LIGETI SPLIT (original) (raw)

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, which would later accompany the "head-trip" sequences in Stanley Kubrick's "2001," 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; his rhythms were fluid, his chords luminous, his 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 classical 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, like many other so-called classics of the twentieth-century literature. They are stocked with classic gestures of piano technique: 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. ♦