{"id":53,"date":"2008-05-19T21:36:48","date_gmt":"2008-05-19T19:36:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/newtimsummerssite\/?page_id=43"},"modified":"2020-03-15T15:05:33","modified_gmt":"2020-03-15T22:05:33","slug":"kurtag-gyorgy-hommage-a-robert-schumann","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.timsummers.org\/?page_id=53","title":{"rendered":"Kurtag, Gyorgy: ‘Hommage a Robert Schumann’"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Hungarian musical tradition is enormously rich up to the middle of the twentieth century, but in the chill of the Soviet occupation, after Bartok and Dohn\u00e0nyi had left – and especially after Kod\u00e0ly had died – there was much silence outside of Socialist realism. GY\u00d6RGY KURT\u00c3\u0081G<\/strong> is one of very few Hungarian composers to have survived the Soviet era and gone on to make a mark in international contemporary music.<\/p>\n

The music for which he has become known descends most evidently from Bartok and speech-pattern on the one hand, and from Anton Webern’s intensely aphoristic expressionism on the other. His match of extreme brevity to the patterns of speech (rather than patterns of tones and gesture, as in Webern) points to intense moments of personal or intrapersonal memory, and to splintered memories of people and voices. His many ‘homage’ works show a complex and persistent interest in the mnemonic, historical, and personal. To name a few: Hommage \u00c3\u00a0 Nancy Sinatra, Homage to Tchaikovsky, and In Memory of a Just Person (all from Games); Omaggio a Luigi Nono; Grabstein f\u00fcr Stephan; In memoriam Zilcz Gy\u00f6rgy; Officium breve in memoriam Andreae Szervanszky; S.K. Remembrance Noise; Hommage \u00c3\u00a0 Robert Schumann; and others. For a composer whose opus numbers go only to 40, these titles constitute a defining tendency.<\/p>\n

In using the instrumentation from M\u00e4rchenerz\u00e4hlungen for his Hommage, Kurt\u00e0g refers both to the fantasy-memory of fairy tale (‘Once upon a time…’), and to the actual historical death of Schumann. Kurt\u00e0g’s movements also refer to the pseudonymous characters Schumann created for himself as composer and critic: Johannes Kreisler, Florestan (F.), Eusebius (E.), and Meister Raro. (These characters simultaneously constitute Schumann’s own personal fairy tales and fragments of his own fragile character. They were borrowed, to a greater or lesser degree, from characters in the literature of Jean Paul and E.T.A. Hoffman.) Into this already complex memory of Schumann and his character(s), Kurt\u00e0g blends elements of his own life and work, including references to his own Kafka Fragmente and …Quasi una fantasia….<\/p>\n

The first five movements are extremely fleeting – gone in a matter of three or four minutes. The effect of the more extended sixth movement, an imagined meeting of Meister Raro (who served as a mediator between Florestan and Eusebius in Schumann’s psychological narrative) with the medieval composer Guillaume de Machaut, is strange and powerful. At the unmistakable end of Schumann’s life, we are left with memories of an historical character filtered through his own fractured fairy tales, given too briefly to hold, but too affectively to forget. As Ezra Pound described, imprisoned in Pisa, and looking to (bird)song and Medieval music for aid:<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 nothing matters but the quality
\nof the affection –
\nin the end – that has carved the trace in the mind
\ndove sta memoria<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

— Ezra Pound, Pisan Cantos, Canto LXXVI<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Hungarian musical tradition is enormously rich up to the middle of the twentieth century, but in the chill of the Soviet occupation, after Bartok and Dohn\u00e0nyi had left – and especially after Kod\u00e0ly had died – there was much silence outside of Socialist realism. GY\u00d6RGY KURT\u00c3\u0081G is one of very few Hungarian composers to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":21,"menu_order":115,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.timsummers.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/53"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.timsummers.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.timsummers.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.timsummers.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.timsummers.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=53"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.timsummers.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/53\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1293,"href":"https:\/\/www.timsummers.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/53\/revisions\/1293"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.timsummers.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/21"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.timsummers.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=53"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}