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My story with the Diabelli Variations is in a way the story of my life. I started to study it in 1951 and the present recording was made almost half a century later in 1999. I first played it in 1952 at my graduation concert. I happened to be the first pianist to perform the piece in Hungary after the war. For some reason it was neither programmed in concerts, nor was it available on recordings by great performers. So we had no ideal models, we had to resolve by ourselves the special problems of interpretation required by the variations. I use the plural as always, when speaking about music, because Gyorgy Kurtag and I married when we were students at the Music Academy in 1947, and we have worked together throughout our long lives since. I learnt the piece from Hans von Bulow's commented edition of 1871. What he wrote in the introduction affected me deeply! This work is like a cathedral. Gyorgy and I have continually tried to build it up, stone by stone. I have continually returned to it throughout the past 48 years. And it is indeed 48 years, for that is how much time has passed between the "laying of the foundation stone" and the recording, when I finally felt at home with the piece and could move around it as in my own house. Meanwhile, in the 90s I gained new inspiration from Arnold Munster's monograph Studien zu Beethoven's Diabelli-Variationen. Setting out from a different academic discipline, he subjected the material to the most thorough study. At the age of seventy-two, I recorded my first solo disc, the Diabelli Variations, because I did, after all, want to leave a trace of myself. Occasionally I have had the feeling that, to the world at large, I only exist as the wife of Gyorgy Kurtag and not an independent being. That is not a bad thing, indeed it's very good of course, even though it has at times been the cause of tears... But I felt the need to set down the work, to show who I am, and what I know about it. (Marta Kurtag)

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Another Jewish diva of a different genre is Hungarian pianist Márta Kurtág, wife of the composer György Kurtág. An unsurpassed interpreter of her husband's music, which she has recorded for the Budapest Music Center (BMC) label, Mrs. Kurtág is one pianist unimpressed by commercial considerations. She studied Beethoven's rambunctiously finger-busting 'Diabelli Variations' for a half-century before recording the piece in 1999, and that thrilling, soulfully sonorous recording is only now available on CD from BMC.

     —Benjamin Ivry, The Jewish Daily Forward