György Ligeti

Ivan Hewett traces the life and career of the great avant-garde composer and investigates what lies at the heart of his enigmatic genius

- Ivan Hewett

Trying to grasp the essence of György Ligeti is a futile exercise. He was by nature a maker of ironically distant, shape-shifting pieces, as private and ultimately ungraspable as the man himself. Like the Cheshire Cat in Alice in

Wonderland (one of his favourite books, which he yearned to turn into an opera), the music has no solidity, no essence. It’s a whirlwind of airy gestures, gauzy sounds, exaggeratedly drooping melodies and loud comic pratfalls. We are ushered into a glistening and somewhat sinister private world, but just as we’re finding our bearings it all shrinks to near-nothingness, like the Cheshire Cat’s enigmatic smile.

Ligeti had good reason to think of music as a fantastical self-made world, into which he could retreat. Right up to his early 30s, he lived in a state somewhere between anxiety and panic. That existential terror was rooted in the difficulties of being born as a Jew in a part of Transylvania that was rife with antisemitism and constantly fought over between Hungary and Romania – the name of his hometown and the language of his education changed twice, from Romanian to Hungarian and then back again.