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“As a conductor and composer, I feel comfortable everywhere, but at home nowhere. Such is my fate. I have a marvelous and very pleasant life, but it is the life of an outsider watching things happen around him.”1
Is it possible to define Peter Eötvös musically? One would be hard pressed to identify an “Eötvös sound” like the immediately recognizable sonic fingerprint of Salvatore Sciarrino or György Ligeti. Nevertheless, three threads, overlapping yet quite distinct, weave their way through this Transylvanian composer’s creative journey: a heightened theatricality, already apparent in his early instrumental works; a penchant for spatializing sound in spectacular ways; and an attraction to the musicality of words and of language as a generative matrix for his works with text.
In the course of his studies at the Liszt Academy in Budapest, Eötvös learned much about melodic invention — a notable feature throughout his work — from János Visni, a student of Zoltán Kodály. But his musical roots lie closer to Béla Bartók than Kodály, a trait he shares with Ligeti and especially György Kurtág. “For me,” he declares in an interview,
[Bartók] speaks the absolute mother tongue of music, a language that I speak as a composer and as a conductor too. By mother tongue of music, I mean not just the compositional process but also articulation. In this respect I can’t really maintain a distinction anymore between the act of composing and that of conducting. As a result of speaking this mother tongue, a special accent, on which Bartók had a formative influence, appears in each work I conduct.2
Bartók’s pervasive influence in Hungary, partly attributable to political factors, compelled Eötvös to look beyond the beaten path. The Second Viennese School never had the formative role for him that it had for many other composers of his generation. Hence the more overt eclecticism of his musical influences, often derived from works and composers of the distant past: Gesualdo above all, but also the madrigalesque comedies of Adriano Banchieri (1568-1634). Eötvös served his time as a working musician in theater and film, even as an adolescent, and he has never tried to distance himself from such experiences, which contributed to his stylistic diversity and the sense of contagious theatricality evident at all levels of his compositional process — in the theatrical gestures of his performers as much as the inherent theatricality of his sound, whether vocal or purely instrumental.
The influence of Bartók also owed much to the theorist Ernő Lendvai, whose teaching Eötvös followed assiduously in Budapest in the 1960s. Lendvai’s theories, based on intervallic relationships, would leave traces in numerous works by Eötvös, recent as well as early. As late as 1999, Eötvös was still highlighting the importance of intervallic relationships to his technique and musical aesthetic.3 In his operas, the use of particular intervals to highlight tension between characters remains a favorite technique, recalling the fact that for centuries intervals have been attributed affective qualities, categorized as perfect or imperfect, even ostracized.4 This dramatization of the interval is central to Intervalles intérieurs (1981), an instrumental piece with magnetic tape that uses intervals as vectors of tension by amplifying the voltage curve between two notes. The work sums up Eötvös’s trajectory over the course of the 1960s and ’70s, when he drew close to Karlheinz Stockhausen and joined Új Zenei Stúdió (Studio for New Music), an important group that functioned as a conduit between foreign music and official culture in Communist Hungary and to which he would belong until 1976.5
Even the juvenile work Kosmos (1961) for one or two pianos, conceived as an homage to Yuri Gagarin and the conquest of space, begins from a sonic range limited to the semitone and widens symmetrically through gradual interval expansion, as a metaphor for the expansion of the cosmos after the Big Bang. This play on the spatialization of sound returns in Psychokosmos (1993), which is an expansion of Kosmos but scored for solo cimbalom and an orchestra that extends and echoes the solo part. Though predating his familiarity with Stockhausen, Kosmos, based as it is on the transformation and expansion of limited material, shows Eötvös’s early affinity for the style of his older contemporary, whom he would meet in 1968.
The seventies saw Eötvös embrace electroacoustic composition and electronic media, with pieces for magnetic tape. Cricketmusic (1970), for example, is constructed entirely from recorded cricket song, and the opening material of Elektrochronik (1974) consists of nothing more than a simple interval played on the organ.
In his well-rounded musical career, Eötvös has worked as a repetiteur in opera houses; as a technician in electroacoustic studios in Cologne (1971-1979); in the electronic music studio of West German Radio, directed by Stockhausen with whom he collaborated closely; and at IRCAM, where Pierre Boulez entrusted him with the direction of the inaugural concert for 1978 and then asked him to take over the musical direction of Ensemble Intercontemporain, which would occupy him until 1991. The ludic element intrinsic to such technical challenges is something Eötvös embraces: “The moment I feel constrained, I feel free.”6 Such an attitude highlights the two recurrent traits of his work, namely theatricality and the manipulation of sound-space.
It is important to remember that composition for Eötvös is inextricably tied to orchestral conducting, as well as to an interest in improvisation and its liminal relationship to composition. Several of his works explore this boundary between composition and improvisation, including Snatches of a conversation (2001), which errs on the side of improvisational freedom over written composition. Also relevant to works such as the saxophone concerto Focus (2021) and Jet Stream for trumpet and orchestra (2002) is jazz, which Eötvös discovered as a child. ZeroPoints (2000), written by one composer-conductor for another (Boulez), with billowing sonic waves worthy of Boulez’s Répons, is an orchestral piece that illustrates the pleasure Eötvös finds in working with sound. Like a nostalgic salute to his own creative journey, ZeroPoints (the title alludes to the measure number 0 at the beginning of Boulez’s Domaines) also evokes an electroacoustic language through traditional means. Steine for twenty-two instruments (1985-1990, for Boulez’s sixtieth birthday) explores the ludic process of improvisation mutating into an act of composition and vice versa. In its first part, the conductor does not conduct but joins the percussion; the other musicians try to strike up a rapport while maintaining the autonomy necessary to improvisation. The only fully written-out part of Steine is the second, which opens with a quotation of the first chord of Pli selon pli.
At the Lyon Opera in 1998, the premiere of Tri Sestry / Three Sisters, with a Russian libretto adapted from Anton Chekhov by C. H. Henneberg and Eötvös, was one of the most stunning successes, popular as well as critical, in contemporary operatic music, one that subsequent revivals have only reaffirmed. If the first part of Eötvös’s career was characterized by experimentation, opera has taken center stage since Three Sisters, not only in his output but also in European theaters. Eötvös has written thirteen operas to date, most recently Valuska, a “tragicomedy with music, or grotesque opera” premiered in Budapest in December 2023.
Among his later operas, Der goldene Drache (The Golden Dragon, 2014) and Sleepless (2020) illustrate the “conflict between the individual and society” that for Eötvös is almost the paradigm for the genre.7 The German libretto of The Golden Dragon (by Roland Schimmelpfennig, adapted by Eötvös) deals with illegal immigration through the tragic fate of a young Chinese man employed in an Asian restaurant. Exploitation, poverty, social marginalization, and moral distress feature equally in Sleepless (English libretto by Mária Mezei after Jon Fosse), a drama centering on the sleepless, ceaseless wanderings of a couple of adolescents on the streets, Asle and Alida.
Even before Three Sisters, several works by Eötvös presaged this operatic turn, including staged pieces such as Harakiri (1973), a “scene with music,” and the “chamber opera” Radames (1975, rev. 1997). Anyone looking for an introduction to Eötvös’s operatic works could do worse than to start with Atlantis (1995), not a staged work but an oratorio for virtual choir, baritone, and boy soprano. In its evocative power, the text by Sándor Weöres, set in a country that might really exist or might be the product of a dream, seems to call for staging. Despite its timeless quality, the narrative alludes to contemporary ills such as environmental disaster and ethnic strife. The same goes for the oratorio Halleluja - Oratorium balbulum (2015), in whose libretto, a chaotic collage by Péter Esterházy, we cross a drunk Nietzsche, the medieval monk and music theorist Notker the Stammerer, and the 9/11 attacks.
Atlantisassembles a number of themes that would return amplified in Eötvös’s operas and in other of his works from the 1990s. Each of its three movements finishes with a reference to Transylvanian music, but without a found-object aesthetic as in Luciano Berio or sublimated folklore as in Bartók or Kodály. Rather, Transylvanian fragments litter the postapocalyptic landscape ofAtlantislike echoes of a vanished world reconstituted through the crackle of an old LP. This theatrical gesture is not so far removed fromKosmos, in which quotations from the “night music” in Bartók’s suiteOut of Doors twice intrude in this musical imagination of the Big Bang.
The opening of Atlantis, a texture of sonic layers and distorted resonances (thanks especially to the sonority of the cimbalom), establishes a kind of stasis unusual with Eötvös, immersing the listener in what seems at first to be the fog of a dream but soon turns into a convulsive magma, until five fanfare signals emerge at last. The spatial distribution of the instruments is governed by a carefully worked out plan: ten percussionists surround the orchestra and public. The downstage is shared by a saxophone, electric keyboards, and three synthesizers, with the strings further back. The arrangement makes possible spatialization effects and sonorous textures that seem to hover outside of space and time, utopian in the literal sense of the word. Such modulations of sound underscore the importance of the visual dimension even in non-scenic works, and their latent theatricality.
Another non-scenic work charged with visual theatricality is Shadows (1996), which is also a fine example of Eötvös’s aversion to the traditional orchestral layout. This composition too calls for a precise placement of instrumentalists and loudspeakers: the sound requires space in which to do its work, a work of colliding with other sounds, invading the space of other sonic entities. Shadows is scored as a double concerto for flute and clarinet, who are surrounded by four groups of instruments. Each group generates a distinct sonic entity that confronts those of the flute and clarinet. These entities move like objects in space, colliding with the others, splitting apart, and projecting sonic “shadows.” The winds shadow the flute, the brass the clarinet, and the timpani the tambour. The celesta meanwhile creates another space, a more ethereal and distant sonic plane. This play of masses and shadows is amplified by the six loudspeakers facing the audience, which repeat snatches of sound emitted by the instruments, giving rise to still another sonic plane, distinct from those of the celesta and the instruments on the stage.
The floating between dream and reality heard in Atlantis returns in several later works, including the opera Angels in America (2002-2004, libretto by Mezei after Tony Kushner). Yet his quest to create multiple levels of perception, most evident in the multiplication of sonic spaces, reaches its culmination in the opera Le balcon, after Jean Genet (2002), in which action, places, scenes, spaces, and times proliferate in a polyphony bordering on chaos. This proliferation extends to the music, chock-full of pastiches of cabaret and popular French song from Fréhel to Léo Ferré. Much the same applies to As I Crossed a Bridge of Dreams (1998-1999), a “dream piece” inspired by the Sarashina Nikki, the journal of a Japanese noblewoman from the early eleventh century. The dramatic arc of this work (which became raw material for the opera Lady Sarashina, premiered at the Lyon Opera in 2008) involves a collision between planes of reality and dream, reflected in the musical setting. The idea of spatial music reaches its apogee: the sonorities of the trombone, bass trombone, and three of the voices render Lady Sarashina’s subjectivity and visions, while the other instruments, manipulated by computer, create new sonic and spatial strata.
The intrusion of visuality into auditory culture is a theme that has much preoccupied Eötvös, one that he encountered early on through his adolescent work as a composer of film music. The libretto for Three Sisters was first conceived as a film script, rather than a traditional theatrical text, for Eötvös hoped from the start to be able to visualize it and translate its close-ups and wide-frames into acoustic terms. For this, he divided the orchestra: in addition to the main chamber orchestra of eighteen musicians, an orchestra of nearly fifty players sits further downstage, once again in an effort to deepen and broaden the sonic space. This cinematic and spatial conception is taken still further in Angels in America, in which loudspeakers amplify the instruments and singers and play on the spatial mobility of their sonic masses.
The visual and spatial parameter also relates to the attention Eötvös pays to the gestures of musicians. As a conductor, he knows as well as anyone that physical gesture is what determines the duration, intensity, pitch, and timbre of a sound. This insight partly explains his interest in non-European forms of theater in which gesture can attain an almost ritual level of significance, as in kabuki or certain African ritual practices. Eötvös often associates sonorous or vocal effects with a precisely specified repertoire of gestures, which when repeated create ritualistic effects. Such a procedure is central to Psalm 151, in memoriam Frank Zappa for solo percussion (1993), designated a “ritual piece.” “Ritual is in my nature,” Eötvös affirms. “I would actually describe all of my pieces as rituals, since ritual is the most primordial form in which gesture and sound appear in perfect union.”8 In Psalm 151 the rhythms and durations are indicated not by the usual means of notation, but by instructions of gestures to be performed: gesture generates the music itself. The scoring for percussion carries a special symbolic significance for Eötvös, who considers percussion a medium of communication capable of transmitting information, as it did in prehistoric times and in non-European cultures. This notion of conveyance, diffusion, dissemination of information informs his other works for percussion too. Triangle (1993), an “action for a creative percussionist” plus twenty-seven musicians divided into four groups, consists of ten sections in the form of a procession: the soloist is less a soloist in the traditional sense of the term than an African-style drum master, whose actions and initiatives are taken up in responsorial fashion by the choir of percussion.
This notion of physical movement as generator of music was already central in Chinese Opera (1986, written for the tenth anniversary of the Ensemble intercontemporain). Neither a reflection on nor an homage to traditional Chinese opera, this work is rather a musical experiment — almost an opera without words — in theatricality and physicality, emanating from the gestures of the musicians.
One is tempted, given his attraction to ritual, to label Eötvös a “spiritual” composer, even if he describes himself as non-religious but interested in religions; yet what his works invoke is more the theatricality of hieratic and ceremonial atmospheres, with their underlying mechanisms of repetition and scansion. Zen Buddhism is the religion to which he refers most overtly, in works such as Cricketmusic (1970), Intervalles intérieurs, Windsequenzen (1975, rev. 1987 and 2002), Harakiri (1973), Elektrochronik (1972-1974), As I Crossed a Bridge of Dreams (1998-1999), and Secret Kiss (2018). This last is a melodrama for narrator and five instruments, with a text adapted from Alessandro Barricco and for the Noh actress and singer Ryoko Aoki. In it, the highly ceremonial quality of the declamation goes hand in hand with a dramatization of instrumental playing.
If gesture can be considered as a matrix for all music, language can be invested with similar potential. The idea that music originates in language pervades works as chronologically far apart as Mese, a 1968 “Klangspiel” (“sound play”) for magnetic tape, and the cantata IMA for choir and orchestra (2002). Both take language as a generative sonic material. Mese (“tale” in Hungarian) calls for a single female voice, electro-acoustically modified and multiplied on three tracks so as to create a three-part canon. The resulting incessant repetition of words gives rise to music: “This constant connection between speech music and musical speech is a strong characteristic of my thinking,” Eötvös has noted.9 That connection certainly animates IMA (Hungarian for “prayer”), a setting of two abstract texts by Sándor Weöres and Gerhard Rühm that give sonority precedence over signification. The first evokes the creation story in Genesis as transcribed into an imaginary language, while the second is a litany, repeated over and over in a mumble. Such manipulation of language continues in Speaking Drums, for percussionist and orchestra (2012-2013), in which the percussionist launches into a similarly asemantic speech-music, whose rhythms gradually spread to the instruments: words emerge from the rhythm, then phrases from the words, and finally a musical narration.
One can see why Eötvös, a man of many languages, refuses to have his operas sung in translation: the choice of language always affects the character of the music. “I’ve composed music for several languages,” he explains in an interview, “and they have always been influential because I hear languages like instruments: they have their own particular tone and timbre…. [E]ach language has made me write a different music.”10 All of Eötvös’s operas show this linguistic individuation. One of his most recent, Valuska, was also the first with a libretto in his native language, whose familiarity nevertheless presents him with an additional difficulty:
I can’t hear Hungarian abstractly. With other languages that I know less well, I hear more of the musical qualities — the rhythm, the noises, the accentuation. When it comes to setting a text in Hungarian, for me and other composers of my generation the vocal music of Kodály and Bartók is definitive. It seems more difficult to find a personal point of contact with the language.11
This special perspective on language and its potential musicality has a parallel in the relation between noise and sound that Eötvös has been exploring since the 1970s, most notably in Harakiri (1973). In this “scene with music” the two musical layers — respectively, the narrator’s vocal cantillation and two shakuhachi (Japanese bamboo flutes) — are superimposed onto the onstage action of a woodsman cutting timber with an ax. This integration of noise into musical composition represents a quite different procedure from the “instrumental musique concrète” of someone like Helmut Lachenmann, who aims to draw attention to the noisy origins of the sounds produced on traditional instruments. Eötvös, conversely, aspires to recover what is naturally musical in noise and language. Hence the scene in Three Sisters (in the third sequence, “Masha”) in which the monotony of the protagonists’ dialogue, superimposed on the equally repetitive and mechanical piano and upper strings, is suddenly set to the frail, irregular tinkling of a broken teacup. Eötvös’s use of raw, undisguised noise injects into organized sound a musicality as unprecedented as it is unexpected.
Jet Stream shows us how, as a child, Eötvös discovered this music through the high-frequency radio, banned in Hungary in the 1950s. The composition recreates that primordial sound in which music reached him through static and other extraneous noises.
This ability to make music out of everything is not merely a testament to Eötvös’s capacity for wonder at the phenomenon of sound.12 It is also what has most infallibly guided the whole of his work: “my relationship to music, sound, sonority, is that of a fish in water. I live in it, and I could never imagine living otherwise.”
Translated from the French by Tadhg Sauvey.
1. Pierre MOULINIER, “‘L’opéra n’est pas mort’: Un entretien avec Peter Eötvös,” in the CD booklet for Trois Sœurs, Deutsche Grammophon, 2 CD 459-624, 1000, p. 59.↩
2. Simone HOHMAIER, “Mutual Roots of Music Thinking: György Kurtág, Péter Eötvös and their Relation to Ernö Lendvai’s Theories,” Studia Musicologica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae, 43/3 (2002), p. 223.↩
3. HOHMAIER, p. 224.↩
4. HOHMAIER, p. 224.↩
5. See the anthology Új Zenei Stúdió: Joint Works of Contemporary Hungarian Composers from the 1970s, BMC Records, CD 116.↩
6. “Dialog über ein Doppelleben: Peter Eötvös in Gespräch mit Michael Kunkel und Torsten Möller,” in Kosmoi — Peter Eötvös an der Hochschule für Musik der Musik-Akademie der Stadt Basel: Schriften, Gespräche, Dokumente, Michael Kunkel (ed.), Saarbrücken: Pfau, 2007, p. 104.↩
7. “Die Opera als Gattung beschäftigt sich fast immer mit dem Konflikt zwischen Individuum und Gesellschaft.” Matthias Nöther, interview with Peter Eötvös, Concerti, winter 2021/2022, https://www.concerti.de/interviews/peter-eoetvoes/, accessed 3 December 2023.↩
8. “Das Rituelle liegt in meiner Natur. Alle meine Stücke würde ich eigentlich als ‘rituelle’ bezeichnen, weil das Rituelle die ursprünglichste Form ist, in der Gestik und Klang in absoluter Einheit erscheinen.” (Peter Eötvös, introductory text to Psalm 151).↩
9. Rachel Beckles WILLSON, “Péter Eötvös in Conversation about ‘Three Sisters,’” Tempo, 220 (2002), p. 12.↩
10. WILLSON, p. 12.↩
11. “Ich kann Ungarisch nicht abstrakt hören. Bei den anderen Sprachen, die ich weniger kenne, höre ich mehr auf die musikalischen Eigenschaften, auf den Rhythmus, auf Geräusche, auf die Akzentuierung. Beim Ungarischen ist die Tradition auch sehr stark. Wenn man einen ungarischen Text vertont, ist für mich und meine Generation die Vokalmusik von Kodály und Bartók prägend. Es scheint mir schwieriger, da einen eigenständigen musikalischen Kontakt zur Sprache zu finden.” Thomas Meyer, “‘Meine Kultur ist eine Mischkultur’: Péter Eötvös im Gespräch,” Dissonanz/Dissonance, 06/2008, no. 102, p. 4.↩
12. As stated about Eötvös in Judit Kele’s documentary film, La Septième Porte (1998) DVD IDEALE AUDIENCE 9DS16, 2006.↩
Texte révisé par l’autrice en 2023.
Do you notice a mistake?