Ever since - some forty years ago - I heard them for the first time,
they have had me in their grip: Ligeti’s Aventures. And they have not
lost that grip after all these years. Quite the contrary. The same goes
for two other works from 1962: ‘Atmosphères’ and ‘Volumina’. In this
essay, however, I confine myself to the unparalleled ‘Aventures’, in my
view – perhaps apart from Alban Berg’s Wozzeck – the only great, though
negative ‘opera’ of the twentieth century. For, even though the work –
in the best tradition of Webern’s ‘Bagatelles’ – lasts for a mere eleven
minutes, there is a great deal to say about it. Not least because it is
governed by the discrepancy between word and deed.
UNEASE IN LANGUAGE
To begin with, there is geti’s intention to create an imaginary
language.
When a composer wants to write for voices, he faces the problem that
voices cannot sing unless they articulate words. Words are borrowed from
a text to which the composer has to subordinate himself. If he wants
music to speak for itself, he obviously can resort to speechless
instruments. But when he cannot refrain from writing for voices – after
all, voices are the primeval instruments – and when he wants those
voices to speak for themselves at that, he inexorably has to neutralise
the text some way or a another. There are lots of possibilities. The
early polyphonists used to reduce the text to a mere filler. When it
turned out to be too short in relation to the melody, it was adapted by
singing several notes on one and the same vowel. Also the tempo of
speech was not always respected: it often was thoroughly slowed down
(cantus firmus). To the effect that language was robbed of its meaning
and reduced to pure sound. Another method is to choose a random vowel or
syllable and to simply repeat it: as with the syllables ‘do re mi fa sol
la si’ used for singing notes, the ‘lalalala’ used when one has
forgotten the text, not to mention the inventive improvisations of
jazz-singers.
Not otherwise does Ligeti proceed in his ‘Aventures’. He wants to write
for voices without having to subordinate himself to a pre-existing text.
By his own account, he attempts to create a text in an imaginary
language. He therefore lets the words fall apart in isolated syllables
such as ‘ku’, ‘pi’, ‘khè’, ‘poe’, ‘tha’, ‘tho’ in measure 24*. Sometimes
those isolated syllables are joined to new ‘words’ such as ‘tu-hai’ or ‘kitupa’,
equally in measure 24, as did Schwitters in his ‘Ursonate’. But
elsewhere Ligeti goes even further: he lets the syllables fall apart in
separate vowels or consonants. Also these may be joined to sequences of
vowels, such as ‘uu-oo-aa’ (measures 4, 28, 48, 93), or of consonants,
such as 'tschthsdcfddj' (measure 20-23 ‘stage whisper’) or 's-z-zj-sch'
and 'f-v' (measure 44). And every reminiscence of words is entirely lost
when Ligeti lets a sequence of vowels change in a sequence of consonants
pronounced with the mouth closed (varying around the ‘m’), whereby the
vibrato is gradually transformed in a babbling movement of tongue, lips
and cheeks’ (‘Plappern’) (measure 65 to 89). In these cases, a
linguistic logic is transformed into a purely musical one: the need to
exploit all the possibilities of the voice. Instruments cannot
‘pronounce’ different ‘vowels’ and from the ‘consonants’ only always the
same. Voices have no such shortcoming: they can produce a real
‘Klangfarbenmelodie’ on their own – which induced Berio to make the
trombone ‘speak’ nevertheless by manipulating the sourdine, ‘singing in’
and so on.
Also from the normal tempo of speech does Ligeti deviate, not only by
immoderately stretching it, as in the ‘nuhiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiidha’
in measure 47, but also by excessively speeding it up, to the extent
that one wonders how the singers succeed in pronouncing it altogether.
Thus, in measure 47, the ‘Olympic runner’ has to pronounce
PEtomopodonorobolotodorobomono DEpamabla CIdurulumupumuTHODJ (see
excerpt above) in top speed, and ‘articulate’ at that! Although Ligeti
hesitatingly adds: ‘not at the expense of speed’...
It remains to be seen, then, whether Ligeti is really out at creating an
- although imaginary - language. Since not only does he reduce language
to what is music in it - its sonorous body - he also spares himself the
detour through language by introducing plain non-verbal elements: pure
auditory expressions. Also these are not absent in classical music: just
think of the countless interjections such as ‘Oh!’, ‘Oh weh!’, ‘Ah!, ‘Oimè!’
– or of the more contemporaneous ‘Yeah! Yeah!’. The fact that these are
noted down with letters, like words, nearly conceals the fact that we
have crossed the boundaries of language. All the more so, since we are
not dealing here with more or less standardised insertions in a text,
but with a extended range of non-verbal expressions. Some of them can
still pass for words in that they are noted down with letters: the
‘h-h-h’ (panting) in measure 1, the ‘hmmm’ in measure 8, the ‘bèèèh’ and
‘psst’ in measure 92 and the ‘ahaa!’ in measure 98. But others are just
indicated with their name: ‘laughing’ in measure 6, ‘babble’ in measure
90. And just like vowels and consonants, also these purely auditory
expressions are joined to entire sequences, like in the continuum ‘Räusperen,
Lachen, Weinen, Ächzen, Stöhnen en Röcheln’ in measure 12-14. Also the
already mentioned ‘stage whisper’ (noted down as a sequence of
consonants) belongs here. Since, even when it is words that are
whispered, these only become a whisper when they are no longer
understandable and hence are transformed in a purely auditory
phenomenon.
And as if that did not suffice, with Ligeti - just like with Schwitters
- the auditory expressions are joined with what we call ‘kinetic
stimuli’: the various sounds with which man uses to endorse his
movements – think of Japanese fighting. In traditional music we have
Papageno’s ‘Heisa, heisa, hopsasa!’ and Brünnhilders ‘Heiatoho!’. Their
counterparts in Ligeti are the threatening gesture endorsed with ‘vvvvè’
in measure 6 or the mechanical - ‘clockwork-like’ - movements of the
singers in measure 45 which are articulated with ‘tit’ ‘cit’ ‘kit’.
The last ties with languages are, finally, severed when Ligeti
introduces real sounds, such as the explosion of a paper bag.
UNEASE IN MUSIC
Ligeti, then, does not so much create an imaginary language. He rather
dismantles language as such and finally disposes of it altogether. And
Ligeti’s rage does not stop short of language. In his endeavour to free
music from the fetters of language, Ligeti seems to want to get rid of
music itself. For all the above-mentioned sounds are no longer sung on
the tones of a melody and are no longer embedded in a harmonic
accompaniment nor woven into a polyphonic fabric. At first sight, it
seems impossible to tell those sounds from natural sounds as they can be
heard in the real world.
It would be deceiving, though, to understand this metamorphosis, in the
vein of Rousseau, as a return to a supposed primeval state when language
was hardly discernable from music. Or, to state it in ontogenetical
rather than phylogenetical terms: as a regression of language and music
to the source whence they originated in individual life: the primeval
scream, weeping.
For all that sounds is not music. Auditory expressions and ‘kinetic
stimuli’ are real phenomena: they belong to the auditory appearance of
man, just like a face to his visual appearance. And just like visual
reality, also auditory reality can by conjured up. For there is also
something like auditory mimesis: as when the actress imitates
Desdemona’s dying scream or the singer don Giovanni’s cry of terror when
he is driven in hell.
But, as is immediately apparent from these examples: not every auditory
imitation is music. To become music, it must fit the pattern of fixed
tones and the concomitant tonality, and submit to the regularity of
metre, which transforms the sequence of impulses into rhythm. Such was
already the fate of Vivaldi’s murmuring brook or Beethoven’s cuckoo, not
to mention human speech elevated to singing in the opera. If it cannot
put up with such transformation, it remains what it has always been:
pure auditory imitation, just like the recording of a bird or the
dialogue of the actors, the auditory counterparts of the visual
imitation of a bird on a painting or a character on the scene. We
thereby do not leave the realm of art. Ordinary auditory imitation can
conjure up not only existing reality, such as dialogue and the sounds of
nature, but also the most divergent imaginary worlds. That is amply
demonstrated by a lot of ‘electronic music’, which, in the decennium
preceding the creation of ‘Aventures’, began to reclaim this new mimetic
domain. But, for a good understanding of the true nature of ‘Aventures’
– or of the development of music and audible art in general – it is
important to tell ordinary from musical auditory mimesis.
Because the point is precisely that the very characteristics that
elevate ordinary auditory mimesis to music are borrowed from what is
sound in language! When speaking, we use tones with a fixed pitch
pertaining to a scale in a specific mode. And because of their diverging
duration and weight, the syllables of the words generate rhythm and
metre. Auditory expressions, on the other hand, have no fixed pitch:
they freely glide through musical space. And - apart form laughing and
panting - they are not rhythmically articulated: that applies only to
words. Only when subordinated to language is the gliding of sound
replaced with a movement between fixed pitches and only through joining
syllables to words is generated articulation and hence rhythm and metre.
That is how auditory mimesis usurps the magic that binds the ear to
speech. Music even enhances that magic by replacing the gliding between
fixed pitches with sustained pitch and metre with regular measure. Only
thus do the hysterical yells of a angry woman develop into the
coloraturas of Mozart’s Queen of the Night. And that transformation not
only concerns auditory expressions, but speech itself: when music stages
speaking beings, they are transformed into the divine beings Rousseau
imagined in primeval times. Even though, in fact, these are nothing more
than the imaginary beings that saw the light of day through music.
But music also borrows elsewhere. Whereas it takes its hypnotising spell
from language, it takes its contagiousness from the power of kinetic
stimuli to provoke and synchronise movement (Bühler). And that is all
the more easy when repetition is predictable, as with the articulation
of words, but foremost with marching, trashing or rowing. Whence
measure. Which, once adopted through music, also facilitates the
coordination of singing.
As it happens, the very characteristics that transform ordinary auditory
mimesis into music have been corroded during the twentieth century. With
atonality and dodecaphony, first the magic of tonality is broken, then
the sympathetic-synchronising power of measure, until finally only
isolated tones in an unarticulated time are to be heard in serial music,
which no longer makes use of a measure that can be felt, but merely of a
‘notational measure’. And also this development goes hand in hand -
although timidly and merely occasionally - with a relapse of singing on
a fixed and sustained pitch into speech gliding between pitches: think
of the ‘Sprechstimme’ in Schönberg’s ‘Pierrot Lunaire’. In this sense,
Ligeti’s ‘Aventures’ are the accomplishment of this trend. In the
tradition of Stravinsky, the elimination of language in music is far
less dramatic. Here, it manifests itself above all in the increasing
importance of what music owes to the ‘kinetic stimuli’: the unleashing
of pure rhythm in ‘Le Sacre du Printemps’.
AgAgainst this background it becomes apparent that Ligeti’s unwillingness
to submit himself to the demands of language is only a façade, hiding a
far more deeper unwillingness that is not perceived as such: the
unwillingness to further dwell in the realm of music. Or to call a spade
a spade: the unease in music.
IS THIS STILL MUSIC?
The unease in music should not be mistaken for the anti-mimetic élan
that has wreaked havoc in the plastic arts by now for some hundred and
fifty years. Already the title of ‘Aventures’ should prevent us from
doing so, not to mention the titles of the two other masterpieces Ligeti
wrote in 1962: ‘Atmosphères’ and ‘Volumina’. Nobody will doubt that in
Aventures Ligeti conjures up an entire world through sound.
Even though we still are moving within the confines of art, by giving up
sustained pitch and metre it seems as if we have left the realm of
music. geti unknowingly seems to admit this when he calls his ‘Aventures’
a ‘mimodrama’. from way back, theatre has been the natural habitat of
non-musical auditory mimesis: its constituting element is dialogue, pure
auditory mimesis of dialoguing dramatis personae, and also behind the
scene there is ample use of auditory mimesis of a whole array of sounds:
from thunder with metal plates, through wind with silk, to horse’s
hooves with coconuts. No doubt, theatre is more than mere auditory
mimesis: the actors are moving in the visual dimension as well. Also in
‘Aventures’, the musicians are supposed to endorse their auditory acting
with a whole array of facial expressions, gestures, postures and even
full-fledged actions.
No opera, then, but speechless ‘mimodrama’ without music. But it would
be misleading to simply reduce Ligeti’s ‘Aventures’ to speechless
theatre. Even when screams like ‘vvvè’ are accompanied by a threatening
gesture, they could as well do without, and then merely conjure up the
concomitant movement. Whoever merely listens to ‘Aventures’, misses the
visual aspect of the drama, but precisely therefore might imagine the
evoked movements more accurately then when they are actually performed
through the singers/actors. What is more: in passages like the great
solo for the baritone in measures 47-48, the gestures of the body have
become movements of the voice, to the extent that we cannot possibly
conceive how they could be adequately performed by an actor. Here,
auditory mimesis has swallowed visual mimesis. The acting of Ligeti’s
musicians comes to resemble the sporadic and incoherent expressions and
gestures of the singer of a song, rather than the full-fledged acting of
an actor on the scene. Which also manifests itself in the fact that
Ligeti relegates the task of performing to actors on the scene, whereas
the singers are hidden behind the scene.
In addition, the mere fact that it is the voice that is 'gesticulating'
and not the body, should remind us that we have somewhat overshot the
mark by asserting that in ‘Aventures’ music threatens to be dismantled
to pure auditory mimesis: however unwillingly, the sounds continue to
move between the fixed pitches of the scale. To be more precise: some of
them are meticulously noted down with notes (such as the laugh in
measure 7), others with crosses and blocks (such as the ‘desonorised
coughing’ in measure 7), still others have been replaced with linguistic
signs (such as the question marks in the final solo – see the example
above – referring to the gliding intonation of a question). It should be
granted, however, that they thereby seem not so much to be elevated to
the level of music. Rather do they seem to cling with their fingers on
the fringe of the rock while threatening to fall in the abyss. And their
anchoring in music is further enhanced by the fact that they seldom
stand on their own: thus, the laughter in measure 7 seems to burst out
of the long sustained tone played by the instruments. Such a thing can
never be heard in the real world. But it is a magnificent evocation of
the – in our case repressed – tension that is building up before being
released in the laugh. It cannot fail to remind us of the final scene in
Mozart’s don Giovanni, where the slowly built up tension is released in
an awful scream: in both cases the unbroken expression breaks through
the fetters of music – a time-honoured mimetic trick.
And the certain impression that we are still dealing with music is,
finally, only enhanced through the intervention of instruments. They are
the real anchors that prevent Aventures from drifting away to the waters
of pure auditory mimesis. Strange enough, since precisely in the
beginning of those same sixties when ‘Aventures’ saw the light of day,
the avant-garde was trying out various new ways of playing, whereby
every conceivable sound was got out of instruments that were
deliberately not designed for it: think only of Ligeti’s own ‘Volumina’
for organ and the already mentioned ‘Sequenza’s’ by Berio. In sharp
contrast with the freely experimenting voices, in Ligeti’s ‘Aventures’
the instruments are producing rather familiar sounds. Only sporadically
do they walk more adventurous paths – as in the impressive passage in
measure 98 where the players have to rub their instruments with paper or
their fingernails. Such reversal is all the more strange since
instruments are after all designed to idealise the human voice – that is
why their whole make-up is focused at producing articulated sounds on a
fixed pitch. While their forebears relapse in a pre-musical world of
natural sound, their descendants continue testifying to what has been
lost – they are the rock on which the suicidal voices are trying to
cling. Thus, the rather conservative instruments are the counterparts to
the through their regression revolutionary voices.
Here as elsewhere the eminent mimetic instinct of Ligeti’s saves him
from ending up in a blind alley.
THE SCALE OF EMOTIONS
Thus, while Ligeti aimed at reversing the traditional relationship
between language and music through trying to coaxe language out of the
sound of music, he threatens not only to free music from language as
such, but also to rob it from all that is language in music itself.
There are more discrepancies between intention and deed in ‘Aventures’.
Take the ‘scale of emotions’ that Ligeti lies at the base of his work.
Already in Schönberg’s dodecaphony (twelve-tone music) all the twelve
tones of the chromatic scale were organised in a fixed sequence: the
‘series’. In ‘serial music’ this ‘serial principle’ was so extended as
to encompass other dimensions - other ‘parameters’ - of music: not only
rhythm, dynamics and timbre, but also space and so on. In ‘Aventures’,
Ligeti adopts this procedure, although he no longer focuses on pitch,
rhythm, timbre and dynamics but on ‘expressions’. He proposes a spectrum
of ‘groups of expressive characters’ as follows: the first "group"
comprises expressions of irony, mockery, derision, abnegation; the
second embodies melancholy, glum, sad, depressive characteristics; the
third consists of mirthful, humorous, joking expressions; the fourth is
erotic, full of desire but also of aggression, linked with frustrated
desire; and the fifth makes use of fear, the ghost-like, the
mesmerizing.
What first catches the eye is that the flag does not cover the cargo:
not all the expressions in Aventures fit in the scale. Where, for
example, shall we place that masterly outburst of the baritone in
measure 47-48? It is the caricature of a wildly gesticulating patriarch
– we cannot help to be reminded of the meanwhile famous chimps that are
trying to demonstrate their dominance. At best we could categorise it in
a combination of two ‘expressive groups’: ‘irony’ and ‘agression’.
And that reminds us of a second shortcoming of Ligeti’s scale: it has no
inherent logic. Not only are opposing emotions such as ‘eroticism’ and ‘agression’
subsumed under one and the same category, other poles have to manage
without their opposite. Thus we would expect a group of ‘manic
characters’ as a counterpart to the ‘caractères dépressifs’. But there
are none. Unless we understand the group ‘irony, mockery, derision,
abnegation' as such. But why, then, not include the third group
'mirthful, humorous, joking expressions' as well?
And the second shortcoming lays bare a third one: the scale is eminently
incomplete. A superficial listening to the work immediately reveals that
not the whole spectrum of human ‘expressions’ is covered. Of the broad
array of feelings expressing love, we only get ‘erotic’ sounds such as
giggling, heavy breathing and voluptuous moaning. And – in view of the
magnificent bloom of love in classical music – that is surely rather
meagre.
Behind the all-encompassing order suggested by the serial procedure goes
hidden the complete opposite of it: sheer arbitrariness. Or rather: a
remarkable one-sidedness. It is as if one would let a pure tonal melody
pass for of a twelve-tone series. Obviously, Ligeti did not submit to a
serial logic. Rather was he led by its complete opposite: mimetic logic.
He is out at evoking a specific world, and in that world there is no
room for the whole array of expressions, let alone for a succession
totally determined by a serial principle.
UNEASE IN LOVE
Suppose we so extend the spectrum that it comes to encompass the whole
array of emotions. It would immediately become apparent that it cannot
become complete as long as we restrict ourselves to pure auditory
expressions. To begin with, the purely auditory expressions of love are
rather limited: the sound of a kiss, ‘mmm’, panting and the screams of
the orgasm, and that’s it. Already broader is the spectrum of verbal
expressions: lovers address each other with short, gently whispered
phrases, and they love to echo each other. But only in singing is fully
unfolded the whole array of loving feelings – as the old Darwinist
philosophers of art, who regarded the calls of rutting animals as the
primeval song, already knew. In the song, the verbal expression of love
is not only elevated and brought to full bloom through extending echoing
with singing together, it is also enriched because only music knows to
convey all the tenderness and passion that real lovers express through
facial expressions, gestures and postures. Further, in contrast with
love, which is rather inaudible by nature, aggression and dominance are
rather noisy affairs, which hence would tend to be over-represented in a
scale of pure auditory expressions. But also here it applies that anger
and rage do not so much express themselves in yelling, stamping, kicking
and throwing, as in the way of speaking. And it is only music that
succeeds in elevating and enriching those expressions by equally evoking
the concomitant facial expressions, gestures and postures through sound:
think only of the impressive tones with which Mozart’s Commendatore
drives don Giovanni into hell. For the mystery is precisely that those
sustained tones are conjuring up the imposing posture of an impressive
appearance: such a posture is not precisely audible in the real world!
It is, on the contrary, rather its motionless silence that petrifies us.
This is music at its best: it is able to conjure up not only movement,
but also motionless standstill through – non-moving – sound.
Thus, the spectrum of emotion cannot become complete unless it comes to
encompass also verbal, but foremost musical expressions. The reverse is
equally true: when we take the spectrum of emotions as a point of
departure, it immediately becomes apparent that ‘Aventures’ does not
encompass the whole spectrum of auditory expressions. We miss the battle
cry, the alarm, the crying for help, the yelling in panic, the burst of
anger and above all the primeval scream: weeping.
A veritable ‘scale of the emotions’, then, would consist of a
progression from the most elementary expressions to their musically most
unfolded forms. And on a second axis would figure the whole array of
emotions. Only on such a chessboard of combined parameters could be
properly played a genuine serial game.
Such double shortcoming of Ligeti’s ‘scale of emotions’ is not only
inspired by mimetic considerations. It uncovers the deeper resistance
that lies at the roots of the unease in music, that in its turns lies at
the roots of the unease in language. The unease in music itself has its
roots in the unease in love in all its forms: the taboo on music is
merely the expression of an underlying taboo on love – not otherwise
than the mimetic taboo (see: ‘The erotic eye’, in preparation).
UNEASE UNDER TERROR
Out of these elements Ligeti builds a ‘serial’ structure, in which the
various emotions are polyphonically interwoven. No opera, hence, with a
linear story divided in separate numbers, but a sequence of various
combinations of emotions determined by a serial logic. Also here
‘language’ in the sense of a ‘story’ is refused. We spare the reader the
trouble to further analyse this structure. For we stumble here on
another discrepancy between intention and deed. The disconcerting
simplicity of Ligeti’s construction is rather a farewell – if not a
parody on – the serial procedure, than an extension to the new parameter
of emotions.
For everything seems to indicate that Ligeti’s ‘serial logic’ has been
no more than an occasion, if not an alibi to unabashedly set foot on the
mimetic domain that came into view through serial music. To understand
this, we have to look through the trees of the structural to see the
wood of what is conjured up through it – no differently than Ligeti, who
used to point out that serial music sounds otherwise than it was thought
out.
Let us, then, in his very own ‘Aventures’ listen to what there is to be
heard with the naked ear. The work falls apart in nine episodes**, often
neatly separated by full measures of rest. Five of them
(I,II,III,VI,VII) are introduced by long sustained tones, as if it were
the strophes of a song. Every episode is centred around the appearance
of a kind of ‘supervisor’. His presence is intimated through a
sustained, threatening tone, which is only absent in episode IV, VIII
and IX. That threatening tone is not the announcement of the impressive
appearance of a respectable figure such as Mozart’s Commendatore calling
don Giovanni to account. Rather is it the prelude to the indecent, if
not obscene sounds with which the ‘supervisor’ indicates that he is
stirring himself: measure 6 in episode I and measure 11in episode II.
When also the subordinates are stirring themselves ever more
audaciously, the supervisor bursts out in an ostentative display of
power: the heated oration in 47-48 and the loud slams in 50 and 57 of
episode V, the catching ‘Ahaa!’ in measure 58 of episode VII. Until he
is somewhat reassured and retires in the swelling threatening tone in
measures 105-107 of episode VII. To finally become silent in episodes
VIII and IX.
The sustained tone – just like the motives creeping around the sustained
tone of the Commendatore in the finale scene of Mozart’s don Giovanni –
is equally the expression of the way in which the terrorised
subordinates are shirking out of fear for the supervisor’s all-seeing
eye that is resting upon them. But when the ‘supervisor’ happens to turn
his back, or to content himself with producing obscene sounds, the
subordinates seize their chance to indulge in some forbidden activity.
According to the horny laughter and the consequent giggling of the
girls, the greedy panting in episode I is released in some transgression
or other. To judge from the sounds in measure 15 and 16, the
‘subordinates’ have done something that makes them disperse. In episode
III they seem to seize their opportunity without catching the
supervisor’s eye: they hastily whisper or eagerly proceed to action,
scattering now and then, until the threatening presence of the
‘supervisor’ makes them calm down. But in IV there is no stopping them
any longer. They lash out at one another. Which provokes the heated
oration of the supervisor. Whereupon they burst out again and are called
to order by the ‘supervisor’ wreaking havoc. So that they behave well
again and eventually sink in the hypnosis of terror. In VI they renew
their provocations of the ‘supervisor’, but, after some self-restricting
admonitions, they subdue to terror again. When they seem to plan another
forbidden undertaking in VII, the ‘supervisor’, only pretending to look
the other way, catches them red-handed. On his ‘Ahaaa!’ the sinners are
paralysed into veritable musical pillars of salt in episode VII: by
their loudly immobility they are trying to outdo each other in proving
that they have done nothing wrong! In VIII they clash with each other.
Whereupon the ‘supervisor’ reaps the fruits of his ‘divide and conquer’
in episode IX.
All this cannot fail to remind of the proceedings in boarding schools,
classes, play-grounds, work-floors, offices, barracks, not to mention
all kinds of hierarchies. Or also: of a troop of baboons where the
alpha-males are anxiously trying to defend their dominant position. Or
more striking still: of Freud’s primeval father trying to monopolise all
the women in the horde, facing the constant attack of the excluded sons
trying to make a deal behind his back, until the primeval father
‘chases, castrates or kills’ them. Also herein do Ligeti’s Aventures
have something in common with Mozart’s don Giovanni, where throughout
the whole opera the scoundrel is trying to escape the growing horde of
deceived husbands, to finally be called to account by the Commendatore -
even when there is worlds apart between the struggle of the champion of
monogamy and the sympathetic libertine on the one hand, and the terror
of an obscene power-mad person against a revolting mob, that, as a way
of resistance, only knows to bring forth the grimace of pure
transgression.
The nearly strophic structure of Aventures, then, is not only a parody
on serial composition. The ‘serial’ unpredictability - and here again
Ligeti’s eminent musical-mimetic instinct is popping up – is transformed
into the striking rendering of the way in which life under terror is
structured. In a world where everything has to be done in the dark and
where behind every corner lurks betrayal – Ligeti was born in 1923, is a
Jew and a Hungarian… - there is no place for any organic flow. Thus,
unpredictability becomes the red thread that binds all the strophes
internally and among themselves.
Ligeti’s reinterpretation of formal procedures is all the more masterly
because there is a perfect match between the world conjured up and the
means used. No better way to render the breakthrough of the repressed
than to let the auditory expressions in which it is embodied break loose
from the order of language and music. And no better way to render the
chaos unleashed through the terror of the primeval father than to parody
the terror of serial over-structuring and to let it loose on a material
that thoroughly resists structuring as such. That is why this work could
only have been written at the moment when the hegemony of the serial
principle was contested from all quarters. By confronting serial music
with its true face, Ligeti delivers it a final blow while at the same
time laying bare the truth of human relations in our era.
EASE IN THE IMAGE
And that brings us to the last contradiction between word and deed. Up
to now, we completely passed over the fact that ‘Aventures' is not at
all absolute music: there is a libretto written by the master himself.
Hence, the above is merely a rendering of the way in which I have been
approaching the work for a long time. For, by reason of circumstances
beyond my control, only much later could I lay hands on the libretto and
still later could I witness a real performance of the piece. That is the
fate of most of the music in my collection. For I can only blame the
circumstances for the fact that in the case of ‘Aventures’ the
transition to the second and third phase took so long. As a matter of
fact, I have always to overcome a certain resistance when reading the
text to vocal music. And such hesitating develops into straight
unwillingness when it comes to assist at a real performance of an opera.
For, even though some works – think of madrigals, songs of Schubert, the
Tristan – only gain when the text is taken into consideration, as a rule
I cannot but experience a confrontation with the visual dimension as a
straightforward disenchantment. All too often does the introduction of
the visual element spoil the music, because the world conjured up in
music is totally different from the world as it appears in the visual
dimension. From a musical point of view, the love-duet of Tristan and
Isolde is completely convincing. But, on the scene, you have to witness
how the poor singers are desperately trying to pretend that they love
each other. The problem is related to that of the relation of
program-music to its program. The 'Fantasia quasi Sonate' "Après une
lecture de Dante" – a work of that other great kindred spirit and fellow
countryman of Ligeti’s – may be considered as the continuation of
Beethoven’s endeavour to merge the sonata and the sonata-form, as in the
‘Grosse Fuge’. When reading the program, one cannot escape the feeling
that the richness of the music has been given a narrowing
interpretation: it loses more than it gains.
All these considerations justify a first approach of vocal music as if
it were pure music. And that goes especially for Ligeti’s Aventures.
For, great was my surprise when I laid eyes upon the libretto! I could
not possibly link the scenes described in it with the music, unless I
had meticulously transferred the indications from the libretto to the
score, measure for measure.
And then it became fully apparent that the libretto - as if it were a
greedy polyp - takes control of the music and disturbs its coherence by
placing all the elements in a new context. Thus, in the beginning we
hear several voices – the whole group of subordinates – heavily pant,
but only the baritone appears through a cut in the curtain. Here, there
are less actors than suggested in the music. The reverse is true in
measure 47-48, where, on the hysterical outcry of the baritone, first a
first double and then a second one appears, until they are finally
joined by the real baritone. The baritone is split not only
simultaneously, but also successively: he lends his voice - as far as it
does not merge in the background music as such - successively to a
‘cavalier-poet’, an Olympic runner, a North-Pole traveller with looking
glasses and a professor teased by his female pupils. And, finally, the
coherence is utterly destroyed in that the libretto introduces lots of
events that are merely visible. Think of the Golem in the first place.
He does not make any noise, and his movements are nowhere represented in
the score: he appears ‘some measures before the end of the scene’ (i.e.
before measure 46), silently makes ‘two or three strides’ in measure 50,
to finally dissolve in the dark. At best, you could consider the
sustained tone as his musical appearance, were it not that it is to be
heard throughout the entire mimodrama as the embodiment of the terror of
‘primeval father’, of which the Golem is merely the faint shadow in
folk-lore. Is it not rather surprising that the only figure on the scene
that could pass for a primeval father has completely detached itself
from the very music wherein he has so convincingly been embodied in
flesh and blood? And the same goes also for the three sculptures of
Laokoon, the series of slides, the steam-engine and the anatomic
wax-model. It looks as if Ligeti has attempted to combine an existing
musical logic with a superposed visual logic into an encompassing whole.
But the visual logic cannot possibly be reconciled with the compelling
musical and mimetic logic of this marvellous music. It reminds me of the
way in which Stockhausen transformed his 'Kontakte' in 'Originale' (in
1961!)
Hence, rather than with a ‘mise-en-scène’ of music, we are dealing here
with a ‘visualising away’ of the music, a veritable ‘mise-hors-musique’.
It immediately reminded me of the way in which a dreamer tries to makes
his dream more coherent – Freud’s ‘Sekundäre Bearbeitung’. Even though
not the transposition of images in words is responsible for the censure
here, but the transposition of music in images. And even though,
paradoxically enough, the strong ‘narrative’, if not ‘strophic’
character of the music, is translated/censured through the dreamlike,
incoherent - ‘surrealistic’ - imagery as we know it from the
contemporaneous theatre of Ionesco and Becket. It thus turns out that
Ligeti released music from the fetters of language only to subordinate
it to a new reign: that of the image.
THE EK-STASIES OF LIGETI
In ‘Aventures’, Ligeti summons up new mimetic means in view of the
disclosure of mimetic domains hitherto left fallow in music. But these
new mimetic means are not at all a new ‘musical language’, in which
everything can be ‘expressed’. They have only a restricted ‘mimetic
domain’: the attempts to escape from the all-pervading terror.
That becomes apparent as soon as Ligeti begins to compose a new
composition in the same ‘style’ between 1962-1965: the ‘Nouvelles
Aventures’. Despite - or as a consequence of - the attempts to concoct a
new whole out of parallelisms and oppositions to ‘Aventures’, the
mimetic impact has thoroughly faded. Which did not prevent Ligeti from
presenting both works as a new whole: ‘Aventures & Nouvelles Aventures.
Musikalisch-dramatische Aktion in 14 Bildern’.
And it comes to its apogee when Ligeti writes his ‘Grand Macabre’
(1974-1977): a full-fledged opera after a libretto of Michel de
Ghelderode. Even though Ligeti had to go to some lengths to find a
suited text, the way he walks here is the very opposite of ‘Aventures’:
he no longer hesitates to subordinate his music to the strange logic of
a pre-existing story. As a consequence, also his musical means have to
be adapted. The sighs, cries and screams that in Aventures were
wriggling out of the grasp of music and language, are now nestling in
their musical and linguistic envelope again. Hesitatingly though. For
what we get to hear is not the full melodic and harmonic music of the
classic period, but the musical medium of the twentieth century, that,
as already mentioned, begins to forsake precisely the characteristics
that elevate auditory mimesis to music. We get a mixture of Bergian
melodies, Schönbergian Sprechstimme, and conventional spoken passages
like in the German Singspiel. The ‘imaginary language’ of Aventures
survives only as an indecent episode in the periphery of a whole that is
enveloped in music and language, as a kind of reversed atavisms in the
musical ‘regression’ towards a more familiar medium.
Such linking up with the pre-serial mimetic means of the twentieth
century is convincing as long as we are dealing with the burlesque
figures in Ghelderode’s universe. But it is totally incompatible with
characters like Amando and Amanda, the couple in love, utterly at loss
on the scene as well as in music. Already within the confines of
Ligeti’s scale of emotions there was no room for a couple in love, as
little as in Freud’s primeval horde. And that goes especially for ‘Le
Grand Macabre’. In order to let a loving couple convincingly sing, it
will not suffice to fall back on the means developed by Schönberg in his
Pierrot Lunaire or by Berg in his Wozzeck. Only a return to the world of
the Salomé by Richard Strauss, or, better still, of the Tristan by
Wagner would do – Verdi’s Traviata or Mozart’s Figaro would be too much
of a good thing. But also here the unease in music continues to haunt
Ligeti: it seems as if he is only ready to fall back on the kind of
music that is already corroded by the very taboo on music. The same
Ligeti that was ready to go back to Berg when it came to embody the
‘primeval father’ in the more concrete, burlesque characters of le Grand
Macabre, is not prepared to fall back on Wagner. Only as an allusion, if
not as a caricature, is the latter present in Ligeti’s music, just like
in the finale scene of Aventures, where the moaning of the alto cannot
fail to remind of Isolde’s ‘Liebestod’. Still, the musical rapture of
Amando and Amanda, however disfigured, has something of the melancholy
tune that Bela Bartok – another great fellow countryman of Ligeti’s –
lets resound amidst the rhythmic turmoil of the last movement of his
fifth quartet only to soon let it be sucked up in the whirlpool of the
forces unleashed again – or of those ‘Nachtmusiken’ and other epiphanies
in Bartok’s works. And it is surely no accident that also Ligeti’s ‘Nouvelles
Aventures’ introduce a similar breakthrough of caricatured music (also
from the point of view of ‘content’: church music!). Those breakthroughs
of homesickness seem to be the counterparts of that sardonic laughter
resounding in the beginning of ‘Aventures’: the embodiment of the
parodying stance taken by Ligeti on contemporary music in the first
place, but – witness the ‘mise-hors-musique’ of Aventures – also on his
own music. That is why that very laughing that Ligeti cannot give up has
something of the jeering of don Giovanni, whose demonic urge is after
all merely a vain effort to silence the voice of the Commendatore,
resounding deep in his inner self. And it speaks volumes that the
sacredness of that call breaks through in Atmosphères and Volumina.
These - this time unbroken - epiphanies express the longing stirred by
the unease under the reign of terror. Only in these works is
accomplished - as well on the level of music as on the level of
‘content’ - the mystic elevation of Wagner’s Tristan, otherwise than in
Richard Strauss’ Salomé or Schönberg’s Pierrot Lunaire. All this makes
it all too plain that the taboo on music is itself merely the
epiphenomenon of the underlying anti-ideal and anti-utopian taboo on
love in all its forms.
That is why the real accomplishment of Aventures is not to be found in
Nouvelles Aventures or Le Grand Macabre, but in Volumina and Atmosphères.
While, in the Nouvelles Aventures, the mimetic domain is fading away
behind the mimetic means, in Le Grand Macabre it is extended without
finding the proper mimetic means. In Aventures, on the other hand, the
newly discovered mimetic means perfectly match the newly discovered
mimetic domain. They are not torn apart in that mimetic means and
mimetic domain each go their own way.
That is what Ligeti’s Aventures have in common with other masterpieces,
such as Schönberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, Richard Strauss’ Salomé or Wagner’s
Tristan. And it remains to be understood why, ever since the Tristan,
such breakthroughs are only followed by their decay and not by any
further development.
Wherewith Ligeti's Aventures be granted their due place in the Pantheon
of Music!
© Stefan Beyst, January 2003.
* This and the following 'quotations' are merely an approximative
rendering of the phonetic notation in the score.
**The nine episodes are: I (1-9), II (10-18), III (20-37), IV (38-48),V
(49-88), VI (89-97), VII (98-107), VIII (108-113), IX (114-115)
CONSULTED TEXTS
BAUER, Amy: ‘Ligeti and Nonsense – Aventures’
LENTZ, Michael: ‘Sprechen macht die Musik. Ein Ausflug in Grenzbereiche’,
Donaueschinger Musiktage, 2002.
http://www.swr.de/imperia/md/content/swr2/donaueschingen/2002/5.rtf
MICHEL, P. : ‘György Ligeti’ Ed. Minerve coll. Musique ouverte
SABBE, Herman: Ligeti, Lezingenreeks Radio 3.
Friedemann Sallis, An Introduction to the early works of György Ligeti.
Studio, Köln, 1996.
SPANGLER, Eric: Language and Media: An Examination of Ligeti's
Artikulation and its World of Discourse
SCORE
Györgi Ligeti: Aventures & Nouvelles Aventures. Musikalisch-dramatische
Aktion in 14 Bildern. Musik und Libretto van Györgi Ligeti. Henry
Litolff's Verlag/C.F. Peters, Frankfurt-London-New York, nr 5935.
DISCOGRAPHY
György Ligeti : Chamber concerto ; Ramifications ; String quartet N° 2 ;
Aventures ; Lux aeterna, Deutsche Grammophon 423 244-2, 1983.
György Ligeti : Requiem ; Aventures ; Nouvelles Aventures, Wergo WER 60
045-50, 1985 (with Bruno Maderna!).
Györgi Ligeti, Varèse, Penderecki,: Cerha, Springer, Vox 5142, 1996:
Györgi Ligeti e.a. Esa-Pekka Salonen Sony 62 311, 1997
Györgi Ligeti: Aventures etc., Boulez, Universal 471608, 2002
referrers:
Universität Mozarteum Salzburg
Classical Composers Database
Sirius
New Music Links
NRC
Music & Vision Magazine
Ralph Lichtensteiger diary
Minima Musicalia
Torres Maldonado
Savannah Agger
Arts
Academy in the
Woods
Vitro Nasa
Josh Ronsen