György Ligeti
Ivan Hewett traces the life and career of the great avant-garde composer and investigates what lies at the heart of his enigmatic genius
Trying to grasp the essence of György Ligeti is a futile exercise. He was by nature a maker of ironically distant, shape-shifting pieces, as private and ultimately ungraspable as the man himself. Like the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland (one of his favourite books, which he yearned to turn into an opera), the music has no solidity, no essence.
It’s a whirlwind of airy gestures, gauzy sounds, exaggeratedly drooping melodies and loud comic pratfalls. We are ushered into a glistening and somewhat sinister private world, but just as we’re finding our bearings it all shrinks to near-nothingness, like the Cheshire Cat’s enigmatic smile.
Ligeti had good reason to think of music as a fantastical self-made world, into which he could retreat. Right up to his early 30s, he lived in a state somewhere between anxiety and panic. That existential terror was rooted in the difficulties of being born as a Jew in a part of Transylvania that was rife with antisemitism and constantly fought over between Hungary and Romania – the name of his hometown and the language of his education changed twice, from Romanian to Hungarian and then back again.
Then there was the tormented history of central Europe in the mid-20th century, which impacted on him in the most ferocious way. All of his family, apart from his mother and himself, perished in fascist prison camps or death camps. After World War II, he had to live under a communist tyranny and suffered from being an intellectual with suspect liberal views. Music became a refuge, but he had to find a way to marry his fantastical imagination with a musical language acceptable to his political masters. So he wrote folky choral pieces in line with the dominant ‘social realist’ aesthetic, which was not entirely uncongenial as his great compatriot (and idol) Bartók had shown how to do this without kitschiness; in fact, his musical language had been wholly transformed by the encounter with folk music.
Decades later, the irregular dancing rhythms of Balkan folk music would return to Ligeti’s music. But first he had to undergo a long journey into modernist
Up to his early 30s, he lived in a state between anxiety and panic, and music was his retreat
abstraction, writing pieces ‘for the drawer’ which the communists would never see. Why? Because building a private musical world can’t just be a matter of inventing ear-tickling gestures and sounds. There has to be an interconnecting logic between these things; they have to make sense.
So, like several other great modernist composers, he went back to the simplest elements of music. ‘In 1951 I began to experiment with very simple structures of sonorities and rhythms as if to build up a new kind of music starting from nothing,’ he recalled years later. ‘I set myself such problems as: What can I do with a single note? With an octave? With an interval? With two intervals?’
The result was the piano suite Musica Ricercata, which begins with a piece for just the note A, disposed in hammered irregular rhythms, though Ligeti breaks
his own rule by ending on D, a typically comic moment. Then comes a piece for two notes, then a piece for three notes, and so on. The tension generated by these seemingly impossible restrictions mirrors the tensions of Ligeti’s own life, which were reaching breaking point. After the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, he escaped across the border into Austria at dead of night with his partner Vera Spitz. For several years, he eked out a living in Cologne and Hamburg, with the help of new friends among the avant-gardistes who until then he had admired from afar.
The move to West Germany, where avant-garde music was welcomed and supported, unleashed Ligeti’s imagination. The turning point came in 19 June 1960, when his first mature orchestral score, Apparitions, was premiered in Cologne. This and the second orchestral score – Atmosphères, premiered the following year – announced a brand-new sound and aesthetic within contemporary music. Instead of the splintered ‘pointilliste’ sounds then typical of the avant-garde, audiences were faced with mysteriously shifting sound-masses, in which the musical interest was no longer in melody or harmony but in very gradual – or sometimes brutally sudden – changes of colour and texture. Audiences were electrified, and the impoverished outsider eking a living at a North German radio electronic studio in Hamburg suddenly found he was a celebrity.
From then on, it was an apparently smooth ascent to the eminence of a professorship in Hamburg, and constant commissions and performances worldwide. By his 40s he had widened his style to embrace Dadaist humour and absurdity, above all in the music-theatre works Aventures and Nouvelles Aventures. Here, unnamed characters communicate in an invented language of grunts and howls and whispers, while a group of instrumentalists respond in kind.
Meanwhile, his investigations into musical material, coloured by years of working in an electronic studio, had shifted from ‘sound-masses’ towards a rediscovery of line. Ligeti discovered that if you constructed melodies of wavering rhythmic uncertainty, and piled them up in dense polyphonies, an aural maze was created in which the ear would pleasurably lose its way. The ne plus ultra of this technique was San Francisco Polyphony of 1974, written for the San Francisco Symphony enlarged with such exotics as an oboe d’amore. Though much of the piece is concerned with slow transformations, such as melodies turning into repeating patterns and back again, Ligeti’s old fondness for startlingly abrupt contrasts had not deserted him. At one point a glacial, quiet single interval – Ligeti’s beloved augmented fourth, the so-called ‘devil in music’ – suddenly interrupts the flow, and later we hear the note C sustained with furious intensity at an extreme of high and low.
Buried in this piece is a new departure, revealed in Ligeti’s own observation that when he heard the work he noticed to his own surprise that it had a Viennese character, with definite echoes of Berg and Mahler. This is the first hint of the eventual readmission into Ligeti’s music of musical and cultural history. You can hear this trend, albeit buried under an absurd surreal surface, in his opera Le Grand Macabre, premiered in 1978. It’s particularly evident in the huge closing scene, which is cast as a passacaglia (a set of variations over a repeating bass pattern – an ancient form which stretches back to Bach and beyond).
It was in the Horn Trio of 1982, unveiled to the world after a long silence following the opera, that the references to the past become overt. Its subtitle, ‘Homage to Brahms’, was a deliberate provocation to avant-gardists. Major and minor chords were liberally sprinkled throughout the texture, sometimes richly doubled in the piano part in a way which recalled Romantic music. There were constant echoes of the ‘horn-call’ that opens Beethoven’s Piano Sonata Op. 81a,
The subtitle of Ligeti’s Horn Trio, ‘Homage to Brahms’, was a deliberate provocation
‘Les Adieux’. And the rumbustious Balkan dance-rhythms that were a feature of his earlier, Bartók-inspired music made an emphatic return. Most surprising of all was the overtly tragic tone of the last movement, an astonishing event for a man who had always held emotion at arm’s length.
Though this might have been expected from a man who now declared that he was bored with the avant-garde, it should be remembered that Ligeti disliked the newly fashionable neo-romanticism just as much. These late works may be more approachable than the avant-garde works of the 1960s and ’70s, but they still have that alarming tendency to go to extremes, which means that, however familiar the starting point of a piece, it soon becomes disconcertingly unfamiliar. Take, for instance, the brilliant series of Piano Études composed between 1985 and 2001. The first takes Bartók’s dancing irregularities and mixed major-minor modes, and screws them up to a pitch of mad complication Bartók himself could never have imagined, while the endlessly drooping phrases of ‘Autumn in Warsaw’ (No. 6) takes the descending ‘lament’ phrase that runs through so many Italian madrigals and makes it descend over and over with such exaggerated despair that it literally falls off the bottom of the piano.
Is that tragedy or farce? We’re not sure, and it’s that uncomfortable state of uncertainty Ligeti suspends us in which ensures his music will never be wildly popular – though it’s that mysterious quality which also explains why Ligeti’s music is enormously attractive to filmmakers; the closing scenes of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey get much of their power from the massive choral weave of Ligeti’s Requiem.
Some might say that Ligeti’s refusal to relax and commit to being happy, charming, sad or whatever actually robs the music of sincerity, that it’s nothing but a teasing aural surface. But it could equally be said that his ultimate aim is to reconcile us to the human condition through the beauty of art. Uncertainty is the ground of our being, and expressing that uncertainty within the frame of a beautiful, entrancing, perfectly crafted piece of music is the best we can hope for.