György Ligeti is one of those composers whose music you probably know even if you think you don’t. Large chunks of it, weird and wild and other-worldly, helped carry the lone pioneer through the ultimate barrier towards the end of Stanley Kubrick’s film “2001: A Space Odyssey” - which thus did at least as much for the composer’s reputation as for a hitherto comparatively obscure tone-poem by Richard Strauss called “Also sprach Zarathustra.” To the ordinary cinemagoer it still seems an inspired choice on Kubrick’s part, though Ligeti was not in the least bit amused. The trouble was that nobody had told him, let alone asked.

He first heard of “2001” when a friend in New York wrote to him in Austria saying that this very important film had come out in America and that he really ought to go and hear the music as soon as possible. He couldn’t afford to travel to London for the European premiere, but he went to the Vienna opening. “I was absolutely astonished. I became very angry.” The tradition is apparently, that brief excerpts can be used with merely the formal permission of the publishers, but that for longer passages consultation is required all round. Ligeti went again to “2001,” armed this time with a stopwatch, and found that just over half an hour of his music, including excerpts from the “Requiem,” appeared on the soundtrack.

So he dived vengefully into the film world’s own special maelstrom of lawyers and contracts. At first he was informed that he ought to be very grateful to have his music promoted in this way. In the end he got $3,000 a small enough sum in context. An American publisher, preparing a book about the making of the film, asked him to write an article about his “collaboration” with Kubrick. When he next visited America and met friends they inquired “Are you coming from Hollywood?” The point of the story - apart from the moral of how, once a man is rootless, he can easily become a faceless non-person in the eyes of those in a position of strength - is that the image of “2001” invested in Ligeti is so utterly uncharacteristic.

Parts of movements Kyrie and Dies irae from György Ligeti’s Requiem, with photos from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 - A Space Odyssey. via YouTube.

For all the growing respect in which he is held in purely musical circles, for all his influence on younger composers and his centrality to a certain cast of musical thought, Ligeti at 51, remains a very private man, one who wants to go his own way as quietly as possible. He doesn’t give many interviews. London may, as we may like to think, be the capital of the musical world, but he has only visited us once before now. Tonight, however, the English Bach Festival stages a complete concert of his works, played in the Queen Elizabeth Hall and broadcast live on Radio 3, with the best possible artists including the London Symphony Orchestra under Elgar Howarth, before which Ligeti himself will give an introductory talk in the Purcell Room.

The essential Ligeti sound is achieved by scoring of massive complexity and detail, fluctuating with immeasurable subtlety; more fancifully, it suggests the murmurings of a distant exotic religious ritual. A “modulation,” or its contemporary equivalent, is extremely dramatic when it comes; when he allows himself a reference to traditional harmony it is often by using the interval of the augmented fourth, the tritone, which in past ages, was supposed to represent the diabolical element in music. Since he was born in Transylvania, one of his publisher’s designers may perhaps he forgiven a picture, which circulates privately of Ligeti with overgrown canines.

It’s another completely false image, though, for as a Jew and a Hungarian he has the instinctive gentleness of man who has been through it. During the war he got useful practice at slipping across borders while all his family were taken to Auschwitz. Only his mother survived.

He settled in Budapest, studying and later teaching at the conservatory there. At the time of the Hungarian uprising, in the autumn of 1956, he was recovering from a car accident, and as soon as he was able he and his wife struck camp. It was too far to walk to the frontier but it was possible to smuggle from one railway station to another hiding under mailbags in trucks. ‘’It was like being in a movie. The Russian police were controlling the frontier. We went across on foot. Four foot.” He makes a crawling gesture. “But then it was nothing for me crossing frontiers in the night without a passport.”

György Ligeti, 2000. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

He went to Vienna where he still lives half-and-half with Hamburg. Matyas Seiber, the Hungarian composer and teacher who encouraged so many young musicians in London, recommended Ligeti to Stockholm, where he was guest professor during the sixties and which helped him develop a new life as a person just as his encounter with Stockhausen assisted him to establish his musical personality. “I was originally Hungarian, but now it makes no difference, only a difference of language. I have no connection with Hungary: I don’t feel Hungarian. I am an Austrian citizen. I left Hungary because I was very unhappy, and when recently I went there again I felt I had not been wrong to leave. I am not a Communist. I spent half my life in two different dictatorships, first the Hitler one and then the Russian one. It is enough.”

I was originally Hungarian, but it makes no difference, only a difference of language. I have no connection with Hungary

His early music - the Six Bagatelles for Wind Quintet for example - shows an influence of Bartok and Stravinsky. At this stage he had no opportunity to listen to Schoenberg or Webern or anything more advanced. As Hungary tried to liberalise itself, however, modern scores and records became available from outside and new music could be heard from German or Austrian radio. The experience convinced Ligeti in the early fifties that the Bartok-Stravinsky style was not his language, and he had already made his first tentative steps in the direction of a new musical world when the events of 1956 effectively ended his more material one.

“I admire Bartok very much, but I reacted against his barbarity. I like Debussy, Schubert, everything soft. I was looking for a music without melody, without harmony. I was invited by the electronic studios in Cologne, and it was here I had contact with Stockhausen. But quickly I realised I wanted to do something very different. I was not interested in serial music, in rows. I wanted to develop a very thick polyphonic web. I call it micropolyphony, because you cannot hear the individual voices. I wanted a new kind of musical colour.” He picks at the sleeve of his jacket. “Here are different threads, green, blue, yellow – but it gives the one surface.

The manuscript for György Ligeti’s Requiem. The Guardian, 7 May 1974.

At one stage in the sixties I came back to rhythmic melodic patterns. I wrote one piece which was even tonal. But very gradually I came to a music in which individual voices could - not be discerned.” Frequently, in Ligeti’s scores, instruments are directed to enter “almost imperceptibly,” which makes his music so hard to follow on the printed page. He doesn’t claim, though, that the effect towards which he strives - “music that is standing still” - is without precedent. He quotes the beginnings of Wagner’s “Rheingold” and the First Symphony of Mahler, whom he often mentions with the reverence so many modern musicians share.

Even allowing for possible mistranslations, he gives an unusually lucid explanation of his composing process. “I always imagine music visually, in many different colours. The muslc is not growing, it is completely empty. The first sketches are always drawings. But if you are to write a programme for a computer you must do it in a language the computer understands: so I have to translate my ideas into a notation the players know. First, there is not sound as sound, but sound as musical form. I look for a long time how to write it down. It usually comes out as I expect, though perhaps I have to change the dynamics a little,”

Sometimes, one might suppose, the intricacy is self-defeating, but this, too, is part of the planning. According to the copious notes which go with the score of the “Requiem,” certain passages “need not be sung in exact intonation. As far as possible, however, effort should be made to keep to the correct pitches.” All this, he says, goes to achieve the desired effect. “I need these details. If the detail was not the same the overall sound would be wrong.”

He speaks much of Stockhausen - five years younger, but with the benefit of an earlier start. It’s hard to find many obvious points of contact beyond a generalised inspiration, though a lot of Ligeti’s works, like Stockhausen’s have merely descriptive titles (“Melodien” “Atmospheres,” “Ramification,” and so on, besides those already mentioned). Now he seems to have made a somewhat romantic departure in calling a new piece, being performed twice at his London concert, “Clocks and Clouds.”



György Ligeti’s Clocks and Clouds, 1972.

This is a study in the contrast between precision and blur, and the title, as it turns out, is, borrowed from the writings of the philosopher Karl Popper. “It seemed to me such a lovely title for a scientific paper, so I took it. I wonder if he knows. I should call him. But I don’t know him.”

The point about Ligeti is that, in some strange way even - if his compositions make you crawl up the wall - he is always profoundly a musician. Stockhausen may sometimes seem almost deliberately to goad those determined to deride him, Ligeti never. Perhaps. though, it’s because Ligeti is not very much bothered what people think, either way. He is not publicity conscious, nor is he self conscious. He tells his composition students in Hamburg that they must be original, not imitate him. He has created his own artistic world, he is developing it in his own way and there is no room in it for the dictatorships either of fear or favour. He has had his share of that sort of thing.

