Corelli and Kurtág, 2015

Corelli and Kurtág, 2015

February 16, 2015.  Corelli and Kurtág.  Last week we celebrated an unusual pair, an Italian Baroque composer from the 17th century, and a modernist Austrian one, born in the 20th.  This week we have a similar and equally disparate pairing: another Italian, also working in the Baroques style and born in the 17th century, and a Hungarian composer of the 20th century, born in what till 1918 was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire.

Arcangelo Corelli, a fine violinist and important composer, came from a small town of Fusignano, not far from Ravenna.  His birthday is February 17th, 1653.  He studied in the nearby Faenza, and then in Bologna, at that time one of the centers of violin playing.  Arcangelo CorelliAt the age of 17 he was admitted to the local Accademia Filarmonica, Bologna’s conservatory.  By 1675 Corelli was in Rome, playing in an orchestra, but very soon became well known as a virtuoso violinist.  He entered the service of Queen Christina of Sweden, the patron of many composers, from Giacomo Carissimi to Alessandro Stradella and Alessandro Scarlatti (Corelli dedicated his Op. 1, Twelve trio sonatas, to Queen Christina).  He continued to perform around Rome, playing solo and leading small string ensembles.  He played in churches and courts of  the Roman nobility and church hierarchs, such as Cardinal Pamphili, whose Palazzo Doria-Pamphili on Corso was one of the musical centers of Rome. Eventually Cardinal Pamphili hired Corelli, and for the following three years Corelli lived in the palace.  When Pamphili moved to Bologna, Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni, also a major patron of music and arts, became Corelli’s main benefactor.  Corelli moved to the cardinal’s palace, the enormous Cancelleria.  Corelli ran the cardinal’s private orchestra, and every Monday presented a concert in which he’d play, along with the most famous musicians in Rome.  He also continued to compose, if sparingly.  Famous not just in Rome but also in most of Europe, he was admitted to the prestigious literary and music society, Accademia degli Arcadi.  Being in the center of musical life of Rome, he met many composers, including the young Handel.  That didn’t go very well, as we wrote on an occasion.  Corelli retired in 1708 but continued to work, mostly editing his earlier compositions.  He died on January 8th, 1713, quite rich and in possession of a fine collection of violins, which he left to his friend, the violinist Matteo Fornari.  Here’s Corelli’s Concerto Grosso op. 6, no 4 in D Major in the performance by I Musici.

The Hungarian composer György Kurtág was born February 19th of 1926 in a small town of Lugoj, Banat.  As we mentioned above, prior to 1918 Banat was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire; many inhabitants were Hungarian-speakers.  It also had a large Jewish population; Kurtág was half-Jewish.  He spoke Hungarian at home and Romanian at school.  As a child, he studied the piano on and off, first with his mother, then with professional teachers.  After WWII, in 1946, the 20-year old Kurtág moved to Budapest and continued taking piano lessons, eventually entering the Franz Liszt Music Academy.  There he met György Ligeti and they became friends for life.  After the Hungarian revolution of 1956, Kurtág moved to Paris (in some ways Hungary was the most liberal of all Soviet-block countries and allowed people to travel).  There he studied with Olivier Messiaen and Darius Milhaud.  He returned to Hungary in 1959 and stayed there for the duration of the Communist regime – the only Hungarian composer of international renown to do so (Ligeti, for example, fled to Vienna right after the failed revolution).  Kurtág resumed traveling after the fall of communism in 1989, staying in Berlin (he was the composer in residence for the Berlin Philharmonic in the mid-90s), Vienna, the Netherlands and Paris, where he worked with Boulez’s Ensemble intercontemporain.  These days Kurtág and his wife live in Bordeaux. 

In our library we have a number of piano pieces from his Kurtág’s Játékok (“Games” in Hungarian), an eight-volume collection of works for solo pianos or piano four hands; we hope you’ll listen to them.  Here, though, we’d like to present a symphonic work from 1994, Stele.  It was commission by Claudio Abbado for the Berlin Philharmonic and is performed by them, live.