On his first visit to Paris, to study with Olivier Messiaen, in 1957-8, in the wake of the Soviet invasion of Hungary, he experienced a kind of breakdown and found that he could no longer compose. As had happened to Hofmannsthal's fictitious Lord Chandos sixty years earlier, the creative act, which had until then seemed so natural to him, suddenly became impossible. He no longer knew how or where to start, or how to go on. He fell into a depression. He was saved from this, he says, by a wonderful psychologist, Marianne Stein, who helped him recover by suggesting he go back to the most primitive building blocks and simply put down one note and then, if possible, another. One note, after all, is a noise; two notes are already a composition. At the time, too, he encountered the music of Anton Webern and the writings of Samuel Beckett, then just beginning to make his name as an artist of international stature.

Kurtág followed Stein's advice and, very gradually, began to recover. He returned to Hungary and has remained there ever since, producing music characterised by its extraordinary brevity and concision, by his startling ability to convey a totally realised world with a unique character in tiny pieces that often last no more than half a minute. In the decades that followed he began to string these pieces together, as in his work for piano, Játékok (Games), which he is constantly expanding and performs with his wife Márta ...