“His music could also be rigorous, however his mild, soft-spoken spirit offers his work an inimitable character and pathos,” mentioned American opera director Yuval Sharon, who directed a 2016 manufacturing of Eotvos’ 1998 opera “Tri Sestri” in Vienna mentioned in an announcement. Calling the work, which relies on Chekhov’s play “Three Sisters,” “unquestionably one of many nice operas of our time,” Sharon mentioned it was solely whereas working with Eotvos that he “realized how a lot of his emotional life is invested in work.”
For the reserved Mr. Eotvos, music was his automobile for expressing that internal life. “In on a regular basis life I’m not a dramatic particular person,” he mentioned in a 2020 documentary about him. “Possibly this veiled dramatic streak can solely come to mild when you have a job to do.”
Within the interview, he described how Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin’s flight into outer area in 1961 – the primary by a human being and “the primary large occasion in my life” – impressed him to write down the piano work “Kosmos” when he was 17 years. He would revisit the work at varied levels of his life, together with within the 2017 “Multiversum” live performance.
“It put my complete life on a cosmic trajectory,” he mentioned.
Lengthy earlier than he was generally known as a composer, Mr. Eotvos was instrumental within the growth of late twentieth century music. As a key participant within the musical avant-garde, he championed and helped transmit the musical doctrines of Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen, figures who dominated post-war European music.
All through his profession, Eotvos has educated and supported younger composers and conductors, together with via the Eotvos Worldwide Institute, which he based in 1991, and the Peter Eotvos Basis for Modern Music, based in 2004. He has taught on the Karlsruhe College of Music and the Karlsruhe College of Music. Musikhochschule Koln (in the present day the College of Music Cologne), each in Germany. After spending a lot of his life overseas, he returned to Hungary in 2004, the 12 months the nation joined the European Union.
