298. Le Grand Macabre (Ligeti)

• Opera in 4 scenes
• Composer: György Ligeti
• Libretto: Michael Meschke and the composer, after La Balade du Grand Macabre, by Michel de Ghelderode
• First performed: Royal Swedish Opéra, Stockholm, Sweden, 12^th April 1978 (in Swedish). Revised Paris, 1996.

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Characters

CHIEF OF THE GEPOPO (Secret Police)	Coloratura soprano	Britt-Marie Aruhn
VENUS	High soprano	Monika Laven / Kerstin Wiberg
CLITORIA [Amanda]	Soprano	Elisabeth Söderström
SPERMANDO [Amando]	Mezzo	Kerstin Meyer
PRINCE GO-GO	Boy soprano or high countertenor	Gunilla Slättegård
MESCALINA, wife to Astradamors	Dramatic mezzo	Barbro Ericson
PIET THE POT	High buffo-enor	Sven-Erik Vikström
NEKROZAR	Character baritone	Erik Saedén
ASTRADAMORS, astronomer (and masochist)	Bass	Arne Tyrén
RUFFIACK	Baritone	Ragne Wahlroth
SCHOBIACK	Baritone	Hans-Olof Söderberg
SCHABERNACK	Baritone	Lennart Stregård
THE WHITE MINISTER	Tenor	Dmitry Cheremeteff / Sven-Erik Vikström (voice)
THE BLACK MINISTER	Baritone	Nils Johansson / Arne Tyrén (voice)

SETTING: In the Principality of Breughelland, an imaginary country, no particular century.

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The twentieth century, according to Leonard Bernstein, was the century of death; its crisis was how to come to terms with the possibility of the death of the world. György Ligeti’s answer is that death is inevitable, but that we should strive to live happily and unafraid in whatever time we have.

In its absurdist, avant-garde way, Le grand macabre is a riposte to the brutality of Die Soldaten or Punch and Judy. Whereas Zimmermann the army conscript and PTSD victim envisaged an infinity of dead soldiers marching into darkness, and Birtwistle the Englishman death, cruelty, and nihilism, Ligeti will have none of it. He had known death, violence and injustice too close to revel in them. A Hungarian Jew, all his family except his mother were murdered in Nazi concentration camps. He had endured first the German and later the Soviet occupation of his homeland before escaping to the west. His music, he said, “bears the imprint of a long time spent in the shadow of death”.¹ Having seen horror, his answer is life — or, at least, not to die.

Based on a 1934 Belgian play, Le Grand Macabre is “a kind of dark farce, a derisive prayer, humorous yet entirely tragic at the same time”.² It concerns “a wretched world that doesn’t really exist; death as the hero — but perhaps merely a little mountebank; the wretched and yet happily prosperous, drunken, bawdy world of the imaginary Breughelland”.³

The score is eclectic, “a dazzling collage of styles, eclectic and mocking”⁴. Its kaleidoscopism can be seen as a reaction against the strictures of serialism and the Darmstadt school, whose totalitarian ethos Ligeti compared to Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia.⁵ “Tonality was definitely out. To write melodies, even nontonal melodies, was absolutely taboo. Periodic rhythm, pulsation, was taboo, not possible.”⁶ Instead, Ligeti “opened himself to all music past and present”. There are quotes from Monteverdi, Mozart, Rossini, Verdi, Beethoven, Offenbach, and Scott Joplin; Brazilian, Bulgarian, Byzantine, Romanian, Scottish and Spanish influences; car horns and doorbells repurposed as instruments; grand processions, insult fights, and musically depicted orgasms.

The Nekrotzar announces that the world will be destroyed by a comet at midnight, and glories in apocalyptic visions of time standing still, of hail and fire and sulphur mixed with blood raining down upon the earth, of huge blazing mountains falling into the sea, and of the sea filling with blood! The usual stuff inspired by John of Patmos’s mushroom-fuelled trips. But the Nekrotzar gets completely blotto on wine (the elixir of life), falls off his horse, and misses the apocalypse; he shrivels up and disappears. Where Wagner’s Ring ends in fire and flood, in Brünnhilde’s immolation, here the Necrotzar, the mighty destroyer of the world, gets well and truly munted.

The content and essence of the play revolve around the fear of death, the impossibility of changing fate, and the futile gestures or efforts made to escape this destiny of death.⁷ One of these ideas (or dreams) for evading fate is to ridicule death. … The idea of the play is to mock death, to place death — that is, the angel of death who threatens to destroy the entire universe — under the influence of alcohol, to intoxicate it.

The punchline of Le Grand Macabre is that nothing happens. It’s an anti-climax. The world doesn’t end. For late twentieth century avant-garde opera, it’s a happy ending. Humanity survives, for now. Life just keeps going. The opera laughs in the face of the apocalypse.

Two lovers, Spermando and Clitoria (later changed to Amando and Amanda), who have spent the opera looking for places to make love, emerge from coupling in a grave, a fine and private place. The opera ends with a passacaglia celebrating the triumph of sex, love, humanity over death:

For life grants most to those who give, and who gives love shall loving live. When one does this, then time and tide stand still; now and for evermore.

Fear not to die, good people all! No one knows when his hour will fall! And when it comes, then let it be… Farewell, till then in cheerfulness!

Not being utterly bleak and horrible should be a baseline, not something out of the ordinary. Le Grand Macabre gestures towards optimism — or at least resignation — but it still suffers from all the problems of twentieth-century opera. It revolves around death (with a capital ‘D’), even if he’s an incompetent pisspot. There’s little heart and no emotional payoff. The characters aren’t people but grotesque types: a masochistic astrologer and his sadistic wife, a foppish countertenor prince, a boxing black and white minister show, a robotic secret policewoman. Ligeti seems to be trying to revive Offenbach or The Love for Three Oranges, but it’s a deflated, hollow version. The absurdity is amusing at first, but the laughs dry up. There are interesting sound effects, but no memorable tunes; the finale’s heart is in the right place, but it’s not the quartet finale of Bernstein’s Candide. The self-conscious quotations and references seem like nostalgia for a time when music still meant something. It’s the product of a sterile age.

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Watch

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1. Kevin Withell, “György Ligeti“. ↩︎
2. Le Grand Macabre, L’Avant Scène Opéra, 1997, p. 96. ↩︎
3. Ibid., p. 89. ↩︎
4. Piotr Kaminski, Mille et un opéras, Paris : Fayard, 2003, p. 786. ↩︎
5. Alex Ross, The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, Fourth Estate: 2007, p. 507. ↩︎
6. Ross, p. 505. ↩︎
7. Avant Scène Opéra., p. 96. ↩︎