Tribute to Peter Eötvos, Hungarian composer and conductor who died at the age of 80 – rts.ch

Born on January 2, 1944 in the Romanian town of Odorhiu Sikowicek in Transylvania, Peter Eötvös followed the lessons of Zoltan Kodály (1882-1967) at the prestigious Franz Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest from the age of 14. After that, he studied and worked with Karlheinz Stockhausen, Bernd Alois Zimmermann and Pierre Boulez. From 1979 to 1991, he was musical director of the Paris-based ensemble Intercontemporain.

Under the influence of Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin’s first space flight in 1961, his first piece of music, the piano piece “Cosmos”, was born in the same year. During his career, Peter Eötvös was the composer of a wealth of work for a diverse audience, but above all his operas including “Trois Soeurs” (1997), “Le Balcon” (2002) and “Angels in America” (2004). It made him popular among the public and gained him international fame.

Works that always deal with powerful themes, such as injustice or our social functioning, that question morality. For many years, he developed music closely linked to the play, which fascinated him, working with his wife, Marie Mizzi, who wrote the libretto for his operas.

A passionate and sexy man

In 2022, he was at the Grand Theater of Geneva directing “Sleepless,” an opera produced the previous year in Berlin. Anne Guillot, contemporary music specialist at RTS, was able to meet him on this occasion.

She recalls a passionate, brilliant man telling her he had an innovative way of working: “I’m a composer and conductor, but I have no musical memory, which is very rare, I think,” he confided to her in approx. Perfect French. “As a composer, I prefer to think in the moment about what to do. What has worked for years is to prepare my score in color, because I have a visual and photographic memory (…). I also record ‘rhythm and expressions (…). “It’s very important, because it gives the characters personalities on stage.”

Peter Eetvös loved working with writers of his time. For this opera “Sleepless,” he drew inspiration from the novel “Trilogy” by Norwegian writer John Fosse, who has since been honored with the Nobel Prize for Literature. At RTS, the Hungarian musician also explained: “I would very much like my operas to be performed in the future and to constitute a sign of our times.”

aq/olhor with ats

Musique d’avenir by Peter Eötvös will be honored on Sunday, March 31, 2024 at 10 pm on Espace 2 with the broadcast of “Dragon d’or”, a musical theater work by Peter Eötvös, composed from a libretto by Roland. Schimmelpfennig, recorded at the Comédie de Genève in 2022. It can then be found via live stream on Play RTS.