Bálint András Varga (BAV): Has listening to a piece of music brought about a fundamental change in your musical thinking?

György Kurtág (GYK): I was eleven or twelve years old when the experience that turned me into a musician occurred. Schubert's “Unfinished” Symphony was playing on the radio, and when my parents told me what it was we were listening to, I was amazed that adults could recognize classical music! Sometime after that, I was alone at home and again listening to music on the radio. I realized that they were playing the “Unfinished” Symphony. I asked for and was given the score, and I learned the two-hand arrangement of the piece. That is what decided that music would become highly important in my life.

Between the ages of five and seven I had piano lessons, and I was fond of serious music. At the age of seven I stopped the lessons and lost all interest in music. I sabotaged my piano lessons, practicing only five or ten minutes a week, because I derived no enjoyment at all from my own playing. The return to music was through dance music, tangos, waltzes, and marches. I must have been around ten when I started dancing lessons, and later, when I went with my parents on our summer holiday to Herkulesfürdoʺ, I danced every evening with my mother in the public rooms at the spa. She was very young and very pretty at that time …

Dancing, then, was one of mother's enticements in the summer months, in winter it was playing piano duets. We played brief, crude transcriptions of passages from operas. It was fun dancing with her (and for me every tango and every waltz had its own individual character), and it was also fun playing duets. Once, all of a sudden, we had a go at the first movement of the “Eroica.” This was far beyond me—perhaps both of us—but we read right through to the end of the symphony, then went on to the First and later the Fifth. (Mother was never willing to play the Funeral March. At the time that seemed superstitious, but it may have been a presentiment: she died at the age of forty.)