Ligeti´s Le Grand Macabre, Essay
Introduction
In
this brief article I will be discussing several aspects inspired by La Fura
Dels Baus’s production of Ligeti’s opera Le
Grand Macabre, which was composed in 1977 and revised in 1996. Some of
these aspects include the concepts of the libretto and ideologies behind both
Ghelderode’s and Ligeti’s text, death as a new concept, or the various
Renaissance influences along with the staging of this particular production.
Libretto: concepts and ideology
It
would be pressing to address first Ligeti’s LGM as new music theatre for
it defies the concept of opera in several ways. For the purpose of coherence
and academic liability, the term opera is still used because it does not fully abandon
the connotations it proposes, as I will explain in the Hyper-operatic
death in LGM. Also, all these points will be related to La Fura dels Baus’s
extraordinary production of Le
Grand Macabre in 2011.
The opera has references to ‘pop art’ and acts as an ‘anti-anti-opera’, with music collages that, even though they refer back to the opera buffa convention, have been perceived as ironic and parodic. This was not new in the absurdist and surrealist movement of the 60s and 70s, as Everett points out, ‘… many avant-garde composers adopted parodic strategies as a form of social critique or commentary’[1].
Ligeti followed this new ideology. However, his opera LGM envisions all sort of concepts, ranging from the use of staging for narrative effect to the exploration of tonality through quotation and pastiche. An interpretation as to why Ligeti turned towards music collages has been observed by Heile and Searby on Kagel’s work ‘Ludwig Van’, where the element of familiarity stands for tradition (an interesting relation to Kristeva’s concept of chora might be enlightening). Searby adds, ‘Perhaps a work like this gave Ligeti a solution to the problem of how to explore the past without sentimentality, by dismantling it in a subversive manner.’[2]
Hyper-operatic Death in LGM
After [Kagel´s] Staatstheater,
writing a ‘real’ opera seemed less sustainable than ever. The styles both of Staatstheater and
his own Aventures had
been fully explored. But, if one could have an ‘anti-opera’ why not also have
an ‘anti-anti-opera’? Like a Houdini-like contortion, Ligeti concluded that
since two successive ‘antis’ cancel each other out, an ‘anti-anti-opera’ must
be… well, opera![3]
Ligeti said
about the concept of the libretto: ‘“The cartoons of Saul Steinberg were my
ideal: characters and situations should be direct, terse, non-psychological and
startling- the very opposite of ‘literary’ opera;… the dramatic action and the
music should be riskily bizarre, totally exaggerated, totally crazy’.”[4] The composer might be referring to a direct, simple
on-stage image, with no intricacies to bias the audience, where the music would
owe ‘“nothing to any tradition, not even avant-gardism’”[5]. If music removes the operatic concepts of Wagner,
Strauss and Berg, its staging and other features would be freer for exploration
as well. The ‘anti-anti-opera’ seems to deconstruct the pillars of opera
history, since Ligeti, at the same time, wanted an opera closer to that of
Monteverdi, Verdi or Rossini. Using music collages would thus not be new, but
it proposes a novel direction in opera and renewed concepts within satire and
irony. But as Amy Marie Bauer points out, there are still some conflicted issues,
‘I thus consider the opera as a whole from three independent but related
perspectives: as parody, as allegory, and as large-scale lament whose
description as “anti-anti opera” confirms its conflicted and melancholic
attachment to the past.’[6]
Steinitz comments, ‘Certainly
the drama is in the music, but the music is inseparably linked to the text,
which needs to be directly understood.’[7] As the opera debates about
the ultimate human experience, death, it had to be universal in every sense,
not only with the translations[8] made but with the
references to every other operatic music that preceded it.
Death is a reality, it is chaotic and difficult, yet it
is still a reality that needs no connotation but Ligeti´s own absurdist
conceptuality. LGM discusses death in an innovative manner. However, after
Wagner and Berg, what is there to be done? Ligeti includes every corrosive
aspect of modern man in this opera. Furthermore, he unintentionally[9]
questions Wagner´s serious approach to death by suggesting that death could be
seen in three perspectives:
1. - be
fake and charlatanic (Chaos);
2. - real
and apocalyptic (Destruction);
3. - or ending
with resurrection (Renewal) like Mescalina.
As both
Ghelderode and Ligeti were interested in Flemish Renaissance realism, Everett
interprets this by using “The Triumph of Death” by Bruegel the Elder to
convey the idea that, before death and horror, the human being resorts to
‘desperate acts’[10]. This desperation could signify a loss of fear, implying
certain positive outlook on death and thus breaking ‘down the barriers that
separate the living from the dead’.[11]
In reality, there is no possible way of knowing, once we are dead, what death is. Ligeti is expanding on Wagner´s pessimism by luring the audience into decadence, where, instead of conventional dramatic climaxes, we might just simply enjoy the ride. La Fura Dels Baus makes an incredible production through the staged, giant woman as a depiction of this pessimism that underpins 20th and 21st century thought,
‘I don’t
want to come over all po-faced here but that no one seemed to notice how ugly
it was for a well-heeled audience to start howling and hooting with laughter at
this impecunious woman’s disgusting habits was deeply depressing.’[12]
An apathetic, unhealthy grieving of oneself which, in
any case, still leads you to death. This hyper-opera leaves the ending
unresolved. Any situation, any life, still concludes with death: the certainty
of doubt, or in this case death, is the only certitude the opera is willing to
commit to, ‘Death, finally, is also the order in which one can believe’.[13]
Adorno had already stated that after the Holocaust society had moved towards a new meaning of death; a more collective yet still rather hypocritical and superficial understanding of it. Ligeti wanted to emphasize Ghelderode’s idea about the failure of death yet still add the element of doubt in the finale. He presents the final passacaglia as a moral statement, where the human being, incapable of avoiding the unavoidable, should enjoy life at its fullest. A link to Adorno is clear when he states,
‘It is an
idea that is particularly topical in a civilization where at any moment the
whole humanity may be destroyed. The thought of the threat of collective death
is always present but we try to eliminate it from our consciousness and to
enjoy to the maximum the days that are left to us.’[14]
This contemporary reflection on death, originated
after the dramatic paradigm shifts caused by two world wars, has created a new
sort of collective hysteria terrified by death and, at the same time, distanced
from it (the technological advances of weaponry and the bureaucratic approach
to war have subverted our concept of death). Precisely Claudia, the fibre-glass
woman in the production of La Fura dels Baus, is a literal, direct and
non-sentimental representation of death as a present, transformative and
thought-provoking entity. Critics have commented the lack of irony and subtlety
in this production. Nonetheless, I believe it follows Kagel’s Staatstheater bald
representation of the crude reality while it still manages to arouse certain
aesthetic pleasure (which would explain why the term opera is never fully
erased). Furthermore, as Claudia has a stroke, her face is immobilized at the
exact moment of her death, which would confirm Ligeti’s statement that, ‘…if
Nekrotzar is really Death, then Death is dead, we have passed into a state of
eternal life, we are in Paradise and we have lived through the Last Judgement
without realising it.’[15]
Since Ligeti intended for his opera to have an
ambiguous ending, this particular production plays with that idea from the very
beginning. Ligeti himself agreed with Boulez’s idea that opera was dead, which
could mean that this opera stands in the eternal, far beyond Wagner, Strauss,
Berg or Verdi. Through pastiche and parody, this hyper-opera as new music
theatre expands on a dramatic reality which is suspicious of both tradition and
novelty; the idea that, ultimately, it is death what determines our path. The
chaotic and crude elements in the work are manifestations of the last moments
before death, before communal threat. It plays with the idea of how absurd
everything would be in the wake of an apocalyptic event that erases every human
trace from this earth. Under these circumstances, priorities, what we once
considered essential, moral, ‘right’, are all exposed and presented as mere
illusions of reason.
Renaissance Influences
There seems to be an adequate reflection of both
Ghelderode’s and Ligeti’s influence of Renaissance ideals in this production,
even a hint to pre-Romantic aesthetics with the grandiose figure of the woman
representing Goethe’s ‘womanly eternal’. Also taken from the Renaissance, the ‘
”womanly”, is an earthly, humanly accessible symbol for a divine eternal
mystery which can only be thus indirectly suggested’.[16] Similarly, the voices from the choir coming from
behind the stage evoke a grotesque deus ex machina indirectly portrayed
by the music rather than the body. As previously mentioned, the production was
criticised due to its lack of irony, however, there are constant suggestions to
this throughout the opera. Bakhtin manages to turn this view by implying that
the importance of the body conveys a totality in elements that are impossible
to measure; ‘“it is a transfer to the material level, to the sphere of earth
and body in their indissoluble unity”’.[17] Nonetheless, the impossibility to measure all (the
main philosophical change in modernity), is ironically transmitted through
Ligeti’s incorporation of Kubrick’s film Space
Odyssey into the opera and the production’s lighting and staging.
The ‘Rabelaisian’ element in Ghelderode is achieved
through Ligeti’s short and fragmentary musical cells. In Ghelderode’s play,
these short episodes resemble ‘loosely related tableaux,’[18] which would give the
opera a bigger chance to interplay with contrast and range. The
Renaissance had Ghelderode in thrall because he saw in it ‘an infinitely
complex and contradictory humanity’[19], given to excess and
sublimity, stretched between extremes: “the ecstasy of living and the horror of
living”.’[20]
Ligeti’s music collages in Act II, could be perceived as exaggerated and vast;
a musical tribute to excess and another reason as to why this work could be
denominated a hyper-opera instead of anti-anti-opera.
Ghelderode saw in Renaissance ideals similar
tendencies that are at the same time applicable to our own age: what Ligeti was
trying to represent through LGM. This new age of information is strongly
analogous to the unknown horizons and intellectual paradigms that were starting
to flourish in the Renaissance (what eventually led to a negation of
absolutisms at the beginning of the twentieth century). As Herz points out
about Ghelderode, ‘that savage century so like our own… its intellectual and
sensual frenzies, a century in which suffering rubbed shoulders with laughter
or even engendered it. - Doubtless it was this last aspect that most keenly
marked the sensibility of our author'.[21] In Ligeti, the human being becomes a menace to itself,
not only a physical one but a symbolic threat too. Ghelderode, just like
Ligeti, relates to the crude reality of the Renaissance period and its
ideological strain; ‘the ideological menaces of the after-life, of the beyond:
hell, the falling, damnations and punishments of all kinds.’[22]
In Ligeti’s music there is a heterogeneous musical
texture that revises all creative opportunities held within the opposite. For
instance, Ligeti writes a rondo for the organ and a baroque-style piece
for the electric piano. Balazs adds, ‘It is a sort of subversion of a
subversion, typical of the Ligetian spirit, which deploys in different levels
of his work, with a will to explore thoroughly the upside of things and the
potential of the “negative”.'[23] T
La Fura dels Baus Production – Staging
Ligeti met with Michael Meschke, director of the
Stockholm Puppet Theatre, along with stage designer Aliute Meczies and the
conductor Elgar Howarth to discuss ideas. Meczies mentioned the drama by the
little-known Belgian writer Michel de Ghelderode, La
Balade du Grand Macabre. ‘When they met, Ligeti explained his concept of
something “cruel and frightening based on the pictures of Breughel and Bosch
and writers like Jarry, Kafka and Boris Vian”'.[24] Before
producing the opera, Ligeti was already prepared with a selection of ideas that
not only related to those of Ghelderode but expanded on them.
‘In Stockholm, the
Meschke-Meczies staging of Scene 3 was undoubtedly effective, with the Black
and White Ministers cast as tall Giacometti-like marionettes towering above a
roly-poly Prince Go-Go, and the Chief of the Gepopo’s gumshoe attendants
dressed like an aviary of twitching birds.’[25]
The original production in Stockholm dressed the
characters in a sort of puppet look. Precisely Ghelderode used the image of
marionettes as a symbolic base for his theatre, just as Goethe had done in 1775
for his Ur-Faust.
In this production the puppet of Nekrotzar appears nearly at the end of Act II realising
he has failed his mission of destruction, giving a hint to the original
production and ideas of Ligeti. Founder member and director Alex Olle, in
collaboration with Valentina Carrasco, thought of the image of Claudia as a
physically cruel and joyous metamorphosis. Claudia depicts a metaphor of
infection and purgation, which was based on the hyperrealist sculptures of Ron Mueck.
Another interpretation of the female body is suggested by Carrasco when she
states that, ‘The fact that it is a woman derives from the idea that the female
body possesses more rounded shapes.’[26]
The
enormous success of Le
Grand Macabre portrays how relevant several of these existential
issues still motivate our search for meaning. Questions such as Death and its
relation to the human being, the horrible and the grotesque, or humour and
satire, are universal themes we believe no longer affects our nerves. A
reflection of today’s society is subtlety evoked through the mask of new music
and pastiche. With this approach, the arrogance of the human being is exposed as
a crude and indecent pathology where death, in a last stroke of genius,
ultimately saves us from ourselves. Perhaps it is time to accept that the veil
of the world has been broken, that reason has indeed produced monsters we no
longer control. La Fura dels Baus’s production successfully addresses the full
realisation that the human being has become disenchanted with the world. Thus,
man is no longer able to see through the eyes (Plato), but conveniently shuts
them while waiting for the ultimate inevitability in life: death.
Bibliography
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the System, Kagel and the Deconstruction of Modernism’, in Judy Lochhead and
Joseph Auner (ed.), pp. 263 – 285, Postmodern
Music, Postmodern Thought, (New York, 2002).
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the Absolute, (Surrey, 2011).
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d’esthetique musicales, (Rennes, 2007).
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‘Signification of Parody and the Grotesque in György Ligeti’s Le Grand
Macabre’, Music Theory Spectre, 31/1
(2009), pp. 26 – 56.
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Poetry and the Burlesque in Ghelderode’s Theatre’, Yale French Studies, 29, (1962), pp. 92-101.
Jentz, Harold, ‘The Place of
the “Eternal-Womanly” in Goethe’s Faust Drama’, PMLA, 68/4 (1953), pp. 791-805.
Ligeti, György: Le Grand Macabre, Symphony Orchestra and Chorus of the Gran Teatre
del Liceu, Michael Boder, (Recorded Barcelona 2011, 101 643, Released 2012).
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Sabbe, Herman, ‘Musique de la
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(2004) pp. 301-305.
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Kilmartin, (1981), pp. 111 – 123.
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with Gyorgy Ligeti in Hamburg’, Canadian
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10/1 (1990), p. 101-117.
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‘Claudia y la Tragedie Bouffe’, Cuerpo
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Searby, Mike, ‘Ligeti the
Postmodernist?’, Tempo, 199 (1997),
pp. 9-15.
Searby, Michael D, Ligeti’s Stylistic Crisis, Transformation in
his Musical Style 1974-1985, (Toronto, 2010).
Steinitz, Richard, György Ligeti Music of the Imagination,
(London, 2003).
Toronyi-Lalic, Igor, Le Grand Macabre ENO, http://www.theartsdesk.com/opera/le-grand-macabre-eno , Reviews, (Date Authored 18th November,
2009, Date Accessed 27th April 2016).
[1] Yayoi Uno Everett, ‘Signification of Parody and the Grotesque in Gyorgy
Ligeti’s Le Grand Macabre’, p. 27.
[2] Mike Searby, ‘Ligeti the Postmodernist?’, Tempo, 199, (1997), pp. 9-15, at p. 31.
[3] Richard Steinitz, György
Ligeti Music of the Imagination, (London, 2003), p. 220.
[4] Ibid, p 223.
[5] Micheline Herz, ‘Tragedy, Poetry and the Burlesque in Ghelderode’s
Theatre’, Yale French Studies, 29,
(1962), pp. 92-101, at p.101: “Yet man is man only because he is able to
declare what he is. The modern theatre, and much of the avant-garde along with
it, is perhaps all the weaker for its neglect of this basic truth.”
[6] Amy Marie Bauer, Ligeti’s
Laments: Nostalgia, Exoticism and the Absolute, p.110.
[7] Steinitz, György Ligeti Music
of the Imagination, p. 223.
[8] The
original German prose was changed to verse, then later translated into Swedish.
In further productions it was mostly translated into English, French and
Italian.
[9] In an interview, Ligeti stated he was not a profound connoisseur of
Wagner’s operas.
[10] Yayoi Uno Everett, ‘Signification of Parody and the Grotesque in
Gyorgy Ligeti’s Le Grand Macabre’, p. 28.
[11] Ibid, p.29.
[12] Igor Toronyi-Lalic, ‘Le Grand Macabre ENO’, http://www.theartsdesk.com/opera/le-grand-macabre-eno
, Reviews, (Date Authored 18th November, 2009, Date Accessed 27th April 2016).,
p. 1.
[13] Herz, ‘Tragedy, Poetry and the Burlesque in Ghelderode’s Theatre’, p.
96.
[14] Claude Samuel, Ligeti,
Interview, trans. By Terence Kilmartin, (1981), pp.111 – 123, at p. 117.
[15] Ibid, p. 117.
[16] Harold Jentz, ‘The Place of the “Eternal-Womanly” in Goethe’s Faust
Drama’, PMLA, 68/4, (1953), pp.
791-805, at p. 791.
[17] Everett, ‘Signification of Parody and the Grotesque in Gyorgy
Ligeti’s Le Grand Macabre’, p. 28.
[18] Michael D. Searby, Ligeti’s
Stylistic Crisis, Transformation in his Musical Style 1974-1985, (Toronto,
2010), pp. 30-31.
[19] Steinitz, György Ligeti Music
of the Imagination, p. 221.
[20] Ibid.
[21] Herz, ‘Tragedy, Poetry and the Burlesque in Ghelderode’s Theatre’, pp.98-99.
[22] Herman Sabbe, ‘Musique de la voix chez Ligeti: sense et
significance’, Revue Belge de Musicologie
/ Belgisch Tijdschrift voor Muziekwetenschap, 58, (2004) pp. 301-305 at p.
305. “Les menaces ideologiques
d'apres-mort, d'outre-tombe : les enfers, chutes, damnations et chatiments de
tous ordres.”
[23] Joseph Delaplace, György
Ligeti, Un Essai d’analyse et d’esthetique musicales, p. 175. “Il s’agit d’une
sorte de subversion de la subversion, typique de l’esprit ligetien, qui se
deploie a differents niveaux de ses oeuvres, dans une volonte d’exploration
toujours plus poussee de l’envers des choses et des potentialities du
“negative”.”
[24] Steinitz, György Ligeti Music of the Imagination, p.220.
[25] Ibid, p. 235.
[26] Mercé Saumell Vergés, ‘Claudia y la Tragedie Bouffe’, Cuerpo del Drama, http://www.ojs.arte.unicen.edu.ar/index.php/cuerpodeldrama/article/view/70/71
(Date Authored not stated, Date Accessed 27th April 2016), p.3. “Y
el hecho de ser mujer viene dado porque el cuerpo femenino posee formas mas
redondeadas”.
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