Eotvos, Peter (1944- )

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    Salzburg Festival Welcomes Peter Eotvos’ Opera “Three Sisters”

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    Peter Eotvos’s “Three Sisters,” based on the 1900 play by Anton Chekhov, is at the festival this year for the first time.On a hot, drizzly afternoon in late June, a rehearsal of Peter Eotvos’s “Three Sisters,” one of the four new opera productions at this summer’s Salzburg Festival, erupted in dainty tinkling.The opera’s cast members sat in the middle of a rehearsal room and tapped spoons against empty teacups. The conductor Maxime Pascal, flanked by two pianos, nodded approvingly at the sounds of clinking, clattering and rattling. On the large copy of the score that lay in front of him, each tap was precisely notated, and there was a visual key illustrating different techniques: tapping with the tip or the stem of a teaspoon, continuous stirring, and setting a spoon down on a saucer.“Peter wrote this moment because it’s a bit boring,” Pascal explained with a slight chuckle during a break in the rehearsal. “The three sisters are very bored, and there is this kind of melancholy.”Based on Anton Chekhov’s 1900 play about siblings in a Russian provincial town who dream of a better, more fulfilling life in Moscow, the opera is unconventional in ways that are, by turns, playful and daring.The four main female characters — Olga, Masha and Irina as well as their sister-in-law, Natasha — are performed by countertenors, the highest male voice type. In addition to china and cutlery, the score calls for two musical groups: a pit band (referred to as the ensemble) of 18 instruments that are identified with specific characters, and a 50-piece orchestra that plays from elsewhere in the theater. (For the Salzburg performances, the orchestra will play from a large hidden balcony that is behind and above the rows of seating in the Felsenreitschule, a cavernous indoor theater that is carved into a cliff.)Alphonse Cemin conducting instrumentalists during a “Three Sisters” rehearsal. Eotvos wrote the score for two musical groups, a pit band featuring 18 instruments, and a 50-piece orchestra that plays elsewhere in the theater.Matteo de Mayda for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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

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      A tireless Hungarian advocate of contemporary music, he adapted literary sources both modern and classic, instilling his work with “inimitable character and pathos.”Peter Eotvos, a towering Hungarian composer and conductor who linked modernist traditions in 20th-century European music and whose multifaceted work was singularly evocative, died on Sunday at his home in Budapest. He was 80.His wife, the librettist Maria Eotvosne Mezei, announced his death.Mr. Eotvos (pronounced OAT-voesh) was a tireless advocate of contemporary music and composed in almost every conceivable genre. At the dawn of the 21st century, he found widespread acclaim as an opera composer. His final work in that genre, “Valuska,” premiered at the Hungarian State Opera in December 2023. Based on the novel “The Melancholy of Resistance,” by Laszlo Krasznahorkai, it was his first opera written to a Hungarian libretto. (Others are in a number of languages, including German, French and English.)Like his German opera-composing contemporary Aribert Reimann, who also died this month, Mr. Eotvos was drawn to literary works both modern and classic. He adapted novels and plays by Anton Chekhov, Jean Genet, Gabriel García Márquez, Tony Kushner and Jon Fosse, the Norwegian author who was awarded last year’s Nobel Prize in Literature.“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 production of Mr. Eotvos’s 1998 opera, “Tri Sestri,” in Vienna, said in a statement. Calling the work, which is based on Chekhov’s play “Three Sisters,” “unquestionably one of the great operas of our time,” Mr. Sharon said that it was only while working with Mr. Eotvos that he “realized how much of his emotional life is invested in the work.”For the otherwise reserved Mr. Eotvos, music was his vehicle to express that inner life. “In everyday life I’m not a dramatic person at all,” he said 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 space in 1961 — the first for a human and “the first major event of my life” — inspired him to write the piano work “Kosmos” when he was 17. He would revisit the work at various stages in his life, including in the 2017 concert piece “Multiversum.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More