Composer Gyorgy Ligeti (1923-2006)

New York Times
June 13, 2006
Gyorgy Ligeti, Central-European Composer of Bleakness and Humor, Dies at 83
By PAUL GRIFFITHS

Gyorgy Ligeti, the Central European composer whose music was among the most innovative of the last half of the 20th century — sometimes eerie, sometimes humorous usually fantastical and always polished — died yesterday in Vienna. He was 83.

His family confirmed his death but declined to divulge the cause, saying only that he had been ill for several years.

Mr. Ligeti produced much of his pioneering music against the backdrop of a Europe in turmoil. Born into a Hungarian-Jewish family, he survived the Holocaust but lost his father and brother in it. With the war's end he felt Soviet repression and fled when liberal revolution was smashed.

Mr. Ligeti became widely known when extracts from his work appeared on the soundtrack of Stanley Kubrick's movie "2001: A Space Odyssey" in 1968 and caught the public's fancy. The works — the Requiem, for voices and orchestra; "Lux Aeterna," for unaccompanied chorus; and "Atmospheres," for orchestra — are characterized by dense texture and very slow change. They were used in the film to suggest the desolation of the moon and the discovery there of a mysterious monolith. The music was not the film's well-known fanfare, composed by Richard Strauss, but it won Mr. Ligeti a worldwide audience.

The moon music was indicative of only one of his expressive modes, however. After fleeing Hungary in 1956, he also showed himself to be a master of a fast, mechanical and comic sort of music. Between these two poles — the "Clocks and Clouds," to quote the title of a later work, alluding to an essay by the philosopher Karl Popper — he created works of exuberant variety and range.

During the late 1950's and 60's, he was close to leaders of the European avant-garde like Karlheinz Stockhausen and Pierre Boulez. He had always been more skeptical than others in that circle, but he still felt adrift when the rule of modernism began to break down in the 1970's. His initial response was a comic opera, "The Great Macabre," his most ambitious work, which was first produced in Sweden in 1978.

He had difficulty in regaining his creative direction after that, but the appearance in 1985 of his first six Etudes for piano signaled a return to vitality. The pieces were prompted in part by the wild, irregular rhythms and processes of Conlon Nancarrow's player-piano studies, and in part by Mr. Ligeti's ability to find new stimulation in recorded music from around the world, including that of Afro-Caribbean dance bands and Indonesian percussion orchestras. From all these sources he distilled his unique late compositions.

Fastidious and self-critical, Mr. Ligeti demanded high standards from those around him. But where he felt sympathy, he could be open, warm and generous. He knew his worth, but he did not make that a barrier between himself and life or let it dampen his curiosity.

"I am in a prison," he once explained. "One wall is the avant-garde, the other is the past. I want to escape."

Gyorgy Sandor Ligeti (pronounced JURGE SHAN-dor LIG-ih-tee) was born on May 28, 1923. His family lived near Cluj (Kolozsvar to Hungarians), the principal city of Transylvania. The region was part of Romania then, and is now again, but in 1940 it was granted by fascist Germany to its ally Hungary.

The annexation seemed to have had little effect on the young composer at first. Between 1941 and 1943 he studied with two of the more important Hungarian composers of the post-Bartok generation, Ferenc Farkas in Cluj and Pal Kadosa in Budapest. He also wrote the earliest pieces he was later to publish, a pair of movements for piano duet.

But in 1943 his education was halted when he was drafted into a military labor corps to support the front-line Axis troops. Mr. Ligeti considered the conscription a lucky break, because it exempted him, as it did other Jews in the service, from deportation to concentration camps, a fate that befell his mother, father and brother. Only his mother returned.

In September 1945, Mr. Ligeti enrolled in the Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest, where he studied with Farkas again and with two other eminent members of the same generation, Sandor Veress and Pal Jardanyi. Life in the new socialist Hungary was propitious for a young idealist, and Mr. Ligeti was able to extend his creative horizons. But in 1949, when he graduated, the country fell under the grip of Stalinism. Only music that was optimistic and close to folk song had a hope of being published or performed.

Mr. Ligeti supplied works of this type, chiefly songs and choruses, while also taking a teaching position at the Liszt academy. The more radical works he was writing at the same time, like "Musica Ricercata" for piano (1951-3) or his First String Quartet (1953-4), had to be kept private.

Later, Mr. Ligeti spoke disparagingly of himself during this period as the "prehistoric Ligeti," emphasizing the lack of information in Hungary about artistic movements in the West, the moratorium in his country on modernism (even Bartok's modernism), and the compulsion to be upbeat and nationalist.

He left Budapest with his wife, Vera, a Hungarian psychiatrist, in December 1956, after the Russians had sent in tanks to crush the more liberal government of Imre Nagy. His destination was Cologne, where Mr. Stockhausen had arranged a stipend for him at the electronic music studio of West German Radio. At the age of 33, he was starting anew. The first works he produced in the West were electronic.

In 1959 he moved to Vienna, eventually became an Austrian citizen, and began "Atmospheres," whose first performance, in 1961, made his professional reputation. Though other composers, including Mr. Stockhausen, had begun to think in slow-moving sounds and tangled webs, Mr. Ligeti's orchestral mastery was unrivaled.

His sense of humor was also unusual. After "Atmospheres" came "Adventures" (1962) and "New Adventures" (1962-5), miniature operas for three singers who express themselves without words but very concretely, by means of musical gestures from a nonsensical phonetic text.

Crazy and comic, these works are also touching. The singers, deprived of language, bravely go on trying to communicate their fears, joys and jealousies. And in the sighs, moans and excited outbursts of Mr. Ligeti's music, they do so effectively.

In the Requiem (1963-5), he responded to the subject of death as both ominous certainty and black joke. The Requiem, with its depictions of damnation and pleas to avoid it, shows how much he had learned as a musician in Western Europe, and how much he had learned as a man who had lost his family in German concentration camps and had suffered severe creative strictures at the hands of Nazi occupiers and their Soviet successors.

Besides surveying its composer's past, the score includes something new: the pristine pleasure of simple intervals occurring within a complex context. Mr. Ligeti was then able to recover something of the sound of the Romantic orchestra in "Lontano" (1967), and gradually to elaborate a new harmonic-melodic language that was, as he liked to say, neither tonal nor atonal.

In 1971 he made a visit to San Francisco, where he was impressed by the music of Harry Partch, whose unconventional tunings began to have an effect on his harmony. He was also drawn to the work of Steve Reich and Terry Riley, to whom he paid musical homage in the middle part of his triptych "Monument — Self Portrait — Movement" for two pianos (1976).

In 1973 he took a teaching post at the Hamburg Music Academy and remained in Hamburg until a few years ago while always wishing, he said in an interview, that he were somewhere else. During those years his wife remained in Vienna with their son, Lukas, later himself a composer. Both survive him.

Mr. Ligeti's first big project in Hamburg was "The Great Macabre," whose subject was again death and the end of the world. Again, too, the subject was treated both as an awesome calamity and as a trick played on humanity. The opera had its premiere in Stockholm, where the composer and his music had found an eager audience since the 1960's. It was later produced in a revised version at the 1997 Salzburg Festival.

After "The Great Macabre," the Horn Trio of 1980 turned out to be a false trail in leading back to more conventional kinds of phrasing and form. Mr. Ligeti found a new path for himself in his first book of Etudes for piano (1985), which opened the door into a style of extreme virtuosity, both creative and re-creative, and for which in 1986 he received the Grawemeyer Award (at $150,000 the largest prize in classical music). Complex rhythms and dazzling speeds combined to produce music of wonder and wit, and he went on to write a second book of Etudes (1988-94) and begin a third.

Meanwhile he explored the implications of his new style on a broader scale in concertos for piano (1985-8), violin (1989-93) and horn (1998-2001). A second opera, on the Alice books of Lewis Carroll, was long contemplated but not seriously begun. His last new work was his 18th Etude, "Canon" (2001). Soon after writing it, he returned to his wife's home in Vienna, where his health slowly worsened.

Mr. Ligeti's late works, fast and busy, are very unlike the music of "2001," but not so far from the compositions he had produced as a young man in Hungary. He was returning to what had always interested him: the scales and rhythms of Central European folk music, if now within a style of much greater sophistication. Long into his exile, what obsessed him was the notion of home.

As a man who grew up in Hungary under German and Soviet tyrannies, when home was exactly where you did not want to be, who moved to Western Europe after the Russians extinguished Hungarian independence, and who had been footloose ever since, Mr. Ligeti had no simple notion of where he belonged, and this feeling informed his work.

One movement in his Trio for Violin, Horn and Piano from 1982, for example, is composed, as he put it, of "an imaginary, synthetic folklore of Latin-American and Balkan elements"; another recalls "the Gypsy music which affected me so strongly as a child."

What, Mr. Ligeti asked himself, is being expressed here: "Nostalgia for a homeland that no longer exists?" And there he put his finger on something: home is not just a place, but also a time.