When György Ligeti Became György Ligeti

This coming Friday SWR Classic will release a new album of the complete works that György Ligeti composed for a cappella choir. It requires two CDs to account for this particular aspect of Ligeti’s work. All of the selections are performed by the SWR Vokalensemble, the “house” choir of SWR (Südwestrundfunk), the regional public broadcasting corporation for the southwest of Germany. The group is led by Yuval Weinberg, who became its Chief Conductor at the beginning of the 2020/2021 season. As usual, Amazon.com has created a Web page for processing pre-orders.

Those familiar with Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey (however many of us still remain) will have had exposure to one of the selections on this album, “Lux aeterna.” It provided the soundtrack for the “trippiest” episode in the film, which served as a cinematic realization of a bizarre light show. Ligeti composed it in 1966, and it was his first a cappella work since 1952, the “early stage” of Ligeti’s works, written at a time when one of his strongest influences was Béla Bartók.

Ligeti had been born in Transylvania, Romania; but his family was Hungarian Jewish. While he received his first musical training in Romania, his primary influence was the Franz Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest, where he began his career as a professional musician. All that changed in 1956, when the Hungarian uprising was violently suppressed by the Soviet Army. Ligeti escaped to Vienna and would eventually take Austrian citizenship in 1968.

György Ligeti preparing a rehearsal performance (from the Dutch National Archives, in Wikimedia Commons, made available under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication)

However, the city that most influenced Ligeti’s efforts as a composer was Cologne. This is where composers such as Karlheinz Stockhausen and Gottfried Michael Koenig were exploring the new possibilities afforded by electronic music. While Ligeti produced very little music in this genre, he was inspired to create similar sonorities working only with conventional instruments.

One of the most successful of his results was “Atmosphères,” completed in 1961 and subsequently appropriated by Kubrick for 2001. Unlike this composition, “Lux aeterna” does not try to evoke “electronic sonorities;” but it does draw upon the tightly-knit polyphony of “Atmosphères.” However, after “Lux aeterna” Ligeti would compose only six short pieces in the a cappella genre.

Thus, the first 45 tracks on this new release reflect back on Ligeti’s more traditional settings of Hungarian texts. In other words, as the title of this article observes, these were the results of the composer’s efforts before he “became” the Ligeti that is familiar to most listeners. Those more interested in his more “experimental” efforts may find these early pieces too bland and/or too predictable. Personally, however, I would prefer these “windows on Hungarian traditions” over the more flamboyant ventures of Franz Liszt into that same domain!

In other words those willing to take a “both sides now” approach to the rich repertoire in this collection are likely to come away more satisfied than they might have anticipated!