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

A work of inviting strangeness and humor, György Ligeti’s Horn Trio brings together three dissimilar instruments: horn, violin, and piano. Sometimes going their own ways, ignoring or misunderstanding one another, they nevertheless engage in conversation. Themes and forms are more evident than in the composer’s earlier music, but rhythmic relationships are more complex, and the harmonies, with deliberate mistunings, are just as new.

Introduction

Ligeti subtitled this work “Hommage à Brahms” to honor an earlier master of the horn trio, but this one, which he completed in 1982, is also much closer to the pre-1900 norms than anything he had written before—if still not all that close. As he put it himself: “Musically this Horn Trio does not have much to do with my opinions of Brahms; what is remembered from Brahms is perhaps only a certain smilingly conservative comportment—with distinct ironic distance.”

The score calls for a natural horn—one that, having no valve keys, has many of its notes slightly out of tune from those on the piano. Part of the piece’s charm comes from how this wild creature participates in highly cultivated chamber music—how its raw sounds and the resulting bent harmonies can accommodate, and even be essential to, a musical dialogue. The violin is able to produce pitches in tune with the out-of-tune horn, in which case the invariably in-tune piano appears, strangely enough, to be the odd one out. Either way, different kinds of tuning must either be brought together or work in conflict. The same goes for different kinds of rhythmic patterns in the music’s dizzying syncopations, and for the presence of folksong elements in its otherwise civilized context. In this work, Ligeti’s use of conventional discourse startles as much as it beguiles; the Viennese tradition is here part of a far wider world.

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

History

Ligeti completed his opera Le Grand Macabre in 1977 and began to think about writing a piano concerto. But he felt himself at an impasse: the avant-garde “project” of the last 30 years, powered by incessant innovation, had, for the moment, run its course. Postmodernism, to him, was only a superficial revamping of music that already existed. He sensed that a more fruitful course would come from bringing together three cultural manifestations he had recently discovered: Conlon Nancarrow’s elaborate studies for player piano superimposing misaligned rhythms; the indigenous musics of regions beyond Europe, especially the Caribbean and South-East Asia; and fractals, a recently formalized geometric phenomenon in which the massing of similar elements produces something at once coherent and chaotic.

To juggle all these influences on the scale of a piano concerto was daunting, and so, when the German pianist Eckart Besch asked Ligeti for a horn trio, his imagination was immediately fired. Not only was this a much simpler combination, but it also presented him with three instruments very different in sound and character. The valved French horn (or horn in F) has been the most common type of horn in classical music since the late 19th century, but the natural horn, which was his own choice, has a history going back through Baroque music, Romantic poetry, and its use in hunting through the forests of Central Europe. It also offers microtones—the pitches between the notes on a piano, or any instrument tuned similarly—and these had been part of the appeal to him of South-East Asian musical traditions.

The work was finished in 1982 and first performed on August 7 that year in Hamburg. The players were Besch, violinist Saschko Gawriloff, and horn player Hermann Baumann, who all came together again for the first recording.

Form

The four movements have some conventional features—notably A–B–A form in the first and third, as well as the clear outlining of themes and motives (short series of notes) all throughout. In its growth, however, the music has much less to do with traditional models than with fractal processes of continuous alteration, whether of relatively long melodic lines (as in the first movement) or of small units. The basic motive is a squashed version of the “horn fifths” progression—a sequence of three implied chords, each consisting of two notes playable on natural horns. Its normal form can be heard at the start of Beethoven’s “Les Adieux” Sonata, and Ligeti has the violin present a variant of this at the start of his Horn Trio.

Analysis

The first movement, "Andantino con tenerezza," begins with the violin slowly moving through transformations of the basic motive while the horn, a little faster, has a longer melody that also evolves. Several of these violin-and-horn segments are heard, with the piano closing them out each time. Gradually, the violin’s pitches approach the horn’s, and a sequence with more eruptive gestures takes the movement to its middle section, led by jumpy rhythms in the violin and piano together. There is then an altered reprise of the opening section.

The second movement, "Vivacissimo molto ritmico," has various figures playing around an ostinato (a repeated sequence of notes) in exhilarating rhythmic diversity. It was, according to the composer, “inspired by the various folk musics of non-existing peoples—that is to say, as if Hungary, Romania and the entire Balkan region were situated somewhere between Africa and the Caribbean.”

Next comes a march, "Alla marcia"—heavily syncopated and angular in its movement—followed by a smoother trio section, as in the Classical scherzo-and-trio form.

The basic motive, which is, again, continually transformed, underpins the final "Lamento. Adagio." Relentless, descending lines of notes convey the contours of lament while the piano reaches the bottom of its range—the very high violin only tightening the expression. A short coda suggests exhaustion.
Connections: The trio did what Ligeti had hoped: it took him into a realm where aspects new and old—tonal and atonal, rhythmically regular and irregular—are made possible by a continuous process of transformation. Here he stayed for the rest of his creative life, and the three instruments of the work stayed with him: he wrote concertos for violin and horn, and the piano received not only its own concerto, but a sequence of Études, whose composition stretched through the next two decades.

Legacy

Ligeti’s example soon stimulated other composers to write for the combination, including his pupil Hans Abrahamsen and Charles Wuorinen. Thus revitalized, the genre has continued to attract attention from a diverse range of composers.

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Article by Paul Griffiths