Gyorgy Ligeti, a musical giant respected for his ability to simultaneously honor and modernize musical traditions and a cult pop figure whose work was used in the film "2001: A Space Odyssey" to evoke the mystery of outer space, died Monday in Vienna. He was 83.
The composer, who began an opera with a honking "Car Horn Prelude," had been in poor health for much of his life and suffered from a combination of diseases. The cause of his death was not given.
Born in Romanian Transylvania of Hungarian Jewish descent, Ligeti studied in Budapest and his musical roots were Hungarian. He survived the Holocaust as well as a harrowing escape from Communist-controlled Budapest in 1956 to Germany, but he loathed all forms of sentimentality and he reflected his tragic relationship with Hungary mostly though his surreal sensibility and ear for bizarre and unforgettable sonorities and textures.
In concertos, string quartets, orchestra and chamber pieces, piano etudes or opera, he demonstrated a compelling sense of form and an instinct for propulsive, unpredictable rhythm. But he was impossible to pin down. He absorbed rules, whether those of neoclassicism, the 12-tone system, Minimalism, African polyrhythms or microtonality; but he jealously guarded his artistic freedom and subscribed to no dogmas.
A student of theories of time and space, of chance and determinacy, he explored those concepts in a 1962 work for 100 metronomes, "Poeme Symphonique." He also had a caustic wit, a taste for sarcasm and a well-developed feel for irony, all of which are evident in his surreal opera, "Le Grand Macabre," in which he subsumes his anger at human suffering in an illicit parody that can so thrill and terrify that an audience hardly knows whether to laugh or cry.
"I don't like the idea of lists," Esa-Pekka Salonen, the Los Angeles Philharmonic's music director, who conducted Ligeti's "Requiem" at Walt Disney Concert Hall last month, said when reached in Finland for comment. "But yesterday I would have said that Ligeti qualified as one of the very, very few best living composers."
Noting how his work can "go through the full scale of incredible complexity and amazing simplicity and everything in between," Salonen credited Ligeti with being an important influence on him as a conductor as well as a composer. "We spoke a lot about music," Salonen said. "He was very interested in the idea of continuity and he hated disruptions of the flow. That influenced my thinking even about other people's music, such as Brahms."
