György Ligeti

György Ligeti was born on 28 May 1923 at Dicsőszentmárton (now Târnăveni) in Transylvania, then part of Romania, into a Hungarian Jewish family. His father was an economist and writer, his mother an ophthalmologist. As a child he dreamed of being a scientist, a chemist or physicist, and all his life he kept a passion for mathematics, biology and fractals. He began piano late, at fourteen, but quickly composed his first pieces.

He studied at the Kolozsvár (Cluj) conservatory from 1941, as antisemitic laws barred him from university to study physics. In 1944 he was sent to a Hungarian army forced-labour camp. His father, his brother and other relatives were deported and died in the Nazi camps; only his mother survived Auschwitz. Ligeti narrowly escaped death in a bombing raid and walked back to Kolozsvár at the end of the war.

In 1945 he moved to Budapest and entered the Franz Liszt Academy of Music, studying with Sándor Veress and Ferenc Farkas, and from 1950 he taught harmony and counterpoint there. Like Bartók, he collected folk songs in Romania. But the communist regime required artists to write simple, popular music; modern Western music was banned. Ligeti secretly composed daring works such as Musica ricercata (1953), a cycle of eleven piano pieces in which the first uses only two notes, the second three, and so on.

In December 1956, after the Soviet army crushed the Hungarian revolution, he fled Hungary with his wife Vera, crossing the Austrian border on foot under fire. He settled in Vienna, then worked at the electronic music studio of Cologne radio with Karlheinz Stockhausen. There he discovered the Western avant-garde and composed electronic works. He became an Austrian citizen in 1967.

Ligeti then invented an entirely new style. In Apparitions (1959) and above all Atmosphères (1961) for large orchestra there is no longer melody or rhythm: dozens of instruments each play a slightly different part, creating huge sheets of sound, slowly shifting “clouds” of sound. He called this technique “micropolyphony”. In 1962 he composed the provocative Poème symphonique for a hundred metronomes, each ticking at its own speed until they stop one by one.

In 1968 the director Stanley Kubrick used several of his works, including Atmosphères, Lux aeterna (1966) and the Requiem, in his film 2001: A Space Odyssey, without asking his permission. Ligeti, at first furious, then became world-famous thanks to the film. He also composed the opera Le Grand Macabre (1978), an apocalyptic, burlesque farce, and the Horn Trio (1982), and was professor of composition at the Hamburg Hochschule für Musik from 1973 to 1989.

From the 1980s he became interested in the complex rhythms of African music, in Conlon Nancarrow’s music for player piano and in fractals. He composed three books of Études for piano (1985–2001), regarded as among the most important since Debussy, and piano, violin and cello concertos. He received many honours, including the Kyoto Prize. He died in Vienna on 12 June 2006, aged eighty-three. He is regarded as one of the greatest composers of the second half of the twentieth century.