6+1 Songs: György Kurtág’s Settings of Poems by Amy Károlyi, Op. 22

Abstract

A Hungarian translation of a Japanese haiku by Kobayashi Issa concludes a series of settings of aphoristic poems by Amy Károlyi (wife of the poet Sándor Weöres) in Kurtág’s op. 22 song cycle for soprano and cimbalom. This last song bears the title Ars poetica which suggests that it might be regarded as of central importance within the series. My initial enquiry was intended to focus on the genesis of such an unusually “mixed” set. The article, however, is based on a first attempt at philologically evaluating the manuscript sources of the songs kept at the Kurtág collection of the Paul Sacher Foundation (PSS) in Basel. One conspicuous characteristic of the manuscripts is the surprising detail in dating both individual compositions and occasional revisions. Thus, in contrast to the published score, which is provided with a single date, actually a dedication to Soprano Adrienne Csengery – “for Adrienne, on 3 January 1982” – the manuscripts reveal, through repeated dating, the occasionally many layers of compositional work on each individual song. The earliest settings (nos. 3 and 5) were started in May 1981 and were further refined until early June. The rest of the cycle was composed in late December. The sources reveal that one of the Károlyi- settings (no. 4) was added after the set was first completed, rather than the Ars poetica, which was part of the concept. In addition to the evolution of the set, the variability of certain compositional details appearing in the successive sources of songs, especially in the vocal part, can also be startling. While the article tries to identify all the text
sources of the poems, an Appendix presents a list of all sources of op. 22 in PSS The article is dedicated to the memory of Julia Pestalozzi Kerpel.