György Ligeti's Le Grand Macabre: Postmodernism, Musico-Dramatic Form and the Grotesque

Peter Edwards

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315531274
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

György Ligeti's Le Grand Macabre (1974–77, revised 1996) has consolidated its position as one of the major operatic works of the twentieth century. Few operas composed since the 1970s have received such numerous productions, bringing the eclectic score to a global audience. Famously dubbed by Ligeti as an 'anti-anti-opera', the piece is a highly ambiguous, apocalyptic fable about the human condition, fear of death and the final judgement. As the first book in English solely dedicated to discussion of this work, György Ligeti's Le Grand Macabre: Postmodernism, Musico-Dramatic Form and the Grotesque offers new perspectives on the opera's musico-dramatic identity in the context of musical postmodernism. Peter Edwards draws on a range of modernist and postmodernist theories to explore the collision of past styles and genre models in the opera, its expressive states and its engagement with the grotesque. This is ably supported by musical analysis and extensive study of Ligeti's sketch materials held at the Paul Sacher Foundation in Basel. Edwards's analyses culminate in a new approach to examining the opera's rich multiplicities, the composition of the musical material and the nature of Ligeti's relationship with the musical past. This is a key reference work in the fields of musical modernism and postmodernism, opera studies and the music of Ligeti.

1 An anti-anti-opera

Ligeti began work on various ideas for an opera during the late 1960s, initiating what would become, as Richard Steinitz characterises it, a ‘winding road to Breughelland’.¹ The development of ideas for the opera is well documented in comments made by Ligeti in interviews and in a handful of studies that present theoretical perspectives on the opera.² Yet much remains to be said about how Ligeti’s engagement with music of the past translates into a new approach to composing opera and the implications of this for the understanding of musical postmodernism. This chapter traces the background for the opera, focusing to begin with on the narrative and initial musical conception. This discussion will prompt questions of history, the status of musical material and the ‘situatedness’ of the listener. Moreover, it will examine the relation of the opera to its own past in response to the historical narratives of today on musical postmodernism.

Core to the expressive identity of the opera and a major theme throughout this book is the awareness that the opera seems to confer of its own self-production: it evinces a level of critical reflection in relation to its past which denies any straightforward explication. Superficial notions of revisiting are insufficient. The tension between past and present is tangible and contributes to the dissolution of definitive borders between the values of modernism and a conventional understanding of postmodernist aesthetics. This chapter will indicate how an understanding of complex issues of pastness, process and becoming may help to situate the opera in a broader and more nuanced historical context, before these ideas are followed up from different perspectives in the chapters that follow.

Background and development of ideas

In February 1968, having just completed his Second String Quartet (1968), Ligeti turned his attention to opera. Later in the year he gave his idea a working title in a letter to his friend and future biographer Ove Nordwall, dated 13 August 1968: Kylwiria – a reference to an imaginary country conceived during childhood, a place of daydreams and private mythologies.³ No libretto for Kylwiria exists. All that remains are Ligeti’s brief references in interviews and in letters to Nordwall and the director of the Opera House in Stockholm, Göran Gentele. In 1969 Ligeti revised his plans, now titling his opera Oidipus. Significantly more material exists relating to the libretto and stage directions; however, no musical sketches remain.⁴ The stage directions were freely adapted from the Oidipus myth, as retold by Sophocles, with the intention that the libretto would be written in tandem with the music. The idea was to continue from where Aventures and Nouvelles Aventures left off: a further exploration of the possibilities contained in a non-semantic libretto and the expressive power of affect.⁵

Peter von Seherr-Thoss considers that Oidipus and Kylwiria may well have been based on the same musical ideas and suggests that the former is a continuation of the latter. This is likely, given Ligeti’s original intention to compose an opera devoid of semantic content, making it possible to adapt the libretto to match any musical material that had already been composed.⁶ As Seherr-Thoss points out, the sketches for Nouvelles Aventures indicate that the phonetic libretto was composed after the music.⁷ Nordwall supports this idea, citing Ligeti’s creative process and tendency to outline a draft musical form first.⁸ Moreover, Ligeti claimed in 1978 that a significant amount of the music from Oidipus was grafted into Le Grand Macabre:

I had used large selections of it in the Grand Macabre. As well as in two other pieces. Clocks and Clouds for women’s chorus and orchestra and San Francisco Polyphony for orchestra, in large part originated from the prepared material for Oidipus. It is thus exactly like what you said: first the music, then the text. A part of the Grand Macabre is made from the music of Oidipus with an adapted text.⁹

Yet there is no obvious indication in the sketch material available for both Clocks and Clouds (1972–73) and San Francisco Polyphony (1973–74) that the works are related to one another, or to an earlier opera project, or to Le Grand Macabre.¹⁰ The musical sketches relating to San Francisco Polyphony resemble the final score of the work fairly accurately and bear no indication that might link them to a previous opera project. (The only exception and possible connection being that some pages of the verbal sketches for both San Francisco Polyphony and Le Grand Macabre are noted on the reverse sides of concert listings from the Musik Vorschau series published by Universal Edition, although the respective pages are taken from different seasons.)

Seherr-Thoss suggests that the claim that certain sections were repurposed would seem to be an exaggeration.¹¹ Ligeti’s comments are the only source to indicate that this was the case. Yet musical material need not have been notated, for it is possible that Ligeti conceived the music for Oidipus in his mind, and that these ideas were later incorporated into Le Grand Macabre. The sketches for many of his works show that the drafting of musical ideas often only followed a period of gestation involving the notation of associative ideas and verbal references, by which to later recall initial musical ideas. When the music was finally committed to paper it took the form of large swathes of draft score. Many of Ligeti’s comments also tend to indicate an adversity to writing down ideas as musical notation until quite late in the compositional process. In a letter to Nordwall dated 23 December 1964 Ligeti writes:

I have to complete three compositions annually […] so I have to rearrange my life around an increased work focus (I was focused before, but now I must be even more so). I have approximately twelve compositions imagined and planned in detail in my head, so that I could actually execute all of them at once.¹²

The sketches and Ligeti’s comments would suggest that the creative process for the opera was similar to that of other works and involved a long period of thought gestation and adaptation of ideas for the libretto.

Despite extensive preparations, Ligeti had considered abandoning Oidipus in favour of setting Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi or Eugene Ionesco’s Macbett. He also refers to Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass as a potential project. Carroll’s work would be saved for later and what would remain an unfinished second opera.¹³ As for Macbett, Michael Meschke, a marionettist and the intended director for the premiere of Ligeti’s opera, found the work too wordy. Ligeti disagreed: he took for granted the need to adapt the text in combination with the music and mentions that he already had several musical ideas that he thought would work.¹⁴

Ligeti became familiar with Meschke’s work in Stockholm in 1964. He stayed in a flat above Meschke’s marionette theatre for a short period while giving a course in composition.¹⁵ Meschke had already staged a version of Ubu Roi to music by Krzysztof Penderecki, a theatrical soundtrack comprising a sound collage for tape. This was an unconventional setting in the context of a puppet or marionette theatre, but a version that contained elements of absurd theatre. Ligeti too was interested in setting Jarry’s play, and would have pursued the idea further had it not been for Penderecki’s own intention to adapt Ubu Roi into a full-scale opera, a right he reserved with Schott, to which both composers were signed.¹⁶

Following several failed attempts to set a timetable for the completion of Oidipus and efforts to grapple with what had become a very complex libretto, the death of Gentele in 1972 put an end to the project. By now Ligeti also felt that his ideas relating to a non-semantic libretto were in need of re-evaluation:

It gradually became clear to me that the idea of a non-conceptual text could not be pursued any further: this kind of text composition was worn out during the 1960s. I not only needed a clearly understandable plot, but also an equally clear and understandable sung and spoken text: from the ‘anti-opera’ emerged the ‘anti-anti-opera’, then on another level, once again, the ‘opera’.¹⁷

Ligeti began to explore the idea of an opera with an apocalyptical theme, but was initially concerned that the epic nature of such a theme might detract from the drama.¹⁸ This was his attitude until later in the year when Michel de Ghelderode’s play La Balade du Grand Macabre came to his attention. Ligeti summarises in retrospect what he found so appealing about the play:

As my ideas were revolving around some sort of tragicomic, exaggerated and terrible but not really dangerous ‘Last Judgement’ – like I had already composed in 1964 with the ‘Dies irae’ movement of the Requiem: suppression of fear through alienation – Aliute Meczies suddenly remembered that such a drama exists, and she introduced us to Ghelderode’s La Balade du Grand Macabre. It was as if the play was tailor-made for my musical and dramatic conception: the apocalypse that does not really take place, Death as a hero, or who is perhaps just a small imposter, the corrupted and yet happily prosperous, drunken, whorish, imaginary world of ‘Breughelland’.¹⁹

Thus Le Grand Macabre was conceived and the seeds of a narrative design for a non-epic apocalypse were sown. Following the stunted attempts to develop a non-semantic approach to opera and a protracted period spent deliberating a new approach to dramatic form on a large scale, the process of adapting Ghelderode’s play into a musical drama began in 1972. This was not to be opera, and not anti-opera, but a new and revitalised approach which harked back to operatic tradition, but in a new way, an ‘anti-anti-opera’.²⁰ While Ligeti reverted to a narrative construction, this would be no traditional operatic narrative. In 1974, as work intensified, Ligeti describes the plot:

You can never know if Death is really death – a supernatural being – or simply human, a false prophet (you know there are those sects foretelling the end of the world). You always have the feeling that this person can only be a fake. In this plot so many stories are woven in, therefore the stories become ambiguous. Death is in the same moment a kind of Don Quixote and has his Sancho Panza and his Rosinante. But his Rosinante is not functioning, so he takes his Sancho Panza (it’s a drunken Flemish ordinary man – he is the only person that doesn’t believe that he is Death), and his Sancho Panza makes him drunk so that it will turn out that he was Death, but he cannot kill persons. So the supernatural layer of the story is corrupted by Man. When Death is the only person who dies, he is coming from this supernatural level to the normal level. It is a false bottom, because you have the feeling it is tragic, but this is only a mask, and under this, if you take this off, it’s very comic. But if you take it away further, it’s tragic again.²¹

Ligeti and Meschke worked intensively together on the libretto for the first version of the opera. Ligeti made frequent changes to the roles and libretto as he worked with the music and continued to make alterations following the premiere of the first version and even beyond the publication of the revised version of 1996.²² Ligeti’s extensive correspondence with Meschke gives significant insight into the process of adapting Ghelderode’s original play and the way in which musical ideas were conceived. The following letter from Ligeti to Meschke dated 1 March 1976 illustrates the nature of their collaboration. Here Ligeti discusses the characters Clitoria and Spermando (later to become Amanda and Armando, the latter subsequently changed to Amando):

The erotic power of the text of Clitoria and Spermando is only seemingly weakened. I have written a super sweet, crazily ethereal music and needed more text neutrality. In consideration of the articulation of the music I also had to rewrite the text as verse (and in ‘silly’ verse à la Friederike Kempner – Julie Schrader). Do not think that this was un-erotic. On the contrary, I think today we have reached a point in sexual liberation (thank goodness!) where we do not need a lot of sexual expressions, but can move on to a more subtle eroticism. The widespread text simplifications in the Spermando-Clitoria duets were necessary also because everything is sung in a highly ornamental manner, and the comprehensibility of the text is reduced, many words disappear, so the rhy...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of tables and music examples
• List of plates
• Preface and acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 An anti-anti-opera
• 2 A conception of musico-dramatic form
• 3 Arias, ‘leit-characteristics’ and expressive states
• 4 Allusion and transformation
• 5 Stylistic dissonance and the collage
• 6 Resisting closure: The Passacaglia finale
• 7 From electronic music to music theatre
• 8 A musical grotesque
• Bibliography
• Index