[2] She met her future husband, György Kurtág, in Budapest, where he had moved in 1946 to study at the Franz Liszt Academy of Music.

[2] Following the Hungarian uprising in 1956, the couple lived in Paris from 1957 to 1958, where he studied with Max Deutsch, Olivier Messiaen, and Darius Milhaud.

[2] Márta Kurtág was described as "of decisive significance in every field"[4] of her husband's life, as a pianist with whom he performed and "as the first listener and critic of his compositions in gestation".

[2][6] They often played from his Játékok (Games), a collection of miniature pieces for two and four hands, including transcriptions of works by Johann Sebastian Bach.

[11] A reviewer from The Guardian observed: Some of Kurtág's duets interlace the players' hands so that one person must stretch across the other in a game of musical Twister; in this familiar embrace, husband and wife played them with beautiful understatement.

They included some of Kurtág's duet transcriptions of Bach which, often underpinned by bass lines chuntering quietly at the extreme bottom of the keyboard, sounded affectionate, quirky and wholly delightful.

[2]In 2015, the couple recorded Marta & Gyorgy Kurtág: In Memoriam Haydée, with pieces from Játékok and transcriptions, including again Bach's Sonatina from Actus Tragicus.