Chamber Music: An Essential History

14. Two Fugitives from the Soviet Bloc: György Ligeti and Karel Husa

fourteen Two Fugitives from the Soviet Bloc: György Ligeti and Karel Husa The Ligeti family settled in Transylvania at the end of the nineteenth century and became residents of Hungary. (Since then, the town of his birth has become part of Romania.) Following the trends among Hungarian nationalists at the time, they changed their German family name, Auer, to an approximation of it in Hungarian: Ligeti.1 From 1941 until 1943, György Ligeti (1923–2006) attended Cluj Conservatory, where he studied composition with Ferenc Farkas. In 1944, Ligeti was conscripted and—since he was a Jew—assigned to perilous labor, transporting explosives. During the Holocaust, he lost both his father and his brother to the death camp at Auschwitz. In 1945, Ligeti resumed music studies at the Budapest Academy of Music, ‹rst with with Sándor Veress and then with Farkas. Ligeti completed the program in 1949 and joined the faculty as a teacher of harmony and counterpoint in the following year. Government censors monitored closely the musical output of innovative young composers like Ligeti. Works in a quasi-Bartókian style were permitted, but adventures like Musica ricercata for solo piano were prohibited . During the 1950s, Liget experimented with serialism and other modern techniques. These experiments coincided with the Hungarian revolution of October 1956. Imre Nagy appealed to the United Nations for aid against Soviet domination. With popular support, he became premier of Hungary and organized a neutral government. The Soviet response was decisive: Nagy was abducted and executed. Fearing for their own lives, approximately 190,000 refugees ›ed the country in the following months. Ligeti ex263 plained that his escape was possible in December 1956 because the frontiers remained open, though Soviet forces had surrounded Budapest. The railway people organized trains for people who wanted to go [to] . . . the Austrian frontier; of course, they never arrived at the frontier. The train stopped at every station, and they telephoned ahead to the next station to ‹nd out if there were Russian soldiers there. I and my wife took the train one day. . . . There had been some mistake and the warning had failed: the train was surrounded by Russian military. But they didn’t have enough people to cover the whole train. . . . We in our end very quickly got out and into the town. Somebody told us to go to the post of‹ce. . . . The next day, the postman took us . . . with ten or twelve people hidden under mailbags. Then we were dropped quite close to the frontier . . . within the prohibited zone, with Russians patrolling. . . . We knew we had reached the border when we fell into the mud where the mines had been: the mines had been cleared during the revolution, because Austria refused to have trade with Hungary while the border was mined.2 After he arrived in western Europe, Ligeti worked during 1957 and 1958 at West German Radio in Cologne, where he became acquainted with Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928–2007) and the music of the avantgarde , especially that of Pierre Boulez (b. 1925). Ligeti soon became involved with the Darmstadt Festivals, participating as an attendant in 1957 and 1958, and then as a lecturer annually from 1959 until 1972. He taught there again in 1976, and his works were featured in 1980 and 1984. Ligeti wrote rather little chamber music, but several of his chamber works are quite extraordinary. Some of his pieces, such as his early String Quartet No. 1, Metamorphoses nocturnes (Nocturnal metamorphoses; 1954) and the Six Bagatelles (1956) for wind quintet, show the in›uence of Bartók. Both scores are tremendously variegated with occasional strands of imitation, modal tunes in a largely homophonic texture, sometimes including considerable dissonance, and allusions to functional harmony. The Bagatelles were actually extracted from his collection of piano pieces called Musica ricercata (1953). From these, he selected the third, ‹fth, and seventh through tenth movements; four exhibit unbounded energy and biting rhythms, while the remaining two—placed second and ‹fth in the set of six—are slow and melancholic. In his later works, Ligeti often built sonic complexes from minuscule elements that could be altered gradually by a predetermined process. Early Renaissance polyphony provided one of the models for this structural ap264 • chamber music proach. In particular, Ligeti was fascinated by the way in which Ockeghem used “stagnating structures [in which] the individual voices are constantly overlapping, just like waves washing one over another.”3...