György Ligeti: Of Foreign Lands and Strange Sounds ed. by Louise Duchesneau and Wolfgang Marx (review)

Heinz-Otto Peitgen speaks of Edward Lorenz and the famous ‘butterfly effect’ when he writes, in his contribution to this volume, ‘This is an example of how one single scientist can disconcert a whole scientific community’ (p. 89). Substitute composer for scientist in the above quote, and you have the subject of the beautifully produced György Ligeti: Of Foreign Lands and Strange Sounds, a grab bag of delights, as befits the gadfly nature of its subject and projected audience of both academics and aficionados. Stemming from the 2007 Dublin conference ‘Remembering Ligeti’, organized by Wolfgang Marx and others, Of Foreign Lands is edited by Marx and long-time Ligeti assistant and musicologist Louise Duchesneau (Duchesneau also translated four of the essays with great attention to context and detail). The scope of the collection, which includes former students, scientists, analysts, and distinguished musicologists, resembles that of a much earlier collection edited by Constantin Floros, György Ligeti: Die Referate des Ligeti-Kongresses Hamburg 1988 (Laaber,1991), with the poignant character of a retrospective rather than Referate’s comprehensive snapshot of a thriving career with great works still to come.

The collection sets analytical essays alongside general considerations of Ligeti’s interests and new discoveries from the archives, allotting fresh insights into the music equal weight to ruminative contributions by senior scholars. I therefore discuss the sixteen essays in four groups. Two larger groupings deal with historical/cultural aspects and considerations of specific works, while the categories of ‘source studies’ and ‘student reminiscences’ each contain two complementary essays that will especially intrigue those already acquainted with the literature on Ligeti. The essays are complemented by twelve figures, fourteen black-and-white images by the late photographer Ines Gellrich, and sixteen full-colour plates representing sketches and diagrams from the Ligeti collection housed at the Paul Sacher Foundation in Basel.

In the category of historical background I include essays by Louise Duchesneau, Otto Peitgen, Ildikó Mándi-Fazekas, and Tiborc Fazekas and Friedemann Sallis (whose An Introduction to the Early Works of György Ligeti (Cologne, 1996) remains the most complete account of Ligeti’s Hungarian music). Sallis writes comprehensively on the sometimes fraught relations between Ligeti and his teacher Sándor Veress from 1945 to 1948, as the composers’ exiles from Soviet-dominated Hungary took divergent paths. If Veress had an ambiguous relation to both wartime and post-war Hungary, he still served for the recently exiled Ligeti as a model of moral rectitude when he left for Berne in 1949, and Sallis traces the influence of Veress on Ligeti’s Musica Ricercata (1951–3). For his part, Veress watched one of his favourite students succumb to the ‘rationalization’ and spiritual sterility of the West, and rebuffed Ligeti’s request for a post in Switzerland (p. 13). Throughout Sallis is sensitive to the difference between artistic refugees who hope to return—whether they would or not—and those who left with no intention of going back.

From the time of his earliest studies with Veress (the Three Weöres Songs, 1946–7), Ligeti was inspired by the sui generis Hungarian poet Sándor Weöres. The contribution of Mándi-Fazekas and Fazekas is a welcome addition to the sparse literature on the prodigal, cosmopolitan, multi-faceted poet and translator. (The primary English-language source on Weöres is a Swedish dissertation by Susanna Fahlström, Form and Philosophy in Sándor Weöres’ Poetry (Uppsala, 1999).) After leaving Hungary, Ligeti would not set the Hungarian language again until the Magyar Etüdök (Hungarian Études) of 1983, when he returned not only to Weöres but to poems of the early 1940s for inspiration, as he did for his final vocal work, the song cycle Síppal, dobbal, nádihegedüvel (With Pipes, Drums, Fiddles, 2000) for soprano and percussion ensemble. In Weöres, Ligeti found ‘Hungary...