At 43, Judit Varga has already accomplished more than many artists have in a lifetime. She’s head of the composition department at Vienna’s University of Music and Performing Arts and composer of the 2022-23 season at Müpa, Budapest’s Palace of the Arts. She’s written an opera as well as scores of orchestral, ensemble, chamber, solo, film, and stage work and holds over 20 awards. Her compositions are regularly performed at prestigious international venues that include the Philharmonie de Paris, Vienna's Konzerthaus and Musikverein, and New York’s Juilliard School. She is reflective when talking about what it’s like to be among the relatively few successful women in a field dominated by men. But Varga says there is still ways to go, though much has changed since the days of Clara Schumann: “The big difference between then and now is that it's now allowed for a woman to make composition a career.” Yet, she says, gender and other biases continue to exist. “We are miles removed from it not mattering whether you are a man, a woman black, white, hetero or not hetero. Ageism and appearance also play a role, although my music is ageless and genderless and everything else ‘less’, it’s pure and simple music”.