EVERETT, Yayoi Uno_Signification of Parody and the Grotesque in György Ligeti's Le Grand Macabre

Society for Music Theory Signification of Parody and the Grotesque in György Ligeti's Le Grand Macabre Author(s): Yayoi Uno Everett Source: Music Theory Spectrum, Vol. 31, No. 1 (Spring 2009), pp. 26-56 Published by: {oupl} on behalf of the Society for Music Theory Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/mts.2009.31.1.26 Accessed: 16-08-2015 17:34 UTC

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Signification of Parody and the Grotesque in György Ligeti’s Le Grand Macabre yayoi uno everett Fashioned as an “anti-opera,” Ligeti conceived the music for Le Grand Macabre as a kind of “pop art,” filled with quotations and references to opera and other preexisting musical genres. Examining the opera’s thematic connections with the original play by Michel de Ghelderode and Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of grotesque realism, I suggest that Ligeti’s parodic approach in this opera is governed by two narrative trajectories: the grotesque and existential irony. Drawing on writings by Robert Hatten, Linda Hutcheon, and Esti Sheinberg, this paper develops semiotic constructs of mapping, troping, and/or reversal in determining the parodic procedures invoked. I argue that, through such procedures, Ligeti engages with musical parody at two levels: the surface level at which quotation of existing music and musical styles are transformed and the global level at which an expressive opposition between ludicrousness and horror is established in articulating the grotesque trope. Furthermore, through deployment of collage and textural disintegration, Ligeti creates an aural counterpart to the allegorical depiction of chaos, destruction, and renewal found in Breughel’s “Triumph of Death.” Keywords: György Ligeti, Michel de Ghelderode, Mikhail Bakhtin, Robert Hatten, Linda Hutcheon, James Liszka, Esti Sheinberg, parody, grotesque, opera, type, topic, trope, micropolyphony, allusion, existential irony, transvaluation

n composing his first and only opera entitled Le Grand Macabre (1977; revised 1996, hereafter abbreviated LGM), György 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” (quoted in Lie 2004, vii). While LGM’s immense popularity derives from the seemingly comical aspects of parody that extend the tradition of opera buffa, it neither

O

I extend my gratitude to Daphne Leong, Kevin Karnes, and Robert Hatten for their suggestions and comments in shaping this article.

resorts to a gimmicky satire nor treats operatic conventions with nostalgia. Intrigued by the composer’s polemical stance against traditional opera, critics and scholars have brought different aesthetic considerations to bear in debating its significance. Paul Griffiths notes that LGM, like Clocks and Clouds (1973) and San Francisco Polyphony (1974), came out of the myriad influences in the early ’70s that marked Ligeti’s first move away from serial orthodoxy (The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians 2nd ed, s.v., “Ligeti”). Richard Toop calls LGM an “anti-opera” and a kind of “pop art,” filled with quotations and references to operatic genres from the past, but “their quality is mainly ironic rather than nostalgic” (1999, 163). Furthermore, Thomas

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signification of parody and the grotesque in györgy ligeti’s le grand macabre May describes the work’s sonic palette as “Rabelaisian, becoming quite visceral in its extremities of contrast, range, volume, and sound color, as well as the call for over-the-top virtuosity” (2004, iv). Ligeti’s deployment of parody and collage in LGM resists easy categorization because of the vast array of procedures by which he transforms historical models, often appropriating styles associated with operatic conventions only to subvert them. To label LGM a work of postmodern pastiche, celebrating plurality for its own sake, however, trivializes the richness and complexity of references that underlie it. Reflecting on the Zeitgeist of late 1960s, many avant-garde composers adopted parodic strategies as a form of social critique or commentary. In this respect, Ligeti shares an ideological vantage point with composers such as Peter Maxwell Davies, Harrison Birtwistle, and Mauricio Kagel, who adopted quotation and collage techniques with the intent to subvert musical conventions, including the avant-garde trends associated with the Darmstadt school.1 Catherine Losada discusses how such works that incorporate quotations and collage constitute both “a response to and an outgrowth of the serial practices” and provides a useful taxonomy of postwar compositions based on the diverse principles and motivations that underlie the adoption of collage technique (2004, 19). Given the nine categories of musical borrowing Losada offers with regard to postwar art music, the work loosely fits into one in which “collage is used as a metaphor for an aesthetic” and whereby “the conceptual incorporation of different styles of music overrides the significance of the individual quotations” (21). Yet what is the meta-musical concept that governs Ligeti’s approach to 1

In dramatic works like Bernd A. Zimmermann’s Die Soldaten (1965), Harrison Birtwistle’s Punch and Judy (1967), Maxwell Davies’s Resurrection (1963), or Eight Songs for a Mad King (1969), composers used parodic strategies in part to supplant the purity of a modernist aesthetics, while channeling the avant-garde’s power of provocation in formulating a social commentary or critique.

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musical parody in this opera? What gives the production of this opera its visceral, Rabelaisian edge? In what sense does it constitute an “anti-opera”? In light of such questions, the present analysis of LGM seeks to unveil the work’s narrative and meta-musical implications in relation to Ligeti’s parodic strategies for recasting borrowed musical styles and quotations. Examining the opera’s thematic connections with the original play by Michel de Ghelderode and Mikhail Bahktin’s concept of grotesque realism, I will suggest that Ligeti’s parodic approach in this opera is governed by two narrative trajectories: the grotesque and existential irony. While many other contemporaneous operas utilize similar parodic techniques to satirize musical conventions, LGM is unique in synthesizing text, images, and sound toward articulating an overarching trope of the grotesque, combined with surrealist and absurdist aesthetics. Furthermore, in theorizing about the narrative trajectories and musical parody as a marked form of intertextual reference, I draw on writings by Linda Hutcheon, Robert Hatten, and Esti Sheinberg. i. on the narrative implication of the grotesque From a dramaturgical point of view, LGM presents a mixture of medieval morality play and absurdist theater, resulting in “a curious hybrid of parody and profundity, of comedy and horror” (Lie 2004, vii). The libretto 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. As a baroque parable on the intertwined fortunes of politics and sex, the story revolves around farcical characters that include the evil tyrant Nekrozotar, young lovers Jadis and Flandre, astrologer Videbolle, his wife Salivaine, drunkard Proprenaz, and prince Goulave. Nekrozotar elicits both fear and laughter as the citizens of Breughelland respond to his announcement of the apocalypse with sheer indifference, indulgence, or panic. In the end, life triumphs over death as the impending crisis

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music theory spectrum 31 (2009)

is avoided and the evil characters (Salivaine and Nekrozotar) are duly punished; the play concludes with a pantheistic celebration of the regenerative cycle of life (Decock 1969, 116). As early as in 1965, Ligeti brainstormed ideas for composing an opera, having received a commission from then director of the Stockholm opera, Göran Gentele. After a failed attempt to compose an opera that parodies Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex, he found inspiration for an operatic libretto in Ghelderode’s play in 1972 (Sewell 2006, 7). For the opera, the names of the inhabitants were modified to Nekrotzar (Nekro + tzar), a peasant named Piet the Pot, young lovers Amando and Amanda, court astrologer Astradamors, his menacing wife Mescalina, Prince Go Go, the goddess Venus, and secret police Gepopo.2 Piet the Pot, a buffoon servant character in commedia dell’arte, is adapted from another Ghelderode character named Piet Bouteille. The addition of Venus is an homage to Baroque operatic convention, while the half-bird, half-woman concoction of Gepopo came about through Ligeti’s interest in surrealism and the absurdist theater. Unlike the villainess Salivaine who lives to be punished, Mescalina falls in love with Nekrotzar and expires in his arms. While substantially cutting back the text from the original play, Ligeti inserted dialogues based on slapstick humor, Gepopo’s comical arias, St. John’s Passion, among other texts, to keep the burlesque and the tragic in balance.3 Amanda Sewell argues that the most important deviation from the original play is found in the conclusion; instead of revealing Nekrotzar as nothing more than a charlatan, Ligeti introduces ambiguity by allowing the audience to decide whether Nekrotzar is Death or fraud and whether the apocalypse ultimately takes place or not in the final scene (2006, 12).

2 3

In the first version of LGM, the lovers’ names were Clitoria and Spermando (Kostakeva 1996, 161). Von Seherr-Thoss (1998) provides a detailed comparison of the contents of the original play by Ghelderode and the libretto for the first edition of LGM (144–45).

The operative narrative articulates principles central to Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of grotesque realism in several important respects. According to Bakhtin, the essential principle of the grotesque originates in the idea of degradation central to the culture of folk humor in the Middle Ages: “the lowering of all that is high, spiritual, ideal, [and] abstract; it is a transfer to the material level, to the sphere of earth and body in their indissoluble unity” (1984, 19–20). Bakhtin further argues that the Renaissance writers’ interest in the material bodily principle or the “rehabilitation of the flesh” emerged as a reaction against the asceticism of the Middle Ages; “the material bodily principle is contained not in the biological individual, not in the bourgeois ego, but in the people, a people who are continually growing and renewed. This is why all that is bodily becomes grandiose, exaggerated, immeasurable” (19). In this respect, Bakhtin credits the French Renaissance writer François Rabelais for foregrounding the importance of the material body as a “triumphant, festive principle” and uniting the cosmic, social, and bodily elements as an indivisible whole; for example, in Rabelais’s popular novel Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532), grotesque figures of giants derived from popular-festive carnival images are interwoven with cosmic phenomena in celebrating the theme of death, renewal, and fertility (328). From another perspective, the painting entitled “The Truimph of Death” (1562) by the Dutch Renaissance artist, Breughel the Elder, captures the ideas fundamental to grotesque realism. At first glance, the graphic scenes of terror may haunt the modern viewer as a horrifying vision of the apocalypse. In the painting, which depicts a battle scene, skeletal legions swarm across the landscape, while ordinary mortals commit desperate acts in confrontation with death: people flee into a tunnel decorated with crosses while a skeleton on horseback slaughters them with a scythe; a starving dog nibbles at the face of a child; the pious pray for salvation; and royal figures, including a court jester and Arcadian lovers, marvel at this phenomenon in sheer disbelief. Yet from the Renaissance perspective on grotesque realism, the painting

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signification of parody and the grotesque in györgy ligeti’s le grand macabre assumes a positive characteristic in celebrating the regeneration of life through death: all values, thoughts, phenomena, and objects are brought together to break down the barriers that separate the living from the dead. Given Ligeti’s lifelong interest in the visual arts, it is hardly surprising that the apocalyptic scene depicted in Breughel’s painting provided the creative impetus for LGM. Ligeti comments: “I have always been fascinated by the idea of hell and scenes of the Last Judgment. I am thinking of Breughel and especially of Bosch, whose paintings present a mixture of fear and grotesque humor” (Várnai 1983, 46).4 Since its 1978 premiere in Stockholm by Opéra Royal, the stage productions of LGM—thirty-one in all—incorporated aspects of grotesque humor, absurdist theater, and surrealism in depicting the imaginary Breughelland to different ends. Especially controversial was Peter Seller’s 1997 production of LGM in Salzburg, which Ligeti found disturbing due to the explicit depiction of the apocalypse set in Chernobyl that detracted from his desire for ambiguity (Sewell 2006, 45). In the early ’80s, Ligeti remarked that only one production had come close to what he had imagined, namely, the 1979 production in Bologna, which captured the true spirit of the work as “a demonical romp, a great extravaganza” (Várnai 1983,113). The ensuing analysis of LGM focuses on the revised score from 1996, in which Ligeti further reinforces his ideas for ambivalence, absurdism, and the sublime through simplified text setting, minimized spoken dialogue, and revised instrumentation for greater transparency of sound (Von Seherr-Thoss 1998, 362–64). In applying semiotic constructs for analysis, I argue that Ligeti engages with musical parody at two levels: the surface level at which he transforms and subverts quotation of existing music and musical styles and the global level at which he articulates the trope of the 4

In 1961, Ligeti saw Breughel’s “Triumph of Death” and Bosch’s “Garden of Earthly Delights” in the Prado and they influenced his Requiem (Lie, vii).

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grotesque through establishing an expressive opposition between ludicrousness and horror.5 Furthermore, Ligeti builds dramatic tension by developing textural strategies of collage and disintegration in lieu of a traditional ensemble ending. In such contexts, parody and other forms of imitation serve as the central means by which the composer creates an aural counterpart to the allegorical depiction of chaos, destruction, and renewal found in Breughel’s “Triumph of Death.” ii. semiotics, parody, and the context of enunciation Before proceeding to the analysis of LGM, I will begin with a brief summary of semiotic concepts relevant for analysis. Building on Charles Peirce’s semiotic theory, Hatten defines type as a “conceptual category defined by features or a range of qualities that are essential to its identity,” while token presents “the perceptible entity that embodies the features or qualities of the type” (1994, 44–45). Topics are “patches of music that trigger clear associations with styles, genres, and expressive meanings” (2005, 2); tokens that define each topic are constrained by a narrow range of gestures, such as a descending chromatic bass line in a minor key that signifies the lament topic. So, for instance, E major is a token of the general key type, yet as a token of a symbol for Masonic unity in Mozart’s Magic Flute, it gains a more specific topical meaning. Although defined by convention, topics are not restricted to historically established ones; Ligeti’s signature style of “sound mass” texture, used repeatedly in the context of LGM as an iconic or onomatopoeic representation of the approaching comet, can be interpreted as an iconic topic that emerges through contextual reinforcement. And all instances of musical borrowing based on direct or stylistic quotation constitute indexical types or topics because 5

Ludicrous differs from comical in referring to a situation that is “amusing or laughable through obvious absurdity, incongruity, exaggeration or eccentricity” (Babcock 1993, 1344).

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they reference existing ones in the musical literature (Monelle 2006, 28). Lastly, Hatten explains how a trope emerges from a “clear juxtaposition of contradictory, or previously unrelated, types” and that “there must be evidence from a higher level to support a tropological interpretation” (2004, 217). In the libretto, even the naming of characters in Brueghelland derives from the troping of familiar words: Nekrotzar merges the idea of a tyrant (tzar) with the underworld suggested by “nekro” (dead); Gepopo combines the evil connotation of Gestapo (secret police) with “Popo”— an oblique reference to the half bird, half man character Papageno from the Magic Flute, and so forth. A musical trope, likewise, opens up room for a creative synthesis of topics by strategically combining stylistically incongruous elements.6 Hatten describes how the Turkish march used to embellish the “Ode to Joy” theme in the finale to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony creates an “all embracing” trope, in which topics that represent “high” and “low” styles are fused to connote the brotherhood of all men (1994, 84). Applied to the thematic, formal, and genre levels, Hatten describes troping as a technique that “constitutes one of the more spectacular ways that composers can create new meanings” (2006, 68). Now, when a composer “parodies” a style from the past, the quoted material or its referent7 is marked or highlighted in a way that differs from other forms of musical imitation. And here I invoke Michael Shapiro’s concept of markedness that establishes a valuative relation between two terms based on asymmetry, in which the marked term is distinguished

6

7

The technique of troping here overlaps with what Martha Hyde calls an eclectic or exploitative type of imitation, where past styles are combined with contemporary techniques to yield “a brilliant manipulation of the new and old” (2003, 102). Hyde offers four categories of imitative strategies (reverential, eclectic, heuristic, and dialectical) in reference to Stravinsky’s neoclassical works. In Charles Peirce’s semiotic theory, the referent or object is what the sign “stands for.” Referents can include ideas, events, and material objects and in the present context refers to the parodied musical element.

from the unmarked one on the basis of degree of specification or determinacy (1983, 79). Rather than restricting the valuative relation, as in a privative opposition (A vs. non-A), it can be based on equipollent opposition (A vs. B), in which one term is often evaluatively dominant than the other (Battistella 1990, 33). So, for instance, the English usage of “woman” and “man” shares this valuative relation, with the former constituting the marked term (due to the degree of specificity attributed to the term “woman”) and the latter unmarked (since “man” can be used as a generic term for both). By extension, musical parody and intertextual reference8 share this valuative relation; parody is construed as a marked reference that involves the composer’s deliberate reworking of a borrowed material or style and elicits a concrete identification by educated listeners (e.g., “that’s a twisted quotation of Wagner’s ‘desire’ leitmotif!”), while an intertextual reference is unmarked and elicits a less determinate range of semantic reference from the listener (e.g., “it sounds like a passage from Die Walküre”). Furthermore, my usage of parody here overlaps with Christopher Reynolds’s term allusion, which he defines as “an intentional reference to another work made by means of a resemblance that affects the meaning conveyed to those who recognize it” (2003, 6). The difference is that Reynolds uses allusion to refer primarily to motivic, rhythmic, and textual appropriations in nineteenth-century music, be it the assimilative process by which Schumann alludes to Beethoven’s song cycle An die ferne Geliebte in his piano work or the contrastive process by which a song by Mendelssohn serves as a model for Schumann’s “Vogel als Prophet” (80). The original model serves as an intertextual reference to the new context, 8

While Julie Kristeva and Roland Barthes treat intertextuality as a modality of perception where the reader is free to associate texts at random (Kristeva 1980, 15), Michael Klein draws a distinction between poietic (authorly intention) and esthesic (readerly response) forms of intertextuality (2005, 12). The present context refers to the esthesic form.

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signification of parody and the grotesque in györgy ligeti’s le grand macabre Original context

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New context

Sign system:

transcontextualization

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example 1. Parodic context of enunciation but typically in an unmarked, neutral sense. Following Hutcheon, I argue that parody in postwar twentieth-century music presents a more pronounced form of doubled-voiced utterance, in which the semantic reference of the original quotation is set in sharp relief from its surrounding musical context. Often through exaggeration and distortion, its meaning is twisted or turned inside out. Ligeti comments with regard to composing LGM: “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 1983, 59). In this respect, Hutcheon offers important criteria for formalizing the semantic structure of parody, which she defines as a form of artistic recycling accompanied by complex forms of “trans-contextualization and inversion” in reference to twentieth-century art forms (1985, 15). She also defines ethos—“an inferred intended reaction motivated by the text”—as an integral factor that determines whether parody

is accompanied by a playful, satirical, or ironic intent (55). In introducing the concept of ethos, Hutcheon emphasizes the viewer’s active role in decoding the artist’s underlying intention. In extending her theory to the enunciation of musical parody, Example 1 presents a diagram that illustrates how the object of a musical sign becomes “trans-contextualized” when transplanted into a new context.9 As shown by the arrows, the change in context transforms the sign-interpretant of the object.10 As a syntactical and rhetorical sign, parody acquires either a marked ethos, satirical or ironic, when the sign-interpretant of its referent (I) undergoes topical reversal or negation (I’). For example, in speech, “Jack is a REAL 9 10

The diagram builds on the model introduced by Sheinberg to illustrate the structure of parody (152). For Peirce, the concept of meaning is simply defined as the actual effect of a sign (its interpretant), that is, the direct feeling (emotional), physical reaction (energetic), or language-based concept (sign-interpretant) inspired in the perceiver by a musical sign (Turino, 224).

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32

music theory spectrum 31 (2009) x

                



          



    

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tiger,” enunciated with a deliberate roll of the eye and satirical tone of voice, conveys the reversal of the literal message— that Jack is not at all aggressive like a tiger, that he is a coward (sign-interpretant). In this case, it is the mode of delivery that transforms the “aggressive” connotation (the ground) associated with the referent “tiger” from affirmation to negation. In musical contexts, the negation or reversal can likewise be achieved through rhetorical and/or syntactical manipulation (Everett 2004).11 For example, when Debussy quotes the “desire” leitmotif from Tristan und Isolde in “Golliwog’s Cakewalk,” I argue that he distorts the borrowed referent through incongruous juxtaposition. As shown in Example 2, first, he extracts the ascending minor sixth motive and exaggerates the sentiment (“avec une grande émotion”), and then he juxtaposes this quotation with the grace-note figuration that “mocks” the serious affect of Wagner’s music. By embedding the operatic leitmotif within the genre of ragtime, 11

In a previous article in Music Theory Online (2004), I introduce three constructs (paradigmatic substitution, incongruous juxtaposition, and progressive decontextualization) that induce satiric ethos locally or ironic ethos at broader metaphoric levels of interpretation.

Debussy blurs the presumed boundary between highbrow and lowbrow music. Thus while the affect of “desire” is associated with the borrowed motif, the changes in musical context brought on by its juxtaposition with the “mocking” motif, exaggerated expressive indication, and formal context of ragtime negate the sign-interpretant of “desire” by trivializing it. According to Sheinberg, Debussy creates “an aesthetic distance, a double outlook which is, simultaneously, satirizing and self-satirizing” (2000, 144). And it is the implicit recognition of the original context of enunciation— e.g., the tragic connotation of the “desire” motif in Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde—that enables the listener to recognize that the sign-interpretant of the original leitmotif has been subverted. Expanding on Hatten’s framework, Example 3 presents my classification of three types of parodic procedures: mapping, troping, and reversal. They are often used in combination with one another and involve a type or topic as referent. Mapping refers to the basic procedure of correlating a particular character or situation with a distinctive stylistic type or topic, troping to juxtaposing or superimposing incongruous topics and types for creative synthesis, and reversal to negating the topical referent of a given quotation through distorting

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signification of parody and the grotesque in györgy ligeti’s le grand macabre Syntactic:

Mapping of topic/type

Troping of topic/type

Reversal of topic

substitution exaggeration

juxtaposition superimposition

distortion

Ethos:

Playful

Expressive States:

Ludicrousness

33

Satirical

Semantic: :

Horror

Trope of the Grotesque (Absurdist Aesthetics) example 3. Parodic Procedures in Le Grand Macabre. Ligeti, Le Grand Macabre.

its syntactical attributes. In the context of LGM, these syntactical procedures map onto two semantic components: a parodic ethos that ranges from playful to satirical along a continuum and an expressive state that signifies ludicrousness or horror. On a broader level, the tropological reading of the grotesque emerges through two interrelated textural strategies in LGM. First, Ligeti builds the ensemble texture in each scene by combining procedures of mapping, troping, and/or reversal into a multi-layered collage. By incorporating incongruous musical types and topics into a collage that gradually increases in textural density, Ligeti effectively blurs the boundary between the ludicrous and horrifying expressive states. Second, he disintegrates a given musical texture through fragmentation and distortion. In LGM, Ligeti gradually transforms the vocal utterances or instrumental collage to a point of total disintegration in order to accentuate the expressive state of horror. Sheinberg finds precedence for both procedures in Dmitri Shostakovich in his early

opera called The Nose (1927–28); in this operatic adaptation of Gogol’s novel, in which a government official loses his nose, Shostakovich depicts a number of scenes where individual voices gradually accumulate in textural density into a cacophonic whole. Sheinberg comments: “when a chaotic multitude of accumulated voices mingles into an indecipherable noise of a horrifying and dangerous mob,” the “crowdtexture” conveys a grotesque picture (2000, 278). Similarly, Ligeti offers extensive passages in which the citizens’ plea for help from the impending disaster builds in density where the initially homophonic choral utterance disintegrates into a cacophonic outcry (Scene III, rehearsal 377). In the course of such a transformation, the initially harmless crowd turns into a dangerous mob. While the first strategy articulates the grotesque trope via blurring the boundaries between the ludicrous and horrifying expressive states through textural accumulation, the second articulates a definitive shift in expressive state from the ludicrous to the horrifying via distortion and fragmentation.

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music theory spectrum 31 (2009) dopia movimento $ = 100

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example 4. Mescalina’s call for Venus (Scene II, r.187). Ligeti, Le Grand Macabre.  1996 by Schott Music. All Rights Reserved. Used by permission of European American Music Distributors LLC, sole U.S. and Canadian agent for Schott Music. iii. parodic strategies in lgm: mapping, troping, and reversal I will now illustrate the diverse contexts in which Ligeti deploys different parodic procedures within LGM. Under the category of parody via mapping, Ligeti pays homage to operatic conventions by assigning distinctive stylistic or timbral idioms to typecast the main characters. Example 4 presents the passage from Scene II where the menacing but lovelorn Mescalina summons Venus for help in finding her a virile mate. Here the comedic features of the two characters are set into sharp relief through the basic procedure of mapping contrastive timbres and stylistic idioms. First, the arpeggiation of the “open” fifth interval, G–D, on the harp

and clavichord signifies the benevolent spirit of the goddess of love, whom Mescalina cries out to. Mescalina begins her “drunken” aria on G, although her erratic vocal line is punctuated by a succession of dissonant string and organ clusters on “Venus”; the abrupt shift in timbre and the deformation of the perfect fifth to tritones in the cluster chords [F, G, G, B, D] and [B, C, D, F, G] convey Mescalina’s greedy disposition. In the subsequent musical passage where Mescalina calls out for Venus, a melody played by oboe d’amore mimics the housekeeper’s yearning for a virile man (rehearsal 192). When Venus finally appears, her otherworldly presence is underscored by the high soprano range and vocal contour based on oscillating thirds (rehearsal 217). In alluding to the “fairy scene” from Verdi’s Falstaff, Venus is

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signification of parody and the grotesque in györgy ligeti’s le grand macabre

Amanda

9  tenuto poco cresc.   ( &*      ' O

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text: “So let us in our bliss together perish. . . . ” (ornamentation applies to underlined text).

example 5. Amanda/Amando duet (Scene I, r. 9/18). Ligeti, Le Grand Macabre.  1996 by Schott Music. All Rights Reserved. Used by permission of European American Music Distributors LLC, sole U.S. and Canadian agent for Schott Music. accompanied by a female chorus, placed off stage, providing a direct echo of every phrase she sings (rehearsal 214–225). Example 5 illustrates a parodic strategy via troping of stylistic types from the lovers’ duet in Scene I. Amanda and Amando sing about the enduring quality of love, projected against Nekrotzar’s omen of the impending catastrophe.

Strings initially accompany the enchanting duet with sustained harmonics; as shown at rehearsal 9, the vocal parts move within an expanding chromatic wedge in rhythmic unison. Later in this duet (rehearsal 18), their vocal texture appropriates a Baroque form of ornamentation on the word “perish,” harmonized in parallel thirds and accompanied by a

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36

music theory spectrum 31 (2009)

2

a tempo

$ = 132

 34   

Piet the Pot

lunga

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example 6. Piet the Pot (Scene I, r. 2–3). Ligeti, Le Grand Macabre.  1996 by Schott Music. All Rights Reserved. Used by permission of European American Music Distributors LLC, sole U.S. and Canadian agent for Schott Music. figuration in the celesta that outlines an atonal hexachord built on thirds. Here, the stylized neighbor-note figures recall the trillo technique of ornamentation that traces back to Baroque vocal ornamentation, specifically, the love duet sung by Nero and Poppea from Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea.12 In transforming this stylistic referent, it is merged with other musical textures to create new meaning. One has to do with the lovers’ stylized stammering on the syllable “pe” of “perish” beginning at rehearsal 18; this exaggerated form of repetition underscores the absurdity of the situation. It is also through troping of Baroque vocal ornamentation and cyclical 12

Seville, 23–24. The aria “Ne più, ne più s’interporrà noia dimora” demonstrates two voices in the treble clef that move in parallel thirds.

repetition of the celesta motive that this passage underscores the seemingly sublime, but ludicrous expressive state. Piet the Pot’s “drunken” aria exemplifies Ligeti’s technique of troping incongruous stylistic topics through abrupt shift in musical discourse. As shown in Example 6, his aria begins with a literal quotation of the head motive of Dies Irae (last pitch is chromatically altered to C), which disintegrates into a descending chromatic line. At rehearsal 3, the vocal line abruptly shifts to a drinking song; Ligeti’s sketches indicate that he modeled the vocal line based on the choral hunting song from Berg’s Wozzeck (Act III, rehearsal 560) and a song called “Valentin Alpenrosen” (Von SeherrThoss 1998, 224–25). Here, Ligeti further distorts Berg’s misquotation of the German folk song Ein Jäger aus

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signification of parody and the grotesque in györgy ligeti’s le grand macabre

37

Tempo giusto $ = 80

( 4 4

4 car horns



4 car horns

44



4  2  2  2   ) 4 2 4 car horns

ff  2  2  2 2

sempre



)



sempre ff

2

 2  2  2 

sempre ff

(

2 222 22       12   12     2+ 2  2 2  2 2+ 2+ 2+ 2  22  2 

22222222 2 

22  22 22 2  2  2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2  22222222 2  2 2  22 22 2  2  2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2  22222222

22  2  22 22 2  2  2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 

2

sempre ff

2

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2 

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axis of symmetry

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example 7. Opening Prelude (Scene I). Ligeti, Le Grand Macabre.  1996 by Schott Music. All Rights Reserved. Used by permission of European American Music Distributors LLC, sole U.S. and Canadian agent for Schott Music.

Kurpfalz through irregular phrasing and a succession of upward leaps by a ninth or seventh (originally an octave in the folk song). At rehearsal 5, the wedge-like vocal entry on the text “O, long lost paradise” anticipates the vocal lines sung by Amanda and Amando at rehearsal 9+5. Because the chromatic motive for Dies Irae later manifests as a signifier of the comet, Piet displays a prophetic vision of the fate of Breughelland while presenting himself as a drunken fool. Troping at the formal level occurs in the instrumental prelude and interludes that separate each scene in this opera. As shown in Example 7, the beginning of each scene begins with

an instrumental “toccata” played by three car horns. The car horns participate in a fugal imitation in which the interval of the successive entries diminish proportionally in rhythmic value by half; the composite rhythm shortens until a steady sixteenthnote motion results at measure 6. After two more measures, the rhythmic pattern reverses itself to form a complete palindrome. Retrograde-symmetrical structure appears in combination with imitative and canonic writing throughout this opera.13 13

The palindromic form is also used by Ghelderode in his ordering of the six tableaux in the original play, from which the libretto for LGM was taken.

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music theory spectrum 31 (2009) Ancora più mosso Vivacissimo molto ritmico

sempre lo stesso tempo

( = = 480)

< = 144 Picc.

Bass Cl.

(

3  4

24

23         Cl.   3

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ff

3 2  4 4

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example 8. Gepopo’s aria (Scene III, r. 394). Ligeti, Le Grand Macabre.  1996 by Schott Music. All Rights Reserved. Used by permission of European American Music Distributors LLC, sole U.S. and Canadian agent for Schott Music. Although the form of the prelude and subsequent interludes between scenes is modeled on an instrumental toccata tracing back to Baroque operas, Ligeti replaces the timbre of brass instruments with car horns and electric doorbells. Such sounds, along with the use of metronomes, alarm clocks, and sirens can be understood as aural markers of surrealism and more specifically futurism, infusing the opera with an unequivocally modernist sound. As a parodic strategy, the construction of preludes and interludes exemplifies mapping via substitution: that is, while borrowing the structure and rhetoric (“fanfare”) of a preexisting form, Ligeti replaces the content with surrealistic sounds of car horns to create aesthetic distance. Mapping via substitution applies to a musical context where the borrowed stylistic referent is less transparent, yet

it is parodic because it invokes and subverts a familiar operatic convention. In an extended aria sung by Gepopo in Scene III, the head of the secret police of Breughelland sings a schizophrenic aria in which she warns Prince Go Go of a comet that will destroy their land, as displayed in Example 8. In an aria that begins with a high trill that overlaps with trills sustained by woodwinds (rehearsal 389), Ligeti blends coloratura techniques with tremolos, angular rhythms, and intervals that fluctuate between extreme ends of the vocal register. Even in the absence of explicit quotations, Gepopo’s aria recalls the style of vocal executions featured in the convention of “mad” arias, for example, from Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor; the cascading descent from a high register and shifting points of reference are

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signification of parody and the grotesque in györgy ligeti’s le grand macabre sub agitato non pesante

429 (

$ = 176

3  4



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goes into a paroxysm of excitement, confusion and panic

  

     

     

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example 9. Gepopo’s aria (Scene III, r. 429). Ligeti, Le Grand Macabre.  1996 by Schott Music. All Rights Reserved. Used by permission of European American Music Distributors LLC, sole U.S. and Canadian agent for Schott Music. points of commonality found in both, although Gepopo’s aria is far more discontinuous and angular. In addition, in commenting on her half-bird, half-man nature, her vocal utterances are accompanied by an array of percussion instruments that offer futuristic sounds and outbursts, alternating with a rhythmic ostinato (based on an aksak rhythm 4+4+3) by temple blocks and congos that brings lightheartedness to the musical passage. Later in the same aria, Gepopo’s mimicking of animal sounds assumes a surreal and Dadaesque quality as her singing degenerates into an unintelligible stutter that extends

the quality of madness to an absurd height.14 As shown in Example 9, Gepopo’s plea to “Call a guard!” dissolves into a repeated utterance of “A-da” across a minor ninth. The accompanying instruments support her musical stutter with sustained trills and the synchronized rhythmic patterns, 14

Ligeti was particularly interested in Alfred Jarry’s absurdist theater, which denied the traditional flow of action and traditional concept of characters on stage by making them appear incoherent and disconnected, like parodies of the real world (Grossman 1967, 475). Gepopo’s incoherence and musical stutter exemplify this theatrical orientation.

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music theory spectrum 31 (2009) the lowest note possible with fluttertongue

3  4 2

Trb. Tb.



3  4

Go Go



3





subito moderato guisto $ = 100



 

E - nough!

3

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3  4







ritenuto al meno mosso $ = 80

44



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E

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nough!

 

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ff

 



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distorted cadence

example 10. Prince Go-Go (Scene III, r. 306). Ligeti, Le Grand Macabre.  1996 by Schott Music. All Rights Reserved. Used by permission of European American Music Distributors LLC, sole U.S. and Canadian agent for Schott Music. which become progressively shorter and faster as she “goes into a paroxysm of excitement, confusion, and panic” (Ligeti’s description in the score). This passage obviously presents a case where the parodic effect is enunciated without troping, but rather through exaggerated forms of repetition and fragmentation associated with the aesthetics of absurdist theater. In contrast to such examples that underscore the ludicrous expressive state, Ligeti reserves the third category of parody via reversal or negation for dramatic moments that satirize a character or articulate a large-scale enunciation of the grotesque in the context of a collage. For instance, Prince Go Go’s role is satirized through troping of stylistic types and distortion. Example 10 is taken from the beginning of the third scene, in which two corrupt politicians try to force Prince Go Go to sign a decree to raise taxes. This scene begins with a boisterous, hocketing duet by the politicians in the comic buffa tradition of Rossini. Against their mockery,

Prince Go Go is portrayed as a naïve and helpless creature, whose noble status is indexed by the use of secco recitative that segues to string accompaniment on the text “Forgive me!” Although the vocal rhythm retains the secco recitative style of enunciation, it is harmonized by dissonances built on thirds and fifths that loosely parallel the vocal contour. The prince’s clueless and idiotic character is satirized through subverting a tonal cadence; note the manner by which the vocal line cadences on B, against which the bass moves from B to F and the retardation and suspension in the upper part resolve to a major ninth from E to F. Another satirical example is provided in Example 11. Mecalina’s schizophrenic aria is characterized by a dramatic shift in musical discourse to reveal two different sides of her personality. First, the lament topic appears in combination with a distorted quotation of of Wagner’s “desire” motif a 〈A F E D〉 to portray the lovelorn nature of Mescalina. Notice

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signification of parody and the grotesque in györgy ligeti’s le grand macabre

44 

Mesc.





Oh,

pain!

 

@



Vlc.

molto sostenuto, dolente $ = 40 sotto voce, dolente

 

41

24

“desire” motif a

 

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pain!

 



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pain!

   

 





     

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pain!

    

 

  

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pain!





     



lament topic with descending bass line

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doppio movimento $ = 80



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inversion of the “desire” motif b

          Who the cook - ing? Who the mend - ing?

  





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example 11. Mescalina’s lament (Scene II, r.153, reduced score). Ligeti, Le Grand Macabre.  1996 by Schott Music. All Rights Reserved. Used by permission of European American Music Distributors LLC, sole U.S. and Canadian agent for Schott Music. how the cello outlines a chromatically descending bass upon which Mescalina sings her song of lament based on the distorted and incomplete rendition of the “desire” motif 〈B G F F〉. In the next system, the music quickly shifts to reveal her menacing character, intensified by chromatic clusters in the organ and strings that support the melodic inversion of the “desire” motif b 〈G A A B〉. Arguably, the whole of the “desire” leitmotif has been divided and distorted across two

contrasting musical passages to convey Mescalina’s lovelorn and menacing dispositions. The “desire” motif surfaces in an ironic moment later in Scene II, when Nekrotzar approaches Mescalina as an answer to her wish to find a virile lover. Example 12 illustrates the sudden change in texture at rehearsal 229, as the string trio presents a bourrée with an expressive indication of grazioso that accompanies the love/death scene of Mescalina. Appropriating

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music theory spectrum 31 (2009) Andantino con moto, grazioso (bourée perpetuelle)

Venus

(

4  4

$ = 104





4  4 

  





It

 sempre sotto voce

Mesc.

 sempre sotto voce

7





shall

be







It

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Nekro.

man!

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elaboration of the “desire” motif a'

example 12. Use of pastoral topic (Scene II, r. 229). Ligeti, Le Grand Macabre.  1996 by Schott Music. All Rights Reserved. Used by permission of European American Music Distributors LLC, sole U.S. and Canadian agent for Schott Music. a courtship dance, the “desire” motif appears in the chromatically descending Alberti bass figures in the lower strings, echoed by the appearance of the motif sung in staggered thirds by Mescalina and Nekrotzar three bars later. Venus, Mescalina, Nekotzar, Piet the Pot, and Astradamors engage in a closing vocal ensemble that accumulates in textural density as the scene results in the death of Mescalina. The perpetual descent in the bass provides the perfect musical analogue for Mescalina’s figurative descent into hell. And the positive affect

of the pastoral is turned inside out by this macabre dance, in which the misaligned vocal entries create a multi-layered collage; while Nekrotzar seduces Mescalina and Venus prods them on, Piet the Pot and Astradamors are plotting to kill Mescalina. Her last utterance on the word “Murder!” is accompanied by a light-hearted dance music in 2/4 meter in the harpsichord and electric piano (rehearsal 235). Furthermore, the rhetorical effect is ironic rather than simply satirical; the combination of euphoric and dysphoric expressions gives rise

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signification of parody and the grotesque in györgy ligeti’s le grand macabre to a trope of irony inaugurated by the contradiction between what is claimed (murder of Mescalina) and an ambivalent context where two motivations coalesce into one (was this scene about love or murder?).15 Although the death of Meculina in the operatic narrative is an aberration from the original play, the scene curiously resonates with Ghelderode’s conviction that “eroticism is a source both of tragedy and of burlesquerie” and his view of lust as “death’s other companion” (Herz 1962, 96). The most dramatic effects are achieved when Ligeti deploys parody via reversal or negation in the context of a multi-layered collage texture to articulate the expressive state of horror. In the first scene, when Nekrotzar announces the coming of the apocalypse, the idea of horror is signified by the polymetric superimposition of descending cluster chords over the ticking of a gigantic metronome on stage. Against the cluster chords in the piano that maintain the notated meter, the harpsichord, metronome, and choral entry proceed in different rhythms and tempi. Example 13 provides the relevant passage. Nektrozar’s static vocal enunciation on C4 draws on the operatic convention of the “oracle” aria. Von Seherr-Thoss traces this topical convention to Gluck’s Alceste (1776), where the voice of Oracle announces the death of the king in a declamatory recitation based on a single note (1998, 251). In response to Nekrotzar’s proclamation, the chorus delivers a chromatically distorted Lutheran chorale that turns the parodic ethos of its referent inside out: more specifically, the text that speaks of a God as guardian in the chorale “Erkenne mich mein Hüter” from Bach’s St. Matthew’s Passion is replaced by one that invokes destruction and peril. Additionally, the chorale melody is harmonized mainly by tritones to convey the musical expression of horror. In Scene III, Ligeti introduces a massive textural collage entitled “Homage to Ives,” where he builds on the formula of 15

Furthermore, Ligeti’s transformation of traditional form (e.g., bourrée in Scene III) intersects with Martha Hyde’s criteria for a heuristic form of musical imitation in which a composer seeks a deeper engagement with a given model in order to achieve dramatic conflict (2003, 119).

43

topical reversal by de-contextualizing the theme from the finale of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 3. As shown in Example 14, the rhythmic is preserved while the pitches are distorted; the theme is transformed into a twelve-tone passacaglia, in which the ordered pitch interval (opi) of the row alternates between ic’s 6 and e. Furthermore, the permutation of twelve tones and the rhythmic talea of Beethoven’s theme are misaligned so that the next entry of the row begins on last quarter note of the talea. This passacaglia forms the foundation for a multi-layered collage in different tempi and meters: a solo violin enters with a ragtime that recalls the devil’s music from 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 Eroica theme. By combining music drawn from high and low styles into a massive collage, this passage turns into an ultimate macabre dance, gradually building in textural density and dynamic intensity, and in which the ludicrous and horrifying states co-mingle. As a musical corollary to Bakhtin’s grotesque body, the individual layers maintain their autonomy through independence in timbre, meter, and tempo, while being subsumed into the ever-growing collective. As this procession of incongruous tunes unfolds, chaos reigns on stage as people fight, eat, drink, copulate, and so forth, in coping with the final moments of life. Following the macabre dance, the citizens of Breughelland make their plea for help in the form of a disintegrated chorale, as Nekrotzar makes his final pronouncement of the apocalypse. In this climactic passage, the “heavenly trombone” motif appears over and over again to signify a form of divine intervention that thwarts Nekrotzar’s omen. Ligeti’s instruction indicates that two trumpeters and two trombonists are to be positioned high up in a box overlooking the stage and that they are to sound as if “coming from far away.” Historically, the trombone symbolizes the supernatural or the underworld and conjures up images of terror and unknown realms of darkness. The presence of trombones plays upon

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music theory spectrum 31 (2009) with a visionary gesture

62 6 

Nekro

For Hrpsd.

 

Pno.

Vla.

Cb.



  ↓ 1    +  

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@





there

will

sub. ff







be

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↑

 

↑

↑

  

cresc. poco a poco

                









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high,

thou

art

in

pe - ril

great.

example 13. Nekrotzar’s announcement of the apocalypse (Scene I, r. 62, reduced score). Ligeti, Le Grand Macabre.  1996 by Schott Music. All Rights Reserved. Used by permission of European American Music Distributors LLC, sole U.S. and Canadian agent for Schott Music. this conventional symbolism, although Ligeti reverses the glorious and triumphant topic that usually accompanies its use in the Tuba Miram sections of the Requiems by Mozart and Berlioz. As shown in Example 15, this theme sounds pastoral, cast in a lyrical 6/8 meter and accompanied by an expressive indication of dolce. In addition, the tenor trombones continuously play notes at the uppermost threshold of their range. And here is an instance where the effect of this

reversed symbol is subsumed by the expressive horror of the music that follows. The trombone motif repeats several times, each time followed by Nekrotzar’s final pronouncement and the chorus’s desperate plea for help. Ultimately the stage darkens as the scene concludes with an instrumental postlude, entitled “Intermezzo: the terrible, imaginary Last Judgment” (rehearsal 603). And there is something rather ironic in Ligeti’s designation of this horrifying

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signification of parody and the grotesque in györgy ligeti’s le grand macabre

451 ( 4 Timp. )  4

Andante misurato, sempre ostinato (“collage”)

$ = 100



   



4  4  pizz.

Vlc. Cb.

 secco

.





      

 





.

A:

 

Violin: ragtime (r. 452) Ragtime two step - ben ritmato

2  4        

$ = 60

     













         

7

.

.

A

opi:

Vln.

45

opi = ordered pitch-class intervals

 

                           

                 

 

Bassoon: Greek orthodox tune (r. 453) Tempo giusto, ben ritmato (alla danza)

Bsn.

    A 68

 

$ = 80

 

 

    



 

   





 

 

 

 

 non legato

Piccolo clarinet: Brazilian samba (r. 454)

$ = 138

Cl. Picc.



    34   







  E   



   E 



    





 

     E    6



     



Flute piccolo (r. 457)

$ = 192 vivace leggiero Fl. Picc.

4  4

   

 possible





   





   

                   

    

          

example 14. Eroica variation theme; collage (Scene III, r. 451, reduced score). Ligeti, Le Grand Macabre.  1996 by Schott Music. All Rights Reserved. Used by permission of European American Music Distributors LLC, sole U.S. and Canadian agent for Schott Music. This content downloaded from 200.130.19.202 on Sun, 16 Aug 2015 17:34:27 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

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music theory spectrum 31 (2009) Parade drum (r. 456) Tempo agitato

Par. Drum

44

 

$ = 192

2222 

22 2 





22 2 

 

2 2

34 2 



22 



22 

 

2 22 

 2

3 brutale Bass trombone (r. 457) Multo vivace, energico

Bass Trb.

4  4 

3 brutale



$ = 168–176









blaring

 

  



          

example 14. [continued ]

postlude as an Intermezzo, referring to a genre of comic operatic interlude presented between scenes of an eighteenthcentury opera seria. This music that serves as the sonic icon for the falling comet, a micropolyphonic texture that increases in dynamic intensity to the written indication of eight fortes, appears to reverse the conventional meaning of an Intermezzo. Or does the “heavenly” trombone motif signify some form of divine intervention? As the stage turns completely dark, the audience is left in suspense over the significance of the music that closes the third scene. Before proceeding to the Epilogue, I will discuss the significance of the structuring of the operatic numbers within each scene in relation to parodic strategies deployed. As mentioned earlier, each of the three scenes develops in a similar manner by a crescendo to a “catastrophic” climax within the Wagnerian “bar form” (Toop 1999, 163). Furthermore, as shown in Examples 16, 17 and 18, musical numbers map onto distinctive expressive states of ludicrousness or horror within each scene. The arrows show the path through which the musical numbers oscillate back and forth between the two expressive states, while the bracket indicates where textural strategies of collage and disintegration cut across the two expressive states.

In the first scene, the ludicrous and horrifying states are brought into stark contrast: Amanda and Amando’s innocent “love” duet oscillates between Piet the Pot and Nekrotzar’s omen about the impending crisis; the momentous build-up to the first collage (rehearsal 59) shifts the expressive state from ludicrous to horrifying, yet the scene concludes with a brief recapitulation of the love duet. The structure of the second scene, given in Example 17, further amplifies the opposing expressive states through abrupt shifts in musical discourse; while Mescalina and Astradamors’s number duet and quotations from Liszt and Schumann belong to the comic buffa genre, Mescalina’s lament and the ensemble scene (rehearsal 228) blend the ludicrous and the horrifying expressive states. The closing comic buffa ensemble (rehearsal 250) immediately follows the ironic bourée perpetuelle and leads to the ominous micropolyphonic postlude that signifies the approaching comet. The third scene, given in Example 18, provides a change in setting as it opens with a series of buffa numbers featuring Prince Go-Go’s politicians at the castle of Breughelland. The playful aksak rhythm is abruptly followed by the sinister choral recitation, which embodies the fear and helplessness of the inhabitants of Breughelland. Gepopo’s “mad” aria provides another comic relief before it segues into

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signification of parody and the grotesque in györgy ligeti’s le grand macabre

Fl. 1/2

Ob. 1/2

(

Da lontano $ = 66

6  8







6 ) 8







6  8



Nekro

489 ' 44 '

 F



44 ''

F



3

44     





He Vln./Vla.

Vlc./Cb.

(

6  8

 

 

 

  

6 )  8   





 



The “Heavenly Trombones” (as though from a long way away, but clearly audible)

   

Trp.

Ten.

  



sub. 

 



    



   

            6 )A 8             dolce





 

 34 



34  



34      



who has ears to hear, let him

44

' '

44 ' ' ff

sub. 

hear, for the hour

34

of

doom

is up



 

34  

 



break off suddenly, without accent

ff





 ( 6                     8          dolce    

Tempo primo $ = 188

47







3: 12th overtone 4: 8th overtone

example 15. The “Heavenly Trombones” (Scene III, r. 489, reduced score). Ligeti, Le Grand Macabre.  1996 by Schott Music. All Rights Reserved. Used by permission of European American Music Distributors LLC, sole U.S. and Canadian agent for Schott Music.

the distorted choral recitation that captures the inhabitants’ desperate plea for help. The sense of catastrophe reaches its climax with the instrumental postlude that depicts the fall of the comet.

In summary, the structure of the three scenes shares a parallel construction with regard to the sequence of numbers that culminates in a polymetric or polytemporal collage. The massive collage comprised of the superimposition of seven

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music theory spectrum 31 (2009) Scene I Ludicrousness

Horror

Prelude [car horns] Piet the Pot Dies Irae quote]

r.1 [Berg: hunting song from Wozzeck] r.9

Amanda/Amando [love duet]

r.51

Piet/Nekrotzar [duet; allusion to Wozzeck]

r.59

Collage 1 Nekrotzar’s announcement of the apocalypse (polymetric “ticking” of metronomes)

r. 63

Deformation of Lutheran chorale (choir’s response)

r. 94

“horse riding” music [allusion to Wagner’s Walküre]

r.110

Amanda/Amando [love duet]

example 16. Mapping of Expressive States in Le Grand Macabre incongruous musical types in the third scene (see Ivesian collage) expands the initial strategies introduced in the first and second scenes. In both contexts, a trope of chaos and destruction is established through inclusion of an explicitly marked referent (e.g., distorted chorale) within a multi-layered

collage. This effect is nonetheless offset by the buffa ensemble or pastoral topic that follows. Continual shifts in topical discourse relativize the effects of the ludicrous and horrifying in the first two scenes, as indicated in the example by the criss-crossing arrows. In the third scene, however, the

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signification of parody and the grotesque in györgy ligeti’s le grand macabre Scene II Ludicrousness r. 119 r. 120

Interlude [car horns] Mescalina/Astradamors duet [comic buffa; pseudo 12-tone]

r. 153

Mescalina’s lament motif [distorted “desire” motif]

r. 165

Astradamors’ song of mercy [parallel fourths/organum]

r. 172

Grand Galop chromatique [Liszt] The Merry Peasant [Schumann]

r. 184 r. 194

Comet music Venus [harp arpeggiation]

r. 209

Piet the Pot/Astradamors duet [comic buffa]

r. 213

Venus/chorus [call & response]

r. 228 Collage 2

Bourée perpetuelle [“pastoral desire” motif]

r. 244 r. 250 r. 273

Horror

Mescalina

Mescalina

disintegration Comet music

Final ensemble [comic buffa] Comet music

example 17. Mapping of Expressive States in Le Grand Macabre (continued)

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music theory spectrum 31 (2009) Scene III Ludicrousness r. 277 r. 278

Interlude [door bells] White/black politicians [comic buffa; pseudo 12-tone]

r. 300

Prince Go-Go [secco recitative]

r. 364

aksak rhythm (4+4+3)

r. 377

Choral recitation

Horror

disintegration “Go! Go!” < ffff

r. 387 r. 395

Chamber Concerto, mvt. III (self-quotation) Gepopo’s “mad” aria

r. 417

Chorus: “dread and fright do sear us”

r. 432

siren < ffffff

r. 451

Collage 3: “homage to Ives” picc. cl: Brazilian samba fl/picc: Hungarian tune parade drum: marching music

r. 474

bass trumpet: leitmotif “The Heavenly trombone” fugue Nekrotzar’s “oracle” aria Chorus “Hear us prince!”

r. 482 r. 504

12-tone def. of “Eroica” violin: ragtime bsn: Greek Orthodox tune

Astradamors/Piet/Nekrotzar [comic buffa] example 18. Mapping of Expressive States in Le Grand Macabre (conclusion) This content downloaded from 200.130.19.202 on Sun, 16 Aug 2015 17:34:27 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

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signification of parody and the grotesque in györgy ligeti’s le grand macabre r. 528 r. 534

Hocket on “drink!” String quartet [Andante Grazioso “Galmatias”]

r. 544

Astradamors/Piet galloping music

r. 576 r. 603

51

deformation of bass trumpet motif “The Heavenly trombones” < ffffffff Intermezzo: “the terrible, imaginary Last Judgment”

example 18. [continued ]

distinction between the two states becomes increasingly blurred from the successive enactment of textural strategies involving collage and disintegration, as indicated by the brackets that cross over the two expressive states. As the ensemble texture acquires greater density, the dynamic indication for the “comet” music is pushed to an absurd level (fffffff ). All of these strategies contribute to Bakhtin’s idea of infinite accretion, “the process that accepts and affirms all contradictory data as part of one large, rich, and varied picture” (Sheinberg 2000, 314). iv. on narrative ambivalence and existential irony Aside from the parodic strategies and the trope of the grotesque, a larger question revolves around what to make of the conclusion of LGM. The short Epilogue of this opera is marked by a reversal of expectation and dramatic irony, as the main characters wake up only to realize that Nekrotzar’s omen was false. As the citizens of Breughelland greet one another in awe, Ligeti presents a brief recapitulation of the “ludicrous” musical numbers featured in the last three scenes in a continuous medley; e.g., the Prelude music of car horns (Scene I), horseriding music (Scene II), Gepopo’s secco

recitative, and the politicians’ duet (Scene III) all return in bits and pieces. Nekrotzar, disempowered and defeated, returns to his grave, as the pastoral topic of the final passacaglia brings the opera to closure. Amanda and Amando, waking up to find out that the world still exists, sing an ethereal duet (with text borrowed from Verdi’s Falstaff ) celebrating the supremacy of love; “Let others fear the Judgment Day: we have no fears, let come what may! ‘Neath terrors dire let others bow: for us there’s only here and now.” Over a fugal passacaglia in mirror canon (“Andantino con moto”), other singers join in to bid farewell and reassure their compatriots not to be afraid of death. This farcical ending has invited critical commentary from critics and scholars. Alastair Williams remarks: “Ligeti’s frustration with limited systems and stable meanings becomes explicit in the absurd libretto to Le Grand Macabre, which deals in its half-mocking, half-serious way with questions of temporality and death, though scorning anything resembling an insight. If the Day of Judgment does not take place, which is one interpretation of the opera, it is death itself that dies on the fictitious Day of Judgment, hence the unknowable other to life fails to become a stable sign that would confer metaphysical significance on the opera” (1997,

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music theory spectrum 31 (2009) archetypes, Liszka comments that irony moves away from the “comedic-like quality of satire to a simple and fatalistic perception of the human condition in which the main emphasis is on the natural cycle, the unbroken turning of the wheel of fate or fortune” (1989, 132). Hutcheon further remarks that ironic meaning emerges when “the unsaid is other than, different from, the said” (1994, 64). On a first glance, the operatic characters’ indifference to the outcome of the disaster seems to suggest dramatic irony; even after facing the most appalling threat of disaster, the characters simply return to the way things were in the beginning. There is no reflection, no moment of enlightenment.16 However, Ligeti’s idea of purposeful ambivalence renders the reading far more complicated than a simple case of dramatic irony. Even if the conditions of death and doom are magically thwarted, the viewer is left with a sense of unease, a lack of resolution to the putative crisis. Perhaps the moral of the story lies in acknowledging that progress itself is kind of an illusion, that our perception of reality is unfinalizable in accordance with Bakhtin’s concept of grotesque realism. Considering Ligeti’s emphasis on ambivalence, the type of irony found here comes closer to existential irony, which Sheinberg introduces in reference to Shostakovich’s embrace of contradictory signifiers in Symphony No. 10 and other works; the recurring waltz theme in Symphony No. 10 articulates the topical correlation of “a dance that is not a dance,” one that conveys an expression of “a euphoric dysphoria” (2000, 316–17). Just as Shostakovich’s symphony leaves contradictory affects fused and unresolved, LGM is filled with instances marked by ambivalence, e.g., Mescalina’s love-death scene, the “heavenly” trombone motif, the designation of Intermezzo for the apocalypse. Even the “happy ending” in

90). But exactly why does Ligeti avoid narrative closure and “resist formation of stable meanings” with regard to death and the Day of Judgment? By dismissing Ligeti’s intention as “half-serious” and “scorning anything resembling an insight,” Williams seems to miss the broader picture, the metaconcepts, that underlie the operatic narrative. In a standard narrative trajectory, there is a progression from the initial conflict (marked) to its eventual resolution (unmarked), accompanied by a process that Liszka calls transvaluation in reference to his analysis of myth: The narration focuses on a set of rules from a certain domain or domains of cultural life which define a certain cosmic, social, political, or economic hierarchy, and places them in a crisis. There is a disruption of the normative function of these rules—they are violated, there is some transgression. The narrative then unfolds to a certain, somewhat ambivalent, resolution to the crisis, depending on the pragmatics of the tale: the disrupted hierarchy is restored or enhanced or, on the other hand, the hierarchy is destroyed, leading to social anomie, or terrible tragic consequences. . . . The ambivalence of the resolution reveals the presence of a certain tension which serves as the dynamic of the narration, the tension between an order or hierarchy, i.e., a set of rules which imposes an order on a culture, and the possibility of its transgression, i.e., the possibility of an alternative order. The narrative of myth continually plays out this tension (1998, 15).

In LGM, the crisis passes without any foreseeable impact on the inhabitants of Breughelland; life seems to go on as usual, and Amanda and Amando sing about love at the end, as if nothing happened. The opera is ironic because in spite of the narrative closure achieved through the apparent resolution of the crisis, the viewer is left to ponder the ambivalence generated by the forced closure. It lacks the transformative moment that characterizes the comedic narrative archetype in which the characters profess to a new beginning marked by the restoration of an idealized social order. Nor does it fit the tragic archetype in which there is a defeat of order through transgression (that is, Nekrotzar fails to conquer Breughelland). In summarizing Northrop Frye’s narrative

16

Muecke describes dramatic irony as a kind of situational or Sophoclean irony in which the characters on stage remain unaware of the prospect or “irony of fate” that lies ahead (1970, 29).

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signification of parody and the grotesque in györgy ligeti’s le grand macabre the Epilogue is fraught with semantic tension. Ligeti may have injected the deus ex machina formula at the end as a critique of the operatic convention that sentimentalizes such moments and intended it also as a farcical commentary on society’s responses to impending catastrophes throughout the ages. v. conclusion and further considerations Undoubtedly, a comprehensive analysis of LGM needs to take into account many other aspects of the opera’s musical design that are not based on the parodic procedures of mapping, troping, and reversal discussed here. The intricate contrapuntal writing, mirror canons, and quasi-serial passages are tokens of Ligeti’s musical style, but they are not marked in a specific sense in constituting a parodic enunciation under the criteria invoked here.17 So are numerous instances of intertextual references or allusions to musical types or topics that remain neutral or unmarked, such as the “horse riding” music that connotes Wagner’s Walküre (Scene I), Nekrotzar’s declamatory recitation based on an “oracle” aria (Scene I), or Ligeti’s self-quotation of the Chamber Concerto (Scene III). Although LGM offers a compositional labyrinth of pitch, harmonic, and rhythmic procedures that is worthy of investigation onto its own, my aim in this article was to demonstrate the systematic manner by which parodic procedures are correlated with oppositional expressive states in formulating a tropological reading of the grotesque and existential irony. Needless to say, not all parodied elements carry the same dramatic weight. A parodic enunciation in LGM acquires markedness or perceptual salience through contrastive 17

Amy Bauer argues, however, that one could consider Ligeti’s method of appropriating and transforming contrapuntal writing as paralleling the Mannerist School and his micropolyphonic texture as an instance of musical parody (1997, 41–46).

53

setting, repetition, and topical reversal. Even the basic strategy of mapping topic or type is often accompanied by contrastive shifts in texture, timbre, and register to underscore the quoted element. Frequency in repetition plays an important role in heightening the level of markedness of a particular parodic enunciation; for instance, the distorted choral music that represents the desperate plea of people returns in various contexts and acquires a music-dramatic weight of its own, compared to the unmodified quotations of music by Liszt and Schumann (Scene II) that appear only once. Thus, certain parodic references assume a narrative function through repetition (akin to that of a leitmotif ), while others impart only a localized, descriptive function to comment on a character or situation. Topical reversal presents the most poignant or pronounced form of parodic enunciation, as the referent is thoroughly transcontextualized in accordance with Hutcheon’s definition of parody. Future work may consider examining the intersection between parodic and non-parodic musical topics in unifying the motivic and harmonic contents of the opera. For example, minor third and tritone surface as important intervallic building blocks for musical topics and types that signify the apocalypse. While the Dies Irae quote embedded in Piet the Pot’s initial aria presents an indexical topic, Ligeti’s micropolyphonic texture for the comet emerges as an iconic topic: that is to say, while the Dies Irae quotation refers to other repertory as a symbol of death and destruction in western musical canon, the latter provides a soundscape that resembles the natural qualities of an impending disaster. And Ligeti’s writing reveals fluidity and inventiveness in transforming the motivic and harmonic content of this indexical topic to an iconic one, as shown in Example 19. The Dies Irae incipit, introduced in Piet the Pot’s aria, distorts the original melody by altering the seventh note to C (rather than C). The triplet figuration and the minor third descent 〈−3〉 are subsequently transformed into a rhythmic

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music theory spectrum 31 (2009) Indexical topic r.2

Piet the Pot

lunga

3   4 

*



 42

Di

 



es i

Iconic topic (comet)



 

 

rae, di

es il



  la



r. 67+2 Fl./Picc.



            1    ff  F 

r.194 Mesc.

3 suddenly shouting loudly

3   8

 48 

Ve - nus,

Ve -

44



Trb.

nus!



3

.



Tr. Bass (off stage)

Venus

3  4

 

 



           

r. 206

 dolcissimo, innocente



like an emergency siren

 



r.217













And then what hath thou done with these two



3   4







 





   





 





 





men?

r. 243 Tutti (Winds/ Brass)

 &

G* '

forced

33

+

break off suddenly

  7

G '

forced, shrill

greatest possible volume

 

33



example 19. Transformation of the Dies Irae motif

diminution of descending thirds in the upper woodwinds (rehearsal 67+2), call and response pattern between Mescalina 〈−3 +3 −4〉 and the trombone motif with tritones and fifths substituting for thirds (rehearsal 194), the bass trombone motif that inverts the contour into an ascending

figure (rehearsal 206), Venus’s response to Mescalina that inverts the latter’s vocal contour (rehearsal 217), and the “comet” motif derived from the same contour (rehearsal 243). The emerging emphasis on the tritone interval is significant because it later surfaces as the harmonic building

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signification of parody and the grotesque in györgy ligeti’s le grand macabre block for the apocalyptic music (Intermezzo: the terrible, imaginary Last Judgment) in Scene III.18 In concluding, LGM constitutes an “anti-opera” par excellence because of its narrative ambivalence and double-voiced forms of parodic enunciation. It has all the ingredients of a post-Brechtian musical theater that engages the audience to actively participate in decoding defamiliarized references (what Brecht calls the “divided sign”), as a way of dislodging conditioned responses in order to perceive works of art in a new light. Even the over-the-top virtuosity that disintegrates into noise, e.g., Gepopo’s coloratura aria that degenerates into animal-like barking, attests to the idea of embracing operatic tradition in order to dismantle it. In this respect, Ligeti’s aesthetic stance is hardly postmodern in the sense of advancing eclecticism for its own sake, but rather aligned with what Hal Foster calls “oppositional” postmodernism, which is concerned with a “critical deconstruction of tradition, not an instrumental pastiche of pop or pseudo-historical forms” (1983, vii). From a biographical perspective, the narrative discourse of this opera constitutes an intertext that mirrors Ligeti’s own artistic habitus of exile; as a survivor of the Holocaust and Hungarian Uprising, the theme of death and survival has been an integral part of his life experiences. There is a profound message that Ligeti communicates in LGM that far surpasses its capacity to elicit laughter: by situating the audience inside the fantasy-world of Breughelland, the opera forces us to confront our own fears and pretensions as we grapple with the existential chaos of the human condition. works cited Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1984. Rabelais and His World. Trans. Helene Iswolsley. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Babcock, Philip, ed. 1993. Webster’s Third New International Dictionary. Springfield MA: Merriam-Webster, Inc. 18

For example, the apocalyptic music (rehearsal 603) comprises intersecting tritones of B-F, C-G, D-G, D-A and E-A.

55

Battistella, Edwin L. 1990. Markedness: the Evaluative Superstructure of Language. Albany: State University of New York Press. Bauer, Amy. 1997. “Compositional Process and Parody in the Music of György Ligeti.” PhD diss., Yale University. Everett, Yayoi Uno. 2004. “Modeling Parody and Irony in Music by Weill, Maxwell Davies, and Andriessen.” Music Theory Online 10.4. Foster, Hal. 1983. The Anti-Aesthetic. Seattle WA: Bay Press. Hatten, Robert S. 1994. Musical Meaning in Beethoven. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ——. 2004. Interpreting Musical Gestures, Topics, and Tropes. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Herz, Micheline. 1962. “Tragedy, Poetry and the Burlesque in Ghelderode’s Theatre.” Yale French Studies 29. The New Dramatists: 92–101. Hutcheon, Linda. 1985. Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms. New York: Methuen. ——. 1994. Irony’s Edge: the Theory and Politics of Irony. London and New York: Routledge. Hyde, Martha. 2003. “Stravinsky’s Neo–Classicism.” In The Cambridge Companion to Stravinsky, ed. Jonathan Cross, 98–136. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lie, John. 2004. “Ligeti and the Shoah.” Program notes to San Francisco Opera Production of Le Grand Macabre. Liszka, James, J. 1989. The Semiotic of Myth. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Losada, Catherine. 2004. “A Theoretical Model for the Analysis of Collage in Music Derived from Selected Works by Berio, Zimmerman and Rochberg.” PhD diss., City University of New York. Klein, Michael. 2005. Intertextuality in Western Art Music. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Kosteva, Maria. 1996. Die Imaginäre Gattung: Über das Musiktheatralische Werk G. Ligetis. Frankfurt: Peter Lang. Kristeva, Julia. 1980. Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art. Ed. Leon S. Roudiez. Trans.

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Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, and Leong S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. May, Thomas. 2004. “Viewpoint.” Program notes of Le Grand Macabre. San Francisco Opera. Monelle, Raymond. 2006. The Musical Topic: Hunt, Military and Pastoral. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Muecke, Douglas C. 1970. Irony and the Ironic. New York and London: Metheun. Reynolds, Christopher. 2003. Motives for Allusion: Content and Context in Nineteenth–Century Music. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Sewell, Amanda. 2006. “Blending the Sublime and the Ridiculous: A Study of Parody in György Ligeti’s Le Grand Macabre.” MMus Thesis, Bowling Green State University. Shapiro, Michael. 1983. The Sense of Grammar. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Sheinberg, Esti. 2000. Irony, Satire, Parody and the Grotesque in the Music of Shostakovich: A Theory of Musical Incongruities. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing. Toop, Richard. 1999. György Ligeti. London: Phaidon Press. Turino, Thomas. 1999. “Signs of Imagination, Identity, and Experience: A Peircian Semiotic Theory for Music.” Ethnomusicology 43.2:221–55. Várnai, Peter, et al. 1983. Ligeti in Conversation. London: Eulenburg Books. Von Seherr-Thoss, Peter. 1998. Gyögy Ligetis Oper Le Grand Macabre (Erste Fassung): Entstehung und Deutung von der Imagination biz zur Realisation einer musikdramatischen Idee. Eisenach: Verlag der Musikalienhandlung Karl Dieter Wagner. Williams, Alastair. 1999. New Music and the Claims of Modernity. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing.

Music Theory Spectrum, Vol. 31, Issue 1, pp. 26–56, ISSN 0195-6167, electronic ISSN 1533-8339. © 2009 by The Society for Music Theory. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website, at http://www. ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/mts.2009.31.1.26

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