3 Songs on Poems by Sándor Weöres (1946–7)

Táncol a hold fehér ingben

Gyümöles-fürt

Kalmár jött nagy madarakkal

5 Songs on Poems by János Arany (1952)

Csalfa sugár

A legszebb virág

A csendes dalokból

A bujtlosó

Az ördög elvitte a fináncot

Both of Ligeti’s sets of songs for voice and piano were written before he escaped from Hungary in 1956. Of the two, the earlier work is the more prophetic of the composer he was to become, not least because it dates from the brief period between the end of the War and the Communist dictatorship when Hungarian composers were subject to comparatively little censorship. No less important, it was inspired by the verse of Sándor Weöres to whom – the only Hungarian poet whose work he was to set after 1956 – he was to return again and again for texts for choral music. According to Ligeti’s great Hungarian contemporary, György Kurtág, “Táncol a Hold and Kalmár jött nagy madarakkal are explosive, courageous, surrealistic madness, both self-discovery and promise for the future, incomparable with anything in his oeuvre right up until the electronic Artikulation of 1958.” Certainly, the piano sound of the first song, with its coruscating figuration in the top half of the keyboard and its bright clusters, is a magical reflection of the poet’s “bluish light.”

The manuscripts of the three Weöres songs were lost when Ligeti left Hungary and, while those of Táncol a hold fehér ingben and Kalmár jött nagy madarakkal were found 30 years later, Gyümöles-fürt had to be reconstructed from a draft – not by Ligeti who, somewhat harshly, dismissed its pentatonic exoticism as “kitsch.” Kalmár jött nagy madarakkal, however, though heavily influenced by Bartók, has the “surrealistic” quality that justifies Kurtág’s observation that this song and Táncol a hold fehér ingben mark the beginning of the “true” Ligeti.

If the Arany songs represent a retreat rather than an advance in spite of being written five years later it is no doubt because censorship was by then so strict that composers had no choice but to conform to the official aesthetic. At a time when even Bartók was out of favour it must have been at some risk that in Csalfa sugár Ligeti applied his dissonant winding line to the accompaniment of a melody derived basically from folk-song. While A legszebb virág, another reconstruction of a lost manuscript, the drinking song A csendes dalokból and the sad lament of A bujtlosó, seem to revert to Kodály, Az ördög elvitte a fináncot is a brilliantly witty addition to the tradition of weird stories of the devil and his violin, all the more amusing in this case in that the victim is the taxman.