ABSTRACT
Ligeti describes the form of Le Grand Macabre as ‘more than allusion, it was polystylistics. Not all that far from Ives in fact: Ives was the embodiment of polystylistics and the simple assembly of preconstructed parts.’1 Yet he concedes that the more concrete allusions in Le Grand Macabre were undesirable and goes as far as to say ‘later on I realised I’d made a mistake. It is not an option for me personally. In Le Grand Macabre and also to some extent in the Horn Trio I do tinker with things from an earlier age … But I don’t go in for that any more, no, I’m in search of something quite different’.2 These comments made in 1991 denote a sense of dissatisfaction with the openly intertextual qualities of the opera. Moreover, a focus on the forms that arise from this perceived juxtaposition of references has at times led critics to describe the opera as jaded or even ‘a cartoon stamped with a very short sell-by date’.3 Such comments find some sustenance in conventional critiques of postmodernism of the kind advocated by Jameson, views which broadly characterise early postmodernism as the revival of the objects of the past indifferent to the historical tensions of the present.
