GYÖRGY LIGETI’S SECOND STRING QUARTET: BIOGRAPHICAL INFLUENCES AND NEW TECHNIQUES
Keywords:
Ligeti, quartet, strings, micropolyphony, biographicalAbstract
Despite György Ligeti’s personal denial of the direct influences on his music by the events from his young years, the listener can easily find traces and echoes of traumatizing experiences in many of his compositions. The study attempts to answer the following question: to what extent is Ligeti’s music tributary to the composer’s unfortunate youth?
The study emphasizes a few critical biographical details, as well as several related musical consequences. After having had quite a happy childhood in his native town of Târnăveni (Transylvania), and relative stable and fruitful teen years in Cluj, Ligeti faced a horrible personal and professional tragedy when The Second World War broke out. Many of his dreams were shattered, and by the end of the conflagration he would lose two members of his family. The circumstances of these occurrences had been horrifying with Ligeti himself surviving the ordeals by pure chance. Many years later, he would testify that during the Nazi occupation “life and death became a matter of relative indifference.” After the war, Ligeti had to endure yet another terrifying reality: the early years of communism in Hungary, the soviet oppression, and the humiliating cultural censorship. Memories of all these years would haunt the composer throughout his entire musical career.
In attempting to solve the question, particular interest is taken in Ligeti’s Second String Quartet. It is a mature composition, a synthesis (although Ligeti disliked the word) of earlier Bartók-Kodály influences, features borrowed from Stravinsky and Berg, micropolyphony from previous works, and the cooled expressionism of late 1960s.
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