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\u201cHis music may be rigorous, but his gentle, soft-spoken spirit gives his work its inimitable character and pathos,\u201d the American opera director Yuval Sharon, who directed a 2016 production of Mr. Eotvos\u2019s 1998 opera, \u201cTri Sestri,\u201d<\/a> in Vienna, said in a statement. Calling that work, which is based on Chekhov\u2019s play \u201cThree Sisters,\u201d \u201cunquestionably one of the great operas of our time,\u201d Mr. Sharon said that it was only while working with Mr. Eotvos that he \u201crealized how much of his emotional life is invested in the work.\u201d<\/p>\n For the otherwise reserved Mr. Eotvos, music was his vehicle to express that inner life. \u201cIn everyday life I\u2019m not a dramatic person at all,\u201d he said in a 2020 documentary<\/a> about him. \u201cPerhaps this veiled dramatic trait can only come to the surface if it has a job to do.\u201d<\/p>\n In the interview, he described how the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin\u2019s flight into outer space in 1961 \u2014 the first for a human and \u201cthe first major event of my life\u201d \u2014 inspired him to write the piano work \u201cKosmos\u201d<\/a> when he was 17. He would revisit the work at various stages in his life, including in the 2017 concert piece \u201cMultiversum.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n \u201cIt put my whole life on a cosmic trajectory,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Long before he found renown as a composer in his own right, Mr. Eotvos was pivotal to the development of late-20th-century music. As a key player in the musical avant-garde, he championed and helped transmit the musical doctrines of Pierre Boulez<\/a> and Karlheinz Stockhausen<\/a>, figures who dominated postwar European music.<\/p>\n Throughout his career, Mr. Eotvos educated and supported young composers and conductors, including through the International Eotvos Institute<\/a>, which he founded in 1991, and the Peter Eotvos Contemporary Music Foundation<\/a>, founded in 2004. He taught at the Karlsruhe University of Music and the Musikhochschule Koln (now the Cologne University of Music), both in Germany. Having spent much of his life abroad, he returned to Hungary in 2004, the year the country joined the European Union.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n