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ISTVAN SZIGETI: I should like to get a picture of your life and work
by counting on three dates, the first being 1923, the year of your birth in
Dicsoszentmarton, Transylvania. The second 1956, when you left
Hungary, and the third 1983, when you came back once more on a visit,
and which is also the occasion of a performance of your works at the
Academy of Music. Let's begin with 1923.
GL: They had no direct involvement with music, but there was a
famous violinist, Lipot Auer, in my father's family. They came from the
region of Lake Balaton. I do not know whether Lipot Auer was my
father's uncle or great-uncle, but he went to live in St. Petersburg and
was a famous violin teacher there at the turn of the century. He was the
only musician in the family. My grandfather was an artist, but not well-
known.
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I've given so many interviews and yet I do not think I've ever told this
to anyone anywhere, it has never come up in the conversation before.
GL: No, I could not at that stage. I had not heard any contemporary
music on the radio, Richard Strauss was the most modern composer
broadcast at the time, and even so, I didn't hear much until I was
sixteen. I knew that there was such a thing as orchestration, and that
Albert Siklos had written a two-volume work on it. I asked my aunt in
Marosvasarhely to buy it for me as a birthday present when I was
fifteen, and the first volume, which contained a description of the
instruments, was unobtainable. She bought volume two, and that was
very advanced, it explained how to write scores. That became my
textbook. I started to write a major symphony straight away, without
any idea of the instruments I was writing for, or about anything. All that
I had done was to have read Siklos's book which included an analysis of
the scores of Wagner. You can imagine the result.
IS: Even so, isn't it true that some of your work was published when
you were only eighteen?
GL: I think it was when I was nineteen, by that time the Jewish laws
were already in force and the split was beginning to come about which
isolated the Jewish culture. Jews could not take part in official concerts,
but there was a Hungarian-Jewish publishing firm called “Ararat”
which organized a song-writing competition. I wrote a song called
“Kineret” which was a poem by the Palestinian poet Rachel Blochstein.
I translated it from Hebrew into Hungarian, and set it to music. This
won a prize and was published. Yes, I did write it when I was eighteen,
but I was nineteen when it appeared in print.
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GL: I studied under Farkas until January 1944, but for family reasons I
sometimes had to be in Budapest for months at a time, and then I
studied under Pal Kadosa. In January 1944 I was called up by the
Forced Labor Service, but I deserted on October 10, 1944. The
Russians had already reached the Great Hungarian Plain and I went on
foot to Kolozsvar where I spent the winter of 1944-45. I was ill for most
of the time with pleurisy and was in hospital. It was a recurrent illness
which I contracted on forced labor service, and if I had not deserted
when I did I would have died. Even if I had not ended up in
Mauthausen, the pleurisy would have been fatal as it needed a well-
equipped hospital to treat it in those days. My parents were deported,
and my father died. My mother was taken to Auschwitz, but she
survived, and returned home. She lived on right up to last year, when
she died in Vienna, aged eighty-nine.
IS: Did all these bitter experiences find an outlet in your later work?
GL: Of course, they did. We were living in terror, the few who
managed to come out of that alive knew that it was only by pure
chance. Then came the liberation and we thought that everything was
wonderful, and it indeed was wonderful for two years. By that time I
was studying in Budapest in 1945, and was taught by Sandor Veress at
the Academy of Music. Then we found that we had got from the frying
pan into the fire; we found ourselves under the Stalin dictatorship.
Dictatorships left a very bitter feeling, I think it must be the same for
everyone who lived through these times.
IS: You not only studied in Budapest, you also later taught at the
Academy, that's quite a transition. Who else taught you?
GL: I've mentioned that I studied under Sandor Veress. Well, he went
to Switzerland in 1947, and I was taught for a while by Pal Jardanyi, for
whom I continued to feel great warmth even when he had ceased to be
my teacher. Then I think in 1948 or 1949 Ferenc Farkas became
Veress's successor and I studied under him once again. I owe most of I
my skill as a composer to Ferenc Farkas, harmony, counterpoint, and
what's more, a certain truly professional way of thinking. I graduated in
1949 but I still had a few exams to pass though I was already teaching
at the Academy of Music, while preparing for the remaining exams. For
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At that time I often used to visit Beni Rajeczky; Laszlo Lajtha also
worked at the Museum of Ethnography. Part of the collection of the
earliest recordings of folk music was kept there, in fact, the very
recordings from which the "Treasury of Hungarian Folk Music" was
compiled, and which later was transferred to the Institute of
Musicology. I had started to help Rajeczky with the transcription, and I
can honestly say that I found it tremendously interesting, but when
Kodaly said that he would fix a job for me there, I told him that I did
not like to fuss on details. He replied that if I did not like to fuss on
details then I'd never become a composer. Then Kodaly asked me what
I would like to do, and I said that I would like to teach music theory
somewhere. A few months later I was given a job as a teacher of
harmony and formal analysis at the Academy of Music. I owe thanks to
many people for this, including Erzsi Kozma who was the secretary of
the Academy, but Kodaly was really behind it all. I was never taught by
Kodaly. I studied folk music under Jardanyi too, but nevertheless it is
Kodaly I have to thank for my teaching post at the Academy, which
was no small achievement for a young man of twenty-seven, and also
the fact that there was no loss of continuity, whereas others--Ferenc
Szabo--had wanted to trip me up, it was in fact a very complicated
situation. So from 1950 onwards I taught counterpoint, and I also
carried on with my own studies.
I feel that I learned most from Ferenc Farkas, and that's not just my own
personal experience, he was the greatest teacher for a whole generation
of musicians. Apart from that, Lajos Bardos's classes on theory and
analysis were extremely important, not only as far as understanding the
mechanics of music is concerned, but they also had a great effect on my
composition. Then in December 1956 I left Hungary. I went to Vienna,
first of all, and was really on the bread-line. I obtained a scholarship to
go to Cologne, the scholarship was for four months, I'd wanted to go to
the electronics studio there, which I did, and then afterwards I stayed on
in Cologne for two years, back on the bread-line again.
IS: What do you mean by "on the breadline?" What is life like for a
poverty-stricken composer in Vienna, or, rather, Cologne?
GL: By that time I was too old to be a student, and it was even quite
difficult to get a scholarship at thirty-three. I was still unknown as a
composer, so I had to work my way up from nothing. I had a
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scholarship for four months, and then I lived on a very small grant in
Vienna for a few months. I had to find some way of being able to
compose, so I got some miserable lodgings with the [toilet] in the
backyard and no running water, that is how I lived. I do not want to
make a romantic story out of it, but that's how it was. I lived for ten
years like that, from about 1957 until the mid-sixties. I do not quite
know how the money came from here and there, I wrote some texts for
example. After Apparitions and Atmospheres had been performed in
1961 I became famous, but I couldn't make a living from this. Then I
was invited to be a guest teacher in Stockholm, but I never lived there, I
just went there quite a lot, about three times a year, for two weeks at a
time. In those days there was such a difference in exchange rates
between the Swedish krona and the Austrian schilling that I could live
for six months on the money I earned teaching for two weeks in
Sweden. My wife was studying at the university, and she had a modest
post as a psychologist, we managed to come through it all somehow. It
did not bother us too much, the poverty, we walked instead of taking
the tram, we could just afford to pay the rent for our room each month,
and so we managed.
IS:What did it feel like to be famous after all that? Because I think that
it all happened quite fast; Apparitions had its first performance around
1960, and although it was not exactly overpraised, it certainly brought
you world-wide recognition.
IS: Do you read the reviews and actually take notice of them? Some
composers say that they aren't at all interested in critical opinion, they
are the only ones who are qualified to judge their own work.
GL: I think that is very conceited. If I happen to see a review then I'm
interested enough to read it. Often it is just nonsense, whether praising
or damning, and it is usually the praise that is nonsense. But I
frequently give serious consideration to criticism. To take the example
of Le Grand Macabre, the libretto which I had written jointly with a
Swedish director, well, the libretto was the weak point of the opera, and
when it attracted adverse criticism I began to think perhaps it really was
rubbish, and that I should not write any more libretti, I should stick to
music.
IS: If I asked you to select the work which pleases you, and you
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Yes, well, I can say only little as yet about the next one. It is a piano
concerto which I began years ago, but which I always begin fresh.
About my last finished work: it consists of four choral pieces: The
Three Fantasies were written to Holderlin poems, and as the title of one
of them is “Abendfantasie,” I named all three fantasies. Then I set a few
of Sandor Weores's Hungarian Etudes to music, but I have never even
heard them, in other words, they only exist on paper. The last really
finished piece that I wrote last summer is a Trio for violin, horn, and
piano, which has already been performed. This I am now able to judge
in perspective. A pianist who played the Brahms Trio with a very good
horn player and violinist asked me whether I felt like writing
something, and I was just in the mood because I am very fond of the
horn. I even thought of a horn concerto but I decided to keep to
chamber music. This piece is important for me, because after my opera,
which I completed in 1977, I composed only two harpsichord pieces in
1978. A four-year gap followed which had two causes. One of them
was that when a man approaches sixty, that is in itself an illness. To put
it bluntly, I had been gravely ill for some time, and this meant a pretty
big break in my life. The other was a stylistic caesura, that is, the works
of my youth were composed under the powerful influence of Bartok,
and gradually already here in Budapest, even before 1956, a change
came about. I began to write what I call surface music and
micropolyphonic music. Then I gradually arrived at a point where I felt
this could no longer go on, I wanted to remain myself. I did not want to
follow any kind of fad, not even the fashion of turning back to
romanticism, but I knew I would have to change something in my own
music as well. This occurred gradually, in the course of the Le Grand
Macabre opera, but the four years after it were not really a pause, I
simply did not complete any piece. I was writing a piano concerto, I
have started on it about twenty times, but it was still not the real thing, I
tried to loosen up the dense polyphony in it. I had already started this in
the Kammerkonzert, [Chamber Concerto] and in the piece entitled
Melodien, but I would like to loosen it further, so that there should
remain a complex polyphony, but I want the individual parts to be more
melodious and independent. I should like to return to the large, but not
static, form, nor to thematic or motivic work. It is very difficult to
express this in words, because I think in terms of music, I have never
yet formulated things in this way. I shall try to outline what I have to
say.
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IS: Can I say that this static music has been as it were, a bit troubled?
GL: Well, in fact if you listen to the Horn Trio, this cannot be
categorized according to the traditional forms, except perhaps its third
movement alone. There I applied such a primitive device as the a-b-a
form, that is, it is a march movement with a trio in the middle and the
march returns in varied form, but this is only the outer framework. The
most essential thing here is a highly complex polymetrics. I wonder
whether you know my two-piano pieces, Monument, Selbst-Portrait mit
Reich und Riley and Bewegung? In these we do not hear the various
levels but something else, something like the three-dimensional
impossible perspectives in Maurice Escher's pictures. In the same way
there are rhythms and rhythmic formulae which neither pianist plays,
but which emerge from the combination of the two pianos. What you
get there is a complex acoustical illusionary rhythm, which I then
extended to a type of proliferant melody also, and this I developed
further, this is what is essential in it. Then I clearly turned away from
chromaticism, I might say that the horn piece is not an atonal work, but
a non-tonal diatonic horn composition. There are even micro-intervals,
because I use the horn as a natural horn, a natural horn always with a
different tuning, but its individual melodies are homogeneous, they
always remain within a given valve position. In this sense it is very
typically written for a horn.
IS: Will there be a new Ligeti style? Perhaps you'd like to say
something about your plans, about your life.
GL: My private life? Well I live in Vienna with my wife and son, and I
teach in Hamburg, there will be no changes in that respect. I am bold
enough to say that I have already found that new style. I am myself, but
let us call this my last period, the period of my old age, I do not know
how long it will last. I have a great many plans, my next piece happens
to be just that piano concerto which I have tried to write so many times.
I should like to realize this complex polymetrical and very melodious
style in it. Of course it will be a virtuoso piece, it is important for me
that I think in terms of instruments. I am also planning a wind
instrument orchestral composition, and then, in time, a new type of
opera, based on Shakespeare's The Tempest.
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