Program booklet »Le Grand Macabre«

GYÖRGY LIGETI

LE GRAND MACABRE

CONTENTS

P.

4

SYNOPSIS P.

10

A FURIOUS STROKE OF GENIUS PABLO HERAS-CASADO P.

14

AMBIGUITY AS AN ANSWER TO EVERY QUESTION INTERVIEW WITH JAN LAUWERS P.

22

THE CREATION OF LE GRAND MACABRE GYÖRGY LIGETI

P.

28

“DO WE LIVE OR DON’T WE?” GERGELY FAZEKAS P.

34

“BREUGHELLAND”: SUBVERTING THE ANTINOMY OF UTOPIA AND DYSTOPIA ANDREAS DORSCHEL P.

42

ALL I CAN DO IS POINT ELKE JANSSENS P.

46

IMPRINT

GYÖRGY LIGETI

LE GRAND MACABRE OPERA in four scenes Text MICHAEL MESCHKE & GYÖRGY LIGETI based on LA BALADE DU GRAND MACABRE

by MICHEL DE GHELDERODE ORCHESTRA 3 Flutes (2nd and 3rd doubling Piccolo), 3 Oboes (2nd doubling Oboe d’amore, 3rd doubling Cor Anglais), 3 Clarinets in B (2nd doubling Clarinet in E and Alto Saxophone in E , 3rd doubling Bass Clarinet in B ), 3 Bassoons (3rd doubling Contrabassoon), 4 Horns, 4 Trumpets, 1 Bass Trumpet, 3 Trombones, 1 Double Bass Tuba, Timpani, 3 Chromatic Harmonicas, 1 Harpsichord (doubling Celesta), 1 Concert Grand Piano (doubling Electric Piano), 1 Electric Organ (doubling Organ-Regal), 1 Harp, 1 Mandoline, 3 Violins, 2 Violas, 6 Violoncellos, 4 Double Basses,

Xylophone, Vibraphone, Glockenspiel, Marimbaphone, 12 Mechanical Car Horns, 4 Music Boxes, 6 Electric Door Bells, 2 Tambourines, Military Drum, 2 Snare Drums, 4 Tomtoms, 3 Bongos, Conga, 2 Tenor Drums, 3 Bass Drums, Parade Drum, Wood Drum, 3 Pairs of Crotales, 2 Triangles, Suspended Cymbals, 1 Pair of Small Cymbals, 1 Pair of Normal Cymbals, Gong, 2 Rins ( Japanese Temple Bells), 2 Tamtams, Guero, 2 Tubular Bells, 2 Woodblocks, Large Wooden Hammer, Wooden Slats, Signal Whistle, Maracas, 2 Ratchets, 2 Flexatones, Ducks Quacking, 2 Lion’s Roars, 2 Whips, Large Alarm Clock, Large pyramid-shaped Metronome, Woodblock, 1 Pair of Claves, 1 Pair of Castanets, 4 Temple Blocks, Siren Whistle, Slide Whistle, Police Whistle, Cuckoo Whistle, Steamship Whistle, 2 Sirens, Wind Machine, 2 Sheets of paper, Tissue paper or newspaper, 1 Pair of Sandpaper Blocks, Paper Bag, Tray full of Crockery, Kitchen Pot, Pistol Shot

WORLD PREMIÈRE 12 APRIL 1978 Royal Swedish Opera, Stockholm (1st version) WORLD PREMIÈRE 28 JULY 1997 Salzburg Festival (new version) FIRST PERFORMANCE 11 NOVEMBER 2023 Vienna State Opera (new version) DURATION

2 H 30 MIN

INCL. 1 INTERMISSION

GYÖRGY LIGETI

SYNOPSIS The piece is set in the totally depraved but carefree prosperity of the Principality of Breughelland in the “umpteenth century”.

SCENE ONE Piet the Pot, always slightly drunk (a professional wine taster) and duly cheerful, a sort of realistic Sancho Panza, sees the beautiful couple Amanda and Amando. They are looking for an undisturbed spot where they can make love in private, but this seems to be difficult in Breughelland, with its constant uproar. While Piet the Pot watches the couple avidly, Nekrotzar suddenly appears. Nekrotzar, the Grand Macabre, is a sinis­ ter, shady demagogic character, humourless, pompous, with an unshakeable sense of mission. Piet, who is fearless, mocks Nekrotzar, who announces he is “Death” and will destroy the whole world tonight, with the help of a comet. He orders Piet to fetch his props – scythe, trumpet, cape – and be his servant generally. He doesn’t ask if Piet is willing to do this – Nekrotzar is the master and used to people obeying him without question. Amanda and Amando meanwhile retreat into the vacant grave, and will sleep through the end of the world undisturbed.

Nekrotzar rides to the capital of the principality. The pair of lovers sing a duet.

Previous pages: SCENE

4

SYNOPSIS

SCENE TWO The home of the court astrologer, Astradamors. The mistress is Mescaline, who has Astradamors totally in her power. At the start of the scene, she attacks him, and then Astradamors has to look at the stars. Meanwhile, Mescalina – guzzling red wine – falls asleep and dreams that the goddess Venus finally sends her a better husband. Venus actually appears, together with Nekrotzar and Piet. Astradamors happily recognizes his drink­ ing buddy Piet. Nekrotzar goes up to Mescalina, embraces her brutally and finally bites her neck like a vampire. With a terrible scream, she falls to the ground, lifeless – Astradamors rejoices.

Nekrotzar orders her corpse to be cleared away.

Finale: Nekrotzar triumphantly announces the impending end of the world. Nekrotzar, Piet and Astradamors leave for the prince’s palace. Astradamors comes back and feels “at last master of the house”.

SCENE THREE The gluttonous, baby-like Prince Go-Go rules in Breughelland.

He is tyrannized by his two corrupt ministers, the leaders of the feuding White and Black Parties, although there is no difference at all in their positions. The business of state is conducted in a totally confused way, the ruling prince has no say, and the two ministers are in constant conflict, threatening to resign, and then reconciling, only to fall out again. They also force the prince to practise posture and riding and to “wear the crown with dignity”. They declare the country’s constitution is blank paper, but still force Go-Go to sign endless new decrees to raise taxes sky-high. Prince Go-Go is hungry, he thinks only of food and finally dismisses the ministers, accepts their resignation and gorges himself. A rapid appearance of the head of the secret police (“Gepopo”) with his entourage. He gives Go-Go an encrypted message and warns him of the arrival of an angry mob of demonstrators.

5

SYNOPSIS

There are cries of fear and rage from the people. The ministers try to calm the crowd from the balcony of the throne room, but the mob calls for the prince. He finally speaks to them and beats the constantly resigning ministers. Suddenly, the police chief appears again. The latest encrypted message warns of the arrival of an enigmatic, threatening figure. The police chief flees in panic, but instead of the threatening figure, Astradamors appears, yodelling happily, still rejoicing that he’s free from his wife. The ministers have meanwhile run away as well. Go-Go and Astradamors sing and dance together. Suddenly, a siren sounds, then another. Go-Go reverts to childhood, begs for help, and Astradamors hides him under the dinner table. Nekrotzar appears in dark and grandiose pomp. Triumphantly and pompously, he announces that the end of the world is coming and recites distorted and fragmented quotes from the Book of Revelation. High above the “last trumpets” sound. The crowd beg Nekrotzar for mercy, and he gets sucked into the all-too fleshly activities of the Breughelland dwellers. Piet gives him a glass of red wine, and Nekrotzar believes in his megalomaniac obsession that he is drinking the blood of his victims, which he needs for reinforcement to fulfil his “sacred duty”. Piet and Astradamors keep filling his glass, and the inebriation scene becomes more and more mechanical. Go-Go also gets one glass after another under the table, and finally all four stumble around, drunk. Piet introduces the two rulers – Czar Nekro, Czar Go-Go – to each other. Suddenly there’s an explosion, screams of terror, and the threateningly close appearance of the comet. Nekrotzar panics, announces he will destroy the world, and falls from the saddle, drunk.

SCENE FOUR Piet and Astradamors think they have died and gone to heaven.

Go-Go stumbles in, believing he is alive, but fearing he is the only living person left on earth. Three ruffians – Ruffiack, Schobiack and Shabernack – appear suddenly. They arrest Go-Go as “a civilian” and prepare to kill him. Suddenly, Nekro­ tzar appears in all his gaunt height. When he recognizes the prince, the three ruffians let Go-Go go. Weakened by disap­ pointment and alcohol, Nekrotzar wishes he was dead. But suddenly Mescalina appears and throws herself on him in a rage. Two ruffians hold Mescalina, and the third brings in the two ministers. The ministers cowardly and sycophantically plead for mercy, claiming they were only thinking of the

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LE GRAND MACABRE

welfare of the people. They and Mescalina accuse each other of inventing the astronomical taxes, launching the inquisition, and planning to dispose of the prince. The debate leads to a general melee until all of them are lying on the ground.

Piet and Astradamors wander in, still thinking they are in heaven. The prince greets them and gives them wine to drink. This is too much for Nekrotzar. He begins to shrink in grief, gets smaller and smaller and finally disappears without a trace. The two lovers emerge from the grave, dishevelled.

FINALE (PASSACAGLIA) Amanda and Amando know nothing of the assumed end of the world. The final chorus is sung by all except Nekrotzar. “Don’t fear Death, good people! At some point he will come, but not today! And when he comes, then it’s time… Farewell till then in cheerfulness!”

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Next pages: SCENE

PA BLO HER A S- CA SA DO

A FURIOUS STROKE OF GENIUS Among the numerous significant opera world premières in the second half of the 20th century, Ligeti’s Le Grand Macabre stands out as unique. As is so often the case with iconic masterpieces, great art is combined here with fantastical entertainment.

Basically, Ligeti was concerned with human suffering, with key moral and ethical values in this work, like Bernd Alois Zimmermann in Die Soldaten. How­ever, Ligeti pre­ ferred to deal with the justified concern about a possible end to humanity with a certain remoteness and a black sense of humour. With the help of the grotesque, macabre and satire he communicated a certain degree of optimism.

It is striking that Ligeti classified Le Grand Macabre as antianti-opera. Among other things, this description was a reaction to Mauricio Kagel’s anti-opera Staatstheater.

Ligeti wanted to emphasize that you can still write operas today which differ from the traditional rules and roots. In Le Grand Macabre we find, for example, numerous historical forms of composition, such as a chorale, mirror canon or passacaglia.

At the same time, he was also working on a revision of these centuries-old foundations and pillars. The last thing he wanted to do was to merely create a platform for ornamental song. Instead, Ligeti was concerned to develop a strong link with language, rhetoric, a rhetoric of messages. In this connection I think immediately of Alban Berg’s Wozzeck or Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo. In both cases, the composers didn’t want to write an opera in the current meaning of the word, but a musical drama around the text, in which various forms were used in the interest of structural symmetry.

In Monteverdi these included the purely instrumental sinfonia, ballette, ritornelli, in Berg the symphonic forms, counterpoint, canons, fugues etc.

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A FURIOUS STROKE OF GENIUS

I’m sure that Ligeti followed these examples. This is because he succeeded in a fascinating way in putting text, instrumentation and song or speech, as well as the physical setting of the scene into a refined relationship with each other as an extended concept of the “total work of art”. This then creates the desired theatrical moment.

However, in many key moments he resorts to the familiar operatic tradition. For example, at the end of the second and fourth scenes he wrote an ensemble finale following Mozart. Ligeti generally loved recalling the past, including through quotes, specifically Verdi, Monteverdi, Beethoven, mixed with folk music borrowings from all over the world.

He used all this to create a crazy music in Le Grand Macabre which he called “exaggerated”. An ambition which he fully succeeded in achieving. Why? Because he deliberately ignores every musical expectation and formal con­g ruence. For example, there are very few moments in which the flow of the music is not constantly interrupted. A phrase barely seems to be forming before it comes to an abrupt end after two or three bars, the musical colour is constantly shifted, every organic development is brutally sabotaged.

In addition, there are extreme contrasts in dynamics and tempo.

Much is almost unplayable and unsingable because of these extreme demands, on the stage and in the pit.

It is never comfortable for the interpreters. Ligeti also piles up layer upon layer of the most varied forms, content and sounds. At one point a quote from musical history, at another individual instruments must play different micro-tempi at the same time, at yet another familiar forms ap­­pear in an unusual style.

In order not to challenge the audience too much with the aural impression of this extremely demanding and complex music, Ligeti helps his listeners with points of reference. This is why so much sounds spontaneous, natural and improvised, even though the score notates everything with extreme precision, musically and rhythmically, to make just this impression, and not least to ensure absolute, unshakeable synchronicity between stage and the pit.

Singers have to respond to sounds from the orchestra, and conversely individual instruments quote the words and rhythm of the singers. Every fermata, every pause has

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PA BLO HER A S- CA SA DO

a precisely deter­mined length to the second, and these in turn are dovetailed with the events on the stage.

As noted earlier, there are constant leaps be­t ween ex­tremes – in dynamic, emotionality, atmospheric impression, tempo. I conducted Ligeti’s Aventures in Los Angeles perhaps 30 years ago. In this fascinating work, Ligeti’s footnotes explaining the sound he wants takes up more space than the actual piece.

This isn’t so extreme here with Le Grand Macabre, but it’s clear that Ligeti had very precise, dramaturgically driven ideas about every smallest detail. My principle is to follow these ins­truc­tions as passionately as possible, to unleash and restore the full power of the music. But all this has to be done in the context of a production, and this is where the interpretative freedom exists to ensure that at the end you get strong, living theatre.

The instrumentation, which Ligeti deliberately described as abnormal, is challenging and striking at first glance.

He wasn’t talking there about the use of car horns right at the start, but about the extremely unusual composition of the orchestra, perhaps the most unusual I was able to find in the whole opera repertoire.

It directly flies in the face of centuries of tradition.

A disproportionately small string section, which is mostly split into individual parts, contrasts with a very large and colourful woodwind section – including instruments such as two piccolos, an oboe d’amore and a contrabassoon.

There is also an unusually varied percussion section. Each of the three percussionists has up to 30 instruments to play, including the most conceivably exotic and extravagant ones: a large hammer, as in Mahler’s Sixth Symphony, contrasts with very simple things such as newspapers to make noise. There is also a separate keyboard section, consisting of cembalo, piano, electric piano and organ. This is also enriched by a harp and a mandolin.

The important thing is that each of these instruments serves the dramatic moment in the drama. Nothing is for show.

The vocal parts are somewhat less “abnormal”. For example, there is no­t hing unusual about setting Piet the Pot as a tenor, Astradamors as a bass, or Mescalina as a dramatic mezzo, and casting two women for the pair of lovers Amanda and Amando follows the fami­liar tradition of breeches parts. Setting Prince

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A FURIOUS STROKE OF GENIUS

Go-Go as a countertenor is somewhat less usual, if only because this voice is hardly ever found in casting in the 19th or early 20th centuries.

This exotic voice combined with the plucking and tremolo sounds from the pit is intended to emphasize the ludi­crous nature of the character. Other striking features are the vocal acrobatics demanded of Gepopo, the head of the secret police, and Venus.

What place does Le Grand Macabre take in György Ligeti’s works, particularly since he continuously and consciously evolved as a composer?

Ligeti was cosmopolitan, lived in several countries, was familiar with the most diverse styles and developments, all of which he absorbed. The resulting clever use, transformation, and appropriation of this staggering diversity of material – including clear quotes from his own earlier pieces – runs through his work and distinguishes his personality.

In Le Grand Macabre, which is his only opera, he takes all this to a climax which is brilliant in every respect. In its ency­ clopaedic approach and wealth – comparable with Stravinsky or Picasso in the visual arts – this piece reflects the evolution of musical history generally and particularly in the 20th century, with all its crises and horrors as a whole.

The unique musical collage format and language focuses on the central issues of destruction and self-destruction and apocalyptic annihilation which plague us globally.

This makes it a deep, eternally valid, retrospective and at the same time prophetic piece. It’s prophetic even if we consider the brutality and vulgarity of its use of language, which anticipates much that we currently see in the social media.

I think it’s a good and important thing in any case that in 2023 – the centenary of György Ligeti’s birth – we can experience his genius and his greatness through this opera.

13

DIRECTOR JAN LAUWERS IN AN INTERVIEW WITH OLIVER LÁNG

AMBIGUITY

AS AN ANSWER TO EVERY QUESTION ol

After the world première of Le Grand Macabre, people wrote va­ rious things, some talked about a masterpiece, others claimed it was a “porno opera”. People also liked to call the piece great world theatre. How do you see the opera? jl World theatre? ol In the sense that it presents a view of life, the world as a whole.

In other words, it contains every­ thing. jl I’d say that all the art I do should ideally do just that. (Laughs) You know, there’s a certain trend towards specialization which produces definitions.

But specialization also leads to impo­ verishment. For example, I’ve heard that there’s now a school exclusively for directing operas. I think that’s wrong.

It’s wrong to go on specializing more and more, that leads to limitations. If there’s no more ambiguity in art, then I don’t find it interesting. Because if you focus on the ambiguity, you create new possibilities, new questions emerge.

And art is always about questions. Not answers. It’s about questions. For me,

that’s the definition of art. Le Grand Macabre is also ambiguous. ol Ligeti at least has defined this as an anti-anti-opera. jl Here he isn’t saying that he’s against opera. No, he’s against what’s opposed to opera. It’s a double negative!

Ligeti was an uncommonly positive person who was a complete master of his craft. For me, he was one of the greatest composers of all time. He knew the history of opera and its masters extremely well, he constantly commented and quoted from history. And Ligeti had a radical form of humour, a radical form of joy – I know a lot of people who met him. He was something like an unrivalled clown, a fool – in the best possible sense! I admire that very much. ol Since we’re talking about hu­ mour… is Le Grand Macabre a comedy or a tragedy? jl Ligeti himself talked of a deep tragedy, and saw the work as not just a comedy. He used humour as a weapon. I personally use too much humour in my own works, in my writings. Sometimes I think I do this because I’m a coward.

And then I think that humour is a way

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AMBIGUITY AS AN ANSWER TO EVERY QUESTION

of surviving. Ligeti wrote the opera in the 1970s, when the sexual revolution happened, people felt free, the future was bright. Today, the world has become a lot darker, just think of Ukraine, of Israel or climate change. The gender debate is more serious and grave than the sexual revolution in the 1970s – and I’m very much in support of a great deal that I hear in these debates, very much.

You can’t entirely ignore the influences of the period in which a work of art is created, even if you try to free yourself of them and leave space for ambiguity.

This is why Le Grand Macabre is darker today than at the time of its world première, and that’s why my view of Ligeti puts more emphasis on the grotesque.

It’s natural for this reason that I look for the dark sides of the voices of the fantastic singers in our production. ol You’re drawing while we’re talking. You’ve also made nu­ merous pictures of Le Grand Macabre. Is this because of the indivisibility of art? This allround approach to a work? jl When we started talking I was draw­ing a devil, now I’m drawing a clown. No idea why… but I always do this. Always. I think with my hands, I’ve done that all my life. ol And how do you approach work­ ing on new productions like this? jl Every production I do has a different concept. Particularly, there’s a difference between creating one of my own works and working on an existing opera, like Le Grand Macabre. In the second case, the creator is the master.

This means I’m a servant of Ligeti, and his opera is the bible which we all do our best to understand and try to get across to people. The first thing I do is listen to

the music and fall in love with the music.

While I’m listening to the music, I draw, make images… and then the ideas come. ol What’s the relationship between Lauwers the visual artist and Lauwers the director? The rela­ tionship between the director and the set designer? jl I create visual art, which is completely separate from theatre productions, but even what emerges in the course of productions is a self-contained work of art. It has its own existence. And if I design an object for the stage, like the giant dolls in Le Grand Macabre, they have to “function” in three dimensions. It’s not like they’re just a façade, that would only work from one side. They’re designed in the round, whether the audience can see it or not – as a self-contained piece. This is because I’m an artist who does opera.

And not an opera director. And I do develop my own sets. But the set designer Lauwers isn’t the director Lauwers, you have both – the set designer and the director. I see myself as a theatre maker, as an artist who does opera. ol Le Grand Macabre plays in an imaginary Breughelland, there are numerous paintings by the Flemish master shown here on the rehearsal stage. jl Bruegel was a liar. He cheated in his paintings, because what was happening in his day? A mini-ice age. The plague. People were dying in hordes. If you look at Bruegel’s winter landscapes, you see hardly any people. And then he painted these big paintings with all the cakes and the delicacies. Why? Because that was the commission, because the lord in his castle wanted pictures with food, food that just wasn’t there in reality. And this gets us back again to the complexity of works of art! It’s fantastic

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DIRECTOR JAN LAUWERS IN AN INTERVIEW

how much is present in a painting, how many levels, truth, lies. That’s why every day before rehearsals I tell the singers and dancers, “Look at the Bruegel pictures we’ve put up! Then sing! Then dance!” It’s so inspiring… ol Do you feel this inspiration in your work generally? jl Well, look at the Bruegel painting The Triumph of Death. There’s no identifiable centre. And that’s what I’ve learned from Bruegel, everyone can make their own story, everyone can pick out what attracts them. My artistic life is based on exactly this principle: the audience always has a choice. Even if there’s a diva on stage in an opera production, even then there’s a balance, a diversity. Ligeti incidentally does just this in Le Grand Macabre. And as far as this production is concerned, our costume designer Lot Lemm took Bruegel’s The Triumph of Death as a model, the lighting designer Ken Hioco uses exactly the colours of the painting in his lighting. ol You’ve talked about your perso­ nal relationship with Bruegel.

There’s even a local connection. jl I was born and grew up in the region where Michel de Ghelderode, who wrote the play the opera is based on, lived and grew up. I lived in the village where Bruegel was born, I was baptised in the church which you can see in his paintings. Right from the first day I felt very close to him, and, you know, sometimes I think I might be his reincarnation. I’d love to be! (Laughs) In any case, I have the feeling that I understand him very well. Bruegel is close to me in many ways, I’d say we were alike in our very first encounter with art. In Catholicism, which I was born into, for a long time the first work of art that you’d be confronted by as a child was a portrayal

of the Passion of Christ, the blood, the nails. And the darker the paintings were, the more popular they were. This suffer­ ing figure was my prehistory as an artist, my first consciously perceived painting.

And that was also the first painting that Bruegel saw, that Ghelderode saw.

There’s a connection here. We all came into a world where a tortured human is a symbol – and that naturally does something to you. It took years for me to accept this. In Bruegel, Rubens and so on, there’s a hunger for cruelty. A different type of darkness and cruelty than you find in Vienna, for example among phenomenal artists like Thomas Bernhard, Michael Haneke or Hermann Nitsch. In Antwerp I felt a different darkness, even if the background is the same. It’s inter­esting that the best art is often based on such dark notions of humanity. In Le Grand Macabre Ligeti some­how avoids the darkness to discover an absurdity. ol And your relationship to Ligeti? jl I learn from Ligeti every day. I also have the feeling that I totally identify with him… I’ve read interviews, have felt my way into his ideas. And I think I now understand him completely! But it’s a very challenging piece. There’s music by other composers where you can perhaps cut a little. With Ligeti, there’s not a second. It’s simply impossible. Ligeti’s work is simply too perfect. And there’s something fascinating that happens in Le Grand Macabre. People don’t move on the stage as they normally move. They don’t sing on the stage as they normally sing. Everything’s different! ol There are always characters in opera that you feel closer to or more remote from. Is there a character in Le Grand Macabre that you sympathize with?

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AMBIGUITY AS AN ANSWER TO EVERY QUESTION

jl Everyone in the opera is impor ­ tant, I don’t have any preferences. On paper, I was initially alarmed, because the image of Mescalina is so fragile and disturbing, and so I focused on her to begin with. What does it mean if a woman comes on the stage who’s totally drunk, is murdered twice, is drunk again, is abused? What can you do with a character like that today? It’s almost impossible! I talked to Marina Prudenskaya about this. How do you feel about Mescalina? How do you see her? These are the questions we have to ask ourselves now. In the rehearsals I see how complex all the characters are, every one of them. We have tremendous singers, from Georg Nigl to Sarah Aristidou, and they’re all seriously challenged. This work is different in many ways from many others, it’s not Mozart or Wagner.

But we’re having great fun working.

One thing that’s certain for everyone, Le Grand Macabre is a challenge. ol Ligeti always took performers to the limits of what could be done.

Is this a strategy you use as well? jl The goal isn’t to be exhausted. And it isn’t a competition which the best person wins. The thing is to be better than you are. To face the challenge and outdo yourself artistically. And Ligeti offers plenty of opportunity for this! ol Let’s turn to the end of the opera.

What’s it saying to us? That there are no limits left? No cer­ tainties? Not even death provi­ des a framework? jl There’s ambiguity. And that’s what Ligeti said. You can think that it’s a nihi­ list ending, Death is dead. There are no rules left. Conversely, you can see it as a tragic end, imagine that there’s no more death! What would that mean for life?

I’m leaving the finale still open, four

weeks before the première. But I’m struggling with the end. Perhaps our scene 4 is still too pretty? Perhaps it needs to be darker? But then I think that sometimes we all want to find some comfort in art!

Can this piece provide comfort? Let’s compare it with Claudio Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea, a piece I did at Wiener Staatsoper. Despite the cruelty of Poppea and Nero, there’s comfort in the music. This is also possible in Le Grand Macabre, Ligeti’s music can also be very moving. ol Is Nekrotzar Death? jl Nekrotzar is a charlatan, a clown, Death… we don’t know. He can also be a wrathful god who wants to destroy the planet. Or an image of apocalyptic climate change. Ligeti felt everything is conceivable, the audience has to choose. ol What is Nekrotzar for you? jl I think he’s Death. And when he dies, we all go to hell. And that’s the end of the fun. And hell is then on earth – and it’s a golden box we’re all trapped in, without any hope or joy. Despite the alcohol that’s drunk, the parties orga­ nized – no more fun! You can drink, and drink, and drink, but it doesn’t change anything. Because to have meaning, life must be fragile. But you know some­thing? I’m already explaining too much! The audience must ask themselves questions, they must have ideas and be responsible for them. I don’t want to impose my views on anyone. Ligeti deliberately left the end of the opera without a clear definition, and I’m going to show it in its ambiguity. I’m not going to simply say, this is how it is, and that’s all there is to it! ol So everyone in the audience has to ask themselves about the end? jl What I want to offer Wiener Staats­ oper audiences is the opportunity to

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AMBIGUITY AS AN ANSWER TO EVERY QUESTION

watch this masterpiece and open their hearts to it. Le Grand Macabre is a complex work that constantly throws up new questions. ol And the question about the eve­ ning’s message? jl Asking about the message of art is asking the wrong question. I’m not only an artist, I love art itself. For example, I love being alone in a gallery and looking at pictures. And every good work of art changes my life. But art emerges in the mind, in the spirit, internally, and not through its external being. If you go to a gallery and don’t remember what you saw, then the works of art have no existence. This is where I see the difference from entertainment. If it stays in your mind, in your spirit, it’s art.

ol

Interestingly, a lot of people look to art for answers to their questions. jl Answers – and comfort. There are many moments when it’s necessary to get just that. But sometimes you get a kick in the pants. Sometimes you leave a performance and think, “Oh, I didn’t get any­ thing from that today.” Or, “Oh, I got a lot from that! Now I have a lot of new questions”. And I think these new questions are a good thing. That’s why it’s also good that the end of Le Grand Macabre isn’t clear cut. So if someone thinks, “What am I supposed to make of the finale?

I’m not satisfied yet!” then that’s good!

Instant satisfaction is perhaps the task of pornography – art gives you ambiguity and a constant flow of new questions.

18

SARAH ARISTIDOU as VENUS

GYÖRGY LIGETI

I SHOULD LIKE TO DIGRESS AT THIS POINT AND EXPLAIN MY ARTISTIC CREED BRIEFLY AND UNPOETICALLY. I BELIEVE ART MUST LIE. MANY PEOPLE SAY, ART MUST BE TRUTHFUL. I BELIEVE THE OPPOSITE. ART MUST BE A LIE, THAT MEANS ART MUST PRETEND TO BE SOME­THING IT ISN’T, ART MUST BE AN APPEARANCE, A FANTASY. I’M NOT TALKING ABOUT MORAL LIES, BUT ABOUT SEEMING TO BE SOMETHING WHICH DOESN’T EXIST. WE DON’T FIND A DRUNKEN PERSON WHO’S ACTUALLY

DRUNK A LOT OF ALCOHOL INTERESTING. BUT WHEN A BRILLIANT ACTOR PLAYS A DRUNKEN PERSON, THIS IS WHERE ART BEGINS… IF CHILDREN POINT TO A PIECE OF WOOD AND SAY, THAT’S A HORSE – AT THIS MOMENT, IT’S MAGIC, THE PIECE OF WOOD IS ENCHANTED AND BECOMES ART, IF YOU LIKE. WITH TWO FINGERS YOU CAN SHOW PEOPLE OR ANIMALS. IN OTHER WORDS, THE KEY THING ABOUT ART ISN’T WHAT IT IS, BUT THAT IT PRETENDS TO BE.

GYÖRGY LIGETI

THE CREATION OF LE GRAND MACABRE After the world première of my Requiem in Stockholm in March 1965, Göran Gentele, who was then the head of the Stockholm Opera, asked if I could come up with a piece for the resources of the big opera stage. I immediately and enthusiastically agreed, and proposed a sort of opera with the title Kylwiria. Kylwiria was an imaginary country from my childhood, a place of daydreams, my “private mythology”.

In 1962 I had already composed Aventures and the second movement of Nouvelles Aventures, and at the time of the meeting with Gentele in 1965 I had just finished the first movement of Nouvelles Aventures. The first ideas for Kylwiria were similar to Aventures – no clear plot and a nonconceptual, purely emotional text. But the more I thought about Kylwiria, the more ideas, drafts, sketches there were, the more I be­came clear that the world of the Aventures was finished. That I couldn’t repeat myself and that for a musical theatre piece for a full evening, a plot was essential as a backbone, a scaffolding for emo­tions, characters and dramatic situations.

So, in 1969 I developed a new and completely different kind of libretto, also mythological, no longer Kylwiria but a variant of the Oedipus legend. If I was going to pick a story which would run through the piece, it would have to be a story which was generally known,

and didn’t need to be told and explained.

However, the Oedipus variant didn’t have to be in a Greek setting and shouldn’t be in the least antiquated. I had a highly stylized, graphic novel treatment in mind for the stage – my ideal was the cartoons of Saul Steinberg, and the music needed to be direct, exaggerated in cartoon style, colourful and crazy.

The Oedipus libretto was complete in the final version with a number of musical drafts in 1971. The sung texts were still on the lines of Aventures, inarticulate, but the story was graphic, clear, and understandable despite the incomprehensible text. During this time, Göran Gentele left Stockholm and became director of the Metro­ po­litan Opera. I spoke to him on the phone in the early summer of 1972 – this was to be our last conversation – we planned a meeting in New York in autumn, to determine all the details of the production. Gentele was going to take leave from the Metropolitan Opera to produce Oedipus in Stockholm in 1974. In July 1972 Gentele died in a car accident in Sardinia.

After Gentele’s sudden death, I couldn’t think of working on the opera for some time, the project had been so strongly connected with him from the start. Meanwhile, Bertil Bokstedt had taken over at the helm of Stock-

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THE CREATION OF LE GRAND MACABRE

holm Opera in 1971. It was touching and considerate of him to respect my grief and leave me time to prepare another opera project, because I had recognized in the months after Gentele’s death that I couldn’t go on working on Oedipus.

I also gradually realized that the idea of the inarticulate text was no longer viable – this kind of text setting had been done to death in the 1960s. I needed not only a clearly understand­able story, but also a libretto which was just as clearly understandable, sung and spoken. The “anti-opera” gradually become an “anti-anti-opera”, an “opera” again, on a different level.

I did keep the idea of a hypercolour­ful cartoonish musical and dramatic style. The characters and stage action needed to be direct, short, unpsychological and surprising – the opposite of a literary opera. The action, situations and characters would be brought to life by the music, stage action and music needed to be dangerous to bizarre, totally exaggerated, totally crazy. The novelty of this music theatre would be manifested in the heart of the music, by the music, rather than in the external details of the performance.

The musical structure shouldn’t be “symphonic”. The musical dramatic concept should be at a definite remove from the Wagner-Strauss-Berg realm, closer to Poppea, Falstaff, Barbiere, but still different – not actually in any tradition, including the tradition of the “avantgarde”.

In the search for the new subject, the team for the planned Stockholm performance met in Berlin-Wilmersdorf towards the end of 1972 – the producer and director of the Stockholm Marion­ nette Theatre, Michael Mesch-

ke, the set designer Aliute Meczies and the musicologist Ove Nordwall. We first looked at a piece by Alfred Jarry, the Jarry trail led to the “theatre of the absurd”, but I really didn’t want a drama with music as an add-on, but the total merger of action and music – staging through music.

I didn’t know the name Michel de Ghelderode at the time, his work is – wrongly – too little known outside Belgian-French cultural circles. My ideas were circling around some tragicomic, exaggerated, terrible but not really dangerous “Last Judgement” – I’d composed something similar in 1964 in the “Dies irae” movement of my Requiem.

Dispelling fear through alienation – Aliute Meczies suddenly remembered that there was a play like that, and she brought us Ghelderode’s La Balade du Grand Macabre.

This piece could have been made for my musical and dramatic ideas: the end of the world, which didn’t actually happen, Death as the hero, but maybe he’s just a swindler, the corrupt but happily prosperous, inebriated, fornicating world of the imaginary “Breughelland”. Vaguely and half sub­­ consciously I remembered that I’d come across the name Ghelderode somewhere. It was years earlier, in the smoky Schlosskeller in Darmstadt, and the Belgian composer Jacques Calonne had said entirely incidentally, typically for him, that Ghelderode was something for me, and then his voice was lost in the smell of wine and the sounds of “Sergeant Pepper”.

Ghelderode’s Balade was still a play and needed to be transformed into a libretto for setting to music. Michael Meschke took on the task of condens­ ing the piece and “jarryfying” it. He

23

THE CREATION OF LE GRAND MACABRE

sent a first draft at the end of March 1973, but I wanted it even more concentrated. So Meschke wrote a new libretto in summer 1973. The story was Ghelderode’s, but the language was like Jarry – very intense, terse and direct. At the time, in summer 1973, I was still working on Clocks and Clouds, then in winter 1973-74 and early 1974 on San Francisco Polyphony.

This was what you might call the incubation period for Macabre. I had to make some more changes to Meschke’s text. Because of the unique style of the music, I needed verses and rhymes, very unsophisticated in the manner of Friederike Kempner and Julie Schrader, and also defective Latin and misquotes from the Book of Revelation. Meschke generously allowed me to “rewrite” the libretto. But we still were racking our brains over a dramatically consistent ending. If the end of the world, which bursts like a bubble, meant that nobody dies except the Grand Macabre, and if he really was Death, then logically that leaves “life eternal”. Everyone’s in heaven, and the world has ended. But what if all the uproar was imaginary, and the Grand Macabre was just a swindler?

This is Ghelderode’s view, but despite

its overall brilliance, his play had some weaknesses right at the end, in resolving the dramatic puzzle. I decided to change his version. It remains a completely open question whether the Grand Macabre is Death or just a swindler, although one transformed by his sense of mission to take on he­ roic status, and the action closes with a sort of triumph of Eros. We don’t care about death and the dark­ ness of the future, the “here and now” is all that there is.

I did most of the revision of the libretto while I was composing. Text changes and verses were always in response to the needs of the music. After a few preparatory sketches in summer 1974, I started actual composition of Le Grand Macabre in December 1974.

The first pages of the score were ready at Christmas. The work took around two and a half years. I was compos­ ing uninterruptedly in 1975-76, I just wrote one piece in parallel between February and April 1976, Monument – Self portrait – Movement, for two pianos, for the Kontarsky brothers. I finished work on Le Grand Macabre in April 1977, the clean copy of the last pages of the score was ready at the end of April.

24

Next pages: SCENE

GYÖRGY LIGETI

A LIFE TOTALLY WITHOUT FEAR, A LIFE SOLELY OF PLEASURE, IS ACTUALLY DESPERATELY SAD.

GERGELY FA ZEK A S

“DO WE

LIVE OR DON’T WE?” OPERA BEYOND DEATH AND HISTORY If I were asked to show the complexity of György Ligeti’s multi-layered figure in a single image, I would choose the night of November 7, 1956. It was two weeks after the outbreak of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution against the Soviet Union. Soviet tanks occupied the streets of Budapest, fighting broke out with members of the resistance, civilians spent most of the day in air-raid shelters. In the basement of one of the Buda­pest mansions was a promising young composer, György Ligeti, professor of music theory at the Franz Liszt Academy of Music, who only a few months earlier had edited an anthology for his textbook of classical harmony published in 1954.

Late in the evening, to the horror of his housemates, Ligeti went to his apartment, not expecting the danger.

While artillery shells were being fired outside, he turned on the radio and rewound it until he found the West German Radio broadcast. He wanted to hear the program that began at 11 pm: the broadcast of a new piece of electro­ nic music by Karlheinz Stockhausen, the key figure of the postwar Western

avant-garde. It is hard to say how Ligeti perceived this music on that terrible night over a supposedly poor mono radio equipment with the heavy bombing in the background. According to his recollections, he was enchanted by what he heard.

Like a condensed mixture, this moment shows us the extremely diverse character of György Ligeti, who is widely regarded as one of the most important composers of the second half of the 20th century: the young compo­ ser, professor of classical music theory, looks death in the eye in order to listen to the most modern electronic music of the time over a bad radio, while Soviet tanks destroy his homeland outside his window.

Ligeti was born in a Jewish family on May 28, 1923, in the small Hungarian town of Dicsőszentmárton in Transylvania, which had become part of Romania only three years earlier as a result of the peace treaties following the First World War. When he was six, he moved with his family to Kolozsvár (Romanian: Cluj-Napoca), where he went to school and

28

“DO WE LIVE OR DON’T WE?”

received his first composition lessons.

During the war, most of his family members were murdered in concentration camps, including his father and younger brother. Miraculously, he survived. From 1945 he lived in Budapest and became a composition student at the Franz Liszt Academy of Music in the class of Sándor Veress, then, after his professor had emigrated, in the class of Ferenc Farkas. He met his lifelong friend, the composer György Kurtág, in the corridors of the Liszt Academy shortly before the entrance examination. After graduating, he collected folk songs in Romania and then became a professor of music theory at the Academy. In 1951 he married Vera Spitz, a young psychoanalyst, with whom he fled to the West in the last days of 1956. Their only son, the composer and percussionist Lukas, was born in Vienna in 1965. Two years la­ter, Ligeti took Austrian citizenship and divided the rest of his life between Germany and Austria. He regularly gave courses in Sweden, in 1972 he spent a semester in the United States as a visit­ ing professor at Stanford University; the next year he became a full-time professor at the Musikhochschule in Hamburg, Germany. He died in Vienna in 2006.

At one point he called European culture his home, but it would be more fitting to consider the whole globe or even the whole universe as his true home, since his thinking was inspired by everything. The tradition of Western art music (back to its medieval roots), the melodies, rhythms and feelings of Eastern European folk music, the complex rhythmic structures of Caribbean popular music and Sub-Saharan African music, the most diverse com-

positional methods of contemporary composers (even those that seemed incompatible to most), literature from the Hungarian Sándor Weöres to the German Hölderlin and the Romanian Ionesco to the English Lewis Carroll (basically in such zigzags), new and old theories of the natural sciences, complicated mechanisms of machines, internal laws of natural phenomena and chemical processes, discoveries of fractal geometry and chaos theory, and the list can be continued ad infinitum.

He was also fascinated by infinity.

For Ligeti, a composer who always lived under the spell of the new, it was by no means a matter of course to turn to opera, the most traditional genre, which is overloaded with centuries-old conventions. The infamous words of Pierre Boulez, Ligeti’s avant-garde colleague, from a 1967 interview about “blowing up the opera houses” are not an expression of contempt for the genre, but for the conservative repertoire and the sloppy work ethic of the opera houses. The genre had been a favorite of Ligeti’s since his early childhood; he was taken to the opera in Kolozsvár for the first time at the age of seven. “Works from Verdi’s middle period or Bizet’s Carmen have become ingrained in me”, he said in an interview given to Péter Várnai in 1979, “I don’t have to think about them, I do not have to search for them, they are constantly present in me.”

His ability to express the content of a text musically can be seen in his early Hungarian songs and choruses, which he wrote before his emigration.

His first major work in the West, an electronic composition entitled Artikulation (1958), is an experiment in the musical reproduction of human speech

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GERGELY FA ZEK A S

by electronic means. And three vocal pieces he wrote in the 1960s can be seen as more concrete preliminary studies for the opera: Aventures and Nouvelles Aventures (1962–1964) use nonsensical texts set to highly gestural music, taking absurdist musical theater to the extreme. But even more important for the opera is the Requiem, the magnum opus that Ligeti composed for the Swedish Radio in the mid-sixties. The monumental work is the most impor­ tant representative of two important stylistic elements in Ligeti’s musical universe: micropolyphony and “blustering”. The former refers to densely written polyphonic textures in which the intense interplay of the chromatic musical parts creates a seemingly motionless, static musical surface. “Blustering” refers to the violent, contrasting gestures of the music: the ori­ginal Hungarian word “handabandázás” used

by Ligeti is impossible to translate, it is some kind of loud, over­dri­ven, aggressive speaking and gesticulating with no decipherable meaning.

It was Göran Gentele (1917–1972), the director of the Royal Swedish Ope­ ra, who commissioned an opera from Ligeti after the premiere of the Requiem.

The composer’s first thought was to use Kylwiria as the theme, the ima­ginary land he had laboriously invented in his childhood: he drew its maps, created its language, built up its mythology.

The first plan was discarded, the next idea was the ancient story of Oedipus, but all these plans ended up in the garbage can when Gentele, who was already director of the Metropo­ litan Ope­ra in New York, died in a car acci­ dent in 1972. It was the set designer Aliute Meczies who suggested the drama La Balade du Grand Macabre by

Michel Ghelderode (1898–1962), the Belgian surrealist writer, as the basis for the libretto. It is about the figure of Death, who brings the Last Judgement, but after the final collapse everything goes on exactly as before. Either Nektrotzar was an impostor, or the world has reached a point where even death fails. Ligeti worked on the libretto (a free adaptation of the original drama) together with Michael Meschke, then director of the Stockholm Puppet Theater, and already had very concrete musical ideas at the beginning of the conception of the text.

The subject of death occupied Ligeti’s imagination throughout his life, as he had to deal with it at a young age (long before the terrible night of November 7, 1956). In an essay entitled “Encounter with Kurtág in post-war Buda­ pest”, he vividly describes the special relationship that people had with death during the war: “We did not live in reality. Since the deportation of our families, life and death had become one and the same. If you died, you died; if you happened to live, you lived.” After completing the opera, he explained the reasons for his preoccupation with death in psychological terms: “The situation that I was very often on the threshold of death for a long time, both collectively and individually, has its projection in my music. Not in such a way that the music becomes tragic, not at all. Those who have experienced terrible things will not create seriously terrible art. They will alienate them.”

Alienation was a common feature of post-war theater music, and Ligeti himself had already experienced it in the two Aventures. But it seemed to him that he could go no further in the

30

“DO WE LIVE OR DON’T WE?”

genre of opera than Mauricio Kagel in his “anti-opera” Staatstheater, which premiered in 1971. Ligeti therefore decided to compose an “anti-anti-opera”, that is, an opera, which means that he not only dealt with death, but with the entire tradition of Western art music and sucked the blood out of it, much like Nekrotzar, the figure of Death, who bites the throat of the sex-hungry Mescalina in the second scene of the opera.

Blood splatters onto the stage as music history spills out of Ligeti’s score. Concrete and distorted quotations appear and disappear again without leaving a trace, ideas from Beet­hoven’s Eroica Symphony, Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, Monteve­ rdi’s laments, Liszt’s piano music, Offen­ bach’s operettas, Verdi’s choruses, Schubert’s Galopps, motifs

by Mozart and Haydn; virtuoso baroque coloraturas and complex counterpoints change places and everything that was important and unimportant in 20th century music, from Schoenberg’s dodecaphony to the sound of car horns. This is no longer micropoly­ phony, but overdriven macro­bluster.

Is it a postmodern opera? Is it a mo­dern opera? Is it a classical opera?

Neither and both. It is an idiosyn­cratic Ligeti opera. The composer used the metaphor of the flea market to explain the seemingly disparate style and structure of the piece: “When you are in the middle of it, in front of the various goods, surrounded by loud clamour, a flea market is just a mishmash. But when you look at it from a balcony, the many small movements become a unified whole, a large pattern.”

He then added an anecdote about the composer Leó Weiner (1865–1960), the legendary chamber music professor at the Liszt Academy: “When old Weiner

accidentally dropped a piece of pâté during a dinner, he pressed it into the carpet with the sole of his shoe so that no one would notice. I did the same thing: I pressed all the garbage of music history into this opera.”

Sometimes it seems as if Ligeti is wrestling with the genre and it is difficult to decide who wins. Ligeti can impregnate the opera with many of his own inventions, but in the end the genre has the last word. There is a plot, even if it is perhaps better suited to cartoons or horror movie parodies than to the prestigious art form of ope­ ra. But all in all, the structure is fairly conventional: four scenes, with a pair of lovers in the first, a sadomasochistic couple in the second and the political couple of the White Minister and the Black Minister in the third, with – of course – Nekrotzar in the background or foreground all the time, pretending to be Death himself. And then there’s the fourth scene, an epilog, which tells us that nothing happens after the fulfillment of the Last Judgement (or that the Last Judgement was just fake news).

There are classic singing roles, even if they push the limits of human vocal possibilities: Nekrotzar’s baritone has a weight worthy of an overtaxed Wagnerian hero, his servant (and sometimes his horse), Piet the Pot is a bright tenor who has to sing with a vitality Rossini could only dream of, the mellow high soprano of Prince Go-Go (he can be sung by either a counter­tenor or a child soprano) and the sharp high soprano of the chief of the political police with his aggressive coloratura, which sometimes reaches up to the stars, the terrible stars that the court astronomer Astra­ da­mors ex­a­mines with telescopes to see if they will bring the end of the world.

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“DO WE LIVE OR DON’T WE?”

And there are conventional-looking oper­atic numbers, duets for the lovers Amanda and Amando (originally called Spermando and Clitoria), who make love in an empty tomb throughout the play, arias for other characters accompanied by a wide variety of musical forms, styles and instrumental colors, there is even an overture, even if it is written for twelve car horns (twelve is not a coincidence: it was the fetish number of postwar serial composers who followed in the footsteps of Arnold Schönberg).

The premiere of Le Grand Macabre was due to take place in April 1977, but had to be postponed for a year, partly because of the extraordinary difficulties of the music and partly because some parts of the libretto were consi­ dered pornographic. For the Stockholm première, 150 international journalists registered to attend and the opera was an immediate success with both critics

and audiences. In the last 45 years, there have been almost 40 different productions around the world, a feat matched by very few operas from the second half of the 20th century. For the 1996 Salzburg production, Ligeti revised the work by deleting or setting to music most of the original’s spoken dialogue and streamlining the overall form of the piece. It was a scandalous production directed by Peter Sellars, above all because Ligeti was very dis­ satisfied with the direct message of the production. Ligeti was of the opi­ nion that the essence of the opera was misunderstood, because its core is uncertainty and ambiguity. As Piet asks shortly before the end of the third scene: “Do we live, or don’t we?” The opera can be seen as the embodiment of Ligeti’s answer to this simple question, and his answer can be phrased accordingly simply: who knows?

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GYÖRGY LIGETI

THE FORM OF POETRY AND MUSIC IS AN ABSTRACTION OF AN ABSTRACTION.

ANDREAS DORSCHEL

“BREUGHELLAND”: SUBVERTING THE ANTINOMY OF UTOPIA AND DYSTOPIA You tell stories to children to make them fall asleep, and to adults so that they will wake up. Le Grand Macabre is definitely: Adults only. But what kind of story does György Ligeti tell in his opera? Is it a dystopian tale, or rather one from utopia? There is no simple answer to this question, but it is worth trying to approach a somewhat complex one. Before that can be done, however, an obvious counter-question needs to be faced, viz.: Are “utopia” and “dystopia” at all adequate categories to speak about Ligeti’s opera? The existing literature on the work implicates that they are not. Thus the most insightful study so far produced, Peter Edwardsʼ 2016 monograph, contains no refe­rence to utopia or dystopia in the text at all, and only a single one to utopia in the footnotes, saying that György Ligeti’s father “had himself written a utopian novel about the failure of capitalism in which he conceived a just society without money. Ligeti subsequently conceived his own utopian land of Kylwiria at an early age.” Edwardsʼ single mention of utopia, then, does not even

refer to the work, Le Grand Macabre.

In a way, this reluctance to enter the to­ pic is hardly surprising – for two reasons.

First, Ligeti himself seems to have shied away from the topic. In a 1972 conversation with Clytus Gottwald under the heading “Gustav Mahler und die musikalische Utopie” (“Gustav Mahler and musical utopia”), for in­ s­tance, Ligeti manages to avoid using the title term “utopia” at all, up until his very last statement. When Gottwald initially asserts that Mahler “unfolds models of the utopian” (“Modelle des Utopischen entfaltet”) and suggests that Ligeti, in Lontano, redeemed such a model (“eine Einlösung eines utopischen Modells, das die Musik Mahlers aufstellte”), Ligeti, in his answer, re­­places “utopian” (“utopisch”) by “ima­ ginary” (“imaginär”), decisively shifting the meaning. Towards the end of the conversation, paying lip service to its title, Ligeti claims in passing that in view of pop artists like Edward Kienholz (1927–1994) the musical technique of Charles Ives (1874–1954) could only now, in the 1970s, be seen in its

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“B R E UG H E L L A N D”:

S U B V E RT I N G

“utopian topicality” (“utopische Aktua­ lität”) – draining the word “utopian” to the point where it just means: Ives was ahead of his time by a couple of years.

There is also another reason for reserve. Both utopia and dystopia take themselves seriously, whereas Ligeti’s opera does not. Le Grand Macabre is comic, ludicrous, playful, joking, flippant, farcical, parodistic and inclined to nonsense. These qualities, i.e., the mode of presentation, bracket all content the opera has, in particular one of its central themes, death. Nevertheless, there are not just the brackets – there is something within the brackets. One strand to be found within the brackets is, I shall argue, that of utopia and dystopia. Of course, what’s in the brackets is not unaffected by the brackets. In fact, the farcical quality of the whole has, I will argue, a direct bearing on the theme of utopia and dystopia.

Traditionally, utopia and dystopia have formed an alternative. In classical utopian literature, on the one hand, an ideal state is imagined where everyone leads a happy life. On the other hand, there are the catastrophic, devastated landscapes of, for example, the many Doomsday movies about the world after a nuclear disaster that have been produced since 1945.

György Ligeti had been, in his twenties, an aspiring young composer in the odd intertwinement of utopia and dystopia political scientists call “state bureaucratic socialism”. He was well aware of both its utopian claims (reason enough to be lukewarm towards the term) and its dystopian reality. For a long time, Ligeti had found an escape route from the forced bliss proclaimed by politicians. Le Grand Macabre grew out of that nostalgic utopia, Kylwiria.

T H E

A N T I N OM Y

That process was by no means straightforward. The opera that emerged from Kylwiria in two versions (1977 and 1996) turns out to be one of those works that actually subvert the anti­ nomy of utopia and dystopia – a claim that treats these categories as relevant to Le Grand Macabre, not as irrelevant, as implied by Edwards. Since that claim concerns the work in its entirety, pointing to one or another detail could not settle it. So the question must be addressed on a general level. Ligeti and his co-librettist Michael Meschke enact the intertwinement of the two strands I referred to, dystopia and utopia, in a series of moves and countermoves: (1) Death, in the figure of “Le Grand Macabre”, appears on earth and threatens to eliminate all life: in the unsurpassed mode of the chief of Gepopo, “kakakakakakastrophe” (II/3) – a dystopian scenario.

(2) But “Le Grand Macabre” only threa­ tens disaster. The earth is saved from the fate of the destruction of life – “Der Tod ist tot”, “Death is dead” (II/4): a utopian development that thwarts the dystopian scenario.

(3) At least that part of the world we encounter in the opera, “Breughelland”, however, will remain under a crude and cruel regime: a dystopian feature that calls into question the utopian plot of salvation.

(4) Ultimately – and here I move to what I earlier called ‘the brackets’ –, Ligeti’s work, through both text and music, never settles us in certainty what can be taken in earnest. As already indicated, utopia and dys-

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ANDREAS DORSCHEL

topia, from Thomas More to George Orwell and beyond, have been serious genres: they mean what they say, whether in hope or despair.

Ligeti, however, spreads elements of parody, comedy or ambiguity over everything – artistic feats that undermine both utopia and dystopia.

While the first three layers still preserve an opposition of utopia and dystopia, although they draw both into a single plot, the fourth layer undercuts the opposition itself. If Ligeti’s overall design is captured by that layering, it would explain, inter alia, the composer’s disappointment about Peter Sellarsʼ production of Le Grand Macabre at the 1997 Salzburg Festival, based on a downright dystopian reading of the work.

The theme of utopia and dystopia is already struck by the “Breughellandlied” that opens the opera’s first scene and serves as a motto to Le Grand Macabre: Dies irae, dies illa, solvet saeclum in …

O, goldnes Breughelland, das keine Sorgen kennt, gib deinen Kindern einen Rausch!

O, altes Paradies, wo bist du hin?

In Geoffrey Skelton’s translation: Dies irae, dies illa, solvet saeclum in …

O golden Breughelland, that never knows a care, fill all your children with delight!

O long-lost paradise, where are you now?

This confused yet somehow clairvo­y­ ant utterance of a drunkard juxtaposes, without mediating thought, the end of the world and the myth of the Golden Age. When Piet, in the first two lines, evokes apocalypse, he shrinks back from the word favilla (“ashes”), that would designate destruction of the world. Instead, he paints his present place, “Breughelland”, as carefree (“das keine Sorgen kennt”). The only land that knows of no worries, and probably the most popular vision of utopia, has traditionally been called in English “The Land Cockaigne”, in German “Schlaraffenland”, and in Dutch – quite relevant to Breughelland – “Het Luilekkerland”. This is the title of a famous painting of 1567 by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, now in the Alte Pinakothek at Munich. The painting is arguably more relevant to Le Grand Macabre than Bruegel’s The Triumph of Death of 1562 that has so often been brought up in connection with Ligeti’s opera. After all, Le Grand Macabre isn’t a triumph of death – quite the opposite. But it is an opera where eating and drinking go on nearly from beginning to end.

Het Luilekkerland presents a utopia of effortless consumption. Egg and pig walk around with the cutlery already attached to them so that they can be devoured right away. In all its convenience, the paradise offered is not exactly a beautiful sight. We see a chaos of lifeless bodies, a potential re­ presentation of the end of a world, if not the end of the world. Utopia might be dystopia, and it might be dystopia very much because it was designed to be utopia. The point has been well made by the most famous dystopian author of the twentieth century, George Orwell.

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“B R E UG H E L L A N D”:

S U B V E RT I N G

Referring to this painting, he wrote: “The emptiness of the whole notion of an everlasting ‘good time’ is shown up in Bruegel’s picture The Land of the Sluggard, where the three great lumps of fat lie asleep, head to head, with the boiled eggs and roast legs of pork coming up to be eaten of their own accord.”

What Orwell refers to as “great lumps of fat” do not seem to amount to characters – just as there are no developing characters in Ligeti’s opera. Character, and development of character, is shaped in action, not in consumption.

Thus the point of “Breughelland” in de Ghelderode and Ligeti may not just be an imaginary Flanders; rather, they could have recognized the inextricabi­ lity of utopia and dystopia specifically in Bruegel’s imagination and imagery.

Even that “great lump of fat”, Pieter Bruegel’s namesake and kinsman Piet, in his way, knows of it when all he craves for in Breughelland is intoxication: “gib deinen Kindern / einen Rausch!”

(Skelton’s translation: “fill all your children / with delight!” misses the point.) And intoxication is of course the highest state in a place the reality of which is unbearable. Breughelland, just praised as “golden”, does not seem so golden if even Piet, high by alcohol, longs for a better past: “O, altes Paradies, / wo bist du hin?” (“O longlost paradise, / where are you now?”)

Granting the theme of consumption centre stage in Le Grand Macabre, the Catalan company La Fura dels Baus, in 2009, videoscreened a feast on fast food in Barcelona’s Gran Teatre del Liceu during the opera’s prelude. In its abundance – a lot of the food was less than half-eaten because there was simply too much – it would have been utopian for ordinary people throughout

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most of history: for throughout most of history there was scarcity. Yet the sight at the Liceu was dystopian even before the audience and the female protagonist saw the premonition of apocalypse. The meal dejected through its shabbiness, not least because of the waste it was shown to pollute the world with. In a consumer society, eating and drinking is not just eating and drinking; it also means that a table covered with debris will be left. This is not quite what had once been dreamt of under the name Cockaigne.

De Ghelderode’s, Meschke’s and Ligeti’s Breughelland, indeed, is not Cockaigne. It does know of worries.

But at the same time its inhabitants are strikingly unworried, even concerning the end of the world. “Devil may care” is the attitude that prevails; an attitude befitting a utopia of consumption. No labour seems ever to be done in that country – time goes by in the consumption of food, drink and sex. “Love”, in Breughelland, is nothing beyond that sphere, let alone its utopian alternative.

True, the duets of the nearly indistinct lovers in the first act seem to point to a utopia where nothing but love matters.

But that utopia, as musically manifested, proves oversweet. It sounds pretentious: too pretty to be true. Dripping of saccharine, it turns into a dystopia of kitsch – a dystopia not of horror, but of blandness.

Consumption and death, then, are two – arguably, the two – central themes of Le Grand Macabre. They are, however, not randomly juxtaposed. In an act of over-consumption, making Nekrotzar drunk in scene 3, death is knocked out. As Meschke and Ligeti dis­covered, there is a crucial connection between consumption and death. Not

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ANDREAS DORSCHEL

a metaphysical connection, but a histo­ rical connection, once “eternal life”, to a majority of people, has lost its credit as an answer to the threat of death.

Consumption is the modern way of manifesting a denial of death. In the affluent societies of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, human beings feel alive, and perhaps only feel alive, as long as they consume, or set out for consumption. In Fürst Go-Go’s, Piet’s and Astradamors’ characteristic variation on the Cartesian formula, “We are thirsty: / ergo, we are alive” (“Wir haben Durst: / ergo wir leben”) (act 2, scene 4), desire has been rendered the ultimate proof of vitality. It implies the belief that those who desire have enough time to live left in order to consume the desired object. Consumption combined with intoxication, for instance drunkenness, even allows to forget the misery of life and death altogether. Of course, nothing is wrong with desire.

It is simply inevitable. Even if they had hell on earth, people would still desire.

But for that very reason, desire and consumption, by themselves, do not recommend a place either.

An interpretation of Le Grand Maca­ bre under the aspect of utopia/dystopia, to be sure, intellectualizes the work in a way Ligeti would not have liked. And the author’s dislike of intellectualization is not a matter of opinion or interview passages; it seems embodied in the work, in its final stanza: Fürchtet den Tod nicht, gute Leut’!

Irgendwann kommt er, doch nicht heut’.

Und wenn er kommt, dann istʼs soweit …

Lebt wohl so lang in Heiterkeit! (act 2, scene 4)

In Geoffrey Skelton’s translation: Fear not to die, good people all!

No one knows when his hour will fall!

And when it comes, then let it be …

Farewell, till then in cheerfulness!

The problem with this conclusion, how­ ever, is not that it would be at odds with subverting the antinomy of utopia and dystopia. For it does reject both utopia­nism and dystopianism. Against utopia­nism the conclusion insists on mortality; against dystopianism it insists on merriment. And that is consistent with seeing utopia and dystopia intertwined.

The problem with the conclusion, rather, is its banality and political nai­ veté. The Hitlers and Stalins of this world, of which Ligeti was so much aware, leave their victims no room for “having fun”. To an intellectual listener, the ending of Ligeti’s opera must be scandalous; in the words of critic Michael Tanner: “Macabre is a genuinely anarchic work, making merry with many things we hold dearest or have a terror of, but it is a sign of its weakness that it ends by telling us to ‘live merrily in cheerfulness’, because you never know when you are going to die, though you know you will. Shouldn’t two hours of inverting every value end with something a bit more surprising than that?” Tanner’s objection is by no means far-fetched. We do have reason to wonder what it means to “live merrily” given that the dramatis personae, such as Mescalina, appear to be not so much alive but undead. Nevertheless,

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S U B V E RT I N G

a threefold reply needs to be made to Tanner’s objection.

First of all: Could anything have been more surprising than the fact that somebody brimming with ideas as Ligeti did would end his only opera with, as Tanner puts it in another place, “such a monumental plati­tude”? Secondly, Tanner confuses the voice of the figures in the play with the authorial voice. We are not entitled to take the lines as Ligeti’s message, even if the composer said so in a commentary on his work. Artists are to be judged by their works, not by their commentaries on their works. As artists, they are each unique; as com-

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mentators, they are each one among many. In Le Grand Macabre, it is clear that the final lines belong to the figures in the play. And then the stanza proves that – in striking analogy to the scena ultima of Mozart’s Don Giovanni – they have not learnt anything from the nearcatastrophe. Thirdly, and most importantly, while the words of the final lines do amount to a monumental platitude, the music of the closing passacaglia, in its severity, does not. Great vocal music refrains from duplicating the text. It goes beyond and sometimes against it.

Adressing us as adults, this is its way of keeping us awake.

39

Next pages: SCENE

ELKE JANSSENS

ALL I CAN DO IS POINT A PORTRAIT OF A PORTRAIT ARTIST “An artist must have the guts to put their subject at the forefront. The idea comes next. The political aspect is always there, but it’s never dominant. This is the fallacy that many people have with regard to the position of art. This was proven by the suprematists. This was proven by Michelangelo. His Sistine Chapel will live in history thanks to its form, not the content.”

Jan Lauwers Time and again, Jan Lauwers starts from his metier of a visual artist to create a new image or story that has “both feet in society”. Always relevant and provocative in the way it questions form and content, starting from the subject matter in order to give shape to the elusive.

He absorbs everything around him like a sponge: “In the Velázquez room in the Prado, I turn into Velázquez and understand all his problems. I am a chameleon. As an artist, I am every­ one.” The white canvas, the blank sheet of paper, comes to be the focal point.

From nowhere, he questions the painting technique with his paint, the writing technique with his pen and the me-

dium in itself with his theatre or opera performances. He transposes the questions that one form of art asks other forms.

Authorship is fully appreciated at the famous artist house Needcompany, which he founded with Grace Ellen Barkey in 1986. As a visual artist, he was driven by the elusive nature of the performing arts. Because the main focus at Needcompany is authorship, artists create works where every me­ dium is given as much independence as possible in order to make the elusive theatre medium more autonomous. No wonder that Lauwers’ role models are the auteur and filmmaker John Cassa­ vetes, and writers James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway.

“Theatre stands for collaboration”, says Lauwers. His entire œuvre is a quest to create a comprehensive portrait of the person he is currently working with. Thus, the character and the person who embodies the character are equally important to Lauwers. He writes on the person’s skin in an attempt to transcend present-day diversity and identity dogmas. In doing so, he brings

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ALL I CAN DO IS POINT

humanity into focus. Failures, love, struggles, big and small sorrows always occupy a special place.

Since theatre did not offer many “big roles” for women, Lauwers was also proud that his work made a difference in that respect. He wrote significant roles for Grace Ellen Barkey and Viviane De Muynck, to name just a few. For the latter, he wrote the famous Isabella’s Room, which John Freeman in his book of the same name called one of “the world’s best performances”. In 2025, he will work with mezzo-soprano Kate Linds­ey and performer Romy Louise Lauwers, who are cast in the role of (war) photographer Lee Miller.

From a theatre studies perspective, his work belongs to a specific movement.

In 2000, theatre researcher Hans-Thies Lehmann wrote the book Postdra­matic Theatre, in which he holds up the work of Needcompany as an example of overcoming traditional boundaries of theatre and exploring new ways of creating meaning and expression in the performing arts. To better understand this position, it would be useful to refer here to the origin of the theatrical.

In 335 BC, Greek philosopher Aristotle reviewed in his Poetica the tragedy that has formed the basis of presentday Western theatre. In this work, he described several conventions used in plotting and narrative development (beginning, middle, end, climax), the catharsis and theatrical elements.

Theatre is made up of various signs/ elements/codes that are expressed in scenery, costumes, music, dance, gestures... These elements are considered to be illustrations of the story’s content that help the spectator find their way through the performance. These elements are also present in other forms of

art. Representation and symbolism play a key role here. Paintings by Botti­celli, Bruegel or Bosch are packed with signs that tell a story and imply references.

Lehmann emphasized that postdramatic theatre moves away from the traditional meaning of this theatrical element. The story is no longer told according to established conventions.

Artists explore a new form that encourages the viewer to actively look for their own meaning. Visual dramaturgy emerges in addition to textual dramaturgy, with equal value. The story is told in fragments; scenery is no longer an anec­dotal emphasis of the narrative, but now exists independently; music, dance, costumes and imagery occupy the space on equal footing with the story, thus creating a host of meanings.

While conventional performing arts follow a traditional linear structure, this is broken in postdramatic theatre.

Representation becomes presentation.

The idea of presentation originates in the performing arts where it is all about the here and now, blurring the line between reality and fiction. Philosopher Gilles Deleuze also elaborates on this idea of presentation: “Thinking is not representing but creating.”

Lauwers’ work exemplifies all these previous aspects. Each work pursues the idea of presentation where the oneoff character is explored. The metatext is equivalent to the text. He uses what he calls an off-centre strategy when the central point is no longer the most important one. Various layers, various offcentres claim their spot to help tell the story and generate various meanings.

Each medium is treated autonomously.

Lauwers’ work is highly visual. “All the media I use are interconnected by the concept of the image. In fact, the

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ALL I CAN DO IS POINT

concept of the image is the only thing I care about. When is an image an image?

I arrived at the conclusion that an image only becomes an image when it is ingrained/incised in the viewer’s me­mory.

The ultimate image exists only by destruction: that of all previous images.”

In 2018, Lauwers ventured into ope­ra with L’incoronazione di Poppea.

This is what dramaturg Erwin Jans said: “Lauwers is not a director. He does not stage repertoire, but the moment when something new emerges from the interplay of forms, bodies, text and music. Perhaps, this is also the reason why Jan Lauwers’ first opera was a baroque opera. In the first half of the seven­teenth century, baroque opera was in its infancy; it was a new genre that was not yet fully codified. For example, Monteverdi wrote the score for the singers, but minimised the score for the musicians. Some voice parts are only accompanied by a basso continuo: ‘Monteverdi’s musical score leaves a lot of freedom for adding instruments.

He offers musicians some space for interplay with each other and with the singers. I would like to approach something like free jazz, where musi­cians and singers look out for each other while playing and singing. Unlike classical singers, baroque singers do not reproduce, they produce, here and now.’ (Lauwers)” In 2021, Lauwers explored another opera extravaganza with Intolleranza

1960 by Luigi Nono. No wonder: it was a fierce political work packed with catas­ trophic images and stories that emphasize human dignity in a musical masterpiece. Erwin Jans: “The confron­ tation between autonomy and engagement, between the clarity of political position and insurmountable ambi­ guity inherent in art runs like a golden thread through Lauwers’ performan­ ces of the past decade.”

With György Ligeti’s Le Grand Maca­ bre, we enter yet another corner of the twentieth century: the ultimate precision of the musical writing faces off against the subject of the Last Judgement and the turbulence of a Flemish dance macabre without offering a clear moral. Ligeti refuses to clear up the point and leaves the choice between laughter, fear, life or death to his performers and audience. And this is very similar to how Lauwers deals with morality in his work. In the performance Images of Affection of 2002, Lauwers says the following through the narrator: “All I can do is point.” This is perhaps the best description of how layered Lauwers works. With the choices he makes, with the texts he writes, by putting the images he creates in the spotlight, he draws attention without moralising. He brings issues to the surface, he questions them. He “points” with the choice he made for his opera directing – look at Monteverdi, Nono and Ligeti. The rest is history.

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GEORG NIGL as NEKROTZAR

KOPFZEILE

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IMPRINT GYÖRGY LIGETI

LE GRAND MACABRE SEASON 2023/24 PREMIÈRE OF THE PRODUCTION 11 NOVEMBER 2023 Publisher WIENER STAATSOPER GMBH, Opernring 2, 1010 Wien Director DR. BOGDAN ROŠČIĆ Music Director PHILIPPE JORDAN Administrative Director DR. PETRA BOHUSLAV General Editors SERGIO MORABITO, ANDREAS LÁNG, OLIVER LÁNG Design & concept EXEX Layout & typesetting MIWA MEUSBURGER Printed by PRINT ALLIANCE HAV PRODUKTIONS GMBH, BAD VÖSLAU TEXT REFERENCES Pablo Heras-Casado: A furious stroke of genius – Jan Lauwers in an interview: Ambiguity is an answer to every question – Gergely Fazekas: Do we live or don‘t we? – Andreas Dorschel: „Breughelland“: Subverting the antinomy of utopia and dystopia – Elke Janssens: All I can do is point TEXT REVISIONS György Ligeti: Synopsis, from: Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 2, Schott, 2007 - György Ligeti: The creation of Le Grand Macabre, from: Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 2, Schott, 2007 IMAGE REFERENCE Cover: Damien Hirst, For the Love of God, 2007 © Damien Hirst and Science Ltd. rights reserved, Bildrecht, Vienna 2023 / Image concept cover: Martin Conrads, Berlin Scenes: Michael Pöhn / Wiener Staatsoper GmbH (Pages: 2-3, 8-9, 13, 19, 26-27, 33, 40-41, 45) English translations Andrew Smith, with the exception of the text by Elke Janssens (translation: Interlingua) Reproduction only with approval of Wiener Staatsoper GmbH / Dramaturgy. Holders of rights who were unavailable regarding retrospect compensation are requested to make contact.

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