Department of Education

Abstract: Conservative critic John Borstlap cited Ligeti as a partisan in his fight against the modernist myth of progress in the arts, based on the famous citation “I am in a prison. One wall is the avant-garde, the other is the past. I want to escape.” Ligeti's ambivalence reflected his distaste for art linked to utopian socialist ideals, and for all that was reactionary. Yet he admitted that his own youthful utopian strivings evolved into a desire for complex music that often defied audibility. This essay traces Ligeti's reception history from the late 1950s onward as a reaction to the thwarted utopian strains in his music. For some, Ligeti's music of the 1960s seemed to define “the contemporary problem itself.” But the composer's increased visibility in the 1990s led to demands that he deal with his Jewish heritage and wartime trauma, and cease writing music with a broad appeal. I argue that Ligeti's works reinscribe the past, the personal, and the extramusical as a conscious expression of his prison. They express the nonlinear notion of progress that defines modernism: a vast “tear in the historical process” able to lift music above the scrum of political-aesthetic skirmishes, to a “region which lies elsewhere.”

Ligeti's oeuvre contains two great representations of death: the Requiem and Le Grand Macabre. But these are no ordinary essays on mortality. Their musical substance and themes are often allied to the grotesque as a trope, in which the ugly and deformed appear as characters and their actions in the opera, or musical techniques pushed beyond acceptable limits in the Requiem and other works. In taking the title of our conference at face value, I wish to show how the grotesque in such readings is but a mask for a peculiar relationship with death found throughout Ligeti's work: a sign of the undead, that life substance which persists beyond life, in defiance of social and symbolic norms. In this paper I will identify how, in the opera and in instrumental works, Ligeti adopts narrative and musical positions that could be called grotesque, with reference to Julie Brown and Esti Sheinberg's application of the grotesque to music by Bartók and Shostakovich. But I will further show how these grotesque elements—as a negation of the proper, of narrative laws and musical conventions—were already implicit within those conventions, retroactively inscribed as their vulgar support. As such, the grotesque in Ligeti embodies the threshold between a symbolic life and death: one made literal in the plot of Le Grand Macabre but existing metaphorically in Continuum, the Chamber Concerto, and the Études for piano.