2. György Ligeti

Extract

György Ligeti (b. 1923), who is now an Austrian citizen, left Hungary in 1956 and his links with his native country are now extremely tenuous. Nevertheless, as far as any nationality may be ascribed to him as a composer, it must still be Hungarian rather than anything else, and it may be enlightening in several ways to consider him alongside his contemporaries who remained behind. When his orchestral piece Apparitions at the ISCM Festival in Cologne in 1960 sensationally introduced a quite new compositional thinking in the post-Webern era, he was known only to a few ‘insiders’, and then only as a remarkably original talent in the electronic field. His Artikulation (1958), the last of three compositions for the electronic medium, still remains one of the peaks in this admittedly still experimental genre. It is also a key work in Ligeti's output, pointing far ahead, to Aventures, the Dies Irae movement in the Requiem and the opera Kylwiria now in progress.