Gábor Takács-Nagy started his career with the Takács Quartet almost 50 years ago. Successful as a first violinist, he turned to conducting, leading ensembles such as the Verbier Festival Chamber Orchestra and the Manchester Camerata. During our conversation with the recent Kossuth Prize winner, we went back in time: he talked about his years at the Liszt Academy, quartet playing, his Beethoven discography series released in 2023, but also about stories related to Zoltán Kocsis and Bernard Haitink.
– You received the Kossuth Prize in March this year. How did you receive the award?
– Of course I was very happy to receive the prize, but my first thought was that it didn’t mean I knew more about Bartók or Mozart. My professional knowledge itself is the same, with and without the prize. It is a field full of doubt, and sometimes you feel how much smaller a speck of dust you are compared to the great composers. But these praises confirm that I am on the right track.
– Looking back on your career so far, which began nearly 50 years ago, what are you most proud of?
– I don’t think of myself as having any genius gifts, either mentally or physically. But what I am proud of is that I feel that when I am on stage, I have an antenna for genius. And I consider it a success that even though I can’t play the violin on stage anymore because my hand was bad, I can still be there as a performer.
I am convinced that music is a spiritual medicine and I believe I can heal the soul of the audience through music.
Haydn wrote towards the end of his life that because God had given him a talent for composing music, he felt it was his duty to lift his fellow human beings out of their everyday troubles for a moment. I don’t want to compare myself to him, but in my humble way I feel the same. When I’m on the podium, I think about the people behind me who have come to get out of whatever they’re in. And it’s our job as performers to make them forget their problems.
– You have founded several successful chamber music groups: the Takács Quartet, the Takács Piano Trio and the Mikrokosmos Quartet. How do you remember them?
– Seventeen years with the Takács Quartet is a wonderful memory, it filled my life completely at that time. We were the first quartet in Hungary whose members didn’t go into orchestras or teaching, so that was all we could focus on. We were blessed to work with the great Hungarian string quartets: the Hungarian Quartet, the Végh Quartet, the Tátrai Quartet and the Bartók Quartet, from whom we learned the secrets of the ‘golden thread’ of the Hungarian quartet school. We also learned a lot from the Amadeus Quartet.
I remember a story from that period. We were rehearsing a Mozart string quartet in a room at the Academy of Music until late at night, and by the end we were questioning everything we had been sure of. I go down the stairs from the third floor and there is Zoli Kocsis. I was twenty, he was twenty-four. He says, „What’s wrong with you?” I said, „Zoli, we’ve been rehearsing for four and a half hours, I’m so tired and it’s such a long way to go”. He says: „Haven’t you heard that if you want to be a piper you have to go to hell?” That sentence has stayed with me ever since.
Even after the Takács Quartet, life brought me together with great musicians. It was a great pleasure for me to be able to record all six Bartók quartets again with the Mikrokosmos Quartet. I also had the chance to get a taste of orchestral playing, as I was concertmaster of the Budapest Festival Orchestra for eight years.
– Who do you consider to be your masters?
– In the second half of the seventies, when I was at the Academy of Music, I was studying in a „second golden age” (I associate the „first golden age” with the 1920s and 1930s, when Bartók, Kodály, Dohnányi and Weiner were all teachers there.) I don’t want to leave anyone out, but I had the opportunity to take chamber music lessons with great musicians like András Mihály, Ferenc Rados, György Kurtág and Sándor Devich. Music history was taught by György Kroó and András Pernye, and orchestra practice was given by Albert Simon „Jumi”. But we were not only surrounded by fantastic teachers, but also by young musicians of great calibre such as Miklós Perényi, Andris Schiff, Zoli Kocsis and Dezső Ránki, who were a few years older than us.
– If you could go back in time, is there anything you would do differently?
– When I was 19 years old, when I got to the big teachers, I expected them to tell me everything. In hindsight, I can see that I could have used my imagination a bit more and been a bit braver. Braver in the sense that I should have had more faith in my instincts. But you are so young and you want to live up to other people. I now think that the greatest strength is to dare to be yourself, even with your weaknesses. You go on stage and you know that not everyone is going to like what you do.
– In 1997 you started teaching at the Geneva Music Academy. What is the most important thing about music that you want to pass on to young people?
– There is a saying that everything is in the score, but never the most important things, because spirituality cannot be marked with a piano or a forté. To do that, I have to tell you a personal story. When my father died in 1992, I wanted to see him again before the funeral, because I had been on tour with the quartet for months before. I almost didn’t recognise him, as if he hadn’t been there. And my wife said, „you know why you didn’t know him? Because you saw an envelope without the letter. His soul was already gone”.
That’s when I realized that what we see in the score is just the „envelope”, but we have to act out the „letter” behind the score.
– How well can this be taught?
– You can teach a lot of things, but you also need an openness of mind and spirit that is either there or it is not. Young people today interact digitally and live in a more emotionally closed world. I’m not saying they don’t have emotions, but they need to open their minds a tiny bit.
A friend of mine recently made a pithy analogy in this regard. He said that there should be a spiritual excitement in a young musician, like a dog on a hunt, who sniffs and sniffs until he finds the prey, and then goes off the trail.
– In 2023, you released a five-disc album on Deutsche Grammophon featuring all of Beethoven’s symphonies. How did you get the invitation?
– I have to say that I have a little sadness in my life that although I played all seventeen Beethoven string quartets with the Takács Quartet, we did not record them. Now, however, life has given me the opportunity to record the symphonies, and not just on any label. Deutsche Grammophon had previously recorded these works with conductors such as Herbert von Karajan and Otto Klemperer, and in theory this was the last CD-format recording of the symphonies.
But the story begins when I became artistic director of the Verbier Festival Chamber Orchestra in 2007, and two years later I conducted Beethoven’s First Symphony. Over the following years, we progressed to the Sixth Symphony, and professional recordings of these concerts were made. The recording was auditioned by Deutsche Grammophon and we agreed that if the other symphonies were successful live, they would release the whole cycle.
– How did you prepare for this „Beethoven journey”, as the title of the album suggests?
– I listened to recordings of the great masters of old and learned a lot from them, as they lived even closer to the ‘source’. Bruno Walter, for example, was born in 1876, about 50 years after Beethoven’s death. But the recordings of Ferenc Fricsay and Wilhelm Furtwängler were also a great inspiration, and I even studied an essay by the latter conductor. Furtwängler wrote that a conductor who does not take into account the fact that Beethoven experienced every human emotion ten times more intensely than the average person cannot conduct his works authentically. His idea that playing together should not be an end, but a result, has also really stuck with me. If the orchestra plays together for a purpose, the musical process suffers.
– Who among contemporary conductors has had a big influence on you?
– Of course I could name many, but I have to mention Bernard Haitink, whom I met 15 years ago. He told me that conducting is not about putting your ego first, because musicians can sense that immediately. A conductor has four things to do in front of the orchestra: inspire them, help them with the moves, tell them when to play, give them confidence, and also be grateful. „Be grateful,” Haitink said, „because I’m sure there are very good musicians sitting around you in every orchestra, and sometimes they would have a better idea of the words you’re saying, but they’re still playing what you’re asking.”
If the orchestra feels that you’re not working for success, but for the love of the music, they’ll give you their soul.
– What other concerts are you doing this year?
– I’ve got some very nice gigs coming up. On 20 July, I will conduct Mozart’s opera The Marriage of Figaro at the Verbier Festival, which is a continuation of a series, as two years ago we did Don Giovanni and in 2026 we will perform Cosi fan tutte. I’m incredibly happy to be conducting a Mozart opera, because opera is the key for him. Mozart was a man born to the stage. We also learnt from the Amadeus Quartet that if you’re running out of inspiration in a string quartet, think about what an operatic situation this would be.
The other thing I think is important about Mozart is that there was something childlike about him. After he died, his sister Nannerl wrote of him that he lived his whole life like a child. When we deal with Mozart, we have to find that deep honesty in ourselves that children still have.
