ABSTRACT
Ligeti’s Violin Concerto astonishes due to an emotional intensity that appears to be rather unusual when compared to the majority of his works. By some means or other, nearly all movements refer to his Hungarian-Transylvanian origins, although these references are more or less distilled and masked by other, ‘later’ issues. Additionally, movements III–V are characterized by catastrophic culminations and by the expression of violence, existential fear, grief and agony. These characteristics suggest that not until the early 1990s was Ligeti able to articulate and, by means of composition, cope with his earlier traumatic experiences – the Holocaust, Stalinist terror and the loss of his homeland – without giving up the aesthetic standards and the technical and stylistic standpoint he had reached by then.
This chapter will substantiate this interpretation on the basis of exemplary details from all five movements, as well as through a dramatic reading of the concerto as a whole. An analysis of the fourth movement forms the central part of the article; here I will demonstrate how Ligeti succeeds in compensating for (or keeping at a distance) the considerable amount of pathos exhibited in some passages by a kind of ‘glassy’ reserve in other passages and, in general, by a tendency towards discontinuity and slightly ironic exaggeration which characterizes Ligeti as a composer. In other words: the concerto manages to retain aspects of terror, loss and grief while, at the same time, undermining any kind of naive identification.
