obituary of Peter Eötvös

Peter Eötvös rehearses with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in Cologne, 2017. Photo: Ullstein Bild/Getty Images

The Hungarian composer and conductor Peter Eötvös, who has died at the age of 80, is now best known for the twelve operas he wrote in the last 25 years of his life. Before that, he played a leading role as a conductor, specializing in the promotion of European musical modernism.

The work that premiered in Lyon in 1998 was Three Sisters, marking the start of Eötvös' career as a successful opera composer. The libretto, written with Claus H Henneberg, reworks Anton Chekhov's play into ...