I’d like to take people with me on a journey
A portrait of the composer Peter Eötvös

Composer and conductor Peter Eötvös died in March of this year at the age of eighty. When the Berliner Philharmoniker give the German premiere of his piano concerto Cziffra Psodia this September, the orchestra pays homage to a passionate musician who was a close associate for decades.

“We are influenced by culture in many ways”, he once observed.  “I would be happy if, at the end of my life, once the world had flowed through me, something of it remained caught there, as if I were a sieve.” 

There can be no doubt that many things remained. Born in Transylvania, Peter Eötvös grew up in Hungary, trained as a conductor in Germany, and was ultimately at home in concert halls all over the world, a true musical cosmopolitan. Though many different cultures influenced his musical identity, he somehow amalgamated all of them to create his own distinctive style. By the end of his life, the sieve was full, with a wealth of experience that made him one of the most frequently-performed opera composers of our time.

Musical journeys

Openness, a delight in experimentation and an unerring feel for the most varied kinds of musical expression – all of these elements arguably contributed to Peter Eötvös’s success as a musician. His music speaks to us directly and is clearly legible not only to specialists of the avant-garde but also to general audiences in concert-halls and opera houses around the world. And the desire to be understood by his audience was a decisive factor in motivating the Hungarian composer and conductor when it came to writing music. “My music always tells a story,” he once explained. “There’s always a narrative to it. So-called ‘absolute music’ isn’t for me. For me, it’s very important that the very first note is an invitation to the audience. I’d like to take people with me on a journey: they shouldn’t just listen, they should also participate.”

The son of a pianist and a music teacher, Peter Eötvös was surrounded by music from his earliest childhood. “I was only four when I started to compose – just like that. Writing music, spelling out the letters of the alphabet and playing the piano were an integral part of my life,” he later recalled. Even so, he dreamed of becoming a cosmonaut, since Yuri Gagarin’s first orbit of the Earth in 1961 affected him profoundly. By then, however, he had been studying for some time as one of the youngest pupils in Zoltán Kodály’s composition class at the Budapest Academy of Music.  Space remained a constant preoccupation, and for his first piano work he chose the title Kosmos. “It’s still performed today, and doesn’t seem too bad,” he remembered with amusement – and with a certain sense of pride.

From Budapest to Darmstadt

Although Eötvös regarded the music of his fellow countryman Béla Bartók as his “mother tongue”, he retained a burning interest in all that was happening in the musical world of Western Europe. He was able to attend his first Summer School in Darmstadt in 1965, and the following year a scholarship took him to Cologne, where he studied with Bernd Alois Zimmermann. “This was the centre of the world of contemporary music at that time. Above all, I was interested in the Studio for Electronic Music and in the West German Radio Symphony Orchestra. I dreamt of getting to know Stockhausen, and I had the good fortune to be able to do so. We remained in contact for more than forty years – right up till his death.” Eötvös became a member of the Stockhausen Ensemble, in which he played the piano, percussion and synthesizer. It was in this capacity that he first appeared at the Berlin Philharmonie, performing Stockhausen’s Hymnen in May 1972. He worked as a sound engineer and later conducted the world premieres of Montag and Donnerstag from Stockhausen’s Licht cycle. In 1979 Boulez invited Eötvös to join him in Paris, where he spent many years running the Ensemble InterContemporain.

Despite his close links with Stockhausen and Boulez, Eötvös refused to be tied down to a particular aesthetic movement, retaining his independence at a time when there were marked differences between, on the one hand, these two radical representatives of the avant-garde and, on the other, Hans Werner Henze and his school. “I tried to maintain my distance from this often-violent debate,” he said, “and I am glad that as a composer I never belonged to any particular school. Back then, both of these aspects were important to me: I found both of these worlds interesting. Fortunately, this era of division is now behind us.”

International breakthrough

Eötvös stepped down as music director of the Ensemble InterContemporain in 1991, after twelve years in the post. By now, the world’s concert halls were all open to him. When he made his conducting debut with the Berliner Philharmoniker in 1999, he was already devoting more of his time to his composition work, initially with important works for orchestra and smaller ensembles such as Psychokosmos, Shadows and Atlantis, later focusing on the world of opera. Even as a student in Budapest, he had worked for the cinema and for the theatre. “Here you can see straight away if the music works for an audience,” he explained. ”And if it works, the music creates images in your imagination. So ‘sound-theatre’ means that we can see something even though we are just listening to music. That’s my music in a nutshell: it’s a pictorial language.”

Eötvös made his international breakthrough as an opera composer in 1998 when his setting of Chekhov’s Three Sisters was premiered in Lyons. It was followed by many other works of music theatre. Eötvös was a true dramatist – even his instrumental works have a clearly-audible narrative component. “I could go to the theatre every day,” he once confessed. He worked on the librettos of his music theatre works with obsessive attention to detail. “As a medium, opera is almost always about the conflict between the individual and society,” he said. “If the characters aren’t in conflict with their surroundings, the opera will simply be beautiful, and sometimes just boring. There is then no tension, and – to put it simply – no build-up to a climax.”

In his music, Eötvös drew on a vast range of expressive possibilities. His scores contain not only references to the major and minor tonalities of tradition, but also elements of an avant-garde musical language which is often gestural in character, and influenced by non-European musical cultures and jazz. As with jazz, improvisation often played a key role in his works, especially those written just before the new millennium. “If there were a mixture between compositional and improvisatory thinking, and if this tradition could be perpetuated, then this would be the ideal future for me,” he explained at the time. But this remained a Utopian vision, and Eötvös returned to through-composed music. 

Homage to Georges Cziffra

Although Peter Eötvös was a musical cosmopolitan, he never lost touch with his Hungarian roots, establishing his Eötvös Foundation in Budapest in 2004 with the aim of training young musicians. His piano concerto Cziffra Psodia, first performed in 2021, likewise evokes his musical past. Eötvös had known the Hungarian pianist Georges Cziffra since he was a child. Cziffra was one of the leading Hungarian pianists of the twentieth century. During the Second World War he ended up as a Russian prisoner of war, and in the 1950s, after unsuccessfully attempting to leave Hungary, he was sent to a labour camp. When he was finally allowed to emigrate, he withdrew completely from public life. His political fate was typical of many men and women who suffered under the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century. “His whole life was accompanied by success and tragedy,” Eötvös said. “It was this atmosphere that I tried to recreate in my piano concerto.” The result is a rhapsodic portrait of a man worn down by life, a piece in which it is no accident that a central role is played by the cimbalom, Hungary’s national instrument. Peter Eötvös said that his music always had a story to tell; and his piano concerto, an impressive legacy, does exactly that.