György Ligeti

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Lore & Background

Ligeti was born in 1923 at Diciosânmartin (Dicsőszentmárton; renamed to Târnăveni in 1941) in Romania, to a Hungarian Jewish family. He was the great-grandnephew of violinist Leopold Auer and second cousin of Hungarian philosopher Ágnes Heller. In 1941 he received his initial musical training at the conservatory in Kolozsvár (Cluj), and during the summers privately with Pál Kadosa in Budapest. In 1944, his education was interrupted when he was sent to a forced labor brigade by the Horthy regime during the Holocaust. His brother Gábor, age 16, was deported to the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp and his parents were sent to Auschwitz; his mother was the only person alongside Ligeti to survive in his immediate family. After World War II, he graduated in 1949 from the Franz Liszt Academy of Music, studying under Pál Kadosa, Ferenc Farkas, Zoltán Kodály and Sándor Veress. He taught harmony, counterpoint, and musical analysis there from 1950 to 1956. In December 1956, two months after the Hungarian uprising was violently suppressed by the Soviet Army, Ligeti fled to Vienna with his ex-wife Vera Spitz. They remarried in 1957 and had a son together. A few weeks after arriving in Vienna, Ligeti left for Cologne, where he met Karlheinz Stockhausen and Gottfried Michael Koenig and worked in the Cologne Electronic Music Studio. He became an Austrian citizen in 1968.

Reader's Guide

Restricted in his musical style by the authorities of Communist Hungary, only when he reached the West in 1956 could Ligeti fully realise his passion for avant-garde music and develop new compositional techniques. After experimenting with electronic music in Cologne, his breakthrough came with orchestral works such as Atmosphères, for which he used a technique he later dubbed micropolyphony. After writing his "anti-anti-opera" Le Grand Macabre, Ligeti shifted away from chromaticism and towards polyrhythm for his later works. In 1973 he became professor of composition at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater Hamburg, where he worked until retiring in 1989. His students included Hans Abrahamsen, Unsuk Chin and Michael Daugherty. He died in Vienna in 2006 at the age of 83. His funeral was held at Feuerhalle Simmering, and his ashes were buried at Vienna Central Cemetery in a grave of honor. He was survived by his wife Vera and son Lukas, who is a composer and percussionist based in the United States.

Did You Know?

• Ligeti was the great-grandnephew of violinist Leopold Auer and second cousin of Hungarian philosopher Ágnes Heller.
• He did not return to the town of his birth until the 1990s.
• His brother Gábor, age 16, was deported to the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp; his parents were sent to Auschwitz.
• Ligeti completed only two works in electronic music: Glissandi (1957) and Artikulation (1958).
• He was the first composer featured in the annual Komponistenporträt of the Rheingau Musik Festival in 1990.