György Kurtág was born on 19th February 1926 at Lugoj in Romania, not far from the birthplace of fellow hungarian György Ligeti. Both young composers hoped to study with Béla Bartók in Budapest in 1945, but Bartók died in America and Kurtág went on to study piano, composition and chamber music with other teachers at the Budapest Academy. Among his early works was a Korean Cantata which expressed solidarity with the North Koreans in the Korean War against the US, but he reached the age of thirty-three before he was willing to give any of his works opus numbers.

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