Gyorgy Ligeti, the Hungarian-born musical pioneer whose use of texture and density marked him out as one of the greatest composers of the 20th century, died in Vienna on Monday after a long illness. He was 83.
Although sometimes hailed as the spiritual heir to Bartok, Ligeti’s work encompassed everything from Romanian folk music to avant garde, electronic compositions. He was perhaps best known for his contribution to the soundtrack for Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, and his use of the technique he called ”micropolyphony” — creating collages of musical colour and texture rich enough to melt the borders between melody, harmony and rhythm.
Tributes from friends and colleagues poured in on Monday night. Ivan Fischer, director of the Budapest Festival Orchestra, told the Hungarian state news agency that the country had lost ”the most significant composer of the post-Bartok era”, adding: ”Ligeti was an avant garde, definitely modern composer who did the most for renewing the musical language in the second half of the 20th century.”
Stephen Ferguson, who worked as his assistant and editor at Schott Music in the 1990s, said Ligeti was ”one of the few avant garde composers who found his way into the modern programme”, and a master of soundscapes.
”He reintroduced techniques of polyphony out of the tradition of Bach and Palestrina with a playful and innovative sense of sound. He developed a new sound — cluster sound — which fascinated Kubrick and propelled Ligeti to the top of the great composers of the second half of the 20th century,” Ferguson said.
Ligeti was born in 1923 to Jewish-Hungarian parents in the predominantly ethnic Hungarian part of Romania’s Transylvania region. He was denied entrance to university by Nazi laws and began studying music under Ferenc Farkas at the Cluj conservatory in Romania in 1941, and continued in Budapest. In 1943, he was arrested by the Nazis and sentenced to forced labour for the rest of the war. His father and brother were less fortunate, perishing in Auschwitz.
After the war, Ligeti resumed his studies with Farkas and Sandor Veress at Budapest’s Franz Liszt Academy. After graduating in 1949, he did research on Romanian folk music before returning to the academy as an instructor in harmony, counterpoint and formal analysis. He stayed there for seven years before fleeing to Austria with his wife two months after the Soviet invasion in October 1956. He took Austrian citizenship in 1967.
His arrival in Vienna opened up new possibilities. He met key players in Western Europe’s avant garde music movement such as Karlheinz Stockhausen, Gottfried Michael Koenig and Herbert Eimert, who invited him to join an electronic music studio at West Germany’s state radio in Cologne in 1957.
In an interview with The Guardian to mark his 80th birthday, he explained his new found sense of freedom. ”Although the communist dictatorship was different in style to the Nazis, it was also terrible,” he said. ”In a dictatorship you don’t live your life.”
By the late 1950s, he had won praise for his electronic composition Artikulation and the orchestral Apparitions. But his work did not find a global audience until Kubrick used excerpts from Atmospheres, a requiem, and Lux Aeterna on the bestselling soundtrack for A Space Odyssey.
Ligeti’s music became increasingly satirical, witty and eclectic, culminating in Le Grande Macabre, an fantastic opera inspired by the paintings of Bosch and Brueghel.
Ligeti, who for a time also lived in Germany and San Francisco and was a visiting professor at the Stockholm Academy of Music, was known for striking a playful note with his music, epitomised by a piece he wrote for 100 metronomes.
The Austrian chancellor, Wolfgang Schüssel, on Monday described Ligeti as ”the greatest Austrian in the 20th century music world”, while the city of Vienna said it would offer a special grave site in honour of its adopted composer.
- Ligeti is survived by his wife, Vera, and a son, Lukas, a percussionist who lives in New York. – Guardian Unlimited Â