György Kurtág

Kurtág’s music is not so new because everything in it has not yet been heard; no, it is new because in it the familiar does not appear as the familiar, but as something freshly discovered. The unveiling of the original allows me to feel that vibrating intimacy that can only be called love. In this music is the “freshness that makes us live,” as a Webern song puts it.

Freshness—that probably needs no further explanation—which doesn’t just mean a blue sky and dewdrops, freshness that can also be an open wound, a testimony to suffering, suffering that is unredeemed. If Kurtág’s voice now has its own place in the vast world of music, a place close to its roots, a radical place, then I want to see in it above all something comforting; and I no longer want to resent the unanimity with which it is now given one of the first ranks.