In his late twenties, Ladislav Kupkovic was one of the leading avant-garde composers in Slovakia. He conducted the Philharmonic Orchestra, founded a new music ensemble in 1963, and composed experimental pieces, such as Ad libitum (1969), which he defined as a “happening.” Between 1965 and 1980, his works were published by Universal Edition. They include his Souvenir (1971) for violin and piano (or string orchestra), which was for several years on the repertoire of Gidon Kremer. It is no longer “new music” but a witty evocation of salon music fashionable in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. (Kupkovic also has a K.u.K. Musik33 for orchestra written in 1978.)

He left Slovakia for Germany in 1969 and was appointed professor of composition at the Hannover Academy in 1973. It was in Hannover that I met him some years later. By that time, he had turned his back on his avant-garde past. The pieces he played for me in his apartment were, if I remember correctly, in a mock-Handel style. A few years later, on another visit, he had gotten as far as Schumann.

It was all done impeccably but I could not help wondering if it had any raison d’être. Why write music à la Schumann and company, why should musicians play copies if they have access to the original? I could not convince the composer, of course, and I was quite depressed at the prospect that his oeuvre post-Bratislava would fall into oblivion. I wish I were wrong.

Ladislav Kupkovic is an extreme representative of a number of composers who early on in their careers deluded themselves that if they were to be noticed, if they wanted to be performed, they needed to adhere to the lingua franca of the international avant-garde. Eventually, some of them realized that they had voluntarily donned a straitjacket and they went out of their way to shed it—in many cases with the sad result that they surrendered instead to the straitjacket of bygone musical aesthetics without any relevance to our age. What they lacked was a strong personality which would have lent validity and, yes, a raison d’être to their compositions. Kurtág’s bon mot comes to mind: “Was this piece worth getting up for?” You can, of course, easily substitute “day” for “piece” and you are faced with a fundamental existential question.