György Ligeti

György Ligeti was a Hungarian and Austrian composer and musicologist. Born in Dicsőszentmárton in Transylvania into a Jewish family, he grew up with Hungarian as his native language and encountered both Romanian and Hungarian folk music in early childhood, influences that later remained important in his work alongside the music of Béla Bartók. When he was six, his family moved to Cluj-Napoca, where he received his first musical education, and in 1941 he moved with them to Budapest.

His first published work was the song “Kineret” on verses by Rachel Bluwstein, translated by Ligeti himself from Hebrew, published in 1942. In 1943, because of his Jewish origin, he was arrested and assigned to forced labor. During the same period his family was deported to Auschwitz; only his mother survived. His younger brother died in the Mauthausen concentration camp, and his father died in Bergen-Belsen. These wartime losses formed part of the biographical background to one of the most original musical voices of the postwar period.

In 1949, while studying recordings at the Institute of Folklore in Bucharest, Ligeti returned to Romanian folklore, which inspired his 1951 “Romanian Concerto.” At the same time, the constraints of socialist realism limited his activity, and a number of orchestral works, including “Dark and Light” and the oratorio “Ishtar’s Journey to Hell,” remained unfinished. The Iron Curtain also cut him off from direct contact with Western composers, leaving radio broadcasts as his main source of information about new music.

In 1956 Ligeti emigrated with his wife from Hungary to Austria, where he lived for most of the rest of his life; he became an Austrian citizen in 1968. In 1957, in Cologne, he met Karlheinz Stockhausen and Gottfried Michael Koenig and worked with them in electronic music. After about three years, however, he lost interest in electronics and turned back toward acoustic instrumental music. By 1961 he had gained recognition in Western European avant-garde circles with works such as “Apparitions” and “Atmosphères,” in which he made prominent use of sonorism and his own technique of micropolyphony.

Among the notable works of the 1960s are the “Poème symphonique for 100 metronomes,” the absurdist pieces “Aventures” and “Nouvelles Aventures,” the monumental “Requiem,” the choral work “Lux Aeterna,” “Lontano,” and “Ramifications.” After the release of Stanley Kubrick’s film “2001: A Space Odyssey” in 1968, Ligeti discovered that fragments of his music had been used without his authorization, leading to a prolonged dispute with Kubrick and MGM.

In 1977 he completed the opera “Le Grand Macabre,” based on the play by Michel de Ghelderode; it premiered in Stockholm in 1978. In this work, as in “Aventures,” he developed ideas linked to the theater of the absurd. During the 1980s he devised an original rhythmic system, and one of the turning points in his poetics was the “Trio for Violin, Horn and Piano” from 1982. His piano études became especially admired; the first book of études, published in 1986, received the Grawemeyer Award in the United States.

Ligeti’s later works included the “Hamburg Concerto,” dedicated to the German horn player Marie Luise Neunecker, with whom he collaborated closely in his final years. Across his life he also maintained an active parallel career as a musicologist, publishing from 1949 to 1993 on subjects associated mainly with new music, including melody, form, notation, electronic sound synthesis, computers in music, Anton Webern, and his own compositions. He was married from 1952 to Vera Ligeti, a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, and their son Lukas Ligeti became an Austrian and American percussion performer. György Ligeti died in Vienna in 2006.

Connections

This figure has 1 connection in the Music Lineage catalog.