Musikfestival

György Ligeti is one of the most original and at the same time technically refined composers of the 20th century. In his work he combined constructive rigor with associative freedom.

Shortly before his 100th birthday, the 2023 Musikfestival dedicated a two-day program to the composer, during which outstanding performers highlighted key aspects of his work.

Growing up as a Hungarian Jew on the edge of the Carpathian Mountains in Transylvania—which had been part of Romania since 1920—Ligeti was surrounded from an early age by unfamiliar sounds of language that he could not understand. He heard the stirring songs of the mourners, and he marveled at the magical sound of the alphorn in the mountains, with its natural tones that deviated from equal temperament. All of this would later find its way into his music at crucial moments—for example, in the Violin Concerto, which was performed at the 2023 Musikfestival with Barnabás Kelemen as soloist.

The composer evaded the postmodern dilemma between belief in progress and a return to the past at the beginning of the 1980s. Instead, he allowed for more of the strange and colorful: the hypnotic visual representations of fractal geometry, the rhythmic subtleties of the ars subtilior of the 1400s, the pulsation patterns of the music of Central Africa, or the crazy superimposition of different speeds in the studies for self-playing piano by the American Conlon Nancarrow (1912-1997). The "excessively curious", as Ligeti once described himself, absorbed the impulses of a truly globalized culture.

While he broke away from the avant-garde’s strict rules, he assessed the models he chose primarily for their potential for innovation. On the other hand, even when he proceeded with an almost scientific methodology, Ligeti did not rely on any “formula,” but ultimately followed his artistic intuition. Ligeti’s writing was complex but never hermetic: his works sound virtuosic and immediately communicative; they are playful and humorous—and they also repeatedly make room for a very poetically expressed melancholy. Once a victim of two totalitarian systems—two of his family members died in concentration camps—Ligeti, who had fled Hungary in 1956 and made his way to Cologne via Vienna, was already critical of the doctrinal tendencies of New Music as early as the 1960s. “Atmosphères,” the orchestral piece that premiered in Donaueschingen in 1961 and had to be repeated immediately, made the composer, then in his late thirties, famous overnight. The dazzlingly bright pianissimo cluster with which “Atmosphères” begins sounds so synthetic, so alien, and all-encompassing that it seems as if it truly came from another galaxy. Stanley Kubrick sensed this precisely when he used the piece (without the composer’s consent) in his cult film “2001: A Space Odyssey” in the late 1960s. Ligeti employed very similar techniques at the time in his organ piece “Volumina”—which organist Markus Uhl performed at the festival—as well as in the choral composition “Lux Aeterna,” which was performed by KlangForum Heidelberg. Together with the Second String Quartet from 1969, performed by the Quatuor Diotima, this provided a nuanced perspective on the impressive body of work by composer György Ligeti.