György Ligeti
"I am in prison: one wall is the avant-garde, the other is the past. I want to escape."
At a glance 🔭💭
Some coordinates adapted from GeoNames (CC BY 4.0) · Pleiades (CC BY 3.0)
People close to him ⏳🌊
- FamilyIlona Somogyi
His mother, an ophthalmologist, who came back alive from Auschwitz and became the only member of the family besides Ligeti to survive the war.
- InfluenceBéla Bartók
The composer the young Ligeti admired above all; though the two never met, his shadow falls heavily over Ligeti's folk-song transcriptions and String Quartet No. 1.
- TeacherSándor Veress
Ligeti's composition teacher at the Budapest Academy of Music, who himself later left Communist Hungary.
- FriendshipKarlheinz Stockhausen
The colleague who took in Ligeti, an exile newly arrived in Cologne, at his own home; the two spurred each other on at the heart of the avant-garde of the 1950–60s.
- InfluenceConlon Nancarrow
An American composer whose rhythmically intricate studies for player piano captivated the late Ligeti and opened the way to his piano études.
- StudentUnsuk Chin
A Korean composer who studied with Ligeti in Hamburg in the 1980s and carries the teacher's spirit forward on the international stage.
I. A boy from Transylvania · 1923–1943 (age 0–20)
(Birth) He was born in May 1923 in Dicsőszentmárton (today Târnăveni), a small town in Transylvania, Romania. The land had passed from Hungary to Romania only a few years earlier, and the family were Hungarian-speaking Jews. His father, Sándor, worked at a bank and published writings on economics; his mother, Ilona Somogyi, was an ophthalmologist. The celebrated 19th-century violinist Leopold Auer is said to have been a relative on his father's side. (Minority) When he was six, the family moved to Cluj (Kolozsvár in Hungarian), the chief city of Transylvania. At home he spoke Hungarian; at school and in the street, Romanian. Among Romanians he was a Hungarian, and among Hungarians a Jew. That sense of never wholly belonging to any group mirrors the stance he would later take in refusing to join any school. (Daydreams) The boy lost himself in science and fantasy. He played at inventing an imaginary country, complete with maps and a language of its own, and he hoped to become a physicist. He began formal piano lessons only at fourteen, after his brother Gábor, four years younger, had already taken up the violin. Having started late, he was soon drawn more to composing than to playing, and from about fifteen he was writing pieces of his own. (Detour) In 1940, when Northern Transylvania passed back to Hungary, anti-Jewish laws blocked his way. Barred by the quota on Jewish students from studying physics at the university in Budapest, he instead began in 1941 to study composition with Ferenc Farkas at the Cluj Conservatory. Beside the road that discrimination had closed, another road, music, had opened. In those years the composer he looked up to most was Béla Bartók, a fellow son of the Hungarian-speaking world.
II. The son left alone · 1944–1949 (age 21–26)
(Forced labor) In January 1944 Ligeti was taken into one of the Hungarian army's forced-labor units imposed on Jewish men. Instead of a rifle he carried a shovel, hauling supplies and ammunition. That autumn, amid the chaos of the collapsing eastern front, he slipped away from the column and made his way back to Kolozsvár on foot. Luck, he later recalled calmly, had much to do with his survival. (Loss) In the meantime his family had been scattered. His father died in Bergen-Belsen, and his brother Gábor, still a teenager, in Mauthausen. His mother came back alive from Auschwitz. Ligeti never spoke of this at length, but he said many times that living through Nazism and then, soon after, Communist dictatorship had left him deeply distrustful of any ideology that claims absolute truth. (Budapest) In the autumn of 1945 he entered the Franz Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest, where he studied not with Seresi but with Sándor Veress, Farkas and others. Bartók, with whom he had longed to study, died in New York that very September. Postwar Budapest was poor, and so was he, but his conservatory years were the first time he could give himself to music without fear. (Folk song) After graduating in 1949 he spent some time at the folklore institute in Bucharest, recording Romanian folk songs and transcribing them into notation. It meant following the path Bartók had walked from village to village. The staggered rhythms and rough intonation of the village musicians lingered long in his ear, and decades later they would return to his music in another guise.
III. Scores in the drawer · 1950–1956 (age 27–33)
(Teaching) In 1950 Ligeti returned to his alma mater to teach harmony and counterpoint. He was a conscientious teacher and wrote his own textbooks. But after the Communist Party seized power in 1948, Soviet-style socialist realism was forced upon Hungarian musical life. Bright music the people could understand was demanded, and sharp dissonance or experiment was branded 'formalism.' (Censorship) He kept his livelihood and his standing with choral arrangements of folk songs. Yet even the Romanian Concerto (1951), an orchestral work built on folk tunes, was banned from performance after a rehearsal. New music from the West could scarcely be heard, and scores by Schoenberg or Webern were hard to come by. Night after night he listened in secret, through a crackling radio, to the electronic music broadcast from Cologne. (The drawer) And so he wrote, 'for the drawer,' pieces that could never be performed. The piano cycle Musica ricercata (1951–53) was an experiment he set himself: the first piece begins with just two notes, and each piece that follows adds one more. The String Quartet No. 1, Métamorphoses nocturnes (1953–54), which came next, is steeped in reverence for Bartók's quartets. Both truly reached the world only after he had left Hungary. (Escape) In October 1956 the Hungarian Revolution broke out, and in November it was crushed by Soviet troops. That December Ligeti and Vera crossed the border on foot by night and reached Vienna, Austria. They had almost nothing, and most of the scores he had written were left behind in Budapest. At thirty-three he had to begin again from scratch.
A piano cycle from the Budapest years, when Ligeti was writing music for the drawer that could never be performed, in which he tried to start over from a blank page with a single rule of his own making.
- The first piece is built almost entirely on the single note A, with a D sounding just once at the very end. With each new piece the number of notes grows by one, until all twelve finally appear in the eleventh and last.
- The second piece (Mesto, rigido e cerimoniale: sadly, stiffly, like a ritual) uses only three notes, hammering the same pitch again and again. It became widely known through Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut.
- The ninth bears the subtitle 'Béla Bartók in memoriam.' Chords ringing loudly in the piano's low register sound like tolling bells.
- The eleventh and last is a slow fugue (a piece in which several voices take up a single subject in turn) dedicated to the 17th-century composer Frescobaldi. It rewards following the twelve-note subject as it travels from voice to voice.
Like a letter addressed to Bartók's string quartets by a disciple who never met him, the piece was not premiered until 1958, in Vienna, after Ligeti had left Hungary.
- Within a single unbroken movement, one short motif creeping by semitones keeps changing shape, now fast, now slow, now rough. This is the 'metamorphosis' of the title.
- Many have remarked that the passages where the four instruments storm ahead in pizzicato (plucking the strings), using fingers instead of bows, recall Bartók's Quartets Nos. 3·4.
- Midway there is a waltzlike section that puts on graceful airs and then staggers. Ligeti's characteristic way of mixing gravity and drollery in a single piece is already in evidence.
- Listen for the close, which fades away into high, transparent tones (harmonics) drawn by touching the strings lightly.
IV. Clouds of sound · 1957–1965 (age 34–42)
(Cologne) Early in 1957, at Herbert Eimert's invitation, Ligeti joined the electronic music studio of West German Radio (WDR) in Cologne. For the first few weeks he stayed at Karlheinz Stockhausen's house. At the heart of a world he had known only through the radio, he cut and spliced tape to make Glissandi and Artikulation. He scraped a living from work for the broadcaster and from lecturing. (Analysis) He became a regular lecturer at the Darmstadt summer courses, and in 1958 he drew attention with an essay dissecting Pierre Boulez's Structures Ia. His point was that even the most advanced technique of the day, which governed every element by numbers, ultimately reached the ear as clotted masses of sound. Then why not compose the mass itself from the start? His critique became his point of departure. (Clouds) The answer came in the orchestral works Apparitions (premiered 1960) and Atmosphères (1961). Through clusters, in which dozens of instruments sound neighboring notes all at once, and micropolyphony, in which voices are woven so densely that individual melodies vanish, he created clouds of sound with neither melody nor meter. At the Donaueschingen premiere of Atmosphères, conducted by Hans Rosbaud, the response was so fervent that the piece was played again as an encore. (Humor) He was never merely serious. Aventures (1962), a vocal work that laughs, weeps and whispers in meaningless sounds, and Poème symphonique (1962), in which 100 metronomes are wound up all at once, were also pranks that twisted the solemnity of the avant-garde of the day. From 1961 he taught as a visiting professor at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm, and his life grew more settled; in 1965 his son Lukas was born in Vienna. Lukas would later become a composer and percussionist. Premiered in Stockholm that same year, the Requiem was music of vast terror and mourning that calls to mind the dead of the war.
The first work in which the answer he had found by criticizing Boulez's technique, 'compose masses of sound,' rang out in finished form, and the piece that made the émigré Ligeti famous overnight.
- From the very first sound, dozens of string and wind instruments play neighboring notes all at once, extremely softly (a cluster). Simply listen as the color of the sound slowly shifts, with neither melody nor meter.
- The strings are finely divided so that dozens of players each perform a different part. When no single motion can be heard and the whole ripples like a sheet of cloth, that is micropolyphony.
- Midway through, the piccolos shriek at the very top of their range and then in an instant plunge to the lowest register of the double basses, a passage often singled out as the most dramatic moment in the piece.
- At the end, only a faint sound remains as the players sweep the piano strings with brushes. Listen to the silence after the sound has vanished as part of the piece, too. This is the very music used in 「2001: A Space Odyssey」.
V. Time stood still · 1966–1982 (age 43–59)
(Light) The 1966 unaccompanied choral work 「Lux aeterna」 (Eternal light) is a canon in which 16 voices follow the same melody, each slightly out of step with the others, and it became a music of light in which time seems to stand still. The orchestral work 「Lontano」 (Far off) of the following year traveled the same road. In 1967 he acquired Austrian citizenship. It was a homeland on paper, arriving 10 years after he had left Hungary. (Film) In 1968 Stanley Kubrick used 「Atmosphères」, 「Requiem」, 「Lux aeterna」 and 「Aventures」 in his film 「2001: A Space Odyssey」. Ligeti had not been told in advance, but through the film his music reached countless people far beyond the circle of contemporary-music devotees. Kubrick would later use his music in 「The Shining」 and 「Eyes Wide Shut」 as well. (Hamburg) After a stay at Stanford University in the United States in 1972, he taught composition at the Hamburg Hochschule für Musik from 1973 to 1989. From then on he divided his life between Vienna and Hamburg. He never imposed any technique on his students as the right answer; instead, he taught them to doubt everything. (Death) His only opera, 「Le Grand Macabre」 (1974–77), based on a play by the Belgian dramatist Ghelderode, tells of a messenger of death who foretells the end of the world, then gets drunk and botches the job. It was a work in which a man who had lived through the camps and the war made a laughingstock of death. Its 1978 premiere in Stockholm caused a great stir. (Turning point) For several years afterward he could barely bring out a piece. Neither the rules of the avant-garde nor a return to the old tonality satisfied him. In 1982 the 「Horn Trio」 for violin, horn and piano broke that silence. Its subtitle was 'Hommage à Brahms', and at its opening a motif from Beethoven's piano sonata 「Les Adieux」 lies hidden, twisted out of shape. The final movement ends in a song of lament (lamento) that sinks by semitones.
The year after the Requiem, Ligeti took hold of a brief prayer asking 'eternal light' for the dead and made from it a music in which time seems to stand still.
- Starting from a single note, the women's voices enter one by one, each slightly out of step, building up a canon (a round) on the same melody. The staggering is so tight that it sounds less like a round than like light spreading.
- Holding these pitches with nothing but human voices, without accompaniment, is a notoriously daunting task for any choir. Whether the pitch slowly drifts or holds firm is what separates a great performance from the rest.
- Midway, the men's voices enter in a high falsetto, set against a later passage in which male voices resonate deep in the very lowest register.
- Even after the last note fades, the silence continues as if it were part of the piece. Kubrick used it for the moon scene in 「2001」.
Breaking several years of silence after 「Le Grand Macabre」, this is Ligeti's answer: leaning on an old master while refusing to return to the old ways.
- Hidden in the violin at the opening of the first movement, distorted, is the three-note motif of Beethoven's piano sonata 「Les Adieux」. It is also worth listening with Brahms's 「Horn Trio」, written for the same instruments, in mind for comparison.
- The horn deliberately uses the natural harmonics (the notes the tube produces on its own) heard when no valves are used, producing pitches subtly at odds with the piano's equal temperament. This 'slightly off' sound is intentional.
- The second movement (Vivacissimo molto ritmico: very fast and rhythmic) is a hard passage for the players, its rhythm driven by unevenly grouped beats such as 3+3+2, reminiscent of Balkan folk dance.
- In the final fourth movement, 'Lamento' (lament), melodies sinking by semitones pile up again and again, growing ever heavier, until at last they fade almost to inaudibility.
VI. Order and chaos · 1983–2006 (age 60–83)
(Discovery) Around 1980 Ligeti heard the studies the American composer Conlon Nancarrow had written for player piano and was thrilled, calling them 'the greatest discovery since Webern and Ives.' Here were layer upon layer of rhythms no human hands could play. Around the same time, through the recordings of the ethnomusicologist Simha Arom, he encountered the ensemble music of Central Africa. Several musicians doggedly repeat short figures (ostinato), and as these interlock, melodies emerge that no one is actually playing. He also became deeply absorbed in computer-drawn fractals and chaos theory. (Études) All these interests converged in the 「Études pour piano」. In 1985 he dedicated the first book of six pieces to Boulez on his sixtieth birthday, and by 2001 he had written eighteen. With polyrhythms in which different rhythms run simultaneously and with extreme virtuosity, they rewrote the lineage of the étude that runs through Chopin, Schumann, Liszt and Debussy. 「Automne à Varsovie」 from the first book is dedicated to his Polish friends after the martial law of 1981. The first book won the Grawemeyer Award in 1986. (Concertos) The Piano Concerto (1985–88) and the Violin Concerto (1990–92) are also landmark works of this period. In the Violin Concerto he deliberately tunes one violin and one viola in the orchestra differently (scordatura) and has the wind players blow ocarinas, drawing in strange pitches that stray from equal temperament. Among his students from the Hamburg years was the Korean composer Unsuk Chin. (Final years) From the late 1990s his health declined and he came to rely on a wheelchair; around 2003 he stopped composing. The Wolf Prize, the Kyoto Prize and the Polar Music Prize followed, but he was always more curious about his next work. He died in Vienna on June 12, 2006, and was buried in the Vienna Central Cemetery.
This is the collection in which Ligeti, captivated by Nancarrow's player piano, African ensembles and fractals, gathered all of it into ten fingers and added a new chapter to the étude lineage of Chopin·Debussy.
- No. 1, 「Désordre」, has the right hand play only the white keys and the left hand only the black. Listen as the two hands set out together, then the accents gradually slip apart and order collapses. It is a notoriously difficult piece among pianists.
- In No. 3, 「Touches bloquées」, one hand silently holds down certain keys to block them while the other hand plays rapidly across those keys as well. The result clatters like a machine with sounds dropping out here and there.
- No. 5, 「Arc-en-ciel」, flows with soft harmonies reminiscent of jazz piano and is counted the most lyrical piece in the collection.
- In No. 6, 「Automne à Varsovie」, lamenting figures descending by semitones (lamento) pour down simultaneously at several different speeds. It is dedicated to his Polish friends after the martial law of 1981.
A work in which memories of his youth spent transcribing folk songs meet his late-life curiosity about pitches beyond equal temperament.
- Listen closely to the opening of the first movement, where the solo violin begins with a glittering, high, transparent sound made by lightly touching the string (harmonics).
- One violin and one viola in the orchestra are deliberately tuned differently (scordatura), so that slightly skewed pitches impossible on an equal-tempered piano seep into the mix.
- The second movement opens with a simple melody resembling a Hungarian folk song, and the ocarinas (small flutes shaped from clay) played by the wind players break in, adding a strange and moving color.
- The composer left the cadenza of the final movement (the passage the soloist plays alone) to the performer, so comparing what each soloist has written is one of the great pleasures of listening to this piece.
Lesser-known stories
As a child, Ligeti invented an imaginary country called 'Kylwiria', complete with maps and a history, laws and even a language of its own. He told this story many times in interviews and writings in old age, and if you think of 「Aventures」, sung in meaningless syllables, or 「Le Grand Macabre」, set in the absurd land of 'Breughelland', the boy's fantasy reached a long way. It is a side of him rarely mentioned, overshadowed by the image of the serious avant-garde composer. He often spoke of a dream he had as a child as if it were the origin of his music. In it, a room was filled with a dense web like a spider's, and the objects caught in it moved little by little as the whole web slowly changed shape. He wrote himself that the web of sound in pieces like 「Atmosphères」, seemingly moving yet standing still, was connected to the feeling of that dream. The 「Romanian Concerto」 (1951), a relatively approachable piece based on folk songs, was nonetheless banned after its rehearsal. As Ligeti recalled, what the authorities objected to was a single note that did not fit the key of the piece. That was how far censorship reached into the smallest things. The piece was not properly premiered until nearly 20 years later, and so it long remained forgotten in Ligeti's catalog. Nor did he know in advance that his music had been used in 「2001: A Space Odyssey」. He found out only on seeing the film in a theater, and he protested in particular that 「Aventures」 had been used in electronically altered form. The matter is said to have been settled with the studio out of court. Afterward Kubrick obtained proper permission to use his music in 「The Shining」 and 「Eyes Wide Shut」. The event that did most to make his name known to the world began, for the man himself, as an unpleasant surprise.
Notes on terms 📚🔎
Micropolyphony
(Meaning) Micropolyphony joins micro, meaning 'very small', and polyphony, meaning 'many sounds'; it is the name Ligeti used to describe his own technique. The Korean term daseong (多聲) means 'many (多) voices (聲)'. (In music) A method of setting dozens of voices in motion, each with a slightly different melody, so densely that no individual line can be heard and the whole sounds like a single fabric. What stays in the ear is a cloud of sound whose color slowly shifts. It is like hearing hundreds of people chattering on a playground from far away: you can't make out any one voice, only a single murmuring hum. The difference is that Ligeti wrote every strand of that murmur precisely into the score.
Tone cluster
(Meaning) The English word cluster means 'bunch, group'. The name comes from the image of a mass of notes packed tightly together like a bunch of grapes. The Korean eumgun (音群) likewise means 'a group (群) of tones (音)'. (In music) A sound made by striking immediately adjacent notes at once, such as C·C#·D·D#. Rather than blending cleanly like an ordinary chord, it becomes a hazy, thick lump of sound. Think of the sound of pressing piano keys down hard with the palm or forearm. Ligeti expanded this to the entire orchestra to create the opening sound of 「Atmosphères」. (Elsewhere) In computing, several computers linked to work as one are called a cluster; in reports on infectious disease, a group outbreak in one place is called a cluster.
Canon
(Meaning) The Greek kanōn means 'measuring rod, rule'. The name arose because the following voice must follow the leading voice exactly, according to a fixed rule. (In music) Music in which a melody sung by one voice is copied exactly, a little later, by another. The round sung in class with each group coming in a line behind, as in 'Row, Row, Row Your Boat', is exactly a canon. In 「Lux aeterna」 Ligeti made this staggering very short and dense, so that it sounds less like a round than like sound spreading like light. (Elsewhere) In religion, the officially recognized list of scriptures is called the canon; among fans of novels and comics, the 'official setting' of the original work is called canon.
Electronic music
(In music) Music made by generating sound with electrical devices instead of instruments or voices, or by transforming recorded sound with machines and splicing it together. In the 1950s the studio of West German Radio in Cologne was its center. Composers produced pure tones with sound-making machines (oscillators), and obtained new sounds by cutting and splicing recording tape or by running it fast or backward. Play back a voice recorded on a phone at high speed and it rises like a chipmunk's; composers of that era created such changes by handling the tape, piece by piece, with their own hands. Ligeti later carried his firsthand experience of this work in Cologne over into his orchestral music.
Polyrhythm
(Meaning) Poly, from Greek, means 'many,' so polyrhythm means 'many rhythms.' (In music) The simultaneous layering of different rhythms or meters. Try tapping a desk 'one two, one two' with one hand while tapping 'one two three' in the same span with the other, and it proves harder than you'd expect. That is the simplest polyrhythm. Ligeti learned this principle from African ensemble music and from Nancarrow's player-piano music, and in his piano études he set the two hands racing at once with different tempos and accents.
Ostinato
(Meaning) Italian for 'obstinate, persistent.' The name comes from the idea of stubbornly repeating the same figure. (In music) The persistent repetition of a single short melody or rhythm throughout a section of a piece. Just as, in jump rope, the rope keeps striking the ground in the same beat beneath the rhyme 'Kkoma-ya, kkoma-ya,' the underlying repetition carries on unchanged while other things shift above it. In the Central African ensembles Ligeti heard, the ostinatos of several players interlock, and a new melody that no one is playing on their own rises to the ear.
Scordatura
(Meaning) The Italian scordare means 'to put out of tune, to mistune.' The name carries the sense of deliberately throwing the tuning off. (In music) A way of playing a stringed instrument such as the violin with its strings tuned to pitches other than the usual ones. It is much like a guitarist tuning the lowest string down a step to suit a song. The technique was used in the Baroque era as well, but in his Violin Concerto Ligeti retuned one violin and one viola in the orchestra this way, mixing into the music 'slightly off' intervals that do not exist on the piano keyboard.
Lamento
(Meaning) Italian for 'lament, mournful weeping.' It shares a root with the English lament. (In music) A song or movement that expresses grief, often using a melody that descends step by step in semitones. Think of how the voice falls of its own accord when you sigh, and you can see why a descending melody sounds sorrowful. It is an old device, used since the opera of the 17th century, and in the final movement of the "Horn Trio" and in the piano étude "Automne à Varsovie" Ligeti stacked these descending lines layer upon layer to create a grief that seems to come crashing down.