Gyorgy Ligeti
Gyorgy Ligeti
György Sándor Ligetiwas a Hungarian composer of contemporary classical music. He has been described as "one of the most important avant-garde composers in the latter half of the twentieth century" and "one of the most innovative and influential among progressive figures of his time"...
NationalityHungarian
ProfessionComposer
Date of Birth28 May 1923
Steinberg is great. I should like to meet him.
allegory bank fairy father socialist utopian wrote
My father was a bank clerk. He was also a Utopian Socialist and he wrote a Utopian novel. It was a kind of allegory or fairy tale.
budapest paris
If you come from Paris to Budapest you think you are in Moscow.
writing decided knows
I know already the music I will write. But the words? I have not yet decided.
firsts listening-to-music
First of all I listen to music. I like music.
use old-music
I don't use old music.
giving want
I only want to give a metaphysic for my music.
thinking lasts composer
I think a composer is always interested in his last work.
past years financial-problems
For the past ten years I have had no financial problems.
artist grandfather musician
My grandfather was not a musician but he was an artist - a painter, a decorative painter.
years long people
People often thought Leopold Auer was Russian because he lived in St. Petersburg so long, almost fifty years.
october january labor
In January 1944 I was called up by the Forced Labor Service, but I deserted on October 10, 1944.
simple play piano
I was fifteen years old, and I hardly knew how to play a simple Bach prelude on the piano when I began to compose music, and at the most advanced level. I had never studied such things as harmony.
thinking law culture
I think it was when I was nineteen, by that time the Jewish laws were already in force and the split was beginning to come about which isolated the Jewish culture.