György Ligeti (1923-2006): an
obituary
With the passing of György Ligeti on
12 June 2006 at the age of 83 in Vienna
following a lengthy illness, the musical
world has lost a true maverick. An independent
thinker, Ligeti charted a singular route
in his music with the evolution of a
voice that is hard to ignore. In this
respect one is tempted to put him alongside
figures such as Boulez, Cage, Stockhausen
and Xenakis when considering the major
shapers of late twentieth century composition.
Ligeti was born in Romanian Transylvania
in 1923 to Hungarian parents. Musical
studies began in 1941 with his attending
Cluj conservatoire in Romania, which
led to further study at the Franz Liszt
Academy in Budapest, where he was later
appointed Professor.
Following his arrest in 1943, as a result
of being Jewish, Ligeti was sentenced
to forced labour for the remainder of
World War Two. Survival, however, was
not without its cost: the war claimed
his brother and father amongst other
members of his family.
The end of the war might have brought
physical release but musically he continued
to be heavily constrained by the Stalinist
censorship in Hungary. For this reason
much of his early work draws heavily
on the use of Hungarian and Romanian
folksong, reflecting the influence of
Bartók and Kodály. “I am an enemy of
ideologies in the arts. Totalitarian
regimes do not like dissonances”, he
commented ruefully. The Concerto
Romaneşc (1951) is composed
on the very limit of Stalinist dictates.
One can pick up the folk music influences:
Kodály in the dour Andantino, Bartók
in the scherzo and distant shades of
Enescu in the breathless finale.
After the 1956 Hungarian revolution
Ligeti fled to Vienna, and to his first
real contact with avant-garde composers
of the day, becoming an Austrian citizen
in 1967. The orchestral work Apparitions
established his reputation and secured
the important endorsement of Stockhausen
amongst others. From that point on Ligeti
rarely, if ever, looked back as a creative
force. Works such as Atmosphères
and Volumina expounded a personal
alternative to the serialism of Webern
and his followers. However, if there
was a single concern that dominated
his music it was change. No other contemporary
composer’s work is filled with so many
turning points. Some view these changes
as organic growth, taking its cue from
his research into chaos theory, fractal
geometry and biochemistry.
The 1960s saw his music consumed by
the use of super-dense polyphony he
called "micropolyphony". Poème
symphonique, written for 100 metronomes
which run down at different speeds,
is but a single example of this, and
in extreme. Parallels of a kind were
found in his use of speech sounds and
nonsense syllables, which – perhaps
unwittingly – can bring to mind the
Dadaist conception of language-music-construction
found in Kurt Schwitters’ Ursonata.
At the core of his artistic personality
is the quality of fun, and that in no
small measure has helped to make works
accessible to a wide public. Extracts
from Lux aeterna, Atmosphères
and Requiem found their way
into the soundtrack for Stanley Kubrick's
film 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Kubrick was not one to choose his music
lightly, noting that Ligeti’s work had
“an extremely urgent visuality” about
it.
As if to consciously exploit populist
appeal (though I am sure he would not
have agreed with this view) his works
of the 1970s moved back to a whole-hearted
use of tonality. By way of justification
he stated unapologetically, “ I no longer
listen to rules on what is to be regarded
as modern and what as old-fashioned.”
This ran in parallel with several important
explorations of the concerto territory.
Musical “forms with history”, including
the étude (his proved to be the most
important recent contributions to the
genre) were now back on the agenda.
The Piano Concerto blends more
than other works elements of polyphony
and folk music. The Hamburg Concerto,
a horn concerto in all but name, sets
the soloist against instrumental groupings
including four natural horns to make
possible the exploitation of overtones.
The Violin Concerto recalls with
more than a little nostalgia his roots
and the style of folk fiddling with
intentionally varied tuning of the solo
instrument, to an unreservedly polyrhythmical
accompaniment. This reflects the growing
influence that African drumming was
having upon his music in the 1990s.
Surrealist juxtaposition and the theatre
of the absurd came to bear in equal
measure upon the inception of his stage
work Le Grand Macabre,
an effortless mix of operetta and the
darkest of black humour: “Stage action
and music should be dangerous and bizarre,
absolutely exaggerated, absolutely crazy.”
This, he felt, was the most direct way
he could reach an audience.
Among the many awards and prizes his
work attracted a couple stand out. The
2004Polar Music prize recognised his
ability to "stretch the boundaries
of the musically conceivable from mind-expanding
sounds to new astounding processes,
in a thoroughly personal style that
embodies both inquisitiveness and imagination
", as the judges put it. The same
year also brought the ECHO KLASSIK Award
given by the Deutsch Phono-Akademie
for Lifetime Achievement.
There can be little doubt that Ligeti
was fortunate in having musicians with
searching interpretive abilities perform
his music in recent years with Pierre-Laurent
Aimard, Isabelle Faust, Charlotte Hellekant,
Jonathan Nott, George Benjamin and the
Arditti Quartet amongst them. Without
the determination of such artists the
Ligeti Edition on record might never
have been achieved. Requiring several
labels that were willing to get involved
at various stages throughout the project,
more than once it seemed as if the end
might never be reached. How close Ligeti
came to being a major victim of the
recording industry’s collective implosion.
Ligeti is survived by his wife and a
son, Lukas, a New York-based percussionist.
* * *
Personal recollections:
My first extended contact with Ligeti’s
music came in 1989 with the ‘Clocks
and Clouds’ Festival given on London’s
South Bank by the Philharmonia Orchestra
under the committed baton of Esa-Pekka
Salonen. To say that each concert bemused
me would be an understatement. What
was valuable though was the context
of contrasts Ligeti was set in: Debussy
rang strongly at the time. Each concert
ended with a still sprightly Ligeti
jumping onto the platform with armfuls
of sunflowers, which he then distributed
to the performers… meeting with some
bemused looks in the process! That ‘Clocks
and Clouds’ helped announce some key
works in the Ligeti oeuvre to London
was important in itself. For me, it
sparked an ongoing interest in his music
(not that I always get his point first
on first hearing, but that says far
more about me than Ligeti).
Diary notes made following Pierre-Laurent
Aimard’s 2005 Wigmore Hall recital that
featured a selection of Ligeti’s etudes
record that I found:
Across the Études
many long shadows are cast, not least
by Chopin's and Debussy's compositions
in the genre with the techniques of
Scarlatti and Schumann. Satie, Liszt,
Nancarrow or Hungarian and Balinese
flavours (even the sculptures of Constantin
Brancuşi) infuse and form the
basis of individual studies.
Indeed, it was interesting
for me to note how it took such a refined
pianist as Aimard to show that the Études
could "grow from simplicity to
great complexity, behaving like growing
organisms […] displaying high virtuosity
as a response to my own inadequate piano
technique", as Ligeti himself outlined
they should.
And tradition? “There is only one tradition.
Our music either stands up to it or
not.” His certainly did.
Evan Dickerson
The complete Ligeti discography:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/cgi-perl/music/muze/index.pl?site=music&action=discography&artist_id=830324
Further reading:
György Ligeti by
Richard Toop (Pub: Phaidon
Press, 1999)
Based on interviews with Ligeti, this
book surveys his life and music.
György Ligeti: Music of the
Imagination by Richard
Steinitz (Pub: Northeastern
University Press, 2003)
A scholarly traversal of Ligeti’s compositions.
Image credit © Schott Music
See also
Seen
and Heard Obituary
by Tristan Jakob-Hoff
