The Correspondence Between Ligeti and Adorno in the Light of Discussions on Ligeti’s Position in Modernism – With a Sideways Glance at Le Grand Macabre

Abstract

“I am extremely interested in the new upheavals taking place in music - I was completely isolated from all this in Hungary”, Ligeti wrote to Wolfgang Steinecke, then director of the Darmstadt Summer Course for New Music, in spring 1957. In the summer of the same year, he attended his first seminars and lectures at this internationally renowned forum - and just a few years later, he took on the same place an important role as a lecturer and source of inspiration. Despite this and many other clear indications of Ligeti’s central role in new music since 1950, the references to other important European composers of the 20th/21st century are sometimes downplayed in Musicology, to simultaneously emphasize the conservative aspects of some of his statements about music. But does this help us to understand Ligeti’s music? It seems to me that the answer to this question is clearly in the negative. Keywords: Ligeti, Adorno, modernism, Le grand macabre