Having finished the manuscript of this book and tried to read it with a pair of fresh eyes, I realized that for readers outside Central Europe, an introduction would be helpful to put some of the events referred to in the interviews with György Kurtág into perspective. Indeed, the composer's very birthplace—the town of Lugos—is difficult to find on the map. The more so since it is now called Lugoj and is in Romania. But the region where it is situated, along with the city of Temesvár (Timisşoara), which also came up in our conversations, bears a name that only those specializing in the history or geography of this area would have come across: it is called the Bánát (Banat).

If you glance through telephone directories in Budapest, Prague, or Vienna, you will see that the names are a motley mixture—in all of them you will find a great many entries of Hungarian, German, Czech, Serbian, and Romanian origin. The directories are a faithful mirror of Central European history, which was for centuries determined by that of the Holy Roman Empire, the Austrian Empire, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, respectively. It was a kind of United States of Central Europe that disappeared with World War I.

By the time Kurtág or indeed György Ligeti were born (in 1926 and 1923, respectively), the Bánát (an area between the Hungarian Plain and Transylvania) had been ceded to Romania. For both of them, it was natural to grow up speaking three languages: Hungarian, Romanian, and German (spoken by descendants of settlers from Württemberg who had arrived in the eighteenth century and made up a sizable minority of the population).

After World War II, in which Hungary fought on the side of Hitler's Germany and shared its fate, the country—along with Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, and Albania—became part of the Soviet sphere of influence.

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, when Hungary was in the throes of a major social upheaval (the establishment of a one-party system, the nationalization of private property, the elimination and rustication of the former ruling classes, the forced collectivization of agriculture, etc.), culture played an essential role in educating what was called at the time “the masses.” Writers may not have been free to express their views, composers may have worked in a stylistic straitjacket, but they were taken extremely seriously by the powers that be.