by Alex Ross
The New Yorker, May 28, 2001.
György Ligeti, the greatest of Transylvanian composers,
once wrote a "Poème Symphonique" for one hundred
metronomes. The year was 1962, and the piece had the
look of a prank—a rotten egg tossed at the classical
tradition. In performance, however, it cast a curious spell,
one that the composer may not have fully anticipated.
Several years ago, I was lucky to witness a scaled-down,
twenty-four-metronome version of "Poème," at the New
England Conservatory. The hilarity of the scene—a
concert stage filled with windup machines—gave way to
a sense of unexpected complexity, as networks of rhythm
emerged from clouds of ticktock noise. Then, as the
metronomes expired, one by one, there was a strange
tremor of emotion; the last survivors, waving their little
arms in the air, looked lonely, forlorn, almost human. I
thought of Robert Musil’s story "Flypaper," in which a
trapped insect is said to perform "endless gesticulations
of despair."
The "Poème Symphonique" is Ligeti in a nutshell. He is,
first of all, one of the few major composers, modern or
ancient, who are notable for a sense of humor. The
repertoire offers many jokes of the aggressive,
galumphing kind—the shenanigans in "Die
Meistersinger," for example—but less of the sly sort of wit
in which the comedian treats himself as flippantly as he
treats the rest of the world. Haydn had this fundamental
lightness of spirit, and Rossini had it, too. In the twentieth
century, an egregiously humorless one, Carl Nielsen
stood out for his smiling tone. The Beatles also had the
saving grace of silliness; they took themselves seriously,
but not as seriously as their audience did.
If Ligeti were nothing more than a joker, he would never
have reached his perch at the summit of contemporary
music. When the Swedish pianist Fredrik Ullén played
the composer’s Études at Cooper Union earlier this
month, the hall practically shook with the force of a
personality. Blessed with awesome powers of invention
and assimilation, Ligeti may be the one living composer
for whom "genius" is not too strong a word. His music
shows the influence of—to make a random list—the
Masses of Johannes Ockeghem, the player-piano music
of Conlon Nancarrow, the saxophone solos of Eric
Dolphy, the drumming of the Central African Republic, the
etchings of M. C. Escher, and the imprecations of Captain
Haddock in the "Tintin" books ("Blistering barnacles!").
Yet there is a world of raw feeling behind all this
accumulated brilliance, and in recent years the comedian
has almost given himself away.
Ligeti was born in 1923, in Transylvania, to a family of
Hungarian Jews. His father died in Bergen-Belsen, his
younger brother in Mauthausen. He himself survived a
long term in a forced-labor gang. Ligeti was not the only
child of Hitler’s apocalypse who would go on to take a
leading position in the postwar musical avant-garde:
Karlheinz Stockhausen worked in a military hospital
behind the German front; Hans Werner Henze was
drafted into the German Army at the age of seventeen;
and the late Iannis Xenakis had his face torn apart by a
British shell in 1944. The horror of the war seemed to
create in this generation a distaste for sentiment, a need
to discard the past, and an urge to create utopias of
sound.
Ligeti consorted with the avant-gardists, but he remained
wary of them. Having fled Hungary in 1956, he knew that
the enemies of intolerance could become intolerant
themselves. He rarely participated in the ideological
controversies of Stockhausen, Boulez, Nono, and
company; indeed, his "prankster" pieces of the sixties
seemed like a protest against the prevailing aesthetic of
abstraction. In the revolutionary "Atmosphères," of 1961,
Ligeti wrote music of eerie, microscopically evolving beauty, tempering the strangeness of his language with an operatic feeling for phrasing and transition. He avoided the spastic,
stop-and-start gestures that were typical of the era;
rhythms were fluid, chords luminous, forms
organic. The pieces often ended only minutes after they
began, leaving a sense of mystery and expectation.
The work in which Ligeti really found his path was
"Lontano," for orchestra, from 1967. It is a musical
shadow play, in which voluptuous acts seem to be taking
place behind a heavy scrim. The composer helps himself
to harmonies of almost Mahlerian richness, but he
devises his own idiosyncratic syntax for moving from one
chord to another. Is this a Bachian theme in G minor?
Hard to tell, because it has disappeared into a haze of
permutations. Is that a D-major triad in the cellos, right
before the end? Yes, but you can only see it; you can’t
quite hear it. Is this C-sharp now, or F-sharp? No, the D
is coming back. The music hovers out of reach, teasingly
imprecise, yet viscerally beautiful. Each sonority hangs in
the air like the smile of the Cheshire cat. (If you missed
the Concertgebouw Orchestra’s ravishing "Lontano" last
year, you can hear the Munich Philharmonic play it next
February, under James Levine.)
By the nineteen-seventies, the avant-garde had run its
course, and the clearest signal of its obsolescence was
the Beatles’ "Revolution 9," which replicated the way-out
textures of Stockhausen without the benefit of
conservatory training. Composers, trumped by pop,
began to search for a way back toward tonality.
Some, like John Adams, plunged into the thick of
Romanticism, but Ligeti was more cautious; his method
of deconstructing and reassembling tonality on his own
terms—"non-atonality," he called it—meant that
Boulezian scolds could never accuse him of nostalgia.
One landmark of his new style was "Melodien," which
Reinbert de Leeuw has recorded on a gorgeous Teldec
disk; it is modern music charmed and made happy. The
Horn Trio, from 1982, is a virtual-reality chamber-music
masterpiece in which Ligeti’s ghost seems to haunt the
world of Brahms.
With the Études, which began appearing in the eighties,
the composer has come full circle. He is back where he
started, as a student of musicians who had known the
world of Franz Liszt. The pieces are, at times, insanely
difficult, but they are written for the piano, and not around
it. They are stocked with impressive virtuoso gestures: sweeping Lisztian octaves,
shimmering Debussyan arpeggios, Chopinesque passagework, misty chords out of Grieg’s "Lyric Pieces," the stained-glass harmonies of Olivier Messiaen. They
also reach outside classical tradition to the insolent
complexity of Nancarrow, the nervous runs and sweet
cadences of Thelonious Monk, and the rough-edged folk tunes of the composer’s childhood. In these small forms, Ligeti feels free to indulge all his secret loves. The elegance of the resulting high-low mix has already had a profound effect on younger composers, who are hungry for rigor and sentiment in equal measure.
Ullén, a practicing neurobiologist, has recorded Ligeti’s
complete piano music for BIS, but it was another thing to
see him knock off all seventeen Études in high virtuoso
style. After the onslaught of "Coloana Infinita," which was
originally written for player piano, it looked as if Ullén
were going to faint, but he moved on unflappably to the
newest pieces in the set: "White on White" (1995), "Pour
Irina" (1996-97), and "À Bout de Souffle" (1997). The title
"White on White" signals that the pianist is using only the
white keys, and that the music will touch on simple C
major. It is, indeed, clear as day, and yet, as always with
Ligeti, something is off. There are flecks of dark in the
stream of pure, bright, folkish sound. Where the
Romantics used to smile through tears, Ligeti cries
through smiles.
