Növények is Thomas Adès’ first set of original songs in nearly thirty years, it sets four great Hungarian poets: Attila József (1905-1937), Miklós Radnóti (1909-1944), Sándor Weöres (1913-1989) and Otto Orbán (1936-2002). Premiered at Wigmore Hall in 2022 by Hungarian mezzo-soprano Katalin Károlyi, the Ruisi Quartet, Graham Mitchell (double bass) and Joseph Havlat (piano), the 17-minute cycle was released by Platoon in November 2025 to acclaim. Listen here.
Below, Adès discusses the piece with the celebrated British-Hungarian poet and translator George Szirtes.
GS: What made you pick Hungarian poems?
TA: I first went to Hungary in 1989 to study Bartók with György Kurtág, in Szombathely. I heard his wonderful Attila Jószef Fragments for solo soprano there which had a huge impact on me, both the music and the texts. We are still in touch - he is ninety-nine now. I just saw him in Budapest. The song Gyökér is dedicated to him.
I really enjoy setting the Hungarian language because of the way the words almost literally crystallize; whereas in English you'd need lots of fiddly little words around them. For example, the last word of the cycle, keserűsége - "its bitterness" (i.e. the bitterness of my heart) -English needs a lot of words to unpack what in Hungarian is said in one word, with only one stressed syllable. So if you're like me and like to set one note to a syllable, on the whole, Hungarian is a much more grateful language to set than English, which is too conversational much of the time, even in poetry.
GS: Also, it rhymes quite easily. And it agglutinates, so it sticks all those loose bits onto the main root of the word in the way German does
TA: Yes, I'm setting German now, and that is also more helpful for music than English. To understand the rhythm of the Hungarian poetry, I worked closely with Katalin Károlyi, who was very precise about how long a syllable should be, or how stressed.
GS: It's partly because Hungarian poetry, like Greek or Latin, can work with either stress or duration.
TA: Ah, I see! So in Gyökér by Miklós Radnóti, each line has two stresses, so the music is written with two beats to each bar, but it needed a more flexible notation than conventional notation to capture the poem's actual rhythm. This was the first poem I set. I had wanted to set it for a long time. And in "lockdown" an opportunity arose to do it with Katalin in Budapest, the percussionist Ricardo Gallardo in Mexico, and me in London playing the piano strings. Then to create the piano sextet version for IMS Prussia Cove I wanted to give it some companions, so Katalin helped me find the other poems, all with botanical imagery, and this became Növények.
GS: They are very beautiful texts. Gyökér is a superb poem, made even more tragic because one knows how Radnóti ended up. [He was shot in 1944 by Hungarian Fascist forces on a forced march between two concentration camps.] When his body was exhumed from the mass grave, his notebooks were found sewn into the lining of his coat, including the manuscript of Gyökér, written a few months before he died. The notebook is an iconic object in itself.
TA: The subject of the poem is so literal: "Root." I mean someone who is actually buried in that way, with the poem on him.
GS: It's as if he foresees it. It's a very dark poem, about being underground.
TA: It's very beautiful, and there are these elements of vitality in it, but then this devastating final line with the saw wailing overhead.
GS: Yes, it is in your music there with this scream on the saw, dying away. Dramatically it's enormous.
TA: Because that song was first to be composed, when I added the rest, the question was, what order? and it landed on being second, because it is in some ways the heaviest emotional weight of the of the whole cycle.
GS: It's the most specific, isn't it, in its reference to his own life. An interesting detail about Radnóti. Of course he died before I was born, but I did know his contemporary, the poet István Vas who told me that, of Radnóti's three spells in forced labour, Radnóti could have avoided the fatal third. Having been called up for it, chosen and told he had to go, there was a moment when he could have got off the transport that was taking him. And he chose not to get off.
TA: How strange. A sort of fatalism, even a cursed quality - does Attila József have this as well?
GS: Oh, very much so. As you know, he commits suicide, or it is normally taken to be suicide. And he was only 32 when he died.
TA: József is a huge figure in Hungarian literature, isn't he? There's a big street named after him in Budapest.
GS: If you ask Hungarian people of almost any age the twentieth century poet they most love, it would be him. And he published his first book at seventeen while he was still at school. And the poem you've got here, Kertész Leszek, which is also marvellous, is from a very troubled year for him: it's written in 1925. Having come from a situation of abject poverty, he had found a relatively wealthy relative who put him through school and then into university in Szeged, but he was expelled from university this very year, 1925, for writing another poem, the title in English being "With a Pure Heart", which his teacher so hated that he got the university to expel him.
TA: What was so offensive about it?
GS: Essentially, what the poem is saying, and bear in mind this is a poem, not a prose statement: the last line is: "I could kill with a pure heart." József’s commitments were to Socialism, Communism, and later Freudianism but he was living under an authoritarian right-wing regime when to be a Marxist was to risk jail or exile. It's such an interesting year for this poem, as he has all this happening. He goes off to Vienna and Paris for a couple of years, studies at the Sorbonne, makes his money I think selling pamphlets in the street. And then his second book, Nem én kiáltok (It’s Not Me Shouting) comes out also this year. It is this book which really establishes his reputation. József was barely twenty. This book upset the right-wing establishment both politically and morally.
TA: It's odd thinking of this as the poem of a twenty-year-old. When you read it you'd think it's a much older man who's had enough of the world and wants to smoke his pipe and drink milk and look after the garden.
GS: That's right. I'm looking forward to a peaceful old age, the poem appears to say. But to someone of twenty, the prospect us disturbing. It is peace now he wants. And again, as in Gyökér, the poem ends with a grave.
TA: Yes - if the world's already dying, let there be flowers on its grave. Next: Sándor Weöres, who is a very different kind of figure, also hugely important in Hungary.
GS: Weöres is a genius. I mean: he writes an enormous amount. He's linguistically extraordinarily playful. He writes longer episodic poems, and he writes short poems like these. He's the kind of poet who so loves language that his poems can be used in nurseries. They're such wonderful fun to say. And he's never political; not directly. Not so that he would get into enormous trouble. All these are very, very short lines, as you can't help but notice. And, again, I always think that these playful ones are about more than the ostensible subject. I don't mean in a heavily metaphorical way, but that you always sense echoes of meaning.
For example, in the poem with all the daisies, and the immortal pain in stones [Százszorszépet ont a rét]. Stones were an important subject and symbol during the start of the Communist and Stalinist period. There are two or three major Polish poets, such as Szymborska, Milosz and Herbert, but others too in other East European countries who use the image of the stone to suggest detachment and silent resistance, but for the stone in this poem the resistance is also a form of torture.
TA: So even an apparently innocent, natural image like the daisies with the stone, at a time like that becomes infused with this meaning to do with daily life.
GS: The contrast is between the freshness of the daisies and this ancient accursed stone.
TA: And the stone is like someone who takes a stand?
GS: I don't really want to say "this means that", but for me there's a definitely a hint of that because why else would you use these two images? This very fertile field, pouring out its daisies with all that growth and those nymphs, in other words the pureness of nature: and then this old stone, this old damned stone, watching on.
TA: And then Az Ág, this mysterious, beautiful poem of the branch. Of all these poems, it was the one that surprised me the most: it seems so simple and small, but the further I went into it, it's an endless image of the mystery of reality and poetic feeling.
GS: It's mysterious to me too! I mean, the image is clear enough. There is some kind of reconciliation at the end, of fusing, isn't there? He's saying quite directly that the leaves are his feeling. "In between the leaves is my feeling." Interesting: látomásom in the second line of the second verse is what you see, but it's also "vision" in the mystic sense.
TA: So that's it: what you see is external, but a vision is internal.
GS: There's this blurring or fusing of the inside and outside: they become parts of the same thing. He senses something outside, but there's something inside too. I don't think there's anything political in this as far as I could see.
TA: Galagonya is a poem that is very well known in Hungary, right?
GS: Well, it's such fun to say. Galagonya is a lovely sound. And he repeats it. And these short poems are very much influenced by Hungarian folk lyrics, folk songs, that are descriptive of nature. I mean, you're the composer, but I'd imagine somebody in a village saying something or just singing something like this with a basic fiddle. It's the rhythm of it. It's just such a glorious thing to say.
TA: It is this weird image of the moonlight on the hawthorn berries turning them into the moon's daughters. It's like witchcraft. It doesn't work if they're blackberries (as some translations have it); to turn into the moon's daughters they have to be round.
GS: Basically, I think people would have enjoyed singing those rhythms which resemble a lot of Gypsy csárdás songs. That's part of the charm of the thing. It's a lovely thing for children to say, or to sing.
TA: Yes. And is it a little because it's nocturnal, and you have this slightly witchy element to it? So that's also fun for children because they like things that are a bit spooky.
GS: Well, they like the idea of magic, which is what happens: when the moon, out of the berry, conjures a girl. And that kind of transformation story, that again is quite close to Hungarian folk stories.
TA: Then in Hosszú a virágfüzér, the last of the Weöres poems in the cycle, the journey is around the world. We throw the flower-garland across the mountains, over the sea, I wonder whether it's to do with the endless link of humanity.
GS: Yes, I think so. That would seem the most obvious thing.
TA: And is that image one that comes from the age of aviation?
GS: Well - you're crossing over mountains, flying through the sky, among the stars...
TA: Satellites!
GS: It’s ambiguous. Weöres certainly lived in the age of aeroplanes. I mean, he died in 1991. Nearly all the great poets died in 1991 or around then. I did meet Weöres, once. I went over to his flat in Buda. A tiny man, very quiet, a much-loved person and poet. He was very sad because his cat had just died. Another great Hungarian poet who knew him, Ágnes Nemes Nagy, said he was a gnome or imp-genius. He's incredibly playful. His ear is wonderful. Weöres is sheer joy. I wouldn't say that about Attila József, who is deeply moving, and Radnóti of course is tragic. But Weöres - even when slightly dark, it's not very dark at all. No. It's really all about becoming part of what we do, who we are.
TA: Yes. And I've wondered if this handing of the garland, which is so long, goes back through time as well. Is he talking about that, the endless well of language itself, and our forebears? The "from hand to hand" as he puts it, is through time and space.
GS: You can see why - I'd have to check, but he wrote a lot for children - whether this too could have been perfectly suitable for children.
TA: And finally Ottó Orbán. This poem, Erdő sűrüjében, was given to me by Katalin Károlyi.
GS: Well, I knew Orbán. He was a friend. A wonderfully dynamic poet, remarkably intelligent, and very precocious in youth. Also very productive. Hungarians tend to either be very concentrated, like Pilinszky, or very productive. Like Weöres, he has written beautifully for children. But this poem is not a typical children’s verse. This has its dark places: my heart's brightness, and my heart's darkness.
TA: It's somehow too very Hungarian to finish on that; to end each verse with my delight, my delight and then, with the last verse, to finish with the bitterness.
GS: And also in the last verse: I walked into a bottomless well. Walked on pearls into a bottomless well. And I fell in love. Virágom: virágom is a very common address from a man to a woman.
TA: Ah! I see. Lovely. My flower.
GS: I can probably think of two or three songs that use virágom to mean my love.
TA: And again, falling into the well of love, it's going underground.
GS: Well yes, and then it's that darker ending. The darkness and the bitterness, which you're not expecting. I don't think this one could be for children.
[conversation on 24.vii.25]