I would like to refer you to Emil Petrovics’s comments in the following interview on the music of his younger colleague, László Vidovszky. There you have one aspect of the composer’s personality in a nutshell. He does not mince words, never mind the sensibilities he might be hurting. He may have indirectly been addressing his words to Vidovszky spurred by his pedagogical instincts—Petrovics was for many years a respected professor of composition at the Budapest Academy of Music—but it might just as well have been an expression of his irascible character. Recently, he published a two-volume autobiography, which beyond demonstrating his flair for writing (in his youth, he had planned on making fiction his profession) has also managed to enrage many people in the music profession, including those of the generation of his erstwhile pupils.

Emil Petrovics has been a major figure in Hungary, both as a composer and as a public figure. He is credited with two successful operas, both of which count as significant achievements of postwar Hungarian music: C’est la guerre, 1961 (with influences of Puccini and Alban Berg), and Crime and Punishment, 1969 (where he takes a step further along the thorny path of adapting the inflection of spoken Hungarian with its accents on the first syllable to the requirements of music that had departed from the idiom developed by Zoltán Kodály: in his vocal works, such as Psalmus hungaricus or his a cappella choruses, Kodály proved a master of prosody, he had found an ideal solution to setting Hungarian texts to music. That solution, however, could no longer be applied to a more advanced musical style).

In addition to teaching at the Academy, Petrovics also directed the Hungarian State Opera House and was a leading light of Artisjus, the national copyright agency.

In 2009, he looked at our interview and decided it needed no change.

I.

I have had no experience of a similar nature.

Let us examine this question from a wider angle. You see, I did not decide to become a composer from one moment to the next: the decision was the outcome of a slow process. And, unlike most of my colleagues, I did not approach music through Beethoven, Mozart, Bach, or Tchaikovsky.