György Ligeti was that rare bird: an avant-garde composer whose music could actually inspire affection. He rocketed to worldwide fame after some of his works were used, without permission, in Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey.”
Ligeti was born into a Jewish family in an ethnically Hungarian region of Transylvania, one hundred years ago today. Destined to become one of the most important musical voices of his generation, he first had to overcome many hardships. Most of his family was wiped out in the Holocaust. He was conscripted into a forced labor brigade. He lived for a time under strict communist rule. He survived the violent Soviet putdown of the Hungarian Revolution, and finally escaped with his on-again/off-again wife in a couple of mail sacks, leaping off a night train and crawling for miles through the mud to find safety in Vienna.
Ligeti was not the kind of artist who would have flourished under totalitarianism. “Totalitarian regimes do not like dissonances,” he ruefully observed. He even abandoned the avant-garde circle in Cologne, which included Karlheinz Stockhausen, because he found the environment to be too dogmatic. Though he wrote little electronic music himself, he incorporated the lessons he learned at the Cologne Electronic Music Studio into his instrumental works, often creating otherworldly textures.
Remarkably, for all he endured, he was able to hang on to his sense of humor. Unquestionably, he had his playful side, and this shone through in his music from time to time.
Here’s the car horn prelude to his opera, “Le Grand Macabre.”
And the Act II doorbell prelude
If you’re wondering how to pronounce his name, the first sounds like George. His last name does NOT rhyme with spaghetti, since in Hungarian the accent is on the first syllable. Only when you realize this will you understand the genius of my pun when I state that “Ligeti split” in 2006. He was 83 years-old.
His centenary is a round occasion I would have loved to have observed on “The Lost Chord,” had I had the capability to record new shows. No longer reliant on WWFM, you can expect more flexibility from me in the future.
For now, happy birthday, György Ligeti!
Perhaps his greatest hit, thanks to a boost from Kubrick: the Kyrie from “Requiem”
“Lux Aeterna” (with creepy fractal)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-iVYu5lyX5M.
“Mysteries of the Macabre,” a distillation of three coloratura arias from “Le Grand Macabre,” with Barbara Hannigan as Gepopo, the chief of secret police – in case you’re curious, the text is semi-nonsense!
In London
In Berlin
In New York in a semi-staged production of the complete opera
Trailer for the New York Philharmonic performances
H. Paul Moon’s film on Ligeti’s “Poème Symphonique for 100 metronomes”
Ligeti for people who think they don’t like Ligeti: the folk-inflected “Concert Românesc” (“Romanian Concerto”)
I once interviewed Cristian Măcelaru, then conductor-in-residence with the Philadelphia Orchestra, for an intermission feature for a broadcast concert on Philadelphia’s WRTI. You’ll have to scroll down to the gray box below the article at the link (below, not above, the photo of Sarah Chang) in order to hear it. I was not the one who edited the interview, or it would not have sounded so choppy!
Perhaps equally attractive, Ligeti’s “Six Bagatelles”
“I am in a prison: one wall is the avant-garde, the other wall is the past, and I want to escape.” – György Ligeti
