György Ligeti

Born: May 28, 1923, Dicsőszentmárton, Hungary
Died: June 12, 2006, Vienna

Six Bagatelles for Woodwind Quintet

• Composed: 1953
  
• Premiere: Movements 1-5 premiered in 1956, Budapest; complete work premiered October 6, 1968, Södertälje, Sweden.
  
• Duration: approx. 12 minutes

György Ligeti, one of music’s greatest modern masters, was born in 1923 to a Jewish family in the then-Hungarian province of Transylvania. He studied composition at the conservatory in his boyhood home of Kolozsvár during the early years of World War II, when he also managed to take some private lessons in Budapest with the noted Hungarian pianist and composer Pál Kadosa. In 1944, however, Ligeti, with many other Jews, was pressed by the Nazis into forced labor in dangerous situations, including working in a munitions dump just in front of the Russian advance. After the war, Ligeti continued his studies at the Budapest Academy of Music. He pursued field research in Romanian folk music for a short time following his graduation in 1949, but he returned to the Budapest Academy a year later, when he was appointed professor of harmony, counterpoint and analysis. He fled Hungary in the wake of the Russian occupation of 1956 and settled in Vienna, where he met several important figures of the musical avant-garde, most notably Karlheinz Stockhausen; Ligeti became a naturalized Austrian citizen in 1967. In 1957, he was invited to work at West German Radio in Cologne, where he again took up several modernistic compositions in daring idioms that he had to put aside because of the repressive political situation in Hungary. He achieved his first wide recognition in 1960, when his Apparitions was performed at the International Society for Contemporary Music Festival in Cologne. Ligeti continued to compose prolifically while teaching at the Darmstadt Contemporary Music Summer Courses, Stockholm Academy of Music, Stanford University, Berkshire Music Center at Tanglewood and Hamburg Musikhochschule. He was elected to membership in the Royal Swedish Academy of Music, West Berlin Academy of Arts and Hamburg Free Academy of Arts, and he received the Bach Prize of the City of Hamburg and the German decoration Pour le mérit. 

Ligeti’s works include compositions for orchestra, voices, chamber ensembles, organ, piano, theater, electronics (though his music after 1958 was written only for live performance) and one experimental piece for 100 metronomes. He achieved his widest audience when Stanley Kubrick used excerpts from Ligeti's Lux aeterna, Requiem and Atmosphères to stunning effect in his 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey. Ligeti’s music ranges in style from his early flirtations with folk music, Béla Bartók and post-Webern serialism, through the meter-less, blurred chromatic “clouds” of soft, densely packed chords of Lux aeterna and Atmosphères and the minimalistic repetitions of several ostinato-based works of the 1960s and 1970s, to the more traditional pieces of his later years, which incorporate the influence of non-European music while re-embracing his Hungarian heritage. 

In 1953, when Ligeti arranged a half-dozen numbers from his Musica ricercata for Piano (1951–53) as the Six Bagatelles for Woodwind Quintet, he was teaching at the Budapest Conservatory and largely cut off from musical developments in the West, so Bartók became for him a strong influence—“the big genius” in Ligeti's words. The Bagatelles provide a virtual catalog of Bartókian techniques: the modal ambiguity of alternating major and minor thirds in the first movement; the keening, small-interval melody of the second; the cackling ostinato accompaniment of the third; the irregular stomping rhythms of the fourth; the snapping, parlando phrases of the fifth—fittingly, a piece in memory of Bartók; and the asymmetrical rhythms and crushed dissonances of the finale. Despite the strong presence of Bartók, however, the Bagatelles display Ligeti’s distinctive musical personality in their precise balancing of airy and dense textures, their fine tuning of sonority, their post-World War II harmonic acerbity and their sharply etched forms.

—Dr. Richard E. Rodda