In the 1970s I got a recording of György Ligeti’s Adventures and New Adventures for a small group of instruments and “singers.” I listened to it a lot, but had to wait ten years and hear those pieces performed live before I realized they’re falling-down funny: absurdist chamber “operas” expressed by shouts, wheezes, squeaks, sighs, whoops, blitherings, bellows, and so on—everything but actual words. Before then it hadn’t occurred to me that the avant-garde and the comic could cohabitate. They didn’t teach you that in music school. Give them a try, and hear what I mean.
Ligeti’s music sometimes is almost alarmingly funny, other times vivacious, mesmerizing, uncanny, touching, ironic, all the good stuff music used to do. It’s characteristic of his individualism and rapport with the past that as a nominally “experimental” composer he could bring it all off. It was his genius to take the ideas and techniques of the late-century German experimental school and make them musical, which is to say, he humanized the avant-garde.
Ligeti was born in Transylvania, Romania, to a cultured Hungarian-Jewish family who ended up in concentration camps in World War II. His father and brother died there. György managed to escape from a slave-labor camp and walked home to find his home was gone. After the war he studied music and settled into a teaching and composing career in Budapest.
Having survived the Nazis, Ligeti now had to contend with the Soviets. In communist Hungary, writing strange chords could have nasty consequences. After the Russian clampdown of 1956 he precipitously fled Hungary and found himself broke and alone in Cologne, Germany. He was given a place to work in the studios of Cologne Radio, where pioneering electronic music was being put together with remarkably primitive means. In those days they edited tape pieces with scissors and generated sounds with old engineering equipment. Avant-garde icons Karlheinz Stockhausen and Pierre Boulez became his mentors and friends.
But Ligeti’s path diverged from his mentors in important ways. In the 1960s and 1970s Stockhausen was the most visible of European avant-gardists. He decreed that every piece must constitute some kind of revolution. Ligeti needed models but didn’t care for gurus and absolutes. Finding his voice in the heart of the European experimental scene, where ultrarationality was the answer to the war’s irrationality and everything had to be justified by theory, he never fit the mold.
Responding to the horrors of midcentury he had experienced first hand, Ligeti went in a direction more about feeling than intellect. Like his colleagues Ligeti was all for innovation, but new forms and sounds were for him means and not ends. Meanwhile he had not just an undogmatic but a truly antidogmatic passion for everything musical, including Caribbean, central African, and East Asian traditions, and American minimalism of the Steve Reich and Terry Riley persuasion. True, this kind of broad reach and eclecticism was not necessarily comfortable. “I am in a prison,” Ligeti once said. “One wall is the avant-garde, the other is the past. I want to escape.” He declared his later music to be neither tonal nor atonal. To hell, in other words, with both camps.
One form of escape was an all-consuming outlandishness. In his comic mode Ligeti was arguably the funniest composer ever, though his humor has an unsettling edge. His opera Le grand macabre is an exercise in apocalyptic madness, on the subject of the end of the world as a supernatural scam. Ligeti described it as “some kind of flea market half real, half unreal… a world where everything is falling in.” Growing up where and when he did, Ligeti knew that implosion can be funny, but ultimately it’s no joke. I won’t recommend the whole opera for starters, but on YouTube or the like seek out his excerpt from the opera, called Mysteries of the Macabre, especially the performance by the marvelous soprano Barbara Hannigan with Simon Rattle conducting. It will, I promise, be one of the damnedest things you ever heard—or saw.
Ligeti’s religious music has an unearthly aura that made it a natural fit for Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. For me Ligeti’s music remains the most sublime element of that transcendent film. Still, if the Requiem and Lux aeterna used in the movie resemble anything else, it’s not apemen and monoliths on the moon, it’s the ululations of mythical beasts, the sighing of lonely stars in forgotten nebulae, the ritual songs of wraiths. It’s the most genuinely cosmic sacred music I know.
Another singular and overwhelming work is his Violin Concerto. Its hymnlike second movement climaxes with a chorus of ocarinas (that flute thing shaped like a potato) that manage to sound at once goofy and creepy, like a choir of nightmare cherubs. Here Ligeti opened a vein of intoxicating weirdness maybe music had never reached before. His experiments weren’t ever trivial; he sought to express something beyond analysis, in the realm of the heart.
His hypervirtuosic Études for piano are spoken of with awe and fear in keyboard circles. Listen to Ligeti’s favorite pianist, Pierre-Laurent Aimard, play the jazzy and ridiculously difficult Fanfares.
I heard Karlheinz Stockhausen give talks in Boston in the 1960s and 1970s, and in the 1990s saw Ligeti as a guest composer at New England Conservatory. Stockhausen was the image of the German modernist, proclaiming tidily arranged dicta about the imperatives of history. At the conservatory Ligeti simply charmed everybody. He had no theories to offer. He was unpretentious, witty in his scrambled English, and in contrast to Stockhausen’s sharp features and burning eyes there was Ligeti’s wonderful face of an old spaniel.
He told us that when his music was first being performed in European new-music festivals he had to hitchhike to the concerts. “I didn’t have the money to buy a girl a cup of coffee.” Then one day somebody told him, “Did you know there’s a movie with your music in it?” Stanley Kubrick had simply ripped off his work for 2001. Ligeti duly sued Kubrick and in the end, he told us, received the grand sum of $3,000. “Do you like the movie?” somebody asked. “Yah, I really like it,” Ligeti said. And of course, 2001 did for him what being on the cover of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band did for Stockhausen; it helped make him famous beyond the esoteric circles of the European avant-garde. His music has been in a number of movies since.
Ligeti died in Vienna in June 2006. For my money, he is the most interesting, most expressive, most important tonal artist to appear since Stravinsky died. Stockhausen was a great inventor in sound, but Ligeti was a great composer in a long tradition. I don’t see any replacements on the horizon.
More Ligeti: Nonsense Madrigals; Atmospheres; Lontano.