Lateness is a somewhat paradoxical term when applied to Kurtág’s output. In music, as in other art forms, ‘late style’ is often associated with a certain austerity or intractability: Adorno’s memorable description of Beethoven’s last works as ‘bitter and spiny’ fruit points to an expectation that composers’ final creative statements are characterised by dissonance, discontinuity, introspection, and a preoccupation with mortality. Yet these qualities might well apply to much of Kurtág’s mature output: they are reflected in his predilection for chamber forces, fragile and liminal sonorities, structures built of short or fragmentary sections, and above all his preoccupation with lament and remembrance. This is reinforced by critical reception of the composer, which draws on the discourse of late style in presenting him as a final representative (a ‘last of the Mohicans’, as Gergely Fazekas puts it) of the Darmstadt era. In this chapter we first evaluate connections between late style and Kurtág’s whole output, with brief reference to several works from Op. 1 onwards. From here, we turn to the late orchestral works: these retain the stylistic lateness of earlier chamber works in certain respects, but the shift in forces and duration situate the music within broader concerns of genre and the cultural legacy of Western concert music. We explore these ideas through an analysis of …concertante… (2003) before closing by exploring the ways in which Kurtág’s music commemorates and revives key moments from Western musical history even as it laments the passing of aspects of European modernism.
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)