opportunity came in 1968 when his largest work to date, The Sayings of Peter Bornemisza, was performed by Erika Sziklay and Lóránt Szűcs at the Darmstadt Summer Courses for New Music. The critical response was not positive, and his international recognition began to grow only later with Messages of the Late Miss R.V. Troussova for soprano and chamber ensemble, which had its premiere in Paris in 1981. Since the early 1990s, he has worked abroad with increasing frequency: he was composer in residence at the Berlin Philharmonic (1993–95) and the Vienna Konzerthaus Society (1995). He then lived in the Netherlands (1996–98), again in Berlin (1998–99) and upon invitation by Ensemble InterContemporain, Cité de la Musique, and Festival d'Automne, in Paris (1999–2001). Kurtág and his wife lived near Bordeaux from 2002 to 2015, when they moved back to Budapest. The couple remained married until Márta's death in October 2019 in Budapest. Music According to scholar Rachel Beckles Willson, "Kurtág composes painstakingly and haltingly: in 1985, when he was 59, his output had reached only Op. 23, and several works remained unfinished or had been withdrawn for revision." Kurtág's compositions are often made up of many very brief movements. Kafka-Fragments, for instance, is an approximately 55-minute song cycle for soprano and solo violin made up of 40 short movements, setting extracts from Franz Kafka's writings, diaries, and letters. Music journalist Tom Service wrote that Kurtág's music "… involved reducing music to the level of the fragment, the moment, with individual pieces or movements lasting mere seconds, or a minute, perhaps two." Most extreme of all, his piano piece "Flowers We Are, Mere Flowers" from the eighth volume of Játékok ("Games") consists of just seven notes. Because of this interest in miniatures, Kurtág's music is often compared to that of Anton Webern. Prior to Stele, Op. 33 (written for the Berlin Philharmonic and Claudio Abbado), his compositions consist mainly of vocal solo and choral music as well as instrumental music, ranging from solo pieces to works for chamber ensembles of increasing size. Since Stele, a number of large scale compositions have been premiered, such as Messages Op. 34 and New Messages Op. 34a for orchestra and the double concerto …concertante… Op. 42. Kurtág's first opera, Fin de partie, based on Samuel Beckett's Endgame, was premiered at La Scala on 15 November 2018, eight years after the original commission. Beginning in the late 1980s,