György Ligeti

In terms of both popularity and influence—which do not always go together—György Ligeti was one of the most outstanding composers to emerge after the Second World War. His music can be highly intricate, but it speaks clearly, with charm, elegance, eccentricity, and often a touch of dark humor. Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey brought this music to a large public in 1968, and its originality and fervor have kept it on concert programs ever since. Ligeti’s music has also continued to inspire younger composers, many of whom, across a wide range of styles, have learned something of their craft from him.

Early Years: War and Counter-Revolution 

Ligeti was born into a Hungarian Jewish family in a small Transylvania town, where his father was a bank manager. The region was transferred to Romania after the First World War, and Ligeti grew up speaking Hungarian and Romanian. (He later added fluency in German, Russian, French, Swedish, and English.) Imaginative, musical, and intellectually brilliant, he began piano lessons as a boy and was soon composing. His formal studies, however, were interrupted by the Second World War, during which he was drafted into a forced labor camp. He managed to escape, but his father and brother did not return. These experiences as a teenager and a young adult marked his music thereafter with a sense of survival.

In 1945 he made his way to a devastated Budapest in the hope of restabilizing his studies under Béla Bartók, unaware that the lodestar of Hungarian music had recently died in New York. The Franz Liszt Academy of Music, however, was still a good place to learn his craft, and Ligeti was brought onto its faculty soon after graduating. During those first postwar years, Hungary was culturally relatively free and optimistic. The situation changed after the Stalinist takeover of 1949, and when tanks arrived in 1956 to reinforce Soviet control, Ligeti and his wife escaped to Western Europe. 

Middle Years: The Avant-garde Composer

Ligeti was 33 when he arrived in the West—first Vienna, then Cologne. His creative output, modest but scrupulous, included his First String Quartet (1953–54), a set of piano pieces titled Musica ricercata (1951–53), and some songs—notably Three Weöres Songs (1946–47), to verses by Sándor Weöres, the poet he most admired and a fellow artist in terms of combining strict order with unbounded imagination. Ligeti also composed folksong arrangements, which were expected of composers in Hungary at the time. Stylistically, his music was indebted to Bartók and offered almost no point of contact with the practices of his contemporaries in the West: advanced twelve-tone procedures, highly irregular rhythms divorced from a regular pulse, new concepts of timbre and form, and electronic music. Ligeti therefore went to Cologne to make contact with Karlheinz Stockhausen and work in the radio station’s electronic music studio. There, he thought, he would be able to realize the music he had only dreamed of—music of many simultaneous lines moving in continuous change.

Ligeti: String Quartet No. 1 (Métamorphoses nocturnes)

Though he produced one small masterpiece of electronically synthesized music—Artikulation, for electronic sounds making quasi-vocal gestures (1958)—he concluded after a year or so that he wanted to write for large orchestra. Apparitions (1958–59) and Atmosphères (1961), the latter streaming and gleaming through zones of color and harmony, represented Ligeti’s unique sound, and were hugely influential. This sound made an impression on Stanley Kubrick, who used extracts from Atmosphères and subsequent vocal pieces for the appearances of the slim black monolith and for the psychedelic “Star Gate” sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1965–67). Meanwhile, after years of a hand-to-mouth existence, Ligeti secured a position at the music academy in Stockholm (1961–71)—his first teaching job in the West—which was followed by a long period at the conservatory in Hamburg (1973–89).

A superlative artist, Ligeti was also attracted to the anti-art Fluxus movement, which inspired his absurdly titled Poème symphonique for a hundred metronomes (1962). Elevating a humble musical tool to the level of an instrument, the piece requires metronomes to be set at different speeds, so that a colossal confusion of ticking noises gives way to complicated rhythms, and eventually to one metronome ticking alone. The piece is, of course, a skit. But it also belongs with Ligeti’s other works in terms of its density, its complexity, and its poetry—of one surviving catastrophe.

By now, Ligeti was beginning to receive commissions, though, disinclined to repeat himself, he went on working slowly and with fastidious care. His compositions of the next decade are accordingly diverse and all superbly finished: Aventures (1962) and Nouvelles Aventures (1962–65)—a pair of short abstract operas for chamber ensemble—a Requiem (1963–65) with black panels full of internal motion and furious drama elsewhere, Lontano (1967)—an orchestral score continuing in the vein of Atmosphères but readmitting harmonic progressions—a Second String Quartet (1968), and a Chamber Concerto (1969–70), which established the new-music mixed ensemble of a dozen or so soloists. These works also established the Ligetian archetypes: not just the passing clouds descended from Atmosphères, but also the wildly expressive gestures of deep-frozen, musical machineries always on the edge of breaking down. What distinguished his music from that of his colleagues in the avant-garde was his continuing adherence to audible growth and change through time.

Ligeti slowed down in the early 1970s, as the avant-garde project of constant reinvention began to falter and its participant composers began to drift apart. He then devoted himself to his opera Le Grand Macabre (1974–77): a bizarre, comic-erotic, satirical-serious fantasy of the apocalypse. A few years of virtual silence followed. 

Later Years: Rebirth

Ligeti’s first major work after his opera, the Horn Trio (1982), mischievously subtitled “Hommage à Brahms,” caused surprise by engaging standard forms and types of movement. Its composer, however, was strongly opposed to postmodernism and hooked his music with quirks and snares. Irony—always a Ligetian characteristic—had taken hold in a world now devoid of innovation.

Ligeti: Trio for Violin, Horn, and Piano (“Hommage à Brahms”)

For freshness, Ligeti began to involve himself with indigenous musical cultures from many different parts of the world: the Caribbean, sub-Saharan Africa, Polynesia, Southeast Asia. What he took from these sources was crisscrossed and distilled into new tuning systems and complex rhythms that reabsorbed a strong pulse. In a sequence of 18 Études for Piano (1985–2001), he mirrored Debussy, who also wrote a set of piano etudes, to forge new performance techniques and poetic evocations—of the rainbow, Balinese music, and Goethe’s tale of the sorcerer’s apprentice. There were also extraordinary concertos for piano (1985–88), violin (1989–93), and horn (1998–2001) and then, again, silence.

Watching and Listening

The main chamber works of Ligeti’s early, Bartókian phase are his First String Quartet (1953–54), Six Bagatelles for Wind Quintet (1953, arranged from movements of his Musica ricercata), and Sonata for Solo Cello (1948–53). In 1968, as if to show how far he had come, he parallelled the first two of these compositions with his Second String Quartet and Ten Pieces for Wind Quintet. In his last period, he was listening to the music of the world: there followed his Horn Trio (1982) and, with Central Europe back in view, his Sonata for Solo Viola (1991–94).

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