Péter Eötvös, world-famous Hungarian composer, conductor, music teacher, an outstanding figure of contemporary music, was born on 2 January 1944 in Odorheiu Secuiesc, Romania.
Péter Eötvös learned to play the piano from an early age. Béla Bartók’s works were a defining musical experience for him as a child. Zoltán Kodály admitted him to the Liszt Academy of Music, Budapest at the age of fourteen in the special talents group, where he studied composition. From 1966 he studied conducting in Cologne on a scholarship.
He began his musical career as the musical director of the Vígszínház (Budapest), and composed film and theatre music between 1963 and 1971 (he wrote the music for István Szabó’s The Age of Dreams, Károly Makk’s The Cat Game, Sándor Sára’s The Thorn Under My Nail and the incidental music for the Tamás Major theatrical production of The Tragedy of Man). From 1968 to 1976 he was a member of the Stockhausen Ensemble, and from 1978 to 1991 he was artistic director of the Ensemble InterContemporain, founded by Pierre Boulez.
As a conductor, he has regularly conducted the world’s leading orchestras in recent decades, including the Berlin, Munich, London and Vienna Philharmonics, and principal guest conductor of the Budapest Festival Orchestra and the Hungarian National Philharmonic Orchestra. He has conducted in the most famous opera houses, at the world’s most important festivals, and has worked with the greatest directors.
This is how he describes his own conducting and composing methods:
„I never conduct without a score, because I have no musical memory. (Laughs) The sight of a score page and my inner hearing have two relationships: either I see the score and its complex sound is reflected in my inner hearing, or vice versa: what I hear with my inner hearing as a composer I write down in pencil on paper, which then becomes a vision, so I hear it again. For me, this phenomenon is very useful because it allows me to compose with a clear head, there is no ‘other’ music, only the music I am thinking about.”
In 1991, he established the International Eötvös Institute Foundation, and in 2004 the Péter Eötvös Foundation for Contemporary Music to support emerging composers and conductors. He has taught at several music colleges abroad, given seminars at prestigious festivals and was a regular returning professor at the International Bartók Seminar in Szombathely (Hungary). At the Budapest Music Center, which is also the home of his foundation, he has for many years organized international master classes for conductors and composers.
One of the best-known contemporary composers, he was led to opera writing by his electroacoustic and conducting experience.
His first work, based on Chekhov’s Three Sisters, was premiered in Lyon in 1998 to critical acclaim, and he has since earned his reputation as a composer. The premiere of this multi-award-winning opera, in which the Three Sisters were played by male countertenors, was recorded by Deutsche Grammophon. The work has since been performed in many European opera houses, and in Budapest in 2000 by director István Szabó.
„In the Three Sisters, the farewells are represented by sound material. The first is linked to Tuzenbach, Irina’s partner. When Solyony challenges her to a duel, they have one last conversation, after which Solyony shoots Tuzenbach. This conversation, like the classics, has a certain theme, the music of the farewell scene. The second farewell is the departure of the soldiers, who are transferred to another town. For the three sisters, this means the loss of their only connection with the world.
The third farewell is an extremely painful moment, Vershinin’s farewell to Masha. This is a very emotional moment in the opera on several levels, as in the scene Masha’s husband Kulygin watches the farewell scene, and it is compounded by the fact that Vershinin, although he embraces Masha, kisses Olga’s hand and says to Masha only: ‘Write’, causing him great pain. Thirty years on, it is astonishing that such a product could have been created at that time. The Three Sisters is more complex, more powerful, more logical than any of my works since. It was a very emotionally demanding period for me, but that is probably the secret of its success.”
– said Péter Eötvös about the play.
His operas are based on literary works: the adaptation of Jean Genet’s The Balcony (2002), Angels in America (2004), based on Tony Kushner’s play, and the novel Love and Other Demons (2007), by Nobel Prize winner Gabriel García Márquez, and Lady Sarashina (2007), based on the diaries of a noble Japanese poetess of the 11th century.
Angels in America „is the story of a man, Prior, whose life is shattered by a contagious disease, AIDS, and who, desperate to survive, creates in his imagination a world inhabited by angels, where angels give meaning to existence, open a window to the afterlife, offer the hope of immortality. But Prior is sorely disappointed in the angels, takes God’s impotence in the face of human suffering to account, and returns to earth to fight for humanity…”
– Peter Eötvös once said.
Based on The Tragedy of Man, he wrote The Tragedy of the Devil (2010), adapted from a libretto by German writer Albert Ostermaier, and Paradise reloaded (Lilith) (2013). He has written several chamber operas (Harakiri, Radames), and Senza sangue (Without Blood), based on a short story by Alessandro Baricco, premiered in 2015.
He has also recorded numerous vocal, orchestral and instrumental concertos, and his recordings include a compilation of Hungarian folk tales.
He has dedicated individual pieces to his musical idols: one of his works is dedicated to Pierre Boulez, from whom he learned conducting techniques, and he has also composed a tribute to Stockhausen, whom he considers his mentor in composition. He also worked with the American rock musician Frank Zappa, in whose honour he wrote Psalm 151. In 2010, he composed a vocal work based on one of Schiller’s aesthetic treatises, premiered his Speaking drums, a work based on nonsense poems by Sándor Weöres, and his Hommage á Domenico Scarlatti in 2013, and the following year his play The Golden Dragon, based on the play by Roland Schimmelpfennig.
In 2015, he completed his secular oratorio Hallelujah – Oratorium Balbulum, written to a text by Péter Esterházy. In the same year he published Parlando – rubato, a book of conversations between Péter Eötvös and the Portuguese conductor, composer and music historian Pedro Amaral.
„Eötvös perfectly captured the kind of humour that the writer represented, only verbally, and that’s a great thing. Music is a very different form from the written word, and musical humour is governed by a different set of laws. With Haydn, for example, a sense of humour is a defining element, so much so that I regularly want to laugh out loud while listening to one of his symphonies. Of course, in Eötvös’s case it was different, because Esterházy’s words were there, and the two geniuses even amplified each other’s voices. This kind of playfulness is rare these days, especially when there is a deep message behind it.”
– Róbert Szatmári wrote about the Oratorium Balbulum.
In 2017, he premiered his concerto for organ, Hammond organ and orchestra, Multiversum, and in 2020 he was commissioned by the Staatsoper Berlin to write an opera ballad, Sleepless, based on Norwegian writer Jon Fosse’s trilogy, which he commented on:
„A theatre composer has to know everything, has to let every influence flow through him in order to be able to place it in one of his works at the right moment. The broader the palette of my readings, the more colourful the soundscape around me, the richer the material I give to the audience.”
Péter Eötvös was awarded the Béla Bartók-Pásztory Ditta Prize (1997) in recognition of his artistic achievements, and in 2001 he was awarded the Hungarian Classical Prize, founded by Gramofon Magazine.
In 2002 he was awarded the Kossuth Prize, in 2003 he was made an honorary citizen of Budapest, the following year he received the Lifetime Achievement Award for the best living composer at the MIDEM Music Festival in Cannes, the Frankfurt Music Prize (2007), the title of Ambassador of Hungarian Culture (2008) and the Golden Lion Lifetime Achievement Award at the Venice Biennale (2011). In 2015, he was awarded the Order of St. Stephen of Hungary, the highest state honour. In 2017, he received the Prima Primissima Award, in 2018 the Hazám Prize and in Germany the Goethe Medal. He is a member of the French Order of Arts and Letters, the Royal Philharmonic Society, the Berlin Academy of Arts and the Royal Swedish Academy, and an honorary member of the Széchenyi Academy of Literature and Arts.
Péter Eötvös’s latest opera Valuska, based on the work of László Krasznahorkai, was premiered on 2 December 2023 to great acclaim and is the composer’s first stage work written in Hungarian. Our English-language report on the premiere can be found here.
