Gyorgy Ligeti dies at 83

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Avant-garde composer Gyorgy Ligeti dies: publisher
Tue Jun 13, 2006 08:19 AM ET


BUDAPEST (Reuters) - Hungarian composer Gyorgy Ligeti, whose work was used to accompany Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey," died in Vienna on Monday, his German-based publisher Schott Music said.

Ligeti, the spiritual heir to Hungarian composer Bela Bartok, was at the forefront of the avant-garde in the 20th century and experienced and survived both a Nazi labor camp and Hungary's communist dictatorship.

"In Gyorgy Ligeti, we have lost the most significant composer of the post-Bartok era," Ivan Fischer, the director of the Budapest Festival Orchestra told Hungarian state news agency

MTI.

Ligeti, who was 73, was best known among music lovers for pieces like his polyphonic anti-totalitarian opera "Le Grand Macabre," composed between 1975-77.

"Ligeti was an avant-garde, definitely modern composer who did the most for renewing the musical language in the second half of the 20th century," Fischer said.

Music from Ligeti's "Requiem" was used in the 2005 film "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" directed by Tim Burton and starring Johnny Depp as Willy Wonka.

Ligeti was born to a Jewish-Hungarian family on May 28, 1923 in Transylvania, which was part of Hungary until 1921.

He was denied entrance to university by Nazi laws and began studying music under Ferenc Farkas at the Cluj conservatory in Romania in 1941, and continued in Budapest.

In 1943, he was arrested by the Nazis and sentenced to forced labor. His father and brother died in Auschwitz concentration camp.

But Ligeti survived and after the war he resumed his studies with Farkas and Sandor Veress at the Franz Liszt Academy in Budapest, but his music suffered again under communist repression after World War Two.

He fled Hungary in 1956 when Soviet troops suppressed the Hungarian uprising against communist rule and it was in Vienna that he became one of the best-known figures in the avant-garde of west European music.

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