ABSTRACT
Laments figure among Gyorgy Ligeti's first vocal and chamber compositions. Friedemann Sallis's catalogue of Ligeti's early works lists over 30 works begun prior to Ligeti's matriculation at the Liszt Academy in September 1945. The unique mixture of nostalgia, exoticism, and Utopian longing emerges in two of Ligeti's oft-repeated anecdotes, laments of a kind for a prelapsarian innocence effaced by the Nazi and Soviet occupations. Yet to view Aventures as a mere celebration of chaos, or an "inauthentic hybrid", seems cynical and reductive, and risks missing the intentional paradox at the beating heart of Ligeti's project. The tragic denouement of Aventures concludes with all parties frozen on stage, after the alto "in deepest desperation" runs the gamut of pained emotions. Thus lament, like Aventures, continually re-enacts its failure as musical performance as such, in order to reclaim its transcendent possibility as an act both of and outside of music proper.
