Peter Eötvös rehearses with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in Cologne, 2017. Photo: Ullstein Bild/Getty Images
The Hungarian composer and conductor Peter Eötvös, who has died at the age of 80, is now best known for the twelve operas he wrote in the last 25 years of his life. Before that, he played a leading role as a conductor, specializing in the promotion of European musical modernism.
The work that premiered in Lyon in 1998 was Three Sisters, marking the start of Eötvös' career as a successful opera composer. The libretto, written with Claus H Henneberg, reworks Anton Chekhov's play into a series of three 'sequences', each offering a version of events from the point of view of a single character; no fewer than four roles are fulfilled by countertenors.
From then on, he regularly added new stage works to an already growing number of concert works in an extensive production that stood out for its radiant lyricism and brilliant orchestration. By expanding the modernist origins of an approach rooted in the music and ideas of Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen through deep research into other music from cultures outside Europe, Eötvös gradually found his own voice.
Stockhausen had already drawn on Japanese musical and theatrical traditions, and Eötvös's earliest opera, Harakiri - based on the ritual suicide of Yukio Mishima - was composed as early as 1973, while both composers were working together in Osaka. Subsequently, however, Eötvös' style - variously influenced by both Chinese and Japanese traditions, by Indian, African and Basque music, by jazz and not least by Béla Bartók and the folk repertoires of his native Transylvania - developed much of his individuality. interrogations of those cultures that went far beyond mere cultural tourism.
Both his instrumental compositions and his operas often emerge from such sources: the large-scale orchestral work Atlantis (1995), for example, is based on Transylvanian dances that function as a symbol of a lost culture that for the composer is associated with renewed hope. In later years he received many commissions from the world's leading orchestras: in 2016, for example, for Oratorio Balbulum, on a text by Péter Esterházy, for the Vienna Philharmonic, premiered at the Salzburg Festival. This work, which focuses on a variety of current political issues, from the terrorist attacks of 9/11 to relations between countries, is typical of Eötvös' social and political concerns.
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But his operas already seem to represent the most enduring and surprisingly varied dimension of his work. Adapting novels and plays by both classic and modern writers - including Jon Fosse, Jean Genet, Tony Kushner and Gabriel García Márquez - these works demonstrate both Eötvös's broad literary ambitions and his willingness to embrace a variety of different dramatic approaches to explore, both comically and tragically. . In devising some of these opera libretti he was assisted by Maria Eötvösne Mezei, his third wife.
Le Balcon - the libretto by Françoise Morvan, André Markovitz and the composer, derived from Genet's now classic story of power struggles in a revolutionary setting - was first seen in Aix-en-Provence in 2002. Mezei's libretto for Angels in America (2004 ) amounts to less than three hours of the original seven hours of Kushner's play about HIV/AIDS.
Several of his operas have been performed in Great Britain. When his Márquez-based Love and Other Demons was produced 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. The music supports the drama with an innate understanding of how orchestral forces can enhance the overall effect; Although he indulges in beautiful sounds, the composer shows the rare talent of knowing when less can sometimes be more powerful than more.
Eötvös' last opera, Valuska - also his first with a libretto in Hungarian, by Mezei and Kinga Keszthelyi - is taken from the novel The Melancholy of the Resistance by László Krasznahorkai: a tragicomic, surreal story in which a newspaper deliverer and the arrival in his small town of a circus with the largest stuffed whale in the world as the main attraction. Valuska premiered in Budapest last December.
Eötvös, like his older compatriots György Ligeti and György Kurtág, was born in multi-ethnic Transylvania - then in Hungary but then 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. She was a pianist and his father, Laszlo Eötvös, was a lawyer. Peter's early childhood was spent in Miskolc, a northern Hungarian town where he first met Ligeti. The latter already became established as a composer and teacher in the late 1940s, and the two remained in touch.
Eötvös studied piano and composition at the Franz Liszt Academy in Budapest from 1958; on the advice of Zoltán Kodály, János Viski became his composition teacher. He quickly gained a reputation for improvising to accompany silent films and composing scores for both film and theater.
In 1966, at the age of 22, he moved to Cologne on a scholarship to work at Stockhausen. He also studied composition with Bernd Alois Zimmermann and started conducting. When I first attended the Darmstadt Summer School in 1974, I remember Eötvös not only as one of Stockhausen's closest acolytes, but also as a member of a recently formed group of young musicians from Cologne who called themselves the Oeldorf Group and specialized in live performances. involving electronics.
From 1978, after Boulez asked him to conduct the opening concert of IRCAM, his Institut de Recherche et Coördinatie Acoustique/Musique, in Paris, Eötvös gained fame as a conductor specializing in the latest compositional trends that helped advance the global modernist agenda of the time . He soon became musical director of Ensemble Intercontemporain, IRCAM's most important chamber orchestra.
He conducted the world premieres of Stockhausen's operas Donnerstag aus Licht (1981) and Montag aus Licht (1988). In Britain he conducted the Covent Garden performances of Donnerstag in 1985 and was principal guest conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra from that year until 1988. He collaborated with the London Sinfonietta and also conducted Leos Janáček's The Makropulos Case at Glyndebourne in 2001.
It was only after he resigned from his duties with the Ensemble Intercontemporain in 1991 that Eötvös really came to prominence as a composer. With his new status on the European stage and the political events of 1989 and later came new responsibilities.
He taught conducting and contemporary chamber music in both Karlsruhe and Cologne, Germany. After founding the International Eötvös Institute for Young Conductors and Composers in Budapest in 1991, he founded the Peter Eötvös Contemporary Music Foundation in 2004. It was at this point, when Hungary joined the European Union, that Eötvös and his wife Maria - both of whom had previously lived in Cologne, Paris and then Hilversum in the Netherlands - finally moved back to Budapest.
A son from Eötvös' first marriage to actor Piroska Molnár in 1968 was predeceased. In 1976 he married Taiwanese-German pianist Pi-hsien Chen, with whom he had a daughter, Ann-yi. They divorced and he subsequently married Maria Mezei in 1995. He is survived by her, Ann-yi and two stepsons from that marriage, Peter and Daniel.
* Peter Eötvös, composer and conductor, born January 2, 1944; died March 24, 2024
