Ligeti: Le Grand Macabre [CD]

This is the first opera I ever heard, and I picked it up because it is was by Ligeti, not because it was an _opera_ by Ligeti. Ligeti is my favorite composer, so I guess the only natural thing was to hear his opera too. I actually really love it. Ligeti wrote a lot of dark and apocalyptic music, so his opera's subject matter, the end of the world, would be something he has good sense for. This is a very humorous work, however, from the dark yet wacky libretto to the musical score, which could be the soundtrack for an apocalyptic avant-garde cartoon. The story revolves around the angel of death Nekrotzar, emerging ominously from a tomb, sent to destroy the world. He apprehends the drunkard Piet for a steed and trumpeter, and rides off to announce the End Times to the people of Breughelland. There are other strange characters, like a pair of astrologers who enjoy S&M, the hapless Prince Go-Go, and the leaders of two identical political parties. Fortunately for all the funny people in that imaginary place, Nekrotzar ends up getting too drunk to carry out the annihilation of mankind.

There are numerous parts here that amaze me, and on the whole _Le Grand Macabre_ is a highly amusing, dramatic, and adventurous work of music. It has a lot of dark irony, and also some downright haunting passages, and some really quirky, bizarre parts. For all these reasons, _Le Grand Macabre_ is completely set apart from the rest of Ligeti's works. And some of my favorite Ligeti moments are here: The end of Scene III is some of the composer's darkest, the final sense of dread settling in with an atonal orchestra with solo harmonica accompaniment, and boy's choir singing "Consummatum est" ("it is finished"). Only Ligeti could make a harmonica sound apocalyptic. The especially rapturous lovers Amando and Amanda share a ravishing duet at the end of the first scene, singing their love to each other, essentially oblivious to the threat of impending doom. Nekrotzar's doomy entry to the court of Prince Go-Go includes a violin, bassoon, clarinet, and piccolo playing twisted, gloullish folk-music with clattering rhythms.

This is yet another masterpiece from the best composer of the post-war era, and the recording is exceptional. The singing on this one is German; there is an English version on Sony's OOP Ligeti Edition series.

To live in a churchyard is difficult among the voices of the dead coming up from the graves. Somber music and disjointed singing like playing with our bones and teeth. Dead people come back as ghosts. Living people are made of snow and melt away in this graveyard. Lost, surrounded, trapped in this world of death. The music is the chaotic language of what is in its being no more. The first act is a devilish Sabbath with all its folklore, including ass kissing. The witch, or what plays that role, insatiable Mescalina uses Venus to get a man who is well-hung enough to satisfy her. But she gets the living dead from the churchyard. She falls down, dying. The orgy that follows among the men is announced to be the end of the world till a cock crows in that orgiastic night. Astradamors is finally rid of everyone, including Mescalina, and the master of his own home. The second act sets up the Prince and his ministers in some kind of game. The ministers are turning the Prince into a fool with incoherent declarations making him feel disoriented and trying to find some logic in eating and drinking. The music is a real whirl of notes, at times discordant and chaotic but always depicting the vertigo in the Prince's mind when assaulted by the ministers, one white, the other black, a vision that makes the world simple and when it starts turning, black and white get blended into some grey till the black and white ministers together resign. The Prince finally takes a decision to get rid of the whirling maelstrom of the manipulating ministers though he has to go eat first. The stage gets filled with all kinds of police officers, secret or not. Here the Prince is endowed with a high counter-tenor voice that is in constant, and in a way irritating, contrast with all the other voices that are a lot lower, the ministers being only actors, which makes their voices even lower. The Chief of Police is a soprano. When the Prince is confronted to him we have like a disrupted continuity, a hiatus within homogeneity, the soprano pushing her pitch as high as possible. The disappearance of this chief of police in red light makes the atmosphere magic. The Prince's counter tenor voice is a light echo of the Chief of Police. The two ministers who try to speak to the people insult them and the crowd becomes hysterical about the Prince who will follow them, but he refuses the resignations of the ministers. He imposes his own power. The Chief of Police comes back and requires strict and stern measures and the Prince imposes them to the ministers who have to do it, and being incompetent, they just repeat rhyming nouns. The crowd is suffering and provides us with a rare moment of harmonious hymnal. The Chief of Police gets completely ritualistic and uses words like black magic incantations. That's when Astradamors reappears, as the philosopher of the Prince. The Prince who has just lost his ministers finds himself level with his philosopher who has just become a widower. But the help the Prince is asking for cannot come and sirens and other sonorous events bring the end of the world, generally called a revolution. The philosopher's only solution is to push the Prince under the table and tell him to keep quite. Then a vast danse macabre enters the stage and the music is brightly disjointed in its very articulations and different rhythms are crisscrossing one another in some willingly unharmonious way to create a polyrhythmic mess, ending on some more or less military trumpets. That's when Nekrotzar and Piet join Astradamors to transform the revolution into a diabolical Sabbath ending with some derisive sentences sounding like old Gregorian chants. At this moment Nekrotzar reveals himself as being a vampire that is going to fill his chalice with human blood and they will all drink. Then they get into a mental voyage through time and space and can commune with all kinds of fictitious or diabolical or political beings, all of them representing evil, including theatre impresarios. And this orgiastic communion with people all seen beyond normality ends up in an explosion that leaves Nekrotzar and his acolytes out of time and space, disoriented. That timeless and spaceless disorientation is marvelously rendered by the music that becomes a sort of hollow shell resounding with all kinds of echoes. The last vision is that of an apocalypse where everything falls in flame down into oceans. It ends with the words that fit the end of life, of the life of Christ on the cross when all is consumed. That world is dead. The interlude that follows is very strange since it is a closing piece in a way, bringing the end of this world to a close, and yet it opens to a sequel that still has to come. The last scene is the graveyard of the beginning and we find some dead people after the apocalypse who think they are in Paradise. But this peaceful post mortem paradise becomes hellish when Mescalina is brought to it. After that disruption is turns back to some quiet atmosphere with a sermon to the death of death introduced by a dirge played on string instruments. The very end is an explanation about Death for boys and girls, for people not to fear Death any more. What's left at the end is that the world is nothing but some kind of living hell and that Death is the only way to escape that hell. The music is a voyage beyond standard harmony or rhythms to create a well-filled and even overflowing chalice of notes.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne, University Paris 8 Saint Denis, University Paris 12 Créteil, CEGID