Home | Archive | In memoriam

György Ligeti 1923–2006

In March 1957 the 34-year-old Ligeti wrote to Edgard Varèse explaining that, while he and his wife had rights of asylum in Austria, they ‘would very much like to live in the USA’. Asking ‘if you see or know of any possibility for me in the re-establishment of my life’, Ligeti describes his studies in Budapest, and his work as a journalist and teacher: also, ‘I have composed piano music, chamber music, songs, choral and orchestral works, and theatre music. My musical style owes most to Bartók, but in recent years I went through a deep crisis, I became interested in serial music, I experimented with static forms and sound-montages – so I was much impressionated [sic] by some of your works.’

There is no record of any response from Varèse to this appeal, and in view of Ligeti’s later career it seems especially striking that, in the event, he was able to work out the full implications of his Bartókian inheritance without emulating that composer’s unhappy experience of a permanent move to the USA. While the USA eventually came to Ligeti, to the extent that after 1970 he found Nancarrow, Riley and Reich of greater interest than his more determinedly avant-garde European contemporaries, it is difficult to think of his work as a whole without invoking a particularly rich and distinctive interaction between cultivated and ethnic European musics on the one hand, and American experimentalism on the other. This interaction has not won universal favour. Ten years ago Michael Finnissy put the case for the prosecution: ‘compare recent Ligeti with Nancarrow. Whereas Nancarrow is teeming with energy and the very stuff of human existence, Ligeti sounds very nihilistic. It’s as if something is being erased in front of you, and the composer isn’t rushing to save it, or has not realised the poignancy of the moment or even what indeed is there. It becomes a mechanistic thing. Uninterestingly deviant.’ And Finnissy gets even more personal in admitting that ‘for me the greatest measure of a work of art is whether it makes me feel uncomfortable or excites me sexually. Ligeti doesn’t do either of those things and neither does Kurtág.’

The accusation of nihilism, of being merely mechanistic – even if this is regarded as an understandable attempt to ‘escape’ from the horrific memories of life in wartime – needs to be taken seriously. From a ‘complex’ perspective, the predominantly ‘moto perpetuo’ character of Ligeti’s Piano Studies, and many of his earlier works, can appear rhythmically and harmonically impoverished, the grids that underpin and control the music’s evolving processes audible in the foreground instead of filtered out. Ligeti’s career might have had a more productive final phase had he been more conformist with respect either to avant-garde principles or minimalist processes. But the Finnissy anathema prevents its adherents from allowing for the possibility that the music does in fact acknowledge – realise – the ‘poignancy of the moment’, transforming its early, war-torn associations with expressionistic forms of lament into more measured representations of grief and acceptance that it is difficult to detach from ‘the very stuff of human existence’. True, this might not create the discomforting excess that Finnissy craves, and its absence will be the more regretted if it is felt that works from the early 1960s – especially Aventures/Nouvelles aventures (1962–65) – were exemplary demonstrations of how to make listeners ‘feel uncomfortable’. But to a greater extent that those other close contemporaries most directly affected by World War II – Xenakis, Henze, Stockhausen – Ligeti, true to his Bartókian roots, sought to cut back on prolix emoting, and to avoid exploding conventional genres and forms by way of complex, not always coherent, dialogues between acceptance and rejection.

The quality of the result has certainly been mixed, and it is possible to feel that, despite his eventual success at bringing special imagination and energy to the concerto genre, Ligeti spent too much time and effort on writing – and planning – operas, which, in the case of Le grand macabre (1974–77), the one completed example, was not entirely convincing, at least if compared to Bartók’s extraordinarily powerful and radical Bluebeard’s castle. Even admirers of the uncompromising, disturbing character of Aventures/Nouvelles aventures have difficulty in describing their effect in anything approaching positive terms. At best, they can be held to represent an intense irrationality that serves as a metaphor for a degradation from which there is no return, no respite.

The Requiem (1963–65) is not quite so negative. Yet if, as has been claimed, Le grand macabre is analogous to it in its concern with themes especially potent for those of Ligeti’s generation with direct experience of World War II, the possibility that the opera’s style could have been adapted without great difficulty for the later Tempest and Alice projects underlines the degree to which the relative austerity of the Requiem’s expressionistic aura had been jettisoned. Nevertheless, Ligeti’s propensity for lament as a complement to shoulder-shrugging stoicism ensures that a deeply expressive, if no longer truly expressionist quality, was never lost. The Horn Trio (1982) is a masterly demonstration of this tradition-conscious, tradition-transcending manner, and many of the Piano Studies, begun in 1985, displace what Ligeti thought of as sterile serial mechanics by way of play with musical allusions to the invariancies of fractal geometry, and demonstrate the kind of non-serial 12-note technique found, for example, in the consistent, complementary whole-tone hexachords of Study 7, ‘Galamb borong’.

In the Studies 19th century generic roots in Chopin and Liszt give rise to entirely original identities, and it even seems possible that this open-ended sequence of allusive, virtuoso pieces is Ligeti’s response – or riposte – to his friend and contemporary Kurtág’s cycles of vocal and instrumental miniatures. To this extent, they are the fertile culmination of that capacity for critique which first brought Ligeti to prominence by way of his essay on Boulez’s Structures Ia (1958). In its insouciant atmosphere – to be played ‘grazioso’, and ‘avec l’élégance du swing’ – the study dedicated to Kurtág, ‘En suspens’ (no.11), is perhaps a gentle reproof to that composer for his occasionally oppressive solemnity.

No less open-ended than the Studies – at least for the time being – is the story of Ligeti’s life. Fully researched accounts of his early years and work in Hungary, as well as of the actual degree of association between his pre-1956 compositions and those that came later, promise to refine and even at times contradict the impressions given by Ligeti himself in interviews over the years (see Rachel Beckles Willson’s discussion in Music & Letters 85/4, (November 2004), pp.662–66). If Ligeti’s role as an ‘outsider’ in avant-garde European music complemented his aspirations to function as an insider in pre-1956 Hungary, then this symmetry also reflects the technical fascination with oppositions and connections between folk music and art music which was probably the most fundamental and long-lasting feature he inherited from Bartók. No works display such features more directly and arrestingly than the Violin Concerto (1989–93) and the solo Viola Sonata (1991–94). For this listener, these make such iconic earlier pieces as Atmosphères, Lontano, and even the Requiem, seem relatively plain and unambitious. They also reinforce the long-term significance of the title of one of Ligeti’s earliest essays, written for the German Melos magazine while he was still in Hungary: ‘twelve-tone music or “new tonality”?’ (1950).

It is sad that illness helped to make the composer’s last decade relatively unproductive. Even so, the Horn Concerto (1998–99, rev.2002–03) transforms what could have been an awkward assemblage of disparate fragments into a coherent sequence of timbral studies, what Ligeti describes as the ‘very unusual non-harmonic sound spectra’ of the four natural horns in the orchestra interacting with the solo horn (a Prospero figure?) and the rest of the ensemble. As a result, the concerto’s seven short movements, dividing into 14 sections, reveal a magically imaginative sound-spectrum: as the composer says, although the ‘natural’ harmonies are distinctly ‘weird, [...] replete with spectra of strange beats, the resulting overall sound is soft and mellow’. The ostinato-dominated language of these later works might even be categorised as that of an alternative avant-garde, sharing some attributes with the more ‘thematic’ quality of Boulez’s later compositions, yet with a modal, post-serial lucidity that is unique. When Ligeti claimed of his studies that ‘what I actually compose is difficult to categorise: it is neither “avant-garde” nor “traditional”, neither tonal nor atonal’, he could just as well have acknowledged the presence of elements from all these possibilities. Similarly, to say that ‘it is in no way post-modern, as the ironic theatricalising of the past is quite foreign to me’ reinforces his music’s richly ambivalent, late-modern sound world. Since 1980 there has been nothing more appealing, nothing with greater potential for serving as a model for future music, and therefore creating hopes and expectations for such music. Like Schoenberg, who wrote about this in his essay ‘National music’, Ligeti offers something which other composers can take over ‘in order to possess it’: and it can, and does, lead to something new.

Arnold Whittall

György Ligeti: born 28 May 1923, Budapest; died 12 June 2006, Vienna