György Kurtág

Struck by Apollo!

Remembering György Ligeti

 

...

Much has been written about how he profited from folklore research (that of Brailoiu, Kubik, Simha Arom and, of course, again and again, Bartók), but it seems that even he forgot that it was the young Ligeti (1950–53) who revealed in a seminal essay the functioning and harmonising patterns of Romanian folk orchestras.
For him, "the sciences were also a true source of inspiration" (Vidovszky). With Marina Lobanova he spoke about the "paradoxes and beauties of the mathematical way of thinking..." And literature, the arts.
From Heinrich von Kleist to Gyula Krúdy, from Proust to Weöres, Hölderlin and Kafka, Shakespeare and Lewis Carroll, the Joyce of Finnegan's Wake, from Beckett and Ionesco to the Borges of Labyrinths, from Bosch to Piranesi, from Cézanne to Miro and Escher—so much is reflected in this music!

We met and became friends sixty-two years ago. In the first days of September in 1945, the entrance exam for Composition at the Budapest Music Academy changed my life forever. We waited to be called. At the same time I flipped through his scores and saw how far above me his knowledge, maturity and musical fantasy put him.
I hooked up with him for life. Until 1956, as long as he lived in Budapest, we were bound by a close friendship. I had the privilege of witnessing the creation of his works, and participating in his life. I was there when he met Vera, and best man at their wedding in 1952.
I see his life as a single entity, his oeuvre as endlessly ramified, held together by LOYALTY, fidelity. Above all to childhood.
 a) His early childhood Urtraum: motionless textural blocks transform gradually and imperceptibly, squirming and writhing from inside, on the verge of building musical structures. For decades this will be one of his fundamental musical typologies, appearing in its purest form in the immense chromatic clusters and micropolyphonic meshes of his Atmosphères. Then later in the beseeching voice fascicles of the Kyrie fugue in Requiem (1962–1965), unapproachable in its perfection.
 b) Kylwyria, his imaginary country, which he built up between the ages of five and thirteen. He drew colourful orohydrographic maps which could pass for Miro paintings, invented the Kylwyrian language and grammar, geography and history, describing in naive Utopian terms Kylwyria's legal and social systems.
Out of Kylwyria come his Aventures and Nouvelles Aventures (1962–1965). They articulate his second fundamental musical typology: abundant humour, dramatic twists and turns, unexpected tremorous flashes and equally unexpected moments of pause, aggression and apprehension. The three singers develop very human relationships on the basis of non-existent phonetic (Super-Kylwyrian?!) linguistic material. His intention was to unite the two Aventures in a single opera entitled Kylwyria. Happily, Le Grand Macabre was born instead!
Equally, in the Dies Irae of the Requiem a medieval sequence of images unfurls from desperation to anxiety, from the tragic to the grotesque, as if intoning the flash point of a Last Judgement by Hieronymus Bosch, or Hans Memling.
 c) Sometime in his childhood he read the short story by Gyula Krúdy about an old widow whose apartment is bathed in twilight and stuffed full of antique clocks which beat confused, irregular time, creating a unique atmosphere. From this childhood memory and his experience with the Poème Symphonique for 100 metronomes, Ligeti developed a new type of scherzo whose tempo and character notations already disclose much: "Come un mecanismo die precisione" (String Quartet Nr. 2, III) or "Movimento preciso e meccanico" (Chamber Concerto III).
The 1962 world premiere of the Poème Symphonique for 100—mechanical—metronomes was a scandal. The title, harking back to the heyday of Romanticism, together with the mechanically oscillating metronomes was like a provocation, an attempt to épater le bourgeois. But later concerts showed the sheer poetry of the piece over and above its daring novelty. At first the metronomes, all set at different speeds and set in motion at the same time, build an impermeable mesh of sound. But then the structure becomes increasingly clear as the quickest machines run to a halt. The beats of the two slowest, the two "soloists" remaining at the end, are like a moving, moving, lyrical farewell.

The last minutes. Vera and Lukas are by his side. His breathing slows, halts, starts again, becomes even slower.
Lukas: "Like the end of the metronome piece."
...the breathing slows even more and then...—stops.

...

II

Ligeti's knowledge of folk music didn't come from books. From the age of three he was surrounded by the living reality of Hungarian and Romanian folklore. As a small child enjoying the summer freshness in Csíkszereda (Miercurea-Ciuc) in the Transylvanian mountains, he listened to the bucium, the Romanian alpenhorn.
Its special sound (which immediately attracted him to this instrument measuring several metres) derives from its ability to form only natural overtones. These sound false, yet attractive, to our ears accustomed to a tempered tuning.
1949 to 1950, he studied in Romania. He worked at the Bucharest and Cluj Institutes for Folklore, listening to and making many recordings.
1951: Concert românesc for orchestra. The horn solo in the third movement demands a bucium-like natural sound of the soloist.
1998-99: Hamburg Concerto in 6 movements. In 2001, he added a seventh. The work is a horn concerto for soloist, 4 differently-tuned natural horns and orchestra. This is the most decisive progression to a new harmonic world. Each horn plays its own natural tones. But their different tunings interfere with the harmony. In this way he transgresses the tempered tone system with the simplest means.
Whether the composition is finished remains an open question. In any case, he spoke at the time of more movements.
But perhaps it wasn't sickness that hindered him; he may have considered the piece finished with 7 movements. In any event, the consequences of the work could not have been fully exhausted. For those who come after, it is seminal, opening up new ground for their quests.

VIII

The legacy.
When I started copying Webern in my thirties, I had to stop in the first movement of his Symphony Op. 21 to deconstruct and analyse the mirror canon in its separate parts, and recast it in a multi-coloured four-voiced score. I felt that studying this music complemented the analysis of Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (which we took very seriously at the Music Academy), and should be made obligatory for all composition students (which is now the case in Budapest).
Recently, when I once again took up the study of Ligeti's work, one of the first sources I came across was Simon Gallot's outstanding analysis of the 5th movement of the Nonsense Madrigals, the "The Lobster Quadrille" (Simon Gallot: "György Ligeti populaire et savant—aux origines du style." Doctoral thesis, 2005, Universite Lumiere, Lyon). My first reaction was: if I weren't eighty-one years old, I would have to get to work copying and analysing Ligeti's "model pieces".
That would mean, it turned out, taking a close look at many compositions. Not just one or two. Almost like with Bach. Above all, I would have to analyse Requiem, the Kyrie, but also Atmosphères, Lux Aeterna and Lontano. Of the études, at least "Desordre" and "Automne de Varsovie." But also the first movement of the Violin Concerto (both versions; after the first in 1990, he wrote another in 1992), as well as the mirror canon of the first movement of the Hungarian Etudes, Continuum and Aventures.
Numbers 1, 5 and 6 of the Nonsense Madrigals also open up the task of once again looking closely at Josquin and Ockeghem. But it's too late for that, it seems completely hopeless.
Yet, it's not inconceivable that I should get to work: "Io e i compagni eravam vecchi e tardi"—"I and my company were old and slow." I could at least copy, analyse and get through Kyrie and Lux aeterna.
But it's hard to imagine what it could mean for young composers to immerse themselves in these works, to be versed in the problems posed by the "Hamburg Concerto." What's important for me could mean life itself to them.

IX

On the etymology of Kylwyria: Vera says that as a five year old, Ligeti had seen a poster for a film called "The Ordeals of a Mother," using the Hungarian word "kálvária" for "ordeals". The word "kálvária" in the title pleased him, but so did the letter Y, which is why he called his country Kylwyria.
As he planned the fusion of Aventures and Nouvelles Aventures into an opera, the first draft was to be called "Oedipus" (see: Egy anya kálváriája, in English: The Ordeals of a Mother!). But then he decided in favour of Kylwyria. In the end, he wrote Le Grand Macabre.

 

György Kurtág
is Hungary's leading composer. Below he remembers his lifelong friend, the composer György Ligeti, who died on June 12, 2006. The speech was delivered at a memorial session of the Ordre Pour le Mérite in Berlin and was published in German in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung on August 4, 2007. The section marked Appendix, from which parts I, II, VIII, IX are published here, expresses those thoughts and ideas Kurtág was not able to include in his speech because of time constraints. The speech and the relevant parts of the Appendix appear here courtesy of signandsight.com, a service of the journal perlentauche.