GYÖRGY LIGETI (1923–2006)

Trio for Violin, Horn & Piano (1982)

II. Vivacissimo molto ritmico

Soovin Kim, violin

Radovan Vlatković, horn

Gloria Chien, piano

György Ligeti’s early compositions reflect the aesthetics of the post-WWII serialist style in which he was trained. By the late 1970s, however, Ligeti had reached a musical impasse. He composed nothing between 1977 and 1982; during that time, he sought out a more individual language to express his ideas. In a 1981 interview, Ligeti declared, “I reject both [the avant-garde and traditional style]. The Avant-garde, to which I am said to belong, has become academic. As for looking back, there’s no point in chewing over an outmoded style. I prefer to follow a third way: being myself, without paying heed either to categorizations or to fashionable gadgetry.” The following year, Ligeti completed his first composition in this “third way,” his Trio for Violin, Horn & Piano, “Hommage à Brahms.”

Don’t let the subtitle fool you; other than employing the same instruments used in Brahms’ 1865 Trio for Horn, there is nothing remotely Brahmsian in Ligeti’s music. During his self-imposed compositional hiatus, Ligeti had studied the music of Conlon Nancarrow, who experimented with tempo variations. Nancarrow’s original approach to music writing inspired Ligeti to experiment with multiple simultaneous tunings in the Horn Trio. “The piano plays as it is tuned, by definition, tempered,” Ligeti wrote. “The violin tuned in pure fifths deviates from the tempered tuning considerably—as always with chamber music for strings and piano. In a tonal violin/piano sonata of the Classical or Romantic period, the violinist tries to match the tuning of the piano to some degrees, at least in the slow movements. Though this always remains an approximation, it is part of the character of the genre. In my Trio … [although scored for a valved horn] I was thinking in terms of natural horns pitched in various keys, and I indicate these in the score. In this way, mostly untempered overtones occur, which tend to throw the violinist’s fingers off their mark. This is intentional, part of the riddle of this non-manifest musical language.”

The violin’s first three notes are a motif Ligeti used to unify all four movements. The Vivacissimo molto ritmico plays with different simultaneous subdivisions of an eight-beat pulse; 3+3+2 or 3+2+3. The brief Alla Marcia begins forcefully, but competing cross-rhythms in violin and piano cause musical stutters. The march rhythm fades into a steady pulse as the horn joins in. The closing Lamento: Adagio features a somber passacaglia built on a brief chromatic descending motif.

—© Elizabeth Schwartz