THE DISTANTLY FAMILIAR GYÖRGY LIGETI

‘Music is not an island to me but rather part of a complex continuum of life and experience’, wrote György Ligeti. On another occasion, he firmly rejected striving for purity in music, explaining that his works are ‘contaminated by an insane number of associations, because I think in a highly synaesthetic way’. This Bartók Spring concert marking the 100th anniversary of Ligeti’s birth features notable concertos by the world-renowned Hungarian composer. B y Máté Csabai

Ligeti was a brave, immensely resolute individual who was constantly drawn to centuriesold traditions. His countless interests ranged from linguistics through politics to history and his works at once resembled everything and nothing at all. Yet he was not fit for any kind of messianic role and he would not commit himself to any single tendency. What could characterise a composer who created an imaginary land and language as a child, and who later – driven by the desire to explore – left the state socialist system behind and almost proudly proclaimed, as a cosmopolitan artist, that he was not at home anywhere? As he declared, ‘I am a Transylvanian-born Hungarian of Jewish descent and a citizen originally of Romania, then of Hungary and finally of Austria. I belong to no place: I belong to European intelligentsia and culture.’

At other times, he rejected even this and spoke of exotic or dreamlike, physical or metaphysical influences. For Ligeti, art was both the wasteland of T. S. Eliot and the wonderland of Lewis Carroll, where anything can happen. This does not imply a carefree attitude on his part, since he would gladly dwell on details with journalists and fellow professionals alike. He also described himself as an ‘anti-ideologue’ though perhaps knowing that it is difficult for such a thing to exist; at best, only when an artist resists all allures of conformity.

Ligeti’s music cannot be separated from his life, nor his musical inspirations from those derived from mathematics, painting, poetry or science as he himself always refused to set boundaries. According to an oft-quoted comment from fellow composer György Kurtág, Ligeti’s art leads one to suspect that ‘there are connections in art, in the sciences, in the cosmos, which he is aware of’. Exactly what these are will become clearer at the concert of four Ligeti concertos to be conducted by Péter Eötvös with Klangforum Wien on 6 April. Let us see what we can say about Ligeti in light of his works.

The Prison Of Traditions

To the cursory observer, it may seem that when the avant-garde composers of the 20th century violated the musical rules and broke with the traditions of earlier centuries, they no longer needed to bother with tonality, the sonata form, familiar instrumental combinations or the symphonic genre, all of which were previously featured in the composer’s ‘toolbox’. In reality, the exact opposite often occurred: these tools would remain very much present – either because the modernists embraced them or because they rejected them. Throughout his life, Ligeti diligently and avidly studied the scores of his predecessors – Gesualdo, Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Debussy and Bartók – and it appears there was no line of music that would not generate three new ideas. Most of his works trigger associations with a dozen composers, two or three continents and a few scientific findings as well: Atmosphères, famed for its use in 2001: A Space Odyssey, would not exist without Debussy’s impressionistic sonic palette; the spatial effects of Lontano without similar attempts by Mahler and his String Quartet No. 2 without the works of Bartók or Alban Berg in the same genre.

When speaking about his own works, Ligeti often defined them in comparison or in contrast to something: he dubbed his stage work Le Grand Macabre an ‘anti-anti-opera’, while he likened his creation of micropolyphonic textures to Bach or Palestrina – even though there are at least as many discernible differences as there are similarities. All this would be but an irrelevant aside were it not that it greatly aids our understanding of Ligeti’s work. While those with sensitive ears may sometimes perceive it, it is precisely when we listen to Ligeti’s music as if listening to, for example, the similarly revolutionary works of Beethoven in his own time that its greatness can be grasped.

Challenging Concertos

The first note of Ligeti’s 1966 Cello Concerto, the pianississimo emerging from silence and steadily gaining in volume over the next two minutes or so, may immediately evoke another notable musical moment, the opening bars of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9, conjuring the biblical image of the ‘face of the deep’ and the act of creation from the void. For Ligeti, however, the universe is far richer and more chaotic than to merely have a single joyful ode sung in this created world: around it is the teeming universe itself, the attraction and repulsion of elementary particles heard amid a somehow indescribable sense of order.

Three years later, Ligeti wrote the Chamber Concerto for 13 instrumentalists, in which he rediscovers melody – albeit only for fleeting moments. While a composer writing a melody might seem a humorous revelation, in Ligeti’s case it amounts to a discovery of a more philosophical nature. It relates to the question in æsthetics of whether beauty exists that is not artificial or affected, or for the poet whether there is an authentic mode of communication.

From the early 1980s, Ligeti’s style became more classical and this may once again direct our attention to the composer’s relationship with his illustrious predecessors. For years, he struggled with his Piano Concerto – five years for the first page alone to take proper shape – and by his own admission, the work has little to do with Schoenberg, Berg or the Second Viennese School and even less with the avant-garde circles of Darmstadt. It is inspired more by the unusual approaches of Debussy, Stravinsky and Ives and by African, Indonesian and Melanesian rhythms. ‘If this music is played correctly … it will after a time “take off” like an airplane’, wrote the maestro in an accompanying text for the world premiere. A beautiful idea from the same source may help us grasp many of Ligeti’s other works, ‘I prefer musical forms that have a more object-like than processional character. Music as “frozen” time, as an object in imaginary space evoked by music in our imagination, as a creation that truly develops in time, but in imagination it exists simultaneously in all its moments. The spell of time, enduring its passing, encapsulating it in a moment of the present is my main intention as a composer.’ It is no coincidence that we find the mathematical Mandelbrot and Julia sets among Ligeti’s inspirations; needless to say, this is a concerto that imposes superhuman difficulties upon the soloist.

Music Of The Past And Future

Debuting in 1993, the five-movement Violin Concerto is one of Ligeti’s most popular, complex and multifaceted pieces. Before setting out, the composer studied the violin repertoire methodically from Bach to Prokofiev, but he also utilised a folkloreinfluenced movement from his youth. He was drawn to the elegance of Mendelssohn’s popular Violin Concerto, while the influence of Paganini in the music’s broad, extravagant gestures is impossible to ignore. At this time it was increasingly clear even to Ligeti himself that he sought an alternative to the 12-tone technique building on perfect intervals, the overtones of tempered scales: a compositional method simultaneously pointing to the past and future. ‘I imagined a kind of “super-Gesualdo” sound’, wrote Ligeti and if this is hard to explain without score samples and technical jargon, we need only ask the reader to imagine what the music of a 16–17th century Italian composer might have meant in their own time and what perspectives we might hear 400 years later. Ligeti sought these same perspectives when he composed, once noting, ‘I am in a prison: one wall is the avant-garde, the other wall is the past, and I want to escape.’

Ligeti’s œuvre is among the most exciting, but also most liberal of the second half of the 20th century, with a variety that may baffle even familiar audiences. On the one hand, this is the music of the great unknown, the big Other, which is perhaps symbolised by the famous monolith of Space Odyssey. On the other hand, the listener well-versed in music history is filled with a sense of distant familiarity when hearing some of his works. While Stockhausen, Boulez or Xenakis relied on reusable models as the basis for their compositions, Ligeti reinvented himself with each successive work. ‘I am like a blind man in a labyrinth, feeling his way around and constantly finding new doorways and entering rooms that he did not even know existed’, Ligeti once said of himself. Ligeti injected his music with chaos, the fractal structure of the world, Renaissance vocal polyphony and polyrhythms heard from indigenous peoples. He was a composer who did not create a school, but whose music leaves more or less no one untouched. In Eckhard Roelcke’s book of interviews, published in 2003, Ligeti recalls how he once jokingly mentioned to a friend in Budapest: ‘Let me express my wish: nothing should be named after me, but if they insist, let them call it “the György Ligeti Wrong Way”.’ He was right in that the path he showed was not clearly defined; the possibilities he saw, however, lay in all directions of the wide world.

6 April | 7.30pm

Müpa Budapest – Béla Bartók National Concert Hall

P Ter E Tv S And The Klangforum Wien

Ligeti 100

Ligeti: Chamber Concerto

Violin Concerto

Cello Concerto

Piano Concerto

Conductor: Péter Eötvös