Looking back today, Peter Eötvös describes the DAAD scholarship that took him to Cologne University of Music in 1966 to study conducting as a key turning point in his life. The composer and conductor, who was born in Székelyudvarhely, Transylvania in 1944, already held a degree in composition. He had been admitted to the Budapest Music Academy at the age of just 14.

“Back then, the opportunities for travelling were very poor for citizens of East European countries, and I was only able to travel officially to the West with a scholarship. For me, Cologne was at the time a kind of New Music mecca. It was where the WDR Orchestra was based, along with Stockhausen and many other composers that interested me,” recalls Peter Eötvös. Before travelling to Cologne, the Hungarian completed a three-month German language course at the Goethe Institute in Boppard. “Since then, languages have been an important issue for me. In each language, I’m a different person,” says the now internationally renowned artist, who besides his mother tongue also speaks fluent German and French. In his opera Love and other Demons, based on the eponymous novel by Gabriel García Márquez , there is a sonnet in Spanish and scenes that are sung in Latin as well as passages in Yoruba, a West African language. For his first opera, based on Anton Chekhov’s play Three Sisters, Eötvös polished up his school Russian in order to compose the piece in the original language. “Russian is a simply wonderful language for singing.”

In the late 1960s, Peter Eötvös regularly performed with Karlheinz Stockhausen’s ensemble and worked in the WDR’s Electronic Studio. 1980 saw his debut at the London Proms. Since then, he has been working with Europe’s major radio symphony orchestras and with many philharmonic orchestras. With works like zeroPoints (1999), IMA (2002) and Jet Stream (2003), Peter Eötvös has achieved major international success. Furthermore, for his compositions and for CD releases of his works, he has received numerous international awards and prizes, including the coveted Echo Classical Music Prize for the Choral Recording of the Year in 2012, and the previous year the Italy’s Golden Lion Award for his life’s work. In 2015, at the age of 71, he received Hungary’s highest state award, the Order of Saint Stephan.

Promoting young musicians is very close to Eötvös’s heart. Through the International Peter Eötvös Institute, which he founded in Hungary back in 1991, the artist supports young composers and conductors. “I can still vividly remember the difficult time I had after graduating and would now like to help young people through this difficult transitional phase.”

In early 2008, he ended his job as lecturer at Karlsruhe University of Music, where he had taught New Music and conducting since 1992 – with a brief intermezzo at Cologne University of Music (from 1998 to 2001). Today, he still sees the DAAD scholarship as the decisive starting point of his professional career: “My life would have been completely different without the scholarship.”