Greg Stepanich

On the death of Ligeti

With the death Monday of the Hungarian composer György Ligeti, the world loses an eminent creator who had the good fortune late in life to be widely recorded and celebrated by the classical world at large.

But the death of the 83-year-old Ligeti also marks the loss of a composer of the old school, a writer who was prominent in the days when serialism was dominant. We are currently in a time of far greater eclecticism, in which classical writers have essentially opened the door to the influences of the vast world of popular music around them, among other things; it’s safe to say that absolutely anything goes if you’ve got a strong enough message and you can reach an audience.

I’ve been listening to some Ligeti for the past few hours, and what I like about it is that even amid a sometimes-fearsome tonal fabric and an organizational approach that defies ancient expectations, there’s a distinctive personality in there. In a couple student pieces for string quartet, for instance, the hand of Bartok lies heavy on the proceedings, but there’s something gentler about it than the older composer would have counseled.

The Violin Concerto has this absolutely wacky chorale of ocarinas and brass in the middle of the second movement that sounds like the Haunted Nymphs Chorus has wandered into the wrong recital hall, and in the Piano Concerto, the second movements features a slide whistle playing along with a piccolo and bassoon. That, too, makes a deliciously weird effect.

We’re told that Ligeti relished the sound of hard-to-tune instruments, and what’s remarkable to me about their presence as fascinating bits of tone color amid a very different kind of music is what that says about the personality of the man who wrote it. All of the music I’ve listened to since last night (the piano, violin and cello concerti, the two string quartets and a couple string duets) has a kind of urbane impishness that moderates what some ears would find too hard to listen to.

The opening of the piano concerto, for instance, starts with a very jazzy, danceable kind of riffing in the solo instrument, and throughout there’s a geniality that is entirely missing in some of the composers that have followed him. In the first and second string quartets I hear (besides more Bartok) the kind of style now evident in the ongoing Naxos Quartet series of Peter Maxwell Davies. But while Davies is all intensity and seriousness, there’s something much lighter and delicate about Ligeti’s work that invites further listening.

Another thing that we lose with the death of Ligeti is the connection to a time not long ago when substantial portions of Central and Eastern Europe, as well as Russia, had micromanaged the work of their artists in a bid to make it serve the wishes of the state. As Ligeti put it in the notes to a 1996 Arditti Quartet recording of those quartets, the situation in Hungary was such that like-minded artists who weren’t crazy about the idea of being dictated to by the state wrote for themselves, and hopefully, for future performances in friendlier times:

…The fact that everything “modern� was banned (just as it had once been banned in Nazi Germany) merely served to increase the attractiveness of the concept of modernity for non-conformist artists. Books were written, music was composed and pictures were painted in secret, and this in what little free time they had available to them. To work for one’s bottom drawer was regarded as an honor.

It’s easy for us to lightly regard the kind of courage it took to do that. It was no laughing matter to be an artist and defy the tenets of socialist realism, but it’s tough at this distance to think of writing a poem that the Soviets wouldn’t like and filing it away as an act of bravery. But it was, and the composers, writers and painters who continued on when it would have been safer to bend their talents to politics deserve credit for insisting on humanity’s right to be — well, human.

Ligeti isn’t one of my favorite composers, and there’s a lot of his music I should know better, but don’t. I’ll endeavor to do that in the near future, but in the meantime, it’s useful to reflect on his example, which is the example of the artist who wants to pursue an independent path and finds a way to do it.