Kurtág Hommage à Mihály András (12 Microludes for String Quartet), Op. 13
György Kurtág was born at Lugoj, Romania on 19 February 1926 to Hungarian parents; Lugoj was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire until it was ceded to Romania in 1918. Hommage à Mihály András (12 Microludes for String Quartet) Op. 13 was written in 1977-1978 and is Kurtag’s second work written for string quartet. The work was commissioned by the Witten Festival and premiered on 21 April 1978 at Witten, Germany by the Eder Quartet.
The music of Kurtág often draws comparison with that of Webern because of its brevity and concision, but one must take into account his Hungarian roots to fully understand Kurtág’s musical language. Kurtág has called the music of Béla Bartók his “mother tongue”, and one definitely hears this in his music. In Kurtág’s early years he was known more as a performer and his interpretation of Bartók’s works was highly praised. Kurtág’s diploma piece at the Franz Liszt Academy of music was a Viola Concerto heavily influenced by Bartók’s Violin Concerto No. 2.
Access to works of composers from the West such as Webern, Schönberg and Stravinsky was extremely limited due to the policies of the Hungarian communist regime; Kurtág’s first exposure to this music came through his compatriot and friend György Ligeti who possessed a limited number of recordings of music from the West. Kurtág came to Paris to study in 1957-8 and this proved to be a turning point in the development of his musical language. He attended the classes of Messaien, Milhaud and Max Deutsch, but it was his access to the complete scores of Webern that proved to be much more influential. In the grand tradition of many composers before him, Kurtág copied out most of Webern’s principal works by hand to gain a more intimate knowledge of the composer’s language. Kurtág’s sessions with art psychologist Marianne Stein also proved to be very influential. According to the Grove Dictionary article on Kurtág, Stein’s advised the composer that “his compositional voice would be most effectively developed if he set himself simple musical tasks, such as exploring the various ways of connecting two notes.” This sort of exploration still resonates in Kurtág’s works to this day.
In 1968 Kurtág suffered a compositional drought that would last for five years. In 1973 the piano teacher Marianne Teöke asked Kurtág to write piano pieces for children and this resulted in his Elö-Játékok (‘Pre-Games’) and provided a new trajectory for the composer. In these musical games (and in the many that followed) Kurtág experiments with a system of graphic notation that, according to the Grove article, “is intended to stimulate the performer (adult or child) to experiment with sound and sensation rather than to analyse the score intelectually and, according to the performance instructions, to revive the spontaneity of such practices as ‘free declamation, folk music parlando-rubato [and] Gregorian chant’.” Most, if not all, of Kurtág’s compositions from that point onwards have some element of game-playing involved, and the Hommage à Mihály András (12 Microludes for String Quartet) Op. 13 is no exception. Many of Kurtág’s works are homages, in some cases written for serious occasions but in other cases for much more playful reasons (such as the Hommage à Nancy Sinatra or the Hommage à Jeney (Phone Numbers of our Loved Ones 1).
The Op. 13 Microludes were written as a tribute to Kurtág’s friend Mihály András on the occasion of his 60th birthday. András was a composer and conductor and was involved in performances of many of Kurtág’s earlier works. Kurtág had written and earlier homage to András for solo piano that incorporated a theme from András’s Cello Concerto; the Op. 13 pieces do not contain such an overt reference to his friend’s music. The term “Microlude” is an invention of Kurtág’s; literally translated from the Latin roots of the term it means “little game”. Kurtág anchors the 12 Microludes by basing each consecutive movement on one of the notes of the scale; each movement is based on the next note in an ascending chromatic sequence as the piece progresses. There is an obvious reference to Webern’s Op. 9 Bagatelles but one also hears folk elements of the Bartók quartets in the music. Each Microlude is extremely brief and the set explores an extremely diverse set of characters: examples of this are movements ranging from extreme stillness to “molto agitato”. Kurtág’s collections of musical games and homages serve as a personal journal of sorts, and one can surmise that, because of the range of expression explored in the 12 Microludes, Mihály András was a trusted colleague who helped Kurtág explore the many aspects of his creative self.
-Program notes by Dr. Daniel Doña