Breaking his silence
Arriving in Budapest, I receive a summons I cannot refuse. Gyorgy Kurtag wants to see me. Famously elusive, the last of the living avant-gardists is about to present his first opera at La Scala Milan this month and, if past form is anything to go by, he’s unlikely to utter much about it beyond a cryptic Magyar aphorism. Kurtag is 92 and his Scala opera — Fin de Partie, after Samuel Beckett’s Endgame — is a hefty 450 pages long, which may be as much music as he has written in half a lifetime. So why is this master miniaturist — famous for compressing his ideas down to a few
