the late 1970s, Witold conducting a concert of his music. He had a day off and I wanted to show him a beautiful Romanesque chapel in Northern Hungary. I drove him to the village of Nagybörzsöny, which in the Middle Ages had been quite prominent as a rich mining settlement. We drove some of the way along the Danube, in a countryside of idyllic beauty. I had been there a number of times but was still as taken with it as on the first occasion. Rather to my disappointment, Witold was immersed in a topic he was expounding on and only spared the most fleeting look at the river and the forest when I pointed them out.