Afterthoughts on the Seventh Concert: 100 metronomes, 2 clarinets, but no oboes

The shortest work on the program calls for the longest elaboration here. Why the interest? For one, Ligeti was our contemporary. He passed away in 2006, and some of us were alive when the Concert Romanesc was composed in 1951. And then there’s his personal story, born in Transylvania, sent to a Nazi work camp, his family to Auschwitz; later, under Communist rule, unable to speak from his own heart and having this particular work totally banned. There’s more, but let’s hear it from others who have studied Ligeti intimately. The following is from the 2006 St. Louis Symphony program notes by Paul Schaivo:

“Ligeti, one of the most original and important musical thinkers of our time, first came to prominence during the 1960s. In his works of that decade, the usual details of melody, harmony, and rhythm collapsed into tightly woven webs of sound: dense chords yielding cloudlike sonorities, melodic lines piled up to form tangled knots of counterpoint, or long strands of taut sonority. The result was a strange new musical world, at once visceral and dreamlike, which became familiar to a wide audience when several of Ligeti’s compositions were used in the soundtrack of Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey. Since the 1970s, the composer’s music has continued to evolve in a fascinating and unpredictable manner.

“ Concert Românesc, however, is an early work, written in 1951, while Ligeti was still living in Communist Hungary. (He fled his homeland for the West during the uprising of 1956.) Throughout the Stalinist Soviet bloc, concert music in a folkloric vein was encouraged by government officials. Ligeti ostensibly heeded that pressure in writing Concert Românesc. He was, in fact, genuinely interested in Romanian folk music, which he had often heard during his youth and had studied at the Folklore Institute of Bucharest, in 1949. Some of the melodies he had learned during his research made their way into his “Romanian Concerto.” But, as the composer observed of this piece, “not everything in it is genuinely Romanian, as I also invented elements in the spirit of the village bands.” The original touches, especially some modernist harmonies in the final movement, led to the work being banned after a single rehearsal in Budapest. It did not receive a public performance until 1971.

“The four short movements of Concert Românesc follow one another without pause. Of particular interest to us is the evocation, at the start of the third movement, of the Rumanian mountain horn. Here, the composer writes an echoing duet for two horns, calling to each other from a distance, and instructs the players to use “natural” tuning, which produces a peculiar melodic inflection. The horn calls return, poetically, at the conclusion of the piece.”

Ligeti has written that under Stalin's dictatorship, folk music was only allowed on the condition that it conform to a "politically correct" format. "It was forced into the straitjacket of the norms of socialist realism." In December of 1956, two months after the Hungarian revolution was put down by the Soviet Army, he fled to Vienna and eventually became an Austrian citizen.

As one would expect, Ligeti's compositions from this dark time are not examples of a sunny musical temperament. Of this ominous period he writes: "People living in the West cannot begin to imagine what it was like in the Soviet empire, where art and culture were strictly regulated as a matter of course -- they had to conform to abstract concepts that were almost identical to the regulations of the National Socialists. Art had to be 'healthy' and 'edifying' and had to come 'from the people.' In short, it had to reflect Party directives."

“Atmospheres,” for orchestra, serves as an extreme pole of Ligeti's work, conveying visions of a sustained ethereal motion in a texture he calls “micropolyphony.” In contrast, Concert Romanesc is a dynamic and vital work, at times reminiscent of a Gypsy lament and dance. The horns remind us of Alphorns, played without use of any valves, so therefore slightly out of tune. At the other end of the scale is the following piece, described by Alex Ross of “The New Yorker”:

“György Ligeti, the greatest of Transylvanian composers, once wrote a ‘Poème Symphonique’ for one hundred 
metronomes. The year was 1962, and the piece had the 
look of a prank—a rotten egg tossed at the classical 
tradition. In performance, however, it cast a curious spell, 
one that the composer may not have fully anticipated. 
Several years ago, I was lucky to witness a scaled-down, 
twenty-four-metronome version of ‘Poème,’ at the New 
England Conservatory. The hilarity of the scene—a 
concert stage filled with windup machines—gave way to 
a sense of unexpected complexity, as networks of rhythm 
emerged from clouds of ticktock noise. Then, as the 
metronomes expired, one by one, there was a strange 
tremor of emotion; the last survivors, waving their little 
arms in the air, looked lonely, forlorn, almost human. I 
thought of Robert Musil’s story ‘Flypaper,’ in which a 
trapped insect is said to perform ‘endless gesticulations 
of despair.’
“The ‘Poème Symphonique’ is Ligeti in a nutshell. He is,
first of all, one of the few major composers, modern or 
ancient, who are notable for a sense of humor.”

You can look and listen to the “Poeme” at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8v-uDhcDyg (Wait past the French introduction and the hundred metronomes gradually appear. Really.)

Ross continues:
“If Ligeti were nothing more than a joker, he would never 
have reached his perch at the summit of contemporary 
music. When the Swedish pianist Fredrik Ullén played 
the composer’s Études at Cooper Union earlier this 
month, the hall practically shook with the force of a 
personality. Blessed with awesome powers of invention 
and assimilation, Ligeti may be the one living composer 
for whom "genius" is not too strong a word… Where the
Romantics used to smile through tears, Ligeti cries through smiles.”

Somewhere in between is “Desordre,” a piece for piano about which the composer has written:

"I am using only an idea from African notions of movement, not the music itself. In Africa, cycles or periods of constantly equal length are supported by a regular beat (which is usually danced, not played). The individual beat can be divided into two, three sometimes even four or five 'elementary units' or fast pulses. I employ neither the cyclic form nor the beats, but use rather the elementary pulse as an underlying gridwork. I use this principle in Désordre for accent shifting, which allows illusory pattern deformations to emerge; the pianist plays a steady rhythm, but the irregular distribution of accents leads to seemingly chaotic configurations. Another fundamental characteristic of African music was significant to me: the simmultaneity of symmetry and asymmetry. The cycles are always structured asymmetrically (e.g., twelve pulses in 7+5), although the beat, as conceived by the musician, proceeds in even pulses."

Got that?

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Tchaikovsky certainly had his problems, but they were of a personal nature and were not imposed on him by the authorities, as in Ligeti’s case. Perhaps it's fair to say that society had a hand in imposing his problems on him. Whatever your view, who of us can say that Tchaikovsky's suffering was less severe? Which is worse, to be under the rule of brutal authority or finding no way out of our own personal hell? The good news is that both persevered and we got the music.

Two Tchaikovsky quotes:

“I sit down to the piano regularly at nine o’clock in the morning and Mesdames les Muses have learned to be on time for that rendezvous.”

“Music is not illusion, but revelation.”

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Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 23 (K. 488) is more of a special work than some may realize. One of three piano concertos written while also composing “The Marriage of Figaro,” it broke new ground by using clarinets instead of oboes. Also missing are the brightness and volume of trumpets and timpani. The wind coloring is fascinating, a softer, more mysterious fabric. Here’s how Phillip Huscher describes it in Chicago Symphony program notes:

“Mozart entered the A major piano concerto (K. 488) in his catalog on March 2, 1786, only a month after the one-act comic opera, “The Impresario;” just three weeks before the famous C minor concerto (K. 491); and less than two months before “The Marriage of Figaro.” Although it's not documented, Mozart probably performed the A major concerto at one of the Vienna Lenten concerts a few days after finishing it.

“This and the other two concertos of the “Figaro” winter are the first in Mozart's output to call for clarinets. (Sketches show that Mozart started writing this A major concerto as early as 1784 with oboes instead.) Mozart begins as if he were following the conventional recipe for a classical concerto (which is totally unlike him), but then, after a few pages, he proceeds to ignore nearly every subsequent instruction. The result is the kind of risky—though not reckless—creation known only to the very greatest chefs and composers. The tone of the entire movement is generous and warmly lyrical, although, as in the duet in the same key between the count and Susanna in act 3 of “Figaro,” there's still room for mischief, doubt, and the thrill of imminent danger.

“Mozart marks the slow movement Adagio instead of the more common Andante—what he has to say can't be rushed. This magnificent and justly famous music stands alone among all Mozart concerto movements, not only because of its tempo or key (it's his only work in F-sharp minor), but also because it unlocks a tragic power that won't surface in music again until Beethoven. The wind writing is particularly expressive, and the piano solo is as simple and haunting as any slow aria. Even in Figaro, with its celebrated mixture of laughter and tears, there's scarcely a moment that plunges so deeply into the heart. The finale, a buoyant and delightful rondo, brings us back to A major, and, after the Adagio's revelations, it sounds like the happiest key on earth.”

Music “that plunges so deeply into the heart,” "a tragic power that won't surface in music again until Beethoven," writes Huscher; that’s exactly how I feel about this music. Here’s how The New Grove Dictionary puts it:

“The emphasis in K. 482 [the one Mozart composed just before the one on this concert] is on bravura writing may be contrasted with the much more gentle nature of K. 488 in A [the one played on the concert]; lacking its predecessor’s trumpet and drums [and I would add oboes], this concerto draws on another, softer range of tone colours, of a piece with its graceful themes… The Adagio [second movement] Mozart’s only F-sharp minor movement, is famous for its poetry and its pathos, derived from its gently falling phrases, Siciliana rhythm, ‘Neapolitan’ harmony and expressive woodwind writing.”

You tube has a video of Horowitz playing the finale (and also helping the woodwinds) at a rehearsal (I think in Milan) at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYSnrATETaQ&feature=related.

Gregory Barnes