György Ligeti

In 1943, the music education of the Hungarian-Jewish composer György Ligeti (jerj LIGG-itty, 1923-2006) was interrupted when he was forced into a labor camp for the hellish months preceding the end of World War II. His 16-year-old brother and parents were wrenched from their comfortable home into Nazi concentration camps, and when the blood-red cinders had settled, György and his mother were the only members of his immediate family who had survived the Holocaust. After the war, Ligeti resumed his studies in Budapest, which he completed at the Franz Liszt Academy in 1949. He spent a year after graduation conducting ethnomusicological research, but then he returned to the Academy as a professor of harmony, counterpoint, and musical analysis. By that time the Communists had replaced the Fascists, so Hungary and the rest of Eastern Europe suffered isolation from artistic developments in the rest of the world. And as Ligeti's music moved from a fairly romantic style influenced by folk music (and Bartók) into 12-tone atonalism, it escaped less and less the censor's pen. Shortly after the failed Hungarian Revolution in October and November of 1956, Stalin's brutal fist fell hard on the Hungarian Nationalists, but Ligeti was able to slip through the Iron Curtain, hidden in mail bound for Austria. As a refugee, he first joined up with avant garde darling Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928-2007) in Germany, and eventually, in 1968 Ligeti and his wife became Austrian citizens, by which time he was already garnering recognition as one of the world's most distinguished composers. Ligeti had a brief professorship in the United States, at Stanford University in 1972, but returned to Europe as a music professor in Hamburg, Germany, from 1973 until his retirement in 1989. He died in Vienna at age 83, after having spent his last years confined to a wheelchair.

In 1968, besides gaining Austrian citizenship, he unexpectedly got a widespread, international audience when Stanley Kubrick sneaked some of Ligeti's music into the groundbreaking motion picture, 2001, a Space Odyssey--even though Kubrick had failed to ask the composer's permission. The selections by Ligeti used in the film (Atmospheres, Kyrie from Requiem, Lux aeterna, and an altered version of Aventures) demonstrate the dense, appropriately monolithic "micropolyphonic" style that is still perhaps most closely associated with the composer. But Ligeti's work actually was constantly evolving, often humorously absurdist, and, although he never returned to the unabashedly tonal idiom of his youthful works, in the 1990s he once again did return to his native folk music for inspiration. But even by the early 1980s Ligeti's music had allowed for major and minor chords to help break the unrelenting microtones, halftones and tritones that washed through the musical mainstream of the 1950s through the 1970s, creating his own harmonic landscape that he described as neither tonal nor atonal. Regardless, his polyrhythmic vitality, inspired in part by folk music of Central Africa, engages a broader audience in ways lesser modernist composers might envy.

Altogether, Ligeti wrote 18 Études for piano solo, grouped into three Books, completed in 1985 (Nos. 1-6), 1994 (Nos. 7-14), and 2001 (Nos. 15-18), respectively. They are regarded by pianists as an exploration and extension of piano technique, bringing forward the tradition of Chopin, Liszt and Debussy through the late 20th Century into the 21st.

• Études, Book I

  • No. 1. Désordre ("Chaos," Molto vivace, vigoroso, molto ritmico), explores fast polyrhythms (i.e., two or more distinct rhythmic units played simultaneously), but also with the right hand playing only white keys and the left only black.

  • No. 2. Cordes à vide ("Open strings," Andantino rubato, molto tenero), starts out with simple, languid arpeggiations that become quicker and more complex as the subtly impressionistic étude progresses.

  • In No. 3, Touches bloquées ("Blocked keys," Vivacissimo, sempre molto ritmico - Feroce, impetuoso, molto meno vivace - Feroce, estrepitoso - Tempo I), one hand depresses shifting "blocks" of piano keys that prevent the depressed notes from sounding when the other hand plays chromatic figures around and over them.

  • No. 4, Fanfares (Vivacissimo, molto ritmico, con alegria e slancio) is another polyrhythmic study, with an ostinato pattern in 8/8 time (subdivided as 3 + 2 + 3).

  • As the title suggests, No. 5, Arc-en-ciel ("Rainbow," Andante con eleganza, with swing), rises and falls in arching patterns that the composer likens to a rainbow.

  • The title of No. 6, Automne à Varsovie ("Autumn in Warsaw," Presto cantabile, molto ritmico e flessibile), refers not so much to the season, as to an annual contemporary music festival in the Polish capital, called "Warsaw Autumn." It offers the constant transformation of a descending figure introduced as the piece begins.