It was quite an effort to put the date of death after that of András Szőllősy’s birth. Ever since we met in 1972 or so, when I started promoting his music in the world, I would ring him on February 27, to wish him many happy returns on his birthday. The last time we met I visited him in his tiny apartment filled with books, Etruscan objects, and some remarkable paintings by Hungarian artists, and found him with the glow gone from his eyes. His beloved Irish setter had died shortly before (his wife had departed several years earlier when the composer himself was becoming physically too weak to look after her) and I saw on his face that he had given up. He was sitting in his armchair, fully dressed with jacket and tie, his feet on a low stool and waited for Death to fetch him. That would have been in October 2007; he died in December, two days after Stockhausen.

When I was introduced to Szőllősy, he was fifty-one years old. An explosive personality, he would easily fly off the handle, get worked up about anomalies in Hungarian or world politics, about intrigues among his fellow-composers, whatever. He was also emotional. His eyes would fill with tears on hearing a piece of music that moved him—and that piece of music could be by himself. What moved him would be an empathetic performance—for instance, of his Pro somno Igoris Stravinsky quieto (1978), a kind of requiem in memory of the Russian composer who was one of his idols (others being Mozart and Bartók above everybody else). I attended the rehearsals by the Dutch ensemble that had commissioned it. The instrumentalists had to recite the Latin words of the Requiem—and tears would roll down Szőllősy’s cheeks. He also cried when the King’s Singers premiered one of the pieces he had written for them. The atmosphere in the church at Brighton in the South of England was absolutely unique and so was the perfection of the ensemble’s rendition. I can still see the composer’s stocky figure rise at the end of the performance and move with both arms outstretched, head leaned sideways, to thank the singers.