Hungarian composer and conductor Peter Eötvös, who has died at the age of 80, is now best known for the 12 operas he wrote in the last 25 years of his life. Before this, he had played a leading role as a conductor specializing in the promotion of European musical modernism.
The work that launched Eötvös’ career as a successful opera composer was Three Sisters, which premiered in Lyon in 1998. The libretto, co-written with Claus H Henneberg, reworks Anton Chekhov’s play into a series of three “serials”, each presenting a version of events from a single character’s point of view; At least four roles are performed by the countertenors.
From then on, he frequently added new stage works to his already growing body of concert work, with an extensive output notable for its arresting lyricism and exquisite orchestration. Eötvös gradually found his own voice, expanding on the modernist roots of an approach based on the music and ideas of Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen, with the help of thoughtful studies of the music of non-European cultures.
Stockhausen had already drawn on Japanese musical and theatrical traditions, and Eötvös’s first opera, Harakiri, based on the ritual suicide of Yukio Mishima, was composed in 1973, when both composers were working together in Osaka. Later, however, Eötvös’s style – variously influenced by Chinese and Japanese traditions, Indian, African and Basque music, jazz and, most importantly, Béla Bartók and the folk repertoires of his native Transylvania – developed much of its individuality. interrogation of cultures that goes far beyond any cultural tourism.
His instrumental compositions and operas often derive from such sources: the large-scale orchestral work Atlantis (1995), for example, draws on Transylvanian dances that act as symbols of a lost culture for the composer. hope was renewed. In the following years he received many commissions from the world’s leading orchestras: for example in 2016 a text by Péter Esterházy for the Oratorium Balbulum for the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, which premiered at the Salzburg festival. Reflecting on a variety of current political issues, from the September 11 terrorist attacks to relations between countries, this work reflects Eötvös’ typical social and political concerns.
But his operas already seem to represent the most enduring and surprisingly diverse dimension of his production. Adapting novels and plays by both classical and modern authors, including Jon Fosse, Jean Genet, Tony Kushner, and Gabriel García Márquez, these works demonstrate both Eötvös’s broad literary ambition and his willingness to explore a variety of different dramatic approaches, including the comic and the tragic. . He was assisted by his third wife, Maria Eötvösne Mezei, in designing some of these opera libretti.
Le Balcon, with a libretto by Françoise Morvan, André Markovitz and the composer, derived from Genet’s classic tale of power struggles in a revolutionary environment, was first seen in Aix-en-Provence in 2002. Mezei’s libretto for Angels in America (2004) accounts for less than three hours of Kushner’s original seven-hour play about HIV/Aids.
Many of his operas have been seen in England. When the Márquez-based Love and Other Demons was performed at Glyndebourne in 2008, Eötvös became the first non-British composer to premiere a stage work there. Described by the composer as “a bel canto opera”, it explored illicit love, superstition, race and demonic power, with a libretto by Kornél Hamvai. Music underpins the drama, with an innate understanding of how orchestral forces can enhance the overall effect; Although the composer is fond of some magnificent sounds, he displays the rare mastery of knowing that sometimes less can sometimes be stronger than more.
Eötvös’s last opera, Valuska – also his first opera with a Hungarian libretto written by Mezei and Kinga Keszthelyi – is based on László Krasznahorkai’s novel The Melancholy of Resistance: a newspaper delivery boy and his wife arrive at a circus town where the world’s largest stuffed whale is the star attraction. Valuska premiered in Budapest last December.
Eötvös, like his former compatriots György Ligeti and György Kurtág, was a native of multi-ethnic Transylvania – then in Hungary but later transferred to Romania; His birthplace was Székelyudvarhely. The turbulent final months of World War II caused his family, including his mother Ilona Szucs, to flee west. He was a pianist and his father, Laszlo Eötvös, was a lawyer. Peter’s early childhood was spent in the northern Hungarian town of Miskolc, where he first met Ligeti. The latter was already establishing himself as a composer and teacher by the late 1940s, and the two remained in contact.
Eötvös studied piano and composition at the Franz Liszt Academy in Budapest from 1958; On Zoltán Kodály’s recommendation, János Viski became his composition teacher. He soon gained fame for improvising to accompany silent films and composing music for both cinema and theatre.
In 1966, when he was 22, he moved to Cologne on a scholarship to work at Stockhausen. He also studied composition with Bernd Alois Zimmermann and began conducting. When I first attended the Darmstadt Summer School in 1974, I remember Eötvös not only as one of Stockhausen’s closest assistants, but also as a member of a recently formed group of young Cologne-based musicians who called themselves the Oeldorf Group and specialized in live performance. Contains electronics.
After Boulez asked him to conduct the opening concert of IRCAM at the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique in Paris, from 1978 Eötvös became an orchestra conductor, specializing in all the latest compositional trends that helped drive the global modernist agenda of 1978. gained fame. time. He quickly became the music director of IRCAM’s flagship chamber orchestra, Ensemble Intercontemporain.
He directed the world premieres of Stockhausen’s operas Donnerstag aus Licht (1981) and Montag aus Licht (1988). In the United Kingdom, he conducted the Covent Garden performances of Donnerstag in 1985 and served as principal guest conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra from that year to 1988. He has worked with the London Sinfonietta and also directed Leos Janáček’s The Makropulos Case at Glyndebourne in 2001.
Eötvös came to prominence as a composer only after leaving his post at the Ensemble Intercontemporain in 1991. With its new position on the European stage and the political events after 1989 came new responsibilities.
He gave conducting and contemporary chamber music lessons in Karlsruhe and Cologne, Germany. After founding the International Eötvös Institute for young conductors and composers in Budapest in 1991, he founded the Peter Eötvös Foundation for Contemporary Music in 2004. Just at this time, when Hungary joined the European Union, Eötvös and his wife Maria, who had both previously lived in Cologne, Paris, and then Hilversum in the Netherlands, finally returned to Budapest.
Eötvös’s son from his first marriage to actor Piroska Molnár in 1968 predeceased him. In 1976, she married Taiwanese-German pianist Pi-hsien Chen and they had a daughter named Ann-yi. They divorced and he subsequently married Maria Mezei in 1995. He is survived by a son named Ann-yi and two stepsons from this marriage, Peter and Daniel.
• Peter Eötvös, composer and conductor, born 2 January 1944; Died March 24, 2024