Peter Eötvös rehearsing with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in Cologne, 2017. Photo: Ullstein Bild/Getty Images
The Hungarian composer and director Peter Eötvös, who has died aged 80, is now known for the 12 operas he wrote during the last 25 years of his life. Before that, he played a leading role as a conductor specializing in the promotion of European musical modernism.
Premiered in Lyon in 1998, Three Sisters was the work that launched Eötvös’ career as a successful opera composer. The libretto, written by Claus H Henneberg, recreates Anton Chekhov’s play in a series of three “sequences”, each offering a version of events from the perspective of individual characters; joint tenants do not take less than four roles.
From then on, he frequently added new stage works to an already growing body of concert works in an extensive output notable for its radiant lyricism and brilliant orchestration. By expanding the modern foundations of an approach rooted in the music and ideas of Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen with the help of deep investigations into the music of other cultures outside of Europe, Eötvös gradually found his own voice.
Stockhausen was already drawn to Japanese musical and theatrical traditions, and Eötvös’ earliest opera, Harakiri – based on Yukio Mishima’s ritual suicide – was composed as far back as 1973, with the two composers working together in Osaka. . Afterwards, however, Eötvös’ style developed – variously influenced by Chinese as well as Japanese traditions, Indian, African and Basque music, jazz and, in particular, Béla Bartók and the folk repertoires of his homeland. Transylvania – much of its individuality. inquiries into those cultures that went far beyond any cultural tourism.
His instrumental compositions, as well as his operas, often derive from such sources: the large-scale orchestral work Atlantis (1995), for example, draws on Transylvanian dances which act as a symbol of a lost culture which, for the composer, belongs to renewed hope. In the following years he received many commissions from the main orchestras of the world: in 2016, for example, for Oratorium Balbulum, to a text by Péter Esterházy, for the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, which was performed for the first time at the Salzburg festival. Addressing a variety of current political issues, from the 9/11 terrorist attacks to relations between countries, this work is typical of Eötvös’ social and political concerns.
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But his operas seem to represent the most enduring and endearing aspect of his output. Adapting novels and plays by classic and modern writers – including Jon Fosse, Jean Genet, Tony Kushner and Gabriel García Márquez – these works reflect Eötvös’ broad literary ambitions and his willingness to take a variety of approaches to explore different dramas, both humorous and tragic. . Maria Eötvösne Mezei, his third wife helped compose some of these opera libretti.
Le Balcon – its libretto, by Françoise Morvan, André Markovitz and the composer, derived from Genet’s classic story of power struggles within a revolutionary setting – premiered at Aix-en-Provence in 2002. Libretto Mezei for Angels in America ( 2004 ) to reduce Kushner’s original seven-hour drama about HIV/AIDS to less than three hours.
Several of his operas have appeared in the UK. When Love and Other Demons, based on Marquez, premiered at Glyndebourne in 2008, Eötvös became the first non-British composer to have a stage work premiered there. Described by the composer as a “bel canto opera”, it explored illicit love, superstition, race and the power of demons, with a libretto by Kornél Hamvai. The music supports the play with an innate understanding of how orchestral forces can enhance the overall effect; although enjoying some beautiful sounds, the composer shows his rare knack for when less is sometimes more powerful than more.
Eötvös’ final opera, Valuska – his first with a libretto in Hungary, by Mezei and Kinga Keszthelyi – was drawn from the novel The Melancholy of Resistance, by László Krasznahorkai: a tragic, surreal story centered on a newspaper delivery man and his arrival in his home a little circus and, like a star attraction, the biggest taxi whale in the world. Valuska premiered in Budapest last December.
Eötvös, like his older colleagues György Ligeti and György Kurtág, was originally from multi-ethnic Transylvania – then in Hungary but later moved to Romania; his birthplace was Székelyudvarhely. Due to the turbulent final months of the second world war, his family, including his mother, Ilona Szucs, fled west. She was a pianist, and his father, Laszlo Eötvös, was a lawyer. Peter spent Peter’s early childhood in Miskolc, a town in northern Hungary where he met Ligeti for the first time. The latter was already emerging as a composer and teacher by the late 1940s, and the two remained in touch.
Eötvös studied piano and composition at the Franz Liszt Academy in Budapest from 1958 onwards; after receiving advice from Zoltán Kodály, János Viski became his composition teacher. He soon gained a reputation for improvising to accompany silent films and composing scores for cinema and theatre.
In 1966, aged 22, he moved to Cologne on a scholarship to work with Stockhausen. He also studied composition with Bernd Alois Zimmermann and began conducting. When I went to the Darmstadt Summer School for the first time, in 1974, I remember Eötvös not only as one of Stockhausen’s closest acolytes but also as a member of a recent group of young Cologne musicians who called themselves the Oeldorf Group and his specialization in live performance. related to electronics.
From 1978 onwards, after Boulez asked him to conduct the opening concert of IRCAM, his Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique, in Paris, Eötvös became famous as a conductor specializing in all the latest trends in composition. helped push a modernist global agenda. the time. He quickly accepted a position as music director of Ensemble Intercontemporain, IRCAM’s premier chamber orchestra.
He directed Stockhausen’s operas Donnerstag aus Licht (1981) and Montag aus Licht (1988). In the UK, he conducted Covent Garden performances of Donnerstag in 1985 and was principal guest conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra from that year until 1988. He worked with the London Sinfonietta and conducted Leos Janáček’s The Makropulos Case also at Glyndebourne in 2001.
It was only after he left his duties with the Ensemble Intercontemporain, in 1991, that Eötvös really came to the fore as a composer. With his new status on the European scene, and the political events of 1989, new responsibilities came to him.
He taught conducting and contemporary chamber music in Karlsruhe and Cologne in Germany. Having already established the Eötvös International Institute for young conductors and composers in Budapest in 1991, he founded the Peter Eötvös Contemporary Music Foundation in 2004. It was at this time, when Hungary joined the European Union, that Eötvös and his wife Maria – who both lived in Cologne, Paris and then Hilversum in the Netherlands – finally returned to Budapest.
Son from Eötvös’ first marriage, with the actress Piroska Molnár in 1968, who died before him. In 1976 he married the Taiwanese-German pianist Pi-hsien Chen, with whom he had a daughter, Ann-yi. They divorced and he later married Maria Mezei in 1995. He is survived by her, Ann-yi and two stepsons from that marriage, Piedar and Daniel.
• Peter Eötvös, composer and conductor, born 2 January 1944; he died 24 March 2024