In 1964 or so, my father, who was financial director of a Budapest theater, told me about a young man of twenty who could be relied upon to compose music at a moment’s notice for any play with the greatest ease. My father was terribly impressed by Péter Eötvös and arranged for us to meet. Péter visited me at home and I was in turn impressed by his calm, his self-assurance, his maturity: although three years his senior, I felt much younger and certainly far less sure of myself.

We have been in touch ever since, although I cannot claim to be a close friend. I have kept memories of certain episodes most of which are so distant as to appear dreamlike.

For instance, standing near the headquarters of WDR, the West German Radio, in Cologne, and Péter complaining that his association with Stockhausen was so time-consuming that he hardly ever came to composing even though that was his actual goal in life. He felt he was unable to organize his schedule so as to set aside periods for his creative work. That must have been in the early 1970s; ten years later when we conducted the conversation below, he was still in the throes of a frustrating struggle for time to compose. It was not until he married his present wife, Mari Mezei, that his life became organized with iron discipline. The result is there for all to see: one opera after another emerges from his studio (including the phenomenally successful Three Sisters of 1998) apart from works for orchestra and chamber music.

Another scrap of memory is linked to rehearsals for the world premiere of György Kurtág’s … quasi una fantasia … Op. 27, no. 113 for piano and instruments arranged in space. The time was October 1988 and the venue the Berlin Philharmonie’s wonderful chamber hall, which had actually inspired Kurtág to write the piece. The soloist was Zoltán Kocsis, the Ensemble Modern was playing. After an ethereal first movement, which consists of slowly descending scales on the piano with ever so soft, hallucinatory tones coming from suspended cymbals, gongs, tam-tams, mouth organs, and other instruments from all over the hall, the music abruptly changes tempo and turns into a headlong flight as if the orchestra were persecuting the pianist.