ABSTRACT
György Ligeti never made much of his Jewish parentage, neither with regard to his own fate nor that of his family’s. As interest in his person and biography grew, he readily gave information when asked about facts and how they fit together, but always concisely and with the utmost detachment. What we know apart from this comes from two autobiographical texts from the 1970s. These were written when he was already established as a composer in the West and had, following a long period of indecision, finally accepted the Hamburg professorship.
Ligeti’s strongest ties were to the Hungarian language and literature, while his Jewish identity was shaped by the years of his youth and by the experience of being part of a minority marked by discrimination. Under the special circumstances which reigned in Transylvania, this situation corresponded to the notion of ‘double minority’ described by the philosopher Ernő Gáll. Under these conditions he, like many of his generation, embraced the opportunity to acknowledge his Jewish identity offered by the Zionist youth movement and became for a few years a member of Habonim (‘The Builders’, referring to the building of Jewish settlements in Palestine). Founded in Great Britain in 1929, this politically left-wing organisation soon had branches in Transylvania, where, beginning in the 1920s, Jewish nationalism was particularly strong.
Even though Ligeti put the Zionist youth organisation behind him and always distanced himself from any kind of nationalism, he remained aware of belonging to a necessarily solidary community. This also perhaps resonates in the ironic remark that he was ‘halfway assimilated’. On the other hand, Ligeti insisted on separating his life from his work and wanted the fact that he and his family were Jewish to remain private. That those early years in Cluj would also have been reflected in his musical activities was, until now, completely unknown, and Ligeti never mentioned it. In the course of inventorying Ligeti’s manuscripts I surveyed all the sketchbooks, which led me to an interesting discovery: a half-dozen early works from 1939 are directly related to Jewish culture, and these shed a new light on the song Kineret, which was composed a bit later. In the following, I will present and contextualise the newly discovered works, and then examine Kineret more closely. Both of these investigations give us a more differentiated picture of Ligeti’s Cluj years. And, in light of his later utterances, it also provides us with a base upon which to consider his Jewish identity.
