Peter Eotvos, Evocative Modernist Composer and Conductor, Dies at 80

“His music may be rigorous, but his gentle, soft-spoken spirit gives his work its inimitable character and pathos,” the American opera director Yuval Sharon, who directed a 2016 manufacturing of Mr. Eotvos’s 1998 opera, “Tri Sestri,” in Vienna, stated in a press release. Calling that work, which is predicated on Chekhov’s play “Three Sisters,” “unquestionably one of the great operas of our time,” Mr. Sharon stated that it was solely whereas working with Mr. Eotvos that he “realized how much of his emotional life is invested in the work.”

For the in any other case reserved Mr. Eotvos, music was his car to precise that internal life. “In everyday life I’m not a dramatic person at all,” he stated in a 2020 documentary about him. “Perhaps this veiled dramatic trait can only come to the surface if it has a job to do.”

In the interview, he described how the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin’s flight into outer house in 1961 — the primary for a human and “the first major event of my life” — impressed him to write down the piano work “Kosmos” when he was 17. He would revisit the work at numerous phases in his life, together with within the 2017 live performance piece “Multiversum.”

“It put my whole life on a cosmic trajectory,” he stated.

Long earlier than he discovered renown as a composer in his personal proper, Mr. Eotvos was pivotal to the event 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 postwar European music.

Throughout his profession, Mr. Eotvos educated and supported younger composers and conductors, together with via the International Eotvos Institute, which he based in 1991, and the Peter Eotvos Contemporary Music Foundation, based in 2004. He taught on the Karlsruhe University of Music and the Musikhochschule Koln (now the Cologne University of Music), each in Germany. Having spent a lot of his life overseas, he returned to Hungary in 2004, the 12 months the nation joined the European Union.