Benjamin Appl on Lines of Life

György Kurtág celebrated his 99th birthday last week, and to mark the occasion Alpha Classics released a rather special album on which the Hungarian composer features as producer and pianist: baritone Benjamin Appl was personally selected by Kurtág and his late wife Márta to record the Hölderlin-Gesänge and other works, and is joined by Kurtág himself for Brahms's 'Sonntag' and Schubert's 'Der Jüngling an der Quelle'.

I caught up with Benjamin last month to find out more about how he got to know and love this intensely private man through making music together, the many and varied challenges involved in bringing his songs to life, the special significance which the Schubert and Brahms songs on the album have for Kurtág, and how the composer came to make his home at Budapest Music Center (where he still lives and works today...)

How did you and Mr Kurtág meet?

The project was initiated nearly a decade ago by the Konzerthaus Dortmund, when its Intendant visited Mr Kurtág in Budapest and asked which pieces he would like to be included. Kurtág mentioned the Hölderlin-Gesänge, because he thought the connection between text and music was so strong; he’s a famous perfectionist, and he was pleased that each syllable was set in exactly the right way.

They wanted to bring the piece to the next generation, so they collected recordings from ten young baritones and sent them to Mr Kurtág; he’s known for being very demanding, so it took some months for him to listen to them all. He whittled the list down to five, then three, then asked the remaining singers to send a fresh recording of one of the lower passages…and in the end it was me who made it.

I arrived in Budapest with a film team - and a certain amount of trepidation. I’d heard stories about collaborations with other singers foundering after just a few minutes, plus there was the added anxiety around filming: apart from one project with his granddaughter, he hasn't really allowed cameras to be around while he works. There was me, Kurtág and his wife Márta, his publisher and the camera-crew, and I was fighting back the nerves as we got to work. After five minutes his wife said something to him in Hungarian, and he turned to me and smiled: ‘Márta says you are our man!’. He was 93 when we first met, and since then I’ve gone out to Budapest on a regular basis: we go through all kinds of repertoire together, not just his own music.

The rehearsal process was extraordinary, but incredibly tiring: there were times when I wanted to throw the score against the wall. My brain would be completely exhausted, and I’d look up to see this 93-year-old sitting there like a young boy, full of energy! We’d spend an entire day working on the first bar of a song, and I’d come back in the evening looking forward to bar two…only for him to say: ‘Let’s start from the beginning again!’. But I take the view that whatever he says in terms of interpretation is absolutely valid – I would never dream of arguing back! I’ve accepted that I’ll never sing these songs perfectly in a live recital, but getting as close to his intentions as possible will be the work of my life.

What are the main challenges of the cycle?

Firstly, there’s no obvious harmonic framework: most of the piece is for unaccompanied solo voice, with tuba and trombone joining for one of the six songs. If you sing a wrong interval or take a wrong turn you’re lost for the rest of the cycle! But when we started collaborating, I discovered that the harmonic framework is all there in Mr Kurtág’s head: suddenly he would play some chords or a Schubert song which fits perfectly underneath the vocal line, and your entire conception of the music changes when you hear that.

There’s so little on the page, but once you learn to look beyond that you realise how rich the music is. Schubert is a bit like that too – there’s rarely a superfluous note in his songs, but from that simplicity he creates a churn of emotions that takes your breath away. And the texts themselves are quite opaque. I struggled with the second one in particular, and told Mr Kurtág that I didn’t understand it…to which his response was ‘I didn’t understand it, and therefore I composed it’. For him, the act of composing is a path to a deeper comprehension of the poetry.

Mr Kurtág is an eternal searcher: I think his favourite word is ‘Maybe’. He’s very focused on finding the right interpretation in that particular moment, and of course that doesn’t make it easy to achieve a definitive result! This was the most extensive (and expensive) recording I’ve ever made: we did almost 1500 takes, and after the first edit we started up again…But what I eventually realised is that the finished article is not so interesting for him: he’s more invested in the journey itself.

Have you had much opportunity to get to know him on a personal level?

Mr Kurtág does not generally go in for small-talk - in his music, or in conversation. It often takes him quite a long time to formulate a sentence because he wants to search for the right word and not use any unnecessary ones. We recorded an interview for the album which would have been six times as long if our amazing Tonmeister hadn’t edited out all the pauses!

When ideas come to him he often gets into a kind of flow state, but otherwise he’s someone who just enjoys silence. It’s extraordinary to watch him composing: his hand will begin to shake and then move down to the page to add the tiniest detail, perhaps just a staccato dot. It’s not a medical issue, as in general his hands are very steady, but he has so much doubt around writing that you feel you’re watching someone go to hell and back just to get something on paper. I’ve never seen anything like it before.

I’m so full of admiration for this man, because I don’t know anyone else who has such a deep understanding of music at the same time as being so detached from the music industry. I’m a part of that industry, of course, and it was so refreshing to be around someone with that unwavering focus on the music itself. These days the culture is so geared towards rushing from project to project, cutting corners in terms of rehearsal-time, and programming concerts based on logistics and available forces - and he doesn’t give a damn about any of that. This is a man who wrote a thirteen-minute piece in Hungarian for baritone and five cymbal-players! It will probably never be performed…but it’s the process that he loves, not so much the end result.

Was he very hands-on with the recording-process itself?

Yes, he was there in the studio for the whole thing and did all the production himself: the sound-engineers set up the microphones, but the rest was all him. He also plays two pieces on the album, which I think makes him the oldest pianist on record! He was 98 when the sessions took place, and although an injury to his arm meant that he didn’t feel comfortable playing for the whole thing it was wonderful to have him for Schubert’s ‘Der Jüngling an der Quelle’ and Brahms’s ‘Sonntag’. We’ve worked on a lot of Schubert together over the years, including a lot of sessions on Winterreise, so it was nice to have that reflected. When he plays his own upright piano it’s extraordinary. I’ve never heard playing like it, and of course that feeds into the way you sing and phrase.

Were the Hölderlin settings composed with a particular singer in mind?

Kurt Widmer was the first person to record and perform them, but they weren’t written for a specific singer. Kurtág composed the songs while he was at the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin, which is an institution for intellectuals: you’re selected to be a part of it for a year and you basically have to live there, taking meals with your colleagues every day. I think Kurtág was the only person in the history of the institution who was given the opportunity to stay for two years rather than the usual one.

There’s a big park there with a lake which takes about half an hour to walk around, and the fast songs came to him while he was doing laps of it! He wrote a lot of other Hölderlin songs, some of which are still sitting in a drawer…we went through all of them together and he reworked some passages, and ultimately he just wasn’t satisfied enough to publish them. But it was a wonderful experience just to sing through them together and watch him at work.

Speaking of institutions, tell me about the Budapest Music Center where you recorded much of the album: is it residential?

Technically, no! The Center was set up by László Göz, a trombonist who was also a very astute businessman, and out of the profits he made from one of his non-musical companies he built this amazing complex in Budapest: as well as one of the richest libraries of Hungarian music in the world, it has a concert-hall, a jazz club and also a few guest-rooms.

Kurtág and Márta lived in France for a long time, and when they came to Budapest in 2015 to visit a friend they booked into one of the guest-rooms for a week. Márta became unwell and needed medical treatment, so they stayed on while she recovered…then they just never left. There is not much space: just a little living room, a small bedroom and bathroom, and the tiniest kitchen imaginable. 

Márta didn’t leave the flat for years, and even today Mr Kurtág doesn’t go out much: attending concerts within the Center is easy for him, and when he does show up at external concerts and the opera it’s a huge honour. I’m so privileged that he makes the effort to come whenever I perform in Budapest, and it’s extraordinary to see how much the audience appreciates him. 

He’s almost like a god there: when I take a taxi from the airport to the Center, the driver invariably knows who Kurtág is and asks me to pass on good wishes. Can you imagine the taxi-drivers in London or Manchester showing that kind of affection for Birtwistle when he was alive? That’s no reflection on Birtwistle (or on British taxi-drivers!) - I think it’s only in Communist and ex-Communist countries that you see that sense of artists and creatives really belonging to the people and being a source of national pride.

Márta Kurtág died five years before the recording was made, but it sounds like she was a driving-force behind the project in its early stages...

The first time I visited was when Márta was still around, and there was a very different energy – they were like yin and yang in a way, and they also fought a lot because they had different opinions on many things. Mr Kurtág has always struggled with self-doubt, but Márta gave him strength and pushed him to publish certain things. He tends to get very caught up in tiny details, and she was the one who would say ‘György, this piece is ready now: let’s go!’. And when he wasn’t able to finish a sentence, she would jump in and complete it, knowing exactly what he wanted to say.

Theirs is an amazing story. In the part of Hungary (now Romania) where Mr Kurtág comes from, men were only allowed to marry when they reached 21 - so he and Márta booked the first available appointment on the morning of his birthday and were married at 8AM! That was in 1947, and they were married for more than 70 years; it was a very symbiotic relationship.

He fell into a deep crisis after Márta's death. I remember some sessions shortly after her death where he would simply sit and cry: the first Hölderlin song is about longing for a distant beloved, and he got so lost in that world that he began calling her name over and over again. For the first few months we didn’t know if he would be able to cope with the loss, but somehow he’s moved into a new phase of life: he’s staying active and composing again, and is working on a chamber opera right now (scheduled to be premiered in Vienna for his 100th birthday). He has unfinished business.

You've included a selection of Schubert songs on the album: does he hold a special place in Kurtág's affections?

Absolutely: part of the project was about finding music that has been important in his life, and he sees Schubert as the greatest composer of all time. ‘Der Jungling an der Quelle’, ‘Ganymed’, ‘Dass sie hier gewesen!’ and Brahms’s ‘Sonntag’ are all pieces he rehearsed with Márta, with her singing and him playing the piano. He often writes a dedication underneath his own songs, like ‘In memoriam’ or ‘In memento’: I have the feeling that he was mentally inscribing this album ‘To Márta’, and that’s why Schubert songs had to be a part of it.