Some random notes:
- György Ligeti, Le Grand Macabre – Wikipedia entries.
- Ligeti: Mysteries of the Macabre | Essay by György Ligeti – Liner notes from the album Gyorgy Ligeti Edition Vol. 4. Transcribed by the author Richard Jonathan.
Gyorgy Ligeti’s satiric opera about the end of the world. The story follows the devil (Nekrotzar) after he rises from his tomb and menaces a decadent, foolish prince (Prince Go-Go). The opera ends with the apocalypse and a few, befuddled survivors, closing with the cast saying to the audience: “Fear not to die, good people all. No-one knows when his hour will fall. Farewell in cheerfulness, farewell!”
The performances below are of an arrangement by Elgar Howarth. He describes the style for the opera as “non-atonal”.
From 1974 to 1977 I composed Le Grand Macabre. The Mysteries are arrangements of three coloratura arias (of the chief of the ‘Secret Political Police’), reduced (wonderfully) for chamber ensemble by Elgar Howarth.
Ligeti: Mysteries of the Macabre | Essay by György Ligeti
The three arias appear to be taken from Act 2 Scene 3 #4 “Tsk… – Pssst! Ha! Head of my Secret Service”, #5 “Ahh! …Secret cypher!”, and (possibly?) Act 1 Scene 2 #13 “Who’s there? A Man? – A Man!”, although some lyrics appear to be from elsewhere in the opera. Sung by Gepopo, the Chief of the Secret Police.
His music was suppressed in Hungary and it wasn’t until he and his wife escaped to Germany that he could publish freely and have full exposure to the avant-garde composers the Darmstadt School (Boulez, Stockhausen, et al.). In the essay, Ligeti also references a French art movement I’d never heard of called Lettrism. It’s leader was Isidore Isou and it is similar to DADA and conceptual/performance art. Ligeti called Le Grand Macabre an “anti-anti-opera”, which echos Isou’s Lettrist belief that once everything in art that could be done has been done, a new art must be defined.
Before the fateful year 1948 [the year Soviet Communists took over the government to form Hungarian People’s Republic] I was a typical young leftist intellectual: anti-Nazi, opposed to the conservative Hungarian right, a believer in the Socialist Utopia. Stalin’s ‘surreally existing Socialism’ was then so disappointing and humiliating to us that I soon developed an immunity to all ideologies.
Ligeti: Mysteries of the Macabre | Essay by György Ligeti
Two performances of the chamber orchestra reduction on YouTube. The first is Barbara Hannigan, an advocate for contemporary music, singing and conducting (this absurdly complex piece), and the second is uncredited but might also be her (the conductor appears to be Sir Simon Rattle). (Odd trivia: Barbara Hannigan’s significant other is the actor who played the villain in Quantum of Solace, Mathieu Amalric.)
Updated 27 May 2020
I bought a 7-day ticket for the Berlinker Philharmoniker Digital Concert Hall and got to watch a live performance of Ligeti’s “Le Grand Macabre” with Simon Rattle and Peter Sellars. This was the staging that that I seen pictures of and that had the Chief of the Secret Political Police–the character in Mysteries of the Macabre–singing while strapped to a hospital bed. A riveting performance of illness and paranoia. This Regietheater production took place in a kingdom covered with nuclear waste, the administrators dying of radiation poisoning (the hospital bed performance included gagging and near vomiting) surrounded by barrels of waste. Though it’s a concert version and not fully staged, the props, musician, and the involvement of the singers planted in the audience made it feel full.
Though the opera included the standard humorous, exaggerated avant garde moments, I was unprepared for some of the inspired beauty it also offered. And the ending where the singers address the audience, sounding silly in the Wikipedia synopsis, was one of the more moving sections and a profound ending.
I may buy another 7-day ticket (~$10) just to watch it again.