György Kurtág Awarded Honorary Doctorate of the Liszt Academy

The ceremony took place in the university’s historic main building in Budapest, Hungary on Friday, 7 February. In his welcoming address, president Dr. Gábor Farkas said it was an honor to greet those present at an event that could, without exaggeration, be described as a family celebration. “We have gathered to crown an exceptionally long, eight decade relationship that remains vibrant to this day: György Kurtág has been a member of the Liszt Academy community since 1945; he is at home here—this building is his house and his homeland,” he emphasized. As he pointed out, from the very beginning the celebrated composer taught not only piano and chamber music at the university for almost 20 years, but also artistic discipline, modest humility, attentiveness, analytical skills. Additionally, he gave an example of a lifelong intellectual openness, while at the same time educating several generations of students through his example in life itself—among other things, about patience and the understanding that every single note must be earned. “For the Liszt Academy, which is not only proud of its intellectual traditions but also committed to nurturing and keeping them alive, this relationship with György Kurtág—the teacher, the musician, the great composer—has an immeasurable meaning,” the president added. In closing, he said it was a great honor for him personally to be the one among the presidents to present György Kurtág with the honorary doctorate diploma, and likewise an extraordinary distinction for the entire community of the Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music to be able, from this day forward, to regard him as its honorary doctor.

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Photo: Liszt Academy / Andrea Felvégi

Among those present at the event were Anita Kiss-Hegyi, State Secretary for Cultural Relations; László Gőz, founding director of the Budapest Music Center and a member of the Academy’s Consistory; as well as vice-presidents, head of departments and numerous faculty members of the university.

The laudatory speech was delivered by musicologist Gergely Fazekas, Associate Professor at the Liszt Academy, who recalled György Kurtág’s life, his major works, the distinctive characteristics of his compositions, and his several decades-long relationship with the university. It can be read in full extent below.

Hommage à K. Gy. - Laudation for György Kurtág on the occasion of his appointment as honorary doctor of the Liszt Academy of Music

“Dear Professor, my dear friend, it is difficult for me to accept that in the coming years you will no longer participate in our work as you have before, but only as a retired colleague. Nevertheless, the most important thing is that we can continue to rely on your contribution and count on your invaluable pedagogical work, which is significant not only for our academy but also shines beyond the borders of our country.”

These lines are from a letter typewritten on handmade paper with the rector’s letterhead, dated May 30, 1986. József Ujfalussy, rector of the Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest, wrote it to a professor in the Chamber Music Department who had worked at the institution for nineteen years. The professor had submitted his request for retirement six months earlier, on October 14, 1985. This beautifully calligraphed, handwritten letter – the original of which is preserved in the archives of the Liszt Academy along with the rector’s reply quoted above – reads as follows:

“Dear Rector,

I will turn 60 on February 19, 1986. My work as a composer requires me to reduce my teaching activities. I therefore kindly request that you submit my application for retirement with a notice period beginning February 1, 1986. However, as long as I feel fit to work, I would like to make myself available to the Academy of Music on Saturdays in Room XXIII to offer free chamber music courses.

Yours sincerely,

György Kurtág”

Forty years have passed since this correspondence. Much has changed. Almost all of György Kurtág’s former colleagues have passed away. Márta, his wife, whose presence can be felt behind every gesture of Kurtág as a composer and teacher, has been gone since 2019. They married seventy-nine years ago, on February 19, 1947, as first-year students at the Liszt Academy. Meanwhile, the Iron Curtain has fallen; Hungary, once a member of the Warsaw Pact, has joined the European Union; and the Academy of Music has been officially upgraded to a university. The internet has emerged, and email is now the most common form of written communication. The typewriter and handwriting have become obsolete.

Yet some things have not changed in the last forty years. György Kurtág is still “fit for work.” He still teaches, though not only on Saturdays and not necessarily in Room XXIII of the Liszt Academy. If he is active in teaching, he is also active as a composer. He cannot separate the two. For him, creation is simply understanding; the process of understanding is itself creative work. At one point in the documentary Kurtág Fragments, he says: “In teaching, we investigate: What is reality? What lies behind it? What is present but unspoken? The moment a person recognizes something, it is, in fact, creation itself.”

What happens in practice when György Kurtág teaches? Márta gave the most vivid explanation: “He delves right inside the music and illuminates it from within.”

György Kurtág’s life, now spanning a century, began just a few years after the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy in the small town of Lugoj, Romania, near the Hungarian-Serbian border – a place with a multilingual, multiethnic, and multireligious population – and has followed countless twists, turns, ascents, and chasms shaped by World War II, the communist era, the shock of the 1956 Hungarian revolution against the Soviet Union, the attempt to emigrate to Paris, the rethinking of basic assumptions about life and art, the major works created in the intellectual solitude of state socialism accompanied by a series of creative crises, and the gradual building of world fame from the 1980s onward with increasingly numerous masterpieces. Music historiography, with its penchant for dramatic intensification, may point to the opera Fin de partie, based on Samuel Beckett’s play and premiered at La Scala in Milan in 2018, as the culmination of this long journey.

From the mid-1970s onward, György Kurtág’s manuscripts have included not only the precise date but also the exact place of composition, allowing us to establish a geographical background for his work. Mátyásföld, Budaliget, Verőce, Berlin, Vienna, Amsterdam, Prussia Cove, Kerkrade, London, Paris, and Saint-André de Cubzac provide the coordinates for the map of the Kurtág universe. In the autograph manuscripts from the past eleven years, a three-letter acronym appears repeatedly after the final double bar line: BMC. This refers to the Budapest Music Center, a venue for contemporary music and jazz, where he returned with Márta in 2015 and where he still lives. It is the place where he finished Fin de partie in 2018 and completed his second opera, Stechardin, last year at age ninety-nine at BMC.

In 1945, due to the war, the entrance exams at the Liszt Academy were postponed from spring to early September. According to the institution’s yearbook, the entrance exam for the composition major was held in Room I on Monday, September 10, at 9 a.m. In the corridor in front of Room I, among the beautifully ornamented Art Nouveau walls of the building, György Kurtág met for the first time another genius who had fled Romania and came from a Hungarian-speaking Jewish family: György Ligeti. They formed a lifelong friendship. They had both come to Budapest because they believed they would be able to study with Béla Bartók, who was expected to return from his emigration to America after the war. They could not have known that Bartók had only two weeks left to live. “I liked Kurtág’s timid, introverted manner,” Ligeti later recalled of their meeting, “and the fact that he was completely devoid of vanity and conceit. He was intelligent, honest, and, in his own complex way, simple.”

Ligeti’s psychological characterization can also be applied to Kurtág’s music.

This music may not be easy to perform, but from a performer’s perspective, no music is easy – not even Bach, Mozart, or Schumann. Certain works by Kurtág are indeed extremely complex in their compositional structure. However, structure in his music is not an end in itself but serves expression. Kurtág’s works glow with such intensity – even in their quietest moments – and strive so forcefully to discover “what is reality, what lies behind it, what is present but unspoken” that difficulties in understanding them may arise only if we are unprepared to be confronted with what György Kurtág reveals about human existence. If we are unprepared for the fact that he not only sets to music the lines of Péter Bornemisza, János Pilinszky, Dezső Tandori, Attila József, Anna Akhmatova, Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett, and many other writers and poets, but also draws us in behind the words – to a place where, according to his belief, we may find something we might call the truth.

György Kurtág is often called the master of miniature forms. Many of his pieces last only a few minutes or even less. Sir Simon Rattle, former principal conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, said in his birthday message for Kurtág’s 95th birthday that these pieces are “fragments of such extraordinary weight, density, and meaning, it could be like a portion of a white dwarf star, or perhaps the very smallest and heaviest of pyramids.” The question arises whether these fragments will eventually come together to form a whole. Or, when he works with musicians on a few bars of a Beethoven movement for many minutes or even hours, will the entire piece come together in the end?

The late Hungarian musicologist András Wilheim, Kurtág’s closest colleague, had a clear answer. Twenty-five years ago, he wrote:

“When I met Kurtág, what made the strongest impression on me was this: not only regarding one’s own works, but also in relation to music history and even human culture as a whole, one can live in such a way that we see it as a unified, living organism – engaging with one segment or another, but never losing sight of the whole, since everything we knew before can be changed by what we learn later. To look back, reexamine, confront our previous follies, and arrive at new insights is a fundamental duty for everyone involved in the arts.”

During its 150-year history, the Liszt Academy of Music has awarded honorary doctorates to only a few individuals. Among them are the legendary violinist Yehudi Menuhin, György Kurtág’s former piano teacher Pál Kadosa, and Sir John Eliot Gardiner, who conducted the world premiere of Kurtág’s perhaps most poignant work, Songs of Despair and Sorrow, in Amsterdam in 1995. Why György Kurtág is receiving this recognition hardly needs explanation. However, it is worth mentioning what the Liszt Academy wishes to convey with this. This honorary doctorate is a sign of respect and a message of gratitude for his continuous presence in the life of the Academy from 1945 to 2026 – first as a student, later as a professor, then through the performance of his works in the main hall, and finally through his spirit, which is now permanently engraved in the historic walls of the institution.

This laudation cannot claim the virtue of brevity and, as such, may not be worthy of György Kurtág and his life’s work. It might have been more fitting to remain silent, to stammer a few words, or simply to say, “Thank you!”

To conclude my speech in a manner truly befitting György Kurtág, allow me to quote from a 1968 essay by the poet János Pilinszky, one of the most important sources of inspiration for the composer:

“Speech is far more than linguistic forms of expression in the strictly philological sense. The world also ‘speaks’; we just have to hear its words. In fact, this is how all speech begins: with silence, with listening, and thus, once again, with openness – that is, with love. But at the heart of all speech lies silence. According to Simone Weil’s wonderful definition, ‘a genius is someone who loves truth, even if they can get no further than mere stammering’.”

Delivered on February 6, 2026, in Room X of the Academy of Music at the ceremony conferring an honorary doctorate on György Kurtág.