GyörgyLigeti

In December 1956, György Ligeti and Vera, his former wife, hid beneath mailbags on a train out of Budapest. Soviet troops had crushed the uprising; the last stretch into Austria had to be crossed through mud. Recalling the escape to Christopher Ford in The Guardian on 7 May 1974, Ligeti said: “We went across on foot. Four foot.” He made a crawling gesture. He was thirty-three. He and Vera remarried the following year.

1923–⁠56Transylvania, war and Budapest

He had been born in Diciosânmartin, Transylvania, into a Hungarian-speaking Jewish family. They moved to Cluj, where he studied composition with Ferenc Farkas from 1941. He had wanted to study mathematics and physics, but the university’s quota for Jewish applicants kept him out, so music was his second choice. War interrupted the conservatory course. Ligeti was sent into forced labour; his father and younger brother were murdered in concentration camps. His mother survived Auschwitz.

In 1945 he went to Budapest and resumed composition studies with Farkas and Sándor Veress. At the Liszt Academy, where he joined the teaching staff in 1950, he studied and taught counterpoint. Bartók was a more recent model, though the Stalinist authorities banned much of his music along with that of Webern and Schoenberg. Ligeti made folk-song arrangements that could be published and wrote other music that could not be published or performed. His First String Quartet was not given its première until 1958, in Vienna.

1957–⁠61Cologne, tape and Atmosphères

In Cologne he could hear music that he had struggled to hear on Western broadcasts in Hungary. At the WDR electronic studio he worked alongside Gottfried Michael Koenig and Karlheinz Stockhausen, cutting and joining tape with scissors and glue. Artikulation (1958) treats electronic sounds as the elements of an invented language, without words. He later carried that idea into Aventures and Nouvelles Aventures, for three singers and seven instrumentalists.

His work in the tape studio informed what he went on to write for orchestra. Apparitions brought him to international attention in 1960; Atmosphères followed at Donaueschingen in October 1961, conducted by Hans Rosbaud. It opens with a quiet cluster spanning almost five octaves. Later, twenty-eight violins descend while twenty violas and cellos climb, narrowing the space between them to a minor third. In this passage forty-eight separate lines move within a single slowly contracting chord.

1962–⁠68Requiem, metronomes and Kubrick

The Requiem (1963–⁠65) places its twenty-part Kyrie beside a violently broken-up judgement scene. Ligeti had the apocalyptic pictures of Memling, Bruegel and Bosch in mind; the soprano and mezzo-soprano soloists sing against a choir large enough to hold its own against the orchestra. He set only selected parts of the service. In 1966 he returned separately to its Communion text for Lux aeterna. Sixteen unaccompanied voices enter at the edge of audibility; at the first Domine, the basses enter high in falsetto. After the final notes fade, the conductor goes on beating seven silent bars.

He also wrote music for one hundred metronomes. In the Poème symphonique of 1962 they are wound up, set to different speeds and left to run down. The initial clatter thins into patterns until a single machine is left ticking. In Continuum (1968) the process is reversed. A harpsichordist plays so quickly that the separate plucks merge into a buzzing, nearly stationary sound.

Kubrick then used Atmosphères, the Requiem and Lux aeterna in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Ligeti learnt about the film from a friend and attended its Vienna opening. Nobody had consulted him. He went back with a stopwatch and timed more than half an hour of his music in the soundtrack. He was eventually paid $3,000. An American publisher later asked him to describe his collaboration with Kubrick for a book about the film.

1973–⁠82Le Grand Macabre and the Horn Trio

From 1973 Ligeti taught composition in Hamburg, while working on Le Grand Macabre. He and Michael Meschke adapted Michel de Ghelderode’s play about a threatened apocalypse in Breughelland. Car horns open the opera. Nekrotzar announces the end of the world, meets a court of drunks and schemers, and drinks too much himself; the population survives the catastrophe he has appointed. Elgar Howarth conducted the première in Stockholm in 1978. Ligeti revised the score, and the revised version was first staged in Salzburg in 1997.

After the opera came several lean years, then the Horn Trio of 1982, subtitled Hommage à Brahms. It uses Brahms’s combination of violin, horn and piano, but the three players repeatedly fall out of step. A fast dance divides eight beats in competing ways, and the march also misaligns its parts. In the final Lamento, descending chromatic lines close in around a recurring five-bar pattern, and the low register of the piano is used as a large imaginary drum. The horn plays against its fading resonance.

1985–⁠2006Piano études and late concertos

In these years he took up new rhythmic models. In 1980 he encountered Conlon Nancarrow’s player-piano music and bought two recordings in Paris; he was interested in its simultaneous speeds. In 1982 his former pupil Roberto Sierra introduced him to Simha Arom’s recordings of Central African ensembles, and Ligeti played these records repeatedly. Later, discussing African lamellophones, he explained how a player’s two hands could suggest separate instruments, and he wanted to bring this problem to the piano keyboard.

The eighteen piano études, written between 1985 and 2001, made such problems into pieces. In Désordre, the right hand plays on the white keys and the left on the black; their accents begin together and drift apart. Ligeti himself could play most of the studies only slowly. “Everything is playable. I know my trade!” he told Bruno Serrou in a late-1996 interview for Piano. Pierre-⁠Laurent Aimard became a leading interpreter of these works.