Born in Lugoj, Romania, to Hungarian-Jewish parents, Kurtág is today one of the world’s best-known composers. He’s the last living significant member of the post-war avant-garde generation that included Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen and György Ligeti.
Béla Bartók had been a major influence. Kurtág arrived in Budapest in 1945 to study with him at the Franz Liszt Academy of Music, only to see a black flag on the academy’s flagpole marking Bartok’s death in New York.
Kurtág met his wife, classical pianist Márta Kinsker, at the Liszt Academy. He would perform with her for the next 60 years. A feature of their performances was what The Guardian called “a game of musical Twister,” duets in which the players’ hands interlace with each other. If there’s a better metaphor for marriage, I don’t know what it is.
After the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, Kurtág lived in Paris between 1957 and 1958. Here, he discovered Samuel Beckett’s plays. The movie shows him working on a performance of “Fin de partie,” a libretto inspired by Beckett’s “Endgame.” Severely depressed in Paris, Kurtág consulted an art psychologist whose suggestion that he use the simplest musical elements or fragments reenergized him and shaped his approach to composing thereafter. Hence the title of the movie.
Kurtág was forced to move back to Budapest in 1958. From the early 1990s onwards, he worked more frequently abroad, in Berlin, Vienna, Paris and the Netherlands. Between 2002 and 2015, he made his home with Márta in a small village near Bordeaux, France, where his son lived.
When the couple moved back to Budapest, they were given an apartment at the top of the Budapest Musical Center. Márta died in 2019, leaving Kurtág to devote his life to composing music and overseeing performances and recordings of his work.
Before interviewing director Dénes Nagy, I watched his film “Kurtág Fragments.” Although it, too, is fragmented (a pragmatic way of capturing an extremely long creative life), it’s not disjointed. Rather, it moves at a slow, stately pace. On one level, the movie celebrates Kurtág as a remarkably powerful 100-year-old man who has an oddly smooth complexion and a strong, mellifluous voice.
On another, it’s the portrait of a completely dedicated artist whose age is irrelevant. Kurtág is brutally honest with his world-class collaborators and himself. In one deeply moving moment, he admits to hitting his son, who appears in the film and doesn’t look the happiest of fellows, every day between the ages of four and 10 and describes himself as a “sadist.”
Making the movie, director Nagy’s biggest challenge was to edit the 350 hours of footage he’d shot down to a running time of a little under two hours.
“Out of 100 potential scenes, I had to choose one. That was the ratio to which we had to compress material,” he tells me. “Kurtág aims to compress the essential into the smallest fragments. It was most Kurtágian for us to have to identify one tiny thing that resembles an entire world out of all that material.”
Nagy is an award-winning Hungarian film director and screenwriter. His first feature film, “Natural Light,” won the Silver Bear for Best Director at the Berlinale in 2021.
“Normally, I choose a subject on my own initiative, but in 2021, the head of the Budapest Music Center, László Gőz, contacted me to discuss making a movie about Kurtág,” Nagy explains.
“He told me that they didn’t want to treat him as a living legend, saint or mystical figure but a man viewers could feel close to. I really liked this approach, so I said ‘Yes.’ They allowed me total freedom as to what the film might look like.”
Given Kurtág’s age, he was already in his mid-90s when Nagy began, it was likely the last chance to make a film about him. Nagy is certain that the film couldn’t have been made without the influence of Gőz, Kurtág’s gatekeeper.
When he started the film, Nagy found it difficult to listen to Kurtág’s music. Now he understands that “the music can’t be separated from his personality. His music is himself. It comes from his deepest thoughts and emotions and is closely connected to his own personal life. When I understood this, I really started to love his music.”
Nagy says he feels privileged to have come to understand Kurtág’s music by filming him for so many years. The musical giant’s example has also taught him something profound about his own work.
“What’s significant for me is that Kurtág is someone living a totally isolated, ascetic life who thinks about music all the time. Music is life and death for him. He lives in a secluded world which is somehow vast and there’s no place for the mundane. I don’t think his example should be followed. What he does is unique and his life is not a happy one. But it’s very inspiring to spend so much time with someone who is still searching at such a great age, believing he will find and understand something. Even if you know you have to follow your own path.”
Thinking about Kurtág in his eyrie high above Budapest, I wondered if there was something quintessentially Hungarian in his isolation.
“Not at all,” Nagy says. “Kurtág speaks French, English and German as well as Hungarian. His apartment in the Budapest Music Center is a place of pilgrimage. People come from all over the world to rehearse and record with him. His calendar is full for months. It’s vital for Budapest and the world that he can be accessed.”
“Kurtag Fragments” is currently showing in Hungarian cinemas nationwide.
This article was first published in the Budapest Business Journal print issue of March 27, 2026.
Producing journalism that is worthy of the name is a costly business. For over 30 years, the publishers, editors and reporters of the Budapest Business Journal have striven to bring you business news that works, information that you can trust, that is factual, accurate and presented without fear or favor.Newspaper organizations across the globe have struggled to find a business model that allows them to continue to excel, without compromising their ability to perform. Most recently, some have experimented with the idea of involving their most important stakeholders, their readers.
We would like to offer that same opportunity to our readers. We would like to invite you to help us deliver the quality business journalism you require. Hit our Support the BBJ button and you can choose the how much and how often you send us your contributions.
