Work of the Week – György Ligeti: Le Grand Macabre

The anti-anti-opera: Le Grand Macabre by György Ligeti will celebrate its premiere on 28 June 2024 at the Munich Opera Festival at the Bavarian State Opera. The piece thus marks the end of the 2023/2024 season, which began last year on the 100th anniversary of the composer's birth. Kent Nagano will conduct the production, which will be staged by Krzysztof Warlikowski.

Ligeti himself described Le Grand Macabre, which premiered in Stockholm in 1978, as an "anti-anti-opera." He was referring to the play with conventions, which he both serves and turns on its head. On the one hand, he bows to the demands of an opera. The text should be clearly understandable, while the action must be confined in a scenic corset. On the other hand, Ligeti designed a concept that broke with operatic tradition:

I had in mind a strongly schematizing, comic-like stage action, and the music should also be immediate, comic-like, exaggerated, colorful and crazy. The novelty of this musical theater was not to manifest itself in externals of the performance, but in the interior of the music, through the music. - György Ligeti

LE GRAND MACABRE: GYÖRGY LIGETI'S VISION OF TOTAL ANARCHY AND THE END OF THE WORLD

Ligeti wastes no time in realizing this vision: even the prelude, with its cast of twelve car horns, gives the audience a sense of the kind of musical excesses that will be celebrated in Le Grand Macabre. The music accompanies and compels the action on stage, the intoxication of the senses celebrated in the fantasy world of Breughelland. The anarchy in the pit, however, is not a means to an end. Ligeti never loses sight of the opera's ostensible plot, the end of the world with announcement, and gives the work its very own underlying mood:

It is the calculated artistry that keeps the Great Macabre, with all these colorfully jumbled ingredients, in check as a whole. Through the conscious integration and correction of the details in the coordination of the overall plan, transparency is created, and glimpses of the remarkable, macabre seriousness of the situation, which lies in all the cheerfully spread ambiguity of this opera, open up. What then remains, besides the joy, is a deeply queasy feeling. - Ulrich Dibelius

Le Grand Macabre will also run at the Bavarian State Opera in the coming season until 26 October.  A production can also currently be seen at the National Theatre in Prague, which will also run into the autumn. Another new production is due at the Hessisches Staatstheater Wiesbaden, where Le Grand Macabre will be staged from 28 September. 

 
Further Reading:

György Ligeti: Composer Profile 

Le Grand Macabre: Work Details and Online Score 

Website Bayerische Staatsoper

Website National Theater Prague

Website Hessisches Staatstheater

illustration: created with artificial intelligence (Adobe Firefly)