ABSTRACT
As Carl Dahlhaus noted, the string quartet paradoxically unites the intimate sphere of chamber music with ‘pure, absolute musical art’. In the late Beethoven quartets this private realm became identified with formal innovation, giving rise to a new paradox by the mid-twentieth century, in which the genre’s function as a perpetual vehicle of progress became dependent on its history. Thus, Ligeti’s first quartet consciously assimilated and came to terms with the legacy of Bartók, while his String Quartet No. 2 (1968) reached even farther back for inspiration, as it summarized his own compositional journey to date.
This chapter analyses those elements in the Second Quartet that engage Ligeti’s forebears and his earlier quartet, as well as addressing the reception history of the work in the context of the late 1960s avant-garde. Despite Quartet No. 2’s extremely abstract language, it cemented Ligeti’s position as a composer unafraid to draw from a wide variety of, in John McCabe’s words, ‘stylistic resonances and bases’. This large number of ‘stylistic resonances’ incited an equal number of scholarly responses, from Herman Sabbe’s systematic, structuralist analysis to Harald Kaufmann’s search for literary antecedents. Upon reflection, Ligeti admitted to ‘primitive’ motivic-melodic allusions, but stressed the self-contained nature of the quartet: ‘My thinking of that time was completely musical.’ Yet ten years after its composition he admitted to Péter Várnai that the Second Quartet not only contains reminders of his Hungarian compositions, but is a ‘dissolved manifestation’ of the earlier quartet.
Such observations mark the Second Quartet as a moment of extreme self-consciousness in both Ligeti’s personal history and that of the genre. Evidence of Ligeti’s Hungarian works surfaces within the quartet as a return of the repressed, as it were, mirroring the status of the émigré composer within an increasingly politicized late 1960s avant-garde. Its reception history is thus bound up with that moment when European musicologists plumbed the 1960s avant-garde – balanced between the academy and a more politicized existence outside of it – for signs of wider relevance.
