László Gombos: The artistic career of composer Zsolt Durkó

Zsolt Durkó (1934-1997) was one of the most outstanding representatives of the Hungarian composer generation of the second half of the 20th century and an internationally renowned member of the generation. His career took off rapidly: by his early thirties he had already become the most frequently performed contemporary Hungarian composer abroad. His success is due in large part to his unique sense of finding a balance between extremes: his music is at once Hungarian and international, modern and conservative, complex and clearly structured. This makes his music accessible to a very wide range of concert-goers and musicians, his works are almost accessible to those brought up on classical music, his interesting sound effects, colours and expressive melodies captivate the listener at first hearing, while at the same time satisfying the needs of those who are looking for something special, unique, national, or even intellectually challenging.

Durkó has won numerous prizes at international competitions in Rome, Montreal, Budapest and Paris, and has also been awarded the Koussevitzky, Kossuth and twice the Bartók-Pásztory Prizes. He composed and carried out his social duties with a youthful vigour and fire that belied his fragile stature and refined manners, which is perhaps why his early loss came as such a shock to the Hungarian musical community.

Childhood and school years

Zsolt Durkó was born on April 10, 1934, in Szeged, the second child of Reverend Gábor Durkó (1898–1992), a Reformed pastor, and Irén Patkós (1907–1996). His younger sister, Katalin, likewise chose a musical career, becoming a pianist, teacher, radio director, and editor. Zsolt began studying music relatively late. At the age of eleven his absolute pitch was discovered by his uncle, but he did not enroll at the Szeged Conservatory until two years later, at thirteen. There – in parallel with his studies at the Baross Gábor Secondary School – he learned not only piano but also the basics of composition under the guidance of Géza Szatmári. His talent for piano improvisation became evident almost immediately: in the spring of 1949 he won first prize in competitions at both the Szeged and Győr conservatories, and a year later achieved similar results in Sopron. His musical interests were strongly influenced by the opera performances of the Szeged National Theatre under Viktor Vaszy and by the symphonic concerts held in the city.

In 1950 he continued his studies in Budapest at the State Conservatory of Music as a composition student of Rezső Sugár and a piano student of Renée Sándor. For three years he then attended the preparatory piano class reserved for exceptionally gifted talents at the Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music, while earning a living by accompanying choirs and dance ensembles on the piano. Finally, from 1955 he became a student of Ferenc Farkas in the Composition Department, where he received his diploma in 1961. He recalled his master in an interview with Mária Feuer: “Ferenc Farkas had an exceptional receptiveness to the most diverse styles; he taught both European and non-European music. Prohibitive orders limited the scope of our outlook, yet through Professor Farkas the art of Alban Berg, Schönberg, and Webern also reached us. When I listened to Webern’s Six Orchestral Pieces, it was as if a new world opened before me. We also heard Bartók’s ‘forbidden’ works… Ferenc Farkas never required us to work in his style. He paid attention to the goals we set for ourselves and our unfolding attempts at shaping form, and corrected us in that spirit.” (in Rita Gerencsér: Zsolt Durkó, p. 4)

Half a year after receiving his diploma, in December 1961, he travelled to Rome to deepen his knowledge. As Ferenc Farkas had done three decades earlier, he too gained at the Accademia di Santa Cecilia a broader European outlook and inspirations compared to the more insular, German-influenced musical world of the Hungarian capital. Just as Farkas had studied earlier with Ottorino Respighi, Durkó now acquired new experiences in the class of Goffredo Petrassi – and even more so in the vibrant cultural life of the Eternal City, where he encountered firsthand the Latin-rooted Mediterranean outlook on life and amassed a wealth of architectural, pictorial, and other artistic impressions.

He felt that everything he had learned up to that point had now truly matured within him and made him a grown-up creator. It was in Rome that he composed his first work which he continued to acknowledge later and placed at the head of his catalogue. This was the 11 Pieces (11 pezzi) for string quartet, a kind of summation of his student years. Earlier influences are heard in it and fused into a unified, personal style: Webern’s twelve-tone technique, the language of Stravinsky and the Italian contemporaries, and above all Bartók’s music rooted in Hungarian tradition. Durkó’s diploma work was the set of variations Episodes on the B-A-C-H Theme (Episodi sul tema B-A-C-H), which was premiered with great success on May 22, 1963, by the Academy’s orchestra under the direction of Daniele Paris. The work soon became known to the Hungarian public as well, when it was performed by the Radio Orchestra conducted by György Lehel.

The start of an international career in the mid-1960s

In the summer of 1963 Zsolt Durkó returned from Rome, and in the following years he worked as a freelance composer. He wrote incidental music for the theater and film scores, through which his name became known to a wider public. In 1965 he composed the music for Zoltán Huszárik’s film Elégia (Elegy), followed by Hogy szaladnak a fák (How the Trees Run, dir. Pál Zolnay, 1966), Kártyavár (House of Cards, dir. György Hintsch, 1967), Próféta voltál szívem (You Were a Prophet, My Heart, dir. Pál Zolnay, 1968), Nincs idő (No Time, dir. Ferenc Kósa, 1973), the highly influential Az a szép fényes nap (That Bright Shining Day, dir. G. Sándor Szőnyi, 1981), and numerous other works. Commissioned by Hungarian Radio, in 1964 he composed Organismi for violin and orchestra. Its nine movements are built, in a manner characteristic of the composer, from organically developing microstructures, as if the natural transformations observable in nature were manifesting at the level of musical composition. The same fundamental idea of his oeuvre – flowering, organic unfolding – is also expressed in the orchestral work Ornamental Elements (Fioriture ungherese, 1966).

In 1964 Durkó composed the piano piece Psicogramma, premiered at the Warsaw Autumn Festival, and Improvvisazioni for wind quintet. A year later came the Hungarian Rhapsody for two clarinets, orchestra, and cimbalom, in which the composer – both through the music itself and through its title – emphasized his national belonging. Yet this is not a garland of folk songs and popular tunes dressed up in picturesque guise, nor a tourist-baiting csikós-and-gulyás festivity. Durkó found a connection with his homeland on a deeper and more abstract level. Decades later he spoke of this in a televised conversation with András Batta: “This title undoubtedly represented a kind of declaration. The Hungarian Rhapsody was my return, in music, to my homeland […], or at least to that musical intonation whose rhythm and tone are tied to the rules of the Hungarian language.” (ibid., Gerencsér, pp. 7–8).

As in Ornamental Elements, in Altamira (1968) a wordless choir enriches the orchestral sound, through which the composer creates a distinctive atmosphere, evoking the mood of ancient times, their passionate gestures, and their contours fading into the mist. It was first performed in a concert hall at the IGNM Festival in Basel – an honour, but by then no longer an exceptional one, rather the natural recognition due to the composer and his works. Indeed, after publications by Editio Musica Budapest, his works began to appear in succession at Boosey & Hawkes in London, recordings were made, he won prestigious composition prizes in Budapest, Paris, Rome, and Montreal, and his music was performed from Australia to Paris, London and the United States. Commissioned in the United States, the Dartmouth Concerto was composed in 1966. Then, thanks to the record prize awarded to Ornamental Elements (Special Citation International Koussevitzky Award on Record, 1971), the Koussevitzky Foundation invited him to compose a new work. The result was the Chamber Music for Two Pianos and Eleven Strings (1973), whose manuscript is preserved in the Library of Congress in Washington.

By the early 1970s Durkó had settled and firmly found his place, as the international successes enabled him to establish personal security. From 1971 to 1977 he also taught at the Academy of Music, where he lectured on 20th-century composition. Later, from 1982, he held the post of classical music editor at Hungarian Radio. He founded a family in 1963, marrying the cellist Eszter Isépy. From this marriage was born, in 1965, Zsolt Durkó Jr., who became a painter. After his divorce, in 1971 he married the musicologist Rita Gerencsér, who would later become his biographer and the custodian of his legacy. Their son, Péter Durkó, was born in 1972, and followed in his father’s footsteps by also choosing the profession of composer.

The role of chamber music

In 1967 Durkó, as a composer of chamber music, also received significant recognition: his First String Quartet won third prize among three hundred applicants at the Jeunesses Musicales International Composition Competition, organized in connection with the Montreal World Exposition. The work was performed on site by the Bartók String Quartet and later became part of the repertoire of outstanding ensembles, heard in many places worldwide. The single-movement composition refers to the long-established tradition of the genre, to the sonata form built from contrasting materials, while each part is extraordinarily rich in detail. Its complex differentiated rhythmic world evokes the memory of the great predecessors. Yet despite the abundance of melodic material, articulations, and constantly changing textures, the work does not fall apart. With remarkable skill Durkó achieved that, like an underground stream surfacing repeatedly, we can almost always hear – or at least sense – the presence of an endless melody that condenses within itself the essential elements of Hungarian siratos (lament songs).

Undoubtedly, Bartók’s influence stands behind the work. It is not the great master’s style but his spirit that finds continuation here – as in the case of the Second String Quartet, composed in 1970. This work likewise presents itself to the listener as a single, fused form, but on a larger scale than its predecessor. Within its thirteen short movements it unfolds a variety of characters, displaying a wider range of emotional expression. In 1971 it won second prize in Budapest at the international composition competition organized on the occasion of the 90th anniversary of Bartók’s birth (first prize was not awarded). The jury, chaired by Ferenc Farkas, included Tadeusz Baird, György Ligeti, and Goffredo Petrassi. Two years later György Kroó characterized the piece – also recorded by the Kodály String Quartet – in the pages of Élet és Irodalom: “Durkó proves himself more and more, not only in today’s Hungarian music but in the entire international output, to be an artist of synthesis, of harmony, of inner balance. By now he is an internationally renowned master… I feel this work to be particularly personal; alongside its beautiful sonorities, artistic form, and refined technique, it is the song-like quality, the triumph of melodic imagination, that prevails.”

Alongside the two string quartets, a number of further chamber works were composed during this period, representing the finest of the composer’s output in this genre: Szimbólumok kürtre és zongorára Symbols for horn and piano, 1969), Brass Quartet (1970), Iconography No. 1 for two viola da gambas and harpsichord (or cello and piano, 1970), Kolloidok (Colloids) for larger ensemble (1969), and Iconography No. 2 (1971). On Christmas 1971 Peter Maxwell Davies’s ensemble premiered Fire Music for flute, clarinet, piano, and string trio at London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall. In 1974 the New York Harp Ensemble performed the Serenata for four harps in New York, and at the 1974 Budapest International Music Competition the Varianti for viola and piano was heard. The chamber works formed the basis of Durkó’s first composer’s evening, organized in October 1974 within the framework of the Korunk Zenéje Fesztivál (Festival of Contemporary Music), where the introduction was given by the world-renowned Bartók scholar, the musicologist László Somfai.

In the following decade, following a number of vocal works, instrumental chamber music once again played an important role in Durkó's workshop. He wrote Three Essays for clarinet and piano (1983), Clair-obscur for trumpet and organ (1984), Sextet for five clarinets and piano (1987), premiered in Richmond, USA, and Octet for eight wind instruments and ad libitum double bass (1988), which debuted on the BBC in London. Philip Jones commissioned the Sinfonietta (1983), which was first performed by the Philip Jones Brass Ensemble at the Cheltenham International Music Festival in 1985. In two further pieces, one of the instruments stands out from the ensemble and so the composition resembles more a concerto. These include Impromptus in F for flute and chamber ensemble (1983) and Téli zene (Winter Music, 1983), a soloistic employment of the horn, which was premiered at London's Wigmore Hall in May 1984.

Vocal works at the heart of the oeuvre

Zsolt Durkó’s interest turned toward vocal music in the early 1970s. It is true that in some of his earlier orchestral works he had already used a choir singing without text, but there the human voice appeared as an important yet still merely additional timbre within the ensemble’s sound. Now, however, the treatment of text raised new and engaging questions for him. As he told Mária Feuer: “… it was not so much instrumental as vocal music that occupied me […]. Of course, the musical work disassembles the literary work and reconstructs it according to its own laws. Thus it has nothing to do with illustration. In reality it is about creating large forms, about shaping the arc along which the material of music can unfold according to its own inherent laws of development.” (ibid., Gerencsér, p. 12). The sequence began with two cantatas to the poems of Endre Ady, in 1971 and 1972. In the first he employed baritone solo, mixed choir, and orchestra, setting a selection of Ady’s poems; the second, however, was composed for double mixed choir and orchestra without soloist, and set the text of a single poem, On Elijah’s Chariot. Also from that same year came the male chorus Four Studies on poems by Attila József and Árpád Tóth, followed two years later by Seven Melodic Sketches for mixed choir and piano, to a text by the composer himself.

The oratorio Halotti beszéd (Burial Prayer), composed in 1972, rightfully became Durkó’s most famous work. It was commissioned by the capital city to mark the centenary of the unification of Pest, Buda, and Óbuda (an interesting parallel to Bartók’s Dance Suite and Kodály’s Psalmus Hungaricus, which were written for the 50th jubilee). The premiere, however, took place only two years after the 100th anniversary, in 1975, at a concert of the Hungarian Radio, shortly before the work brought the composer further international acclaim. It won first prize in Paris at UNESCO’s Tribune Internationale des Compositeurs and was later performed in Munich and London as well. For this work, scored for tenor and baritone soloists, mixed choir, and orchestra, Durkó found the ideal text in the 12th-century Pray Codex: the Burial Prayer the earliest known continuous text in the Hungarian language. Among its 14 movements, the oratorio also includes traditional movement types of the genre, such as the aria, recitative, duet, turba-like chorus, and orchestral fugue.

Durkó’s only opera, Moses, stands at the center of his oeuvre. It was first performed in 1977 at the Budapest State Opera, where it enjoyed about two dozen successful performances, and was staged even more frequently in Chemnitz in a German translation. The libretto, based on Imre Madách’s drama Moses, was written by the composer himself, who in it addressed the problem of the interdependence of the individual and the community, conceived as a late counterpart to Kodály’s Psalmus Hungaricus. The two main protagonists of the story are Moses and the people he is called to lead to the Promised Land. The first act recounts the story of Egyptian slavery, the burning bush, and the crossing of the Red Sea. At the center of the second act stand the themes of the Ten Commandments and the golden calf; the opera concludes with the lightning strike, Joshua’s departure for Canaan, and the death of the title character.

The end of Durkó’s period of vocal works was marked by the Széchenyi Oratorio in 1982. Thereafter – apart from two choral works and the Three English Songs – no vocal parts appear in his compositions until the cantata A Jelenések könyvének margójára (On the Margin of the Book of Revelation), which closed his oeuvre. The Széchenyi Oratorio was commissioned by the city of Debrecen for the centenary of Kodály’s birth. Scored for tenor and bass soloists, mixed choir, and orchestra, the 12-movement work uses a text compiled by the composer from István Széchenyi’s writings Hitel, Világ, Stádium, and Kelet Népe.

Parallel to his vocal works – and in a sense as their counterparts or complements – Durkó also produced several concerto-like compositions. In the already mentioned Chamber Music (1973), the two pianos assume soloistic roles alongside eleven strings (the piano parts were performed by Erzsébet Tusa and István Lantos at the 1974 premiere at the Academy of Music). In Turner Illustrations, composed around the same time as the Madách opera, the violin’s expansive melodies emerge from the chamber orchestra’s shimmering, fragmented texture, built upon color effects. The violin likewise plays a prominent role in the composition Refrének (Refrains, 1979, with Ferenc Szecsődi as soloist at the premiere in Szeged), while in Négy dialógus (Four Dialogues, 1979) two percussionists are set in opposition to the orchestra. From this period, only the Piano Concerto (1981) explicitly acknowledges its belonging to the concerto genre in its title. This single-movement work was premiered in May 1984 at the Academy of Music by Dezső Ránki, with the Hungarian Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by György Lehel.

Social engagement and the last creative period

While in Hungary during the 1980s opportunities for commissioning, recording, and publishing new works decreased drastically, Durkó was approached with increasing frequency from abroad and received a wealth of commissions. From 1983 onward, in addition to Boosey & Hawkes, another English publisher, Chester Music Publishers, also took an interest in his works. He was regularly invited to serve as a jury member at international composition competitions (Switzerland, Denmark, Rome, Geneva, Siena, Amsterdam, Vienna), gave lectures at American universities, and delivered the introductory address at the Bartók centenary gala concert in Moscow’s Tchaikovsky Hall.

Among his new orchestral works were Ludus stellaris (1984), Ornamenti No. 1 (1984), commissioned by the Szombathely Symphony Orchestra, and Ornamenti No. 2 (1985), premiered at the Salzburg Festival. The Három angol dal (Three English Songs, 1991), set to texts by Wordsworth, Blake, and T. S. Eliot for mezzo-soprano and twelve instruments, was first performed in London, while the Violin Concerto was premiered by Ferenc Szecsődi in 1993. His catalogue of solo works was enriched by Quartina (1983) and Three Rondos (1984) for piano, Laude (1987) for organ, Divertimento (1989) for guitar, and Flautocapriccio (1991). A particularly unusual and distinctive cycle is A gömb története (The History of the Spheres, 1991), a series of sixty piano pieces, presented at the Bartók Memorial House by five pianists playing in alternation.

The year 1987 brought a major change in the life of Zsolt Durkó. Previously he had preferred to withdraw into his composer’s workshop to preserve his independence, but now he felt compelled to take on a public role in order to contribute to the renewal of Hungarian musical life. He founded the Hungarian Musical Arts Society, of which he remained president until the end of his life. The Society organized forty to fifty concerts each year in Budapest and throughout the country, providing opportunities for the presentation of new Hungarian works. Durkó was also the founder of the Mini-Festival, a prestigious forum for contemporary music held annually over three days. His sense of responsibility likewise led him to join the Hungarian Academy of Arts in 1992, and the following year the Széchenyi Academy of Literature and Arts. He also served on committees of the National Cultural Fund, and in 1994 accepted the presidency of the Magyar Zeneművészek és Táncművészek Világszövetsége (World Federation of Hungarian Musicians and Dancers).

Durkó’s last large-scale, summative work, the oratorio A Jelenések könyvének margójára (On the Margin of the Book of Revelation, 1996), was premiered only after his death. The piece, scored for alto, tenor, and baritone soloists, mixed choir, and orchestra, was described by Rita Gerencsér in her 1999 book: “The text was compiled by the composer himself, based on Gáspár Károli’s stately Bible translation: primarily from the visions of John, with passages from Genesis, the Song of Songs, and the Psalms. The musical architecture is divided into four sections which, resonating with the emotional and intellectual arc of the text, form a single overarching vault. It spans the entire Bible: from Genesis to the Apocalypse, from the miracle of creation to the vision of destruction, and finally to the resounding infinite – the light, the heavenly peace, the harmony of forgiveness. [...] Its style suggests the possibility of a new chapter in the composer’s oeuvre, especially in the treatment of choir and orchestra, the fluidity of rhythm, and a harmonic language brighter and more transparent than perhaps ever before.”

Zsolt Durkó died on 2 April 1997 at his home in Budapest, one week before his 63rd birthday, full of plans and ideas still to be realized. He was buried in the Farkasrét Cemetery, where fellow composers Attila Bozay and Sándor Szokolay, as well as the distinguished painter Pál Gerzson, bade him farewell.

[2017]

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