Ligeti’s Third Way

Notes on the Boulez Ensemble’s Program

Harry Haskell

As a student in communist Hungary during and after World War II, György Ligeti was almost completely cut off from the latest trends in Western European music. Left to his own devices, the inquisitive young composer decided to make a virtue of necessity and construct a musical language from the ground up. In the early 1950s, he recalled, “I started to experiment with simple structures of rhythms and sounds, in order to evolve a new music from nothing, so to speak. I regarded all the music I had known and loved up to then as something I couldn’t use.” Ligeti’s early works are steeped in the idioms of Hungarian folk music and Béla Bartók, the country’s most famous musical exile. His First String Quartet, for instance, pays homage to Bartók in its ghostly “night music” effects and chromatic saturation of musical space. At the same time, the score anticipates Ligeti’s Violin Concerto in its atmospheric clouds of sound, extreme dynamics and registers, and long stretches of seemingly unmeasured time.

In the wake of the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, Ligeti fled to Vienna and eventually accepted a teaching position in Hamburg. In Austria his interest in electronic music and “micropolyphony”—a style characterized by dense, nebula­like constellations of notes—bore fruit in his best­known work, Atmosphères, composed in 1961 at the dawn of the space age and popularized (initially without the composer’s permission) in the soundtrack to Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey. Insatiably curious and constitutionally incapable of falling into a rut, Ligeti continually reinvented his musical language over the ensuing four and a half decades. Trapped, as he saw it, between the Scylla of music’s unusable past and the Charybdis of its hyperintellectualized present, he called on composers to “find a way of neither going back nor continuing the avant­garde.” The third way that Ligeti forged was notably idiosyncratic and far from cautiously centrist. It was nourished by an eclectic array of styles and traditions, from Renaissance polyphony to the chance music of John Cage, and from African drumming to bebop. In shunning the straight and narrow path of postwar modernist orthodoxy, Ligeti became a role model for the up­andcoming cohort of undogmatic, polystylistic, multiculturally oriented composers of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, who shared his conviction that “all cultures, indeed the whole wide world is the material of art.”

The three works on tonight’s program span a little more than two decades, a period in which Ligeti became increasingly adventurous in his exploration of music’s basic building blocks—rhythm, harmony, melody, and texture—as well as its endlessly fruitful cultural manifestations. The Chamber Concerto for 13 Instruments, composed in 1969–70, is a dense matrix of complexly overlapping meters and tempos that evokes both the fluid ensemble interplay of the Baroque concerto grosso and the more soloistic concertante idiom of its 20th­century cousins. The melodic impulse comes to the fore in the 1982 Trio for Violin, French Horn, and Piano, a pivotal work in Ligeti’s oeuvre that was conceived as a companion piece to Brahms’s great Horn Trio. Finally, the bracingly virtuosic Concerto for Violin and Orchestra, which took shape between 1989 and 1993, embodies the composer’s growing interest in non­European musical cultures in both its rhythmic and its tonal features.

In 1978 Ligeti scored an unexpected popular success with his opera Le Grand Macabre, a madcap fantasy set in what he called “a disintegrating, disorderly world where everything is falling in, breaking up.” The Horn Trio, composed four years later after a period of self­imposed silence and stock­taking, was the antithesis of Ligeti’s freewheeling dramatic pastiche. Instead of disintegration and chaotic playfulness, the Trio projects an aural image of seriousness and orderly coherence. The misty, densely woven polyphony of his earlier works has given way to a new clarity of both texture and form, coupled with a heightened interest in melody. From the airy, serenely floating chords at the beginning to the haunting, spectral harmonies at its close, the Trio teasingly evokes the language of traditional tonality even as it dissipates before our ears. Ligeti coined the term “non­atonal” to distinguish his style from the pre­twelve­tone music of Schoenberg, Webern, and Berg. “My Horn Trio marked a radical break with atonality,” he said in a 1990 interview. “Now I have the courage to be old­fashioned.”

Although Ligeti identified his work as an “Hommage à Brahms,” he conceded that it bore little relation to Brahms’s Horn Trio beyond “a certain smilingly conservative deportment—with distinct ironic distance.” More pertinent, in Ligeti’s eyes, was the link to Beethoven, starting with an allusion in the first few bars to the “horn call” motif from the “Les Adieux” Piano Sonata. Equally “oldfashioned” is the ternary (ABA) form of the Trio’s first three movements. The second, a fast and furious moto perpetuo whose manic energy is interrupted by a recurrence of the mystical “Les Adieux” chords in the piano, is followed by a rambunctious march in which the violin and piano remain incorrigibly out of step. The final Lamento, in the form of a majestic chaconne, is based on a descending chromatic motif, a musical emblem of grief since the Renaissance. The Trio ends on a fading, widely spaced chord spelled G­C­A. As Alex Ross points out, “These same notes appear in reverse order at the start of the last movement of Beethoven’s final string quartet, in F major—the music to which the composer attached the words ‘It must be!’”

A Concerto for 13 Soloists

The Chamber Concerto is one of Ligeti’s most frequently performed works, notwithstanding the formidable demands it makes in terms of instrumental technique and ensemble coordination.

“The title ‘Concerto’ indicates that all 13 instrumental parts are written for virtuosi of equal ability,” the composer explains, “and there is therefore no division into ‘soli’ and ‘tutti’ as in the traditional concerto. The voices always develop simultaneously, but in varying rhythmic configurations and generally at differing speeds.” The work’s textural complexity is matched by the range of timbres produced by a quasi­orchestral instrumentarium of winds, strings, and keyboards. Ligeti’s liberal use of canons and other time­honored contrapuntal procedures, as well as the concerto grosso–like alternation between different groups of soloists, reinforces the faintly archaic quality imparted by the sound of the harpsichord. At the same time, the unobtrusive weaving of twelve­note melodies into the musical fabric of the finale reflects the composer’s debt to Schoenberg and the Second Viennese School.

Ligeti’s capsule description of the Chamber Concerto offers a helpful road map for the first­time listener: “The four movements contrast in character. The first is polyphonic and contains micropolyphonically interwoven lines that merge together to form a homogeneous texture. The second movement is homophonic and static, the third mechanical in the manner of a clockwork mechanism (my 1962 Poème symphonique for one hundred metronomes serves as a model here), and the fourth movement is an insanely virtuosic presto.” The opening Corrente, with its iridescent sonic surfaces, typifies the restless rhythms and kaleidoscopic colors associated with Ligeti’s music. “My general idea for that movement,” he tells us, “was the surface of a stretch of water, where everything takes place below the surface. The musical events you hear are blurred; suddenly a tune emerges and then sinks back again. For a moment the outlines seem quite clear, then everything gets blurred once more.” In the Concerto’s remaining movements, musical lines continually move in and out of focus, by turns nebulous and sharply defined, eliding the boundary between foreground and background.

A Musical High-Wire Act

Ligeti’s Violin Concerto is dedicated to the German violinist and contemporary­music specialist Saschko Gawriloff, who had participated in the first performance of the Horn Trio a decade earlier. Ligeti immersed himself in the solo violin literature before starting to write, drawing inspiration from such composer­virtuosos as Paganini, Ysaÿe, Wieniawski, and Szymanowski. The result is a high­wire act for the soloist that culminates in the Concerto’s brilliant last­movement cadenza. Ligeti’s study of non­Western music is manifest not only in the colorful battery of wind and percussion instruments, but also in his use of complex polyrhythms and microtonal tunings. (In the first and last movements, one violin and one viola in the orchestra retune their instruments fractionally and play “between the cracks.”) First conceived in three movements, the Concerto was later expanded to five. Gawriloff premiered each version in Cologne, in 1990 and 1992. A year later he introduced Ligeti’s final revision to Parisian audiences, with Pierre Boulez and the Ensemble intercontemporain.

The Concerto’s five movements are arranged symmetrically as a kind of musical arch. The Praeludium and Appassionato, for example, both start with the same idea, a softly throbbing tremolo on open fifths, simultaneously tuned and mistuned. This texture soon morphs, in the first movement, into a silky web of arpeggios, the string harmonics giving the music what Ligeti called a “glassy, shimmering quality.” In the second movement, the violin’s simple, unaccompanied “aria” climbs from the lower register into the stratosphere, as four ocarinas play a breathy, chorale­like variation. After the brief Intermezzo, a quiet flurry of descending scales, the Passacaglia—a lineal descendant of the Horn Trio’s concluding chaconne—silhouettes sparkling spasms of sound against a backdrop of glacial harmonies. The last movement veers close to pandemonium, but Ligeti keeps his forces well under control, and the Concerto ends with a series of short, sharp shocks.

A former performing arts editor for Yale University Press, Harry Haskell is a program annotator for Carnegie Hall in New York, the Brighton Festival in England, and other venues, and the author of several books, including The Early Music Revival: A History, winner of the 2014 Prix des Muses awarded by the Fondation Singer­Polignac.