The Hungarian composer and conductor Peter Eötvös, who has died aged 80, is now best known for the 12 operas that he wrote during the last 25 years of his life. Before that, he played a leading role as a conductor specialising in the promotion of European musical modernism.
Premiered in Lyon in 1998, the work that launched Eötvös’s career as a successful opera composer was Three Sisters. The libretto, written with Claus H Henneberg, reworks Anton Chekhov’s play into a series of three “sequences”, each offering a version of events from the point of view of a single character; no fewer than four roles are taken by countertenors.
From then onwards, he frequently added new stage works to an already growing number of concert works in an extensive output notable for its radiant lyricism and brilliant orchestration. By extending the modernist origins of an approach rooted in the music and ideas of Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen with the aid of deeply considered investigations of other music of cultures beyond Europe, Eötvös gradually found his own voice.
Stockhausen had already drawn on Japanese musical and theatrical traditions, and Eötvös’s earliest opera, Harakiri – based on the ritual suicide of Yukio Mishima – was composed as far back as 1973, while both composers were working together in Osaka. Subsequently, however, Eötvös’s style – variously influenced by Chinese as well as Japanese traditions, by Indian, African and Basque musics, by jazz and, not least, by Béla Bartók and the folk repertoires of his native Transylvania – developed much of its individuality from interrogations of those cultures that went far beyond any mere cultural tourism.
His instrumental compositions, as well as his operas, often spring from such sources: the large-scale orchestral work Atlantis (1995), for example, draws on Transylvanian dances that act as a symbol of a lost culture associated, for the composer, with renewed hope. In later years he received many commissions from the world’s leading orchestras: in 2016, for instance, for Oratorium Balbulum, to a text by Péter Esterházy, for the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, premiered at the Salzburg festival. Ruminating on a variety of topical political issues, from the 9/11 terrorist attacks to relationships between countries, this work is typical of Eötvös’s social and political concerns.
But his operas already seem likely to represent the most enduring and surprisingly varied dimension of his output. Adapting novels and plays by writers both classic and modern – including Jon Fosse, Jean Genet, Tony Kushner and Gabriel García Márquez – these works demonstrate both Eötvös’s wide literary ambitions and his willingness to explore a variety of different dramatic approaches, comic as well as tragic. He was assisted in devising some of these opera libretti by Maria Eötvösne Mezei, his third wife.
Le Balcon – its libretto, by Françoise Morvan, André Markovitz and the composer, derived from Genet’s now classic tale of power struggles within a revolutionary setting – was first seen at Aix-en-Provence in 2002. Mezei’s libretto for Angels in America (2004) boils down to less than three hours the original seven hours of Kushner’s play about HIV/Aids.
Several of his operas have been seen in the UK. When his Márquez-based Love and Other Demons was produced at Glyndebourne in 2008, Eötvös became the first non-British composer to have a stage work premiered there. Described by the composer as “a bel canto opera”, it explored illicit love, superstition, race and demonic power, with a libretto by Kornél Hamvai. The music underpins the drama with an innate understanding of how orchestral forces can enhance the overall effect; though indulging in some gorgeous sounds, the composer displays the rare knack of knowing when less can sometimes be more powerful than more.
Eötvös’s final opera, Valuska – also his first with a libretto in Hungarian, by Mezei and Kinga Keszthelyi – was drawn from the novel The Melancholy of Resistance, by László Krasznahorkai: a tragi-comic, surreal story centring on a newspaper delivery man and the arrival in his small town of a circus with, as its star attraction, the world’s largest taxidermied whale. Valuska was premiered in Budapest last December.
Eötvös was, like his older compatriots György Ligeti and György Kurtág, a native of multi-ethnic Transylvania – then in Hungary but subsequently transferred to Romania; his birthplace was Székelyudvarhely. The turbulent final months of the second world war caused his family, including his mother, Ilona Szucs, to flee westwards. She was a pianist, and his father, Laszlo Eötvös, was a lawyer. Peter’s early childhood was spent in Miskolc, a northern Hungarian town where he first met Ligeti. The latter was already becoming established as a composer and teacher by the late 1940s, and the two remained in contact.
Eötvös studied piano and composition at the Franz Liszt Academy in Budapest from 1958 onwards; after advice from Zoltán Kodály, János Viski became his composition teacher. He soon gaining a reputation for improvising to accompany silent films and composing scores for both cinema and theatre.
In 1966, at the age of 22, he moved to Cologne on a scholarship to work with Stockhausen. He also studied composition with Bernd Alois Zimmermann and began to conduct. When I first went to the Darmstadt Summer School, in 1974, I recall Eötvös not only as one of Stockhausen’s closest acolytes but also as a member of a recently formed group of young Cologne-based musicians calling themselves the Oeldorf Group and specialising in live performance involving electronics.
From 1978, after Boulez asked him to conduct the opening concert of IRCAM, his Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique, in Paris, Eötvös found fame as a conductor specialising in all the latest compositional trends that helped to drive the global modernist agenda of the time. He quickly assumed the position of musical director of Ensemble Intercontemporain, IRCAM’s flagship chamber orchestra.
He conducted the world premieres of Stockhausen’s operas Donnerstag aus Licht (1981) and Montag aus Licht (1988). In the UK, he conducted the Covent Garden performances of Donnerstag in 1985 and was principal guest conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra from that year until 1988. He worked with the London Sinfonietta and also conducted Leos Janáček’s The Makropulos Case at Glyndebourne in 2001.
It was only after relinquishing his duties with the Ensemble Intercontemporain, in 1991, that Eötvös really came to the fore as a composer. With his new status on the European scene, and the political events of 1989 onwards, came new responsibilities.
He taught conducting and contemporary chamber music in both Karlsruhe and Cologne in Germany. Having already founded the International Eötvös Institute for young conductors and composers in Budapest in 1991, he went on to establish the Peter Eötvös Contemporary Music Foundation in 2004. It was at this moment, when Hungary joined the European Union, that Eötvös and his wife Maria – who had both previously lived in Cologne, Paris and then Hilversum in the Netherlands – finally moved back to Budapest.
A son from Eötvös’s first marriage, to the actor Piroska Molnár in 1968, predeceased him. In 1976 he married the Taiwanese-German pianist Pi-hsien Chen, with whom he had a daughter, Ann-yi. They divorced and he subsequently married Maria Mezei in 1995. He is survived by her, Ann-yi and by two stepsons from that marriage, Peter and Daniel.
• Peter Eötvös, composer and conductor, born 2 January 1944; died 24 March 2024
