Ligeti’s Le Grand Macabre:

Considerations of Its Origins in the Grotesque Aesthetic

Issei Herr 

In his seminal dissertation Rabelais and His World, Russian literary scholar and philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin illuminates and explores the works of the oft-misunderstood French Renaissance author François Rabelais. Examining Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel, a historically stigmatized pentalogy of novels, Bakhtin brings to light the notion of grotesque realism in relation to the carnival tradition. Influenced by the idea of the carnival, in its representation of the entirety of mankind and its defiance of social conventions, Bakhtin’s idea of carnivalesque literature entails a world turned upside-down, in which commonly accepted ideas and truths are endlessly tested and contested. Congruently, the essential principle of grotesque realism is degradation, the lowering of all that is abstract, spiritual, noble, and ideal to the material level. The combination of high culture with the profane creates a universal picture, a vision of the “jolly relativity of all things” (Bakhtin). For Bakhtin it is within artistic forms such as the novel that one finds the site of resistance to authority, the place where the seeds of cultural and even political change can be planted.  

This resistance to authority is potently exhibited in György Ligeti’s Le Grand Macabre, an opera that challenges the stereotypical notions of the genre, and of music itself. First presented at the Royal Swedish Opera in 1978, Ligeti’s groundbreaking work is an exemplar of Bakhtin's grotesque realism; from its usage of musical parody and collage to its fantastical, absurdist plot, the work represents the pinnacle of degradation, breaking down numerous cultural and ideological norms. The impetus for the opera’s genesis lies in a 16th century Breughel painting; the apocalyptic scene depicted in the Renaissance artist’s “The Triumph of Death” (1562) provided the creative roots for Le Grand Macabre. In the painting, battalions of skeletons swarm across the desolate landscape while mortals commit desperate acts in confrontation with death: people flee into a coffin-like tunnel while a skeleton on horseback slaughters them with a scythe, a starving dog nibbles at the face of a child, and royal figures, including a court jester and Arcadian lovers, marvel at the entire phenomenon in sheer disbelief. This painting encapsulates the ideas fundamental to Bakhtin’s grotesque realism; all values, thoughts, phenomena, and objects are brought together to break down the barriers that separate the living from the dead. Ligeti, in Le Grand Macabre, achieves a similar breaking down of barriers; in his world, where cultural and social norms have no powers of inhibition, a freer and more universal mode of expression is stimulated. 

Le Grand Macabre teems with characters that satirize the people, politics, and systems that terrorized Ligeti’s life. Born in 1923, György Ligeti the man and the musician resisted ideological doctrines in all forms. He grew up as a Hungarian Jew in what was then Romanian Transylvania, and was the only member of his family not to be transported to a concentration camp during World War II. In Budapest after the war, he found one ideological nightmare replaced by another as the Soviets took control; after fleeing Hungary in 1956, he came in contact with a group of composers in who were deliberately binding themselves to musical and compositional dogmas. Ligeti worked with Karlheinz Stockhausen in his electronic studio in Cologne, and met Pierre Boulez in Darmstadt; however, Ligeti’s own music put him on a different course from these two masters of the avant-garde. His central problem with their ideologies was their use of pre-compositional systems; Ligeti described Stockhausen's approach as “like a Soviet five-year plan. He has to have this ‘planification’. Nobody in Hungary would think this way” (Service). These postwar ideals were rejected by Ligeti; the aims toward a standard of so-called ‘pure music,’ disassociated from any extramusical attachments, were recognized as an impossibility for the composer who had seen and experienced so much. 

For any self-respecting modernist composer of Ligeti's generation, an opera house was the last place one wanted to be seen; at that stage, avant-garde musicians rejected opera as a form crippled by artistic conservatism, a representation of the old musical order which they had spent their compositional lives trying to dismantle. On composing his first and only opera, Ligeti remarked: “I cannot, will not compose a traditional ‘opera’; for me the operatic genre is irrelevant today - it belongs to a historical period utterly different from the present compositional situation” (Lie). Commissioned in the 1960s and composed in the early 70s, Le Grand Macabre was written at a point when Ligeti's compositional style was undergoing a significant change - reflecting a complete break with his approach in the 1960s. Escaping the compositional dogmas of the avant-garde, Ligeti adopted a more eclectic manner, which is reflected aptly in the opera’s plot and musical content. 

Le Grand Macabre draws from various musical and literary sources to create a compelling display of Rabelaisian principles. The opera’s libretto, “a curious hybrid of parody and profundity, of comedy and horror” (Lie), is based on the Belgian playwright Michel de Ghelderode’s La Balade du grand macabre (1934), which depicts the coming of the Apocalypse in the fictional Breughelland. The story revolves around farcical characters that include the evil tyrant Nekrozotar, young lovers Jadis and Flandre, astrologer Videbolle, his wife Salivaine, drunkard Proprenaz, head of the secret political police Gepopo, and prince Goulave. The tyrant Nekrozotar announces the coming of the Apocalypse, eliciting both fear and laughter as the citizens of Breughelland respond with indulgence, panic, or sheer indifference. In the end, life triumphs over death as the impending crisis is avoided and the evil characters (Salivaine and Nekrozotar) are duly punished; the story concludes with a celebration of the regenerative cycle of life. This idea of the cycle of life is central to Bakhtin’s thesis; death and decay are inextricably linked with birth and renewal, the grotesque body being a celebration of both extremes. “The earthy element of terror is the womb, the bodily grave, but it flowers with delight and a new life” (Bakhtin). 

Ligeti’s whimsical score is driven by quotation and pastiche, plundering styles of the past through operatic allusions to Monteverdi, Rossini, Verdi, and beyond. In Ligeti’s words, “I take bits of music or signals, put them in an unfamiliar context, distort them, not necessarily making them sound humorous but interpreting them through distortion just as a surrealist painting presents the world” (Várnai). Parody in postwar twentieth-century music creates a biting musical irony, a double-voiced statement in which the quotation is set in sharp contrast to its surrounding musical context. In the opening scene, Piet the Pot’s “drunken” aria begins with a literal quotation of the head motive of Dies Irae, which then disintegrates into a descending chromatic line. A Latin hymn that dates to at least the thirteenth century, Dies Irae describes the Day of Judgement, in which the last trumpet summons souls before the throne of God, where the saved will be delivered and the unsaved cast into eternal flames. Ligeti creates musical discord by steering the plainchant into a chromatic descent; in the early Middle Ages, dissonance was commonly viewed as “diabolus in musica” (“the devil in music”) - the original Dies Irae is thus free of accidentals. Throughout the opera, this playful and satirical spirit exists alongside an an expressive state of ludicrousness and horror; the resulting composite of text and music creates a carnivalesque atmosphere that mirrors the fantastical aura of Breughelland. 

One of the most Rabelaisian moments of the opera is the character Gepopo’s psychotic Act II aria. The head of the secret police of Breughelland, Gepopo sings a schizophrenic warning to Prince Go Go of a comet that will destroy their land. In the aria, the character degenerates from over-the-top virtuosity into animal-like barking, attesting to the idea of embracing the operatic tradition in order to dismantle it. Even in the absence of explicit quotations, Gepopo’s aria recalls the vocal executions featured in the conventional “mad scene”, such as that of Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor; the rapid shifts between high and low registers are common to both. At the end of the aria, Gepopo’s obsessive utterances of “A-da” across a minor ninth become progressively shorter and faster as she “goes into a paroxysm of excitement, confusion, and panic” (Ligeti’s description in the score). Gepopo’s aria creates a surreal and Dadaesque effect, as her coloratura singing degenerates into an animalistic stutter that heightens the sense of madness to an absurd level. 

Throughout the opera, incongruous elements meld to form a jarring yet riveting musical surface. In Scene III, Ligeti introduces a massive textural collage entitled “Homage to Ives.” American composer Charles Ives is widely considered the father of the fully developed musical collage; in his works, Ives layers several distinct melodies and quotations on top of one another to create a particular effect on the listener. In Scene III of Le Grand Macabre, Ligeti creates a similar sonic phenomenon. Supporting the entire structure is a twelve-tone passacaglia based on the theme from the finale of Beethoven’s Third Symphony; the rhythm is preserved while the pitches are distorted. Above this foundation, a multi-layered collage in different tempi and meters is created: a solo violin enters with a ragtime that recalls Stravinsky’s l’Histoire du Soldat, the bassoon enters with a Greek orthodox tune, the piccolo trumpet plays a Brazilian samba, the parade drum plays marching music in irregular meter, and the bass trombone blares out a distorted variation of the twelve-tone Beethoven theme. By combining music drawn from such high and low styles into a massive collage, this passage turns into an ultimate macabre dance in which the ludicrous and horrifying states co-exist. As a musical corollary to Bakhtin’s grotesque body, the individual layers maintain their autonomy through independence in register, meter, and tempo, while absorbing into the ever-growing collective. As this procession of incongruous music unfolds, chaos reigns on the stage as people fight, eat, drink, and copulate to cope with the final moments of life. This is the ultimate dismantling of the operatic tradition; long gone are the bel canto arias and the transcendent love duets of the past. 

Since the premiere of Le Grand Macabre in 1978, audiences around the world have been entranced by its intricate score, dazzling vocal displays, and whimsical plot. By challenging preconceived notions through its wide-ranging, carnivalesque themes, this thoroughly Rabelaisian opera has brought Bakhtin’s concept of grotesque realism to the fore. Frequently performed to this day on both the concert and operatic stages, audiences are liberated by Ligeti’s characters and score, reacting with laughter and jubilation; this would certainly gratify Bakhtin,  as the first chapter of Rabelais and His World concerns the history of laughter. In recent years, contemporary soprano Barbara Hannigan has made Gepopo’s aria a cornerstone of the concert repertoire, creating an experience that is awe-inspiring in its technical execution, mesmerizing in its visual element (Hannigan is known to simultaneously conduct and sing in full costume), and ultimately liberating of a concert culture that embraces certain rigid dogmas and traditions. Beyond its capacity to elicit laughter and jubilation however, there is a profound message that Ligeti communicates in Le Grand Macabre. Built upon ideals of the grotesque that are often swept away in the aim of presenting a sanitized version of the world, Ligeti holds up a mirror to the world as it is, the fantasy setting of Breughelland serving as a reflection of a reality which is no less grotesque. 

Bibliography  

Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1984. Rabelais and His World. Trans. Helene Iswolsley. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.  

Lie, John. 2004. “Ligeti and the Shoah.” Program notes to San Francisco Opera Production of Le Grand Macabre. 

Service, Tom. “A guide to György Ligeti's music.” The Guardian, 27 August 2012. 

Várnai, Peter. 1983. Ligeti in Conversation. London: Eulenburg Books.