The Hungarian composer and conductor Peter Eötvös has died in Budapest at the age of 80 after a prolonged illness, his family announced on Sunday according to Hungarian media.
Eötvös was internationally acclaimed for his contemporary music works inspired by the likes of Zoltan Kodaly, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Pierre Boulez.
His preoccupation with space from an early age is said to have informed his works, and his Opus No. 1, the piano piece "Cosmos", was meant to evoke the first journey into space made by Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin in 1961.
This was later followed by 10 operas and orchestral pieces with titles such as "Psychokosmos" (1993), "Seven - Memorial for the Columbia Astronauts" (2006) and "Multiversum", premiered in October 2017 in Hamburg's Elbphilharmonie concert hall.
At the same time, his music is also rooted in the traditions of folk music in Hungary and the Carpathian Basin, as with his teacher Kodaly, one of the most important collectors and arrangers of this musical heritage.
Born on January 2, 1944 in Odorheiu Secuiesc in Transylvania, now Romania, Eötvös took lessons from Kodaly (1882-1967) at the renowned Franz Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest from the age of 14.
He received his diploma as a composer in 1963. While still a teenage student of Kodaly, Eötvös was already receiving composition commissions for film productions and major theatres in Budapest.
In the 1960s, a new world opened up for Eötvös there in the German city of Cologne, then a major centre for contemporary music.
Renowned composer Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928-2007) brought him into his ensemble in 1968. From 1971 to 1979, he worked at the WDR Studio for Electronic Music in Cologne.
The young Budapest composer increasingly made a name for himself on the international contemporary music scene. In 1979, Pierre Boulez (1925-2016) invited him to join the Ensemble Intercontemporain, which he had founded.
In 1998, Eötvös made his international breakthrough as an opera composer with "Three Sisters" based on Chekhov, which premiered in Lyon in 1998.