Indeed, this book cannot aspire to be more than a portrait sketch. Experience with work on our interviews, once their texts had been securely saved on the computer, taught me that the guiding principle governing Kurtág's life—penetrating below the surface, penetrating ever deeper—was also true of this genre. There was no subject, no scrap of memory, no experience that, once considered in a new context, did not conjure up further important details that demanded inclusion in the material. The range of associations cajoled from his subconscious was fascinating.

That was one aspect of our encounters that rendered them so unique, thrilling, and frustrating: I never knew what other questions I should have posed to bring those hidden treasures to the surface. Every now and again, months after his first perusing the text, the correction of a word or of a particular phrase would produce a fact adding another trait to the outlines of his portrait.

For instance, a basic feature of Kurtág's personality has been his need to establish human relationships that last a lifetime—even after the death of a friend. They continue to influence his thinking, his work as a composer, and his private life, even posthumously. (“For me, Ligeti is more alive than ever,” he wrote in the introduction to his homage in memory of the composer.) Felician Brînzeu, Max Eisikovits, Magda Kardos, Stefan Romasşcanu, György Ligeti, Franz Sulyok, Robert Klein, Tamás Blum—and his professors at the Budapest Academy of Music (in addition to those listed in the Introduction), Lajos Bárdos and Pál Járdányi—as well as András Mihály and Albert Simon who taught him a lot even though he was not officially a student of theirs, or László Dobszay who plays an important role in Kurtág's life to this day—all of them are part of the composer's universe, of his private mythology. His loyalty to them is unshakable.

And yet, thanks to a chance association in a telephone conversation, the name of András Hajdú (the Israeli composer André Hajdu) came up as an important contact during the year Kurtág spent in Paris in 1957–58. It was Hajdu who suggested that he enroll in Olivier Messiaen's class and Hajdu's piano piece Plasmas (1957) was to exert an influence on the work Kurtág was composing at the time that would become the Eight Piano Pieces, Op. 3.