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The code word “Kylwiria” was mentioned by György Ligeti from time to time since the 1970s. At first, it functioned rather abstractly as a working title for the opera that had been in the making since the mid-1960s and eventually mutated into Le Grand Macabre . Later, Ligeti also shared details about the imaginary land of his childhood, providing glimpses of brightly colored maps of that land and underscoring the importance of his childlike fantasy world. This article explores the dimensions of this “private mythology” and its impact on the composer's creative thinking and work. Its documentary evidence – the description of the land of Kylwiria recorded in 1950 in a booklet of more than 70 pages – is presented in examples and examinated for its particularities. On the one hand, it seems that the pioneering exploration of geographical spaces is transferred as a model to the creative exploration of sound spaces. On the other hand, Ligeti's concept of a fantastic counterworld is to be seen in a literary and cultural-historical context, in which it is to be located somewhere between expedition report, travel guide and utopian design. Such an outline sharpens the meaning of Kylwiria as a cipher for creativity in a characteristic mixture of ratio and fantasy.

Discussing his Horn Trio, György Ligeti imaginatively describes the second movement as a dance that was “inspired by different folk musics of nonexistent people, as if Hungary, Romania, and all of the Balkans were located somewhere between Africa and the Caribbean.” And in more general remarks about his works, he goes on to suggest that, rather than overtly referencing their stylistic features, he abstracted technical principles from various traditions and combined them into an idiosyncratically amalgamated musical language. This essay shows an expansive approach to hybridity in Ligeti's Violin Concerto and Hamburg Concerto , going well beyond previous remarks about African rhythmic influences. Ligeti's practice encompasses not only rhythm, but also texture, pitch, and tuning systems; it spans a wider breadth of traditions as well, including newly identified sources such as flute and panpipe ensembles from New Guinea and yodeling traditions from across the globe. An analysis of passages from these late concertos – undertaken alongside evidence from his ethnomusicological sources, recordings, and sketches housed at the Paul Sacher Stiftung – demonstrates the intricacies and patterns of Ligeti's late style and the compelling statement it makes about the role of hybridity and globalization in contemporary life.

Sándor Weöres's poetry was a life-long passion and source of inspiration for György Ligeti. This article explores the role Weöres played in Ligeti's early development as a composer by providing insight into the genesis of all of his 13 early settings of Weöres, including the unpublished choral works Hajnal [Dawn] and Tél [Winter], the incomplete song “Nagypapa leszállt a tóba” [Grandpa descended in the pond], and the unfinished oratorio “Istar pokoljárása” [Ishtar's Journey to Hell], and by making some analytical observations on them. Ligeti's early settings of Weöres were composed in three periods. The first stage in 1946–1947 was his compositional discovery of Weöres's poetry, which seems to have acted as a fuel and a challenge for him, triggering something of a musical self-liberation. His Weöres settings in 1949–1950 may be seen as a sign of solidarity with the poet effectively silenced by Communist state authorities, while in 1952–1955, Weöres texts seem to have served specifically as material for Ligeti's experimentation with static music and serialism.

On several occasions, Ligeti spoke about an early literary memory that he credited with the origins of his meccanico style. He recalled reading a short story by Gyula Krúdy (1878–1933) at the age of five, in which Krúdy supposedly wrote about a widow who lived in an old house filled with constantly ticking clocks. To date, the best Krúdy experts have been unable to identify the story in question, and it is reasonable to assume that in Ligeti's mind, actual elements from the writer's work were freely recombined and reimagined at a time when the compositions partly inspired by the Krúdy experience had already been written. Ligeti's published interviews contain references to Krúdy that go beyond the story with the clocks, it may be assumed that the writer's influence on the composer goes deeper than what has been acknowledged so far. In addition, there is an aspect of Ligeti's recollection of the Krúdy story that has not received all the attention it deserves. In his conversations with Péter Várnai, the composer spoke of machines that were working or not working (emphasis mine), and elevators stopping at the wrong floor, or not starting at all. Some of the meccanico works are worth revisiting in search of such “malfunctions” as we try to reimagine the old house where not all the clocks might have been running like clockwork.

Is György Ligeti's Le Grand Macabre (1974–1977/1996) a dystopian work, or rather one of utopia? Traditionally, dystopia and utopia have formed an alternative. Yet Ligeti and librettist Michael Meschke enact an intertwinement of dystopia and utopia, in a series of moves and countermoves: (1) Death threatens to eliminate all life. (2) The earth is saved from the fate of the destruction of life – “Death is dead” (II/4). (3) Yet “Breughelland” is and will remain a crude and cruel tyranny. (4) The farcical character of the whole calls into question whether any of the previous moves can be taken seriously. Ligeti's/Meschke's subversion of the antinomy of utopia and dystopia, introduced in the opening “Breughellandlied,” turns out to be in the spirit of Piet the Pot's namesake Pieter Breughel the Elder, as a closer look at his 1567 painting Het Luilekkerland , an inspiration already to de Ghelderode, reveals. The irritating role thus assigned to consumption, however, seems to trivially lose all ambiguity through the words of the opera's final stanza. While this is a weighty objection to the reading proposed here, the conclusion attempts to outline a rejoinder to it.

György Ligeti was very interested in many artistic and scientific fields and drew inspiration for his compositional work from them (his engagement with mathematics – particularly fractal geometry and chaos theory – is perhaps the best known). In this chapter I compare the concept of artistic research with Ligeti's practice and oeuvre. While the notion of artistic research was only appearing in embryonic form during the latter stages of Ligeti's career, many – though not all – of his statements seem to be suitable for describing his artistic processes. The benefit of this investigation is expected to be twofold: applying the concept of artistic research to Ligeti's approaches and practices should yield new insights on the relationship between his work and his interest in other humanities and sciences. Yet this look at Ligeti may also help to refine the concept of artistic research as discussed and applied to the artistic output of today.

From the mid-1950s, Basel harpsichordist Antoinette Vischer (1909–1973) promoted the harpsichord as a modern instrument, commissioning numerous composers to contribute to a new repertoire. To this end, she turned to György Ligeti, who completed Continuum for her in 1968. The composer had already used the harpsichord in ensembles several times, but now he had to think about it in a soloistic function for the first time, starting from a specific performer with her specific instrument. In this paper, I focus on this relationship between composer, performer-commissioner, and instrument, drawing primarily on the correspondence between Ligeti and Vischer preserved at the Paul Sacher Foundation in Basel. These unpublished letters document their collaboration and how both negotiated their artistic positions and aesthetic concepts of the harpsichord as “some sort of machine.” An in-depth analysis of Ligeti and Vischer's exchange about the instrument's peculiarities and performance issues allows us to better understand their self-conception as artists and their ideas of “modernity.” Furthermore, this case study sheds light on a specific period in the history of an instrument that through the efforts of performers like Vischer was transformed from an artifact of the past to an emblem of the present.

Ferenc Farkas, a remarkable twentieth-century Hungarian composer, was one of the most influential professors of composition throughout the history of the Liszt Academy of Music, Budapest. A less known chapter of his life is his involvement in the ethnicist and anti-Semitic political movements of Hungary, during the late 1930s and early 1940s. In 1940, he was among three musicians who elaborated a proposal to establish, in line with the rise of corporatism, a Hungarian Music Chamber. One of the main aims of the new organization would have been a total exclusion of Jewish musicians from all branches of Hungarian musical culture. The Chamber was never actually founded. In 1941, Farkas left Budapest for the Transylvanian city Kolozsvár (Cluj), where he was appointed professor of composition at the Conservatory. One of his first students was György Ligeti, a native Transylvanian, born into a Hungarian family suffering under the anti-Semitic legislation of the Hungarian state. As Ligeti recollected, Farkas “wanted to teach me everything he had learned from his teacher Ottorino Respighi.” Based on archival sources, this study offers new insights into the personal and professional connection between Ligeti and Farkas during the 1940s, and also follows Farkas's post-war path from relative isolation and marginalization to the elite of state socialist music culture.

György Ligeti's comments on his last large orchestral piece San Francisco Polyphony show a remarkable understatement, if not neglect, of this work. This paper intends to find reasons for this attitude. It analyzes the correlation between title and substance, in particular the description of the work as being polyphonic, showing that the piece is less polyphonic than it is melodic or even thematic, resulting from coherent stylistic development as well as from an innate spatial conception rather than from a switchback to 19th-century procedures. At the end, San Francisco Polyphony proves to be a very personal comment on the state of the post-war musical avant-garde and the discussion about postmodernism in music.

Two pieces, both titled Lux aeterna, are works by György Ligeti and contemporary Slovenian composer Tadeja Vulc. The paper offers some thoughts on two pieces through the notion of genre. This point of view seems appropriate on account of Ligeti’s distinctive treatment of the sacred text, but even more on account of Tadeja Vulc’s work, a symphonic piece, which includes whispering the first words of Lux aeterna. This raises several questions, yet the main dilemma is how it came to be possible that pieces which originate from the genre realm of profane can easily embrace both title and text that used to mark a communio of a requiem mass.