György Ligeti (1923-2006)

[Dr. Dread]

Yes, MPR is right: it is "LIG-uh-tee."  Did they play some of his music?

--Bruce

Yes, sir. Some piano thing.

[Novi]

Is his last name pronounced "liggity"? Because that's how they pronounced it on MPR this morning.  And, if so, I've been pronouncing wrong: li-GET-ti. Maybe because I like author Thomas Ligotti.

Yep, accent on first syllable.

Oh, and this is a good Ligeti boxset :

[Dr. Dread]

Yes, sir. Some piano thing.

Gyorgy Ligeti - Etude no. 4 "Fanfare"
Yuja Wang, piano


She's the lastest Chinese piano sensation. Or so they say...

[bhodges]

Gyorgy Ligeti - Etude no. 4 "Fanfare"
Yuja Wang, piano


She's the lastest Chinese piano sensation. Or so they say...

Oh cool...the Etudes are amazing, IMHO some of the greatest piano works of the 20th century.  Haven't heard Wang, though.  Did you like her? 

--Bruce

[Dr. Dread]

Oh cool...the Etudes are amazing, IMHO some of the greatest piano works of the 20th century.  Haven't heard Wang, though.  Did you like her? 

--Bruce

I had to turn it off so I heard little.

She has a new CD out or about to come out from DG.

I might get it.

[MDL]

Popped into Harold Moores records on Great Marlborough Street in my lunch break and they were playing the second movement from Ligeti's Chamber Concerto, which was nice. I would have stayed to listen, but I had to dash back to work. Bugger.

And about the pronunciation of his name, am I right in saying that in Hungarian (Ligeti was born in the Hungarian-speaking area of Transylvania, wasn't he?), the stress always falls on the first syllable?

[purephase]

Ligeti is currently Radio 3's Composer of the Week.  The last 4 shows are still available.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006tnxf

[mahler10th]

Pronunciation of his name?

Li - gi- ty    as in Liggity

Not Ligetty

[The Ninth]

Oh, and this is a good Ligeti boxset :

I just bought this one from Amazon.

I was introduced to Ligeti through the pieces used in Kubrick films (Musica Ricercata, Atmospheres, etc.) . I've since listened to many more of his works and have found that, as with Debussy, it's very rare for me to find something I don't enjoy. I think he may become my favorite composer of the twentieth century.

[bhodges]

I think he may become my favorite composer of the twentieth century.

He's definitely one of mine.  (I would agonize over having to choose just one!)  But I agree: there are very few works I've heard that I don't like.  Some are among my favorite works, period, e.g., the string quartets, Lontano, Atmosphères, Lux Aeterna, Six Bagatelles for Wind Quintet, and of course, the great piano etudes.

I have most of the individual recordings from which that Teldec box--a great series. 

--Bruce

[CRCulver]

It's a real shame that while Teldec released that box set (as did DG, though those aren't composer-approved recordings), Sony is letting the Gyorgy Ligeti Edition completely fall out of print. :-(

[Henk]

Another fan here. Have all the individual discs (which have cost me much more then the box  ).

I know that Ligeti had problems with the Sony cycle at some point. Don't know the exact story, but that could be a reason why they are out of print.

Henk

[CRCulver]

Another fan here. Have all the individual discs (which have cost me much more then the box  ).

I know that Ligeti had problems with the Sony cycle at some point. Don't know the exact story, but that could be a reason why they are out of print.

The reason they are out of print has nothing to do with Ligeti or his performers, it's because Sony refocused itself to classical crossover a few years back and has junked almost all of its serious recordings from the 1990s. At least they mid-priced them first, so that you can pick up some excellent Salonen discs, for example, for cheap, but soon it'll be difficult to find them without paying rarities prices.

[Lethevich]

It's a real shame that while Teldec released that box set (as did DG, though those aren't composer-approved recordings), Sony is letting the Gyorgy Ligeti Edition completely fall out of print. :-(

Story of Sony's life, really... the amount of valuble, important and lucrative things they have allowed to fall permenently OOP can only lead me to think that they are too incompetent to deserve to remain in business...

[Sid]

It's interesting to read everyone's posts...

I've only got Ligeti's Requiem, Aventures, Nouvelles Aventures on a Wergo reissue. I especially like the Requiem, which is very haunting, spooky & dark. The other two works are like wordless nonsense operas. I like how Ligeti really pushed the boundaries of music, and I plan to get that Teldec box set. I think he will easily become one of my favourite composers once I hear more of his music.

[MDL]

There's an excellent full-page article about Le Grand Macabre in today's Guardian. Whoo-hoo!

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/aug/27/le-grand-macabre-gyorgy-ligeti


Tom Service
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 27 August 2009 22.45 BST

ENO's new production of Le Grand Macabre. Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive

It takes all of about five seconds before you realise that Hungarian composer György Ligeti's Le Grand Macabre is an opera of the unexpected. The piece starts with a prelude – a conventional enough idea, except that instead of being played by the orchestra, it's scored for 12 car horns, performed by the hands and feet of three percussionists. It's a surreal coup de musique that starts Le Grand Macabre on its absurdist journey, in which you meet a perennially pissed antihero called Piet the Pot, a sado- masochistic astronomer, a pair of sex- obsessed lovers, a layabout prince, and a couple of preening, pernicious politicians. All of them are subject to the whims of Nekrotzar, the despotic Grand Macabre himself, who has come to visit annihilation on the people of Breughelland, "the entirely run-down but nevertheless carefree and thriving principality" in which the opera is set. Nekrotzar doesn't succeed, however, as Piet gets him drunk, and instead of commanding the minions of hell to raze Breughelland to the ground, he misses his own apocalypse and falls off a rocking horse.

Ligeti wrote his mock-apocalyptic opera in the 1970s, and, three years after his death, the piece has its first UK production for 27 years at English National Opera in London. Le Grand Macabre is Ligeti's only opera, it's the longest piece he ever wrote, and it's one of the few postwar operas to have earned a firm place in the repertoires of opera companies, with more than 30 productions since its premiere. The opera's wild, scatological humour, its grotesque fantasy, biting satire, and above all, the directness and invention of its music make it one of the most riotous experiences you can have in an opera house.

But the significance of Le Grand Macabre isn't just that it's the most successful piece of music theatre by any avant-garde composer. It's also that, with typically elliptical humour, Ligeti holds up a mirror to late-20th-century society, politics, and relationships, and the image it throws back is full of unpleasant truths that still resonate today: politicians from the Black and White parties whose policies are interchangeable, a docile and selfish populace, the vaunting ambition of humourless bureaucrats, the seduction of morbid, millennial fantasies – it's all there.

Yet if you rewind to the mid-60s, when the opera was first commissioned by Royal Swedish Opera, the question is why Ligeti would want to write an opera at all. For any self-respecting modernist composer of Ligeti's generation (he was born in 1923), an opera house was the last place you wanted to be seen. At that stage, avant-garde musicians, spearheaded by Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen, shunned opera as a form stultified by convention and crippled by artistic conservatism, an emblem of the old musical order they had spent their compositional lives trying to dismantle.

Ligeti knew both Stockhausen and Boulez. He escaped to the west from Budapest after the October uprising of 1956, hiding from the Soviets under postbags in a train carriage, and ended up working with Stockhausen in his electronic studio in Cologne. He met Boulez at the summer schools for new music in Darmstadt, where as a lecturer and writer he exposed contradictions in Boulez's compositions and theories, resulting in bitterness between them that took decades to heal. Ligeti's own music put him on a different course to these two masters of avant-garde music. His central problem with both was their use of pre-compositional systems. When I interviewed him in 2003, Ligeti described Stockhausen's approach as "like a Soviet five-year plan. He has to have this planification. Nobody in Hungary would think this way."

Ligeti the man and the musician resisted ideological doctrines in all their forms. He grew up as a Hungarian Jew in what was then Romanian Transylvania, and was the only member of his family not to be transported to the concentration camps. Only his mother survived. In Budapest after the war, he found one ideological nightmare replaced by another as the Soviets took control, and then, in the west, met a group of composers who were deliberately shackling themselves to musical and compositional dogmas. It seemed crazy to Ligeti.

All of this affects Le Grand Macabre, which teems with characters that satirise the people, politics, and systems that terrorised Ligeti's life: there's a chief of the secret police called the Gepopo, a part sung by a soprano that's full of hysterical, nonsensical violence, and Nekrotzar himself is a brilliantly drawn parody of the death-obsessed dictators of the 20th century. Ligeti's synopsis describes him as a "sinister, shady, demagogic figure, humourless, pretentious, and with an unshakeable sense of mission". The lugubrious, self-important music Ligeti writes for him sends him up just as ruthlessly as the moment in the story when his dreams of genocide go up in smoke.

The text is based on a work by the little-known Flemish writer Michel de Ghelderode, La Balade du Grand Macabre. Ligeti, looking for something "cruel and frightening based on the pictures of Breughel and Bosch", could not have found better source material in De Ghelderode's grotesque cavalcade of a play. With his co-librettist, Michael Meschke, who also directed the first production, Ligeti updated the drama's bawdiness and brutality, writing lines like "Stupid dickhead make your prick red!" They originally called the two lovers Spermando and Clitoria (they're now less offensively titled Amando and Amanda), and together they created a text that sends up such operatic conventions as virtuosic coloratura arias and comic ensembles.

But that's nothing to what the music does. Ligeti's score is a gleeful two fingers to virtually every major opera composer – the prelude for car-horns mimics Monteverdi, there are passages that send up Mozart, parody Rossini, pilfer from Offenbach and take the mickey out of Verdi – but it's also a gesture of defiance to the ideologues of the avant-garde. If there was any possibility of writing music for the opera house in the late-20th-century, the end-point seemed to have been reached in Mauricio Kagel's unclassifiable stage-work, Staatstheater. "A masterpiece of musical anti-theatre," Ligeti called it when he saw this piece of non-linear narrative and gesture in 1971. In contrast, what Ligeti was doing in Le Grand Macabre was composing an "anti-anti-opera", as his biographer Richard Steinitz says. And "since two successive 'antis' cancel each other out, an 'anti-anti-opera' must be ... well, opera!".


And that's the point about Le Grand Macabre: it works brilliantly in the opera house. Its dramatic and musical grotesqueries aren't just there to create a clever-clever contemporary parody, they create a work that has a complete expressive world. The music, chaotic on the surface, is rigorously controlled by Ligeti, nowhere more so than in the final Passacaglia, a severe baroque form that is used to stage the work's moral: "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!"

Ligeti was almost as precise in his vision of what Le Grand Macabre should look like on stage as he was about how it should sound, but although he was pleased with the work's success, he saw only one production that he felt did the piece justice. (Richard Steinitz reports that no version of the opera has ever realised Ligeti's incredibly detailed stage directions.) The nadir came in 1997, with the Salzburg premiere of the revised version of the opera, directed by Peter Sellars. Ligeti dissociated himself from the staging, a wilful updating of Le Grand Macabre to a post-nuclear future. Sellars's production was due to reopen the Royal Opera House a decade ago, but Covent Garden cancelled it at the last minute.

So will ENO fare any better this time around? The signs are good. The show is produced by Catalan company La Fura dels Baus, and premiered in Brussels, to rave reviews. A teaser on YouTube reveals some of what's in store for London audiences: a gigantic maquette of a reclining woman, in whose innards and out of whose orifices the drama is staged. It looks like a properly Boschian interpretation of the piece, a garden of earthly delights and disgusts that Ligeti himself might finally have endorsed.

Le Grand Macabre opens at English National Opera, London on 17 September. Box office: 0871 911 0200.

[bhodges]

So will ENO fare any better this time around? The signs are good. The show is produced by Catalan company La Fura dels Baus, and premiered in Brussels, to rave reviews. A teaser on YouTube reveals some of what's in store for London audiences: a gigantic maquette of a reclining woman, in whose innards and out of whose orifices the drama is staged. It looks like a properly Boschian interpretation of the piece, a garden of earthly delights and disgusts that Ligeti himself might finally have endorsed.

Thanks so much for posting this, and I'm going to seek out the YouTube clip.  Making me anticipate the spring of 2010 even more, when Alan Gilbert and the New York Philharmonic will do a semi-staged concert version of the piece at Lincoln Center.  It could be one of the season's highlights.

--Bruce

[MDL]

The reason they are out of print has nothing to do with Ligeti or his performers, it's because Sony refocused itself to classical crossover a few years back and has junked almost all of its serious recordings from the 1990s. At least they mid-priced them first, so that you can pick up some excellent Salonen discs, for example, for cheap, but soon it'll be difficult to find them without paying rarities prices.

I'm about to pop out and haven't got time to do the research (sloppy, I know), but I'm sure that years ago, I read somewhere that Ligeti did have a falling-out with Salonen about some allegedly below-par orchestral performances, which is one reason why the project switched to Teldec.

[Sid]

Since my last post, I've acquired 2 more Ligeti cd's: on Wergo, the Chamber Concerto, Ramifications, Lux Aeterna, Atmospheres & on Naxos, Idil Biret playing the Etudes (Books 1 & 2). I've really enjoyed all of these. I like the complexity of Ligeti's style, every listen I hear something new. My next step will be to get the Boulez interpretation on DG of Ligeti's 3 concertos. I look forward to that...

[CRCulver]

My next step will be to get the Boulez interpretation on DG of Ligeti's 3 concertos. I look forward to that...

Get the complete DG box "Clear or Cloudy". It's better value.