Gesualdo was very important to me, I wanted to do something which corresponded to him.
Gyorgy Ligeti
It isn't false modesty when I say this, but although I am supposed to be a famous person it doesn't mean anything to me. I just sit at home and work.
I listen to all kinds of music - new music, old music, music of my colleagues, everything.
Yes, fractals are what I want to find in my music.
When I was younger I was completely without money - when I was studying in Budapest, when I was a refugee.
If you come from Paris to Budapest you think you are in Moscow.
People often thought Leopold Auer was Russian because he lived in St. Petersburg so long, almost fifty years.
Once, in London, the BBC asked me what was my favorite English book. I said Alice in Wonderland.
But if you go from Moscow to Budapest you think you are in Paris.
For the past ten years I have had no financial problems.
Then, after the war it was impossible to travel, after so many years of Hitler and Stalin.
Steinberg is great. I should like to meet him.
My grandfather was not a musician but he was an artist - a painter, a decorative painter.
I write bars, for the musicians, because they have to be together.
Stravinsky used Mother Goose. He was influenced by Mother Goose, indirectly, but very beautifully.
I know already the music I will write. But the words? I have not yet decided.
I lived under the Nazis and under the Communists.
But I do not want to use Hungarian verses for British people.
First of all I listen to music. I like music.
In my piano concerto I developed this polyphony to much higher complexity.
I only want to give a metaphysic for my music.
I don't use old music.
I like to stay home and listen to recordings.
I don't read such boring things. Life is too short.
There is a wonderful Hungarian literature, especially in lyric poetry.
New York is the dream world, the center of jazz and rock.
Perhaps the better word is emotional yes, I am an emotional man.
However, I began composing as soon as I started taking piano lessons.
I was fifteen years old, and I hardly knew how to play a simple Bach prelude on the piano when I began to compose music, and at the most advanced level. I had never studied such things as harmony.
I think it was when I was nineteen, by that time the Jewish laws were already in force and the split was beginning to come about which isolated the Jewish culture.
I continued to study Math and Physics on my own, but one and a half years later I realized that I did want to be a composer, and after that I never changed my mind.
In January 1944 I was called up by the Forced Labor Service, but I deserted on October 10, 1944.
I think a composer is always interested in his last work.
Well I live in Vienna with my wife and son, and I teach in Hamburg, there will be no changes in that respect.
