Ligeti Trio for Violin, Horn, and Piano
Michael Barenboim, Ben Goldscheider, Giuseppe Mentuccia
Musical Performance Trio 0After finishing his one-of-a-kind opera Le Grand Macabre in 1977, György Ligeti found himself unable to produce any significant works, though he made hundreds of sketches. But with the Trio for Violin, Horn, and Piano of 1982 came a breakthrough that also marked a change of orientation. The impetus was a friend’s suggestion to write a contemporary companion work to the Brahms Horn Trio (itself a rare experiment in chamber music of the time). Ligeti adopts traditional forms of the past—including in the remarkable lamento finale, the old-fashioned passacaglia form with its ostinato bass that Brahms had reclaimed for some of his own compositions. Yet the Trio, which maintains what Ligeti called “a distinctly ironic distance” from the past, is no postmodern pastiche. Different tuning systems are simultaneously called into play for each instrument, and the music contains, as Ligeti put it, “odd angles and trick floors that do not fit in anywhere.”
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György Ligeti (1923–2006) Trio for Violin, Horn, and Piano (1982)
I. Andante con tenerezza II. Vivacissimo molto ritmico III. Alla marcia IV. Lamento. Adagio
Michael Barenboim, Violin Ben Goldscheider, French Horn Giuseppe Mentuccia, Piano |
In 1978 Ligeti scored an unexpected popular success with his opera Le grand macabre, a madcap fantasy set in what he called “a disintegrating, disorderly world where everything is falling in, breaking up.” The Horn Trio, composed four years later after a period of self-imposed silence and stock taking, was the antithesis of Ligeti’s freewheeling dramatic pastiche. Instead of disintegration and chaotic playfulness, the Trio projects an aural image of seriousness and orderly coherence. The misty, densely woven polyphony of his earlier works has given way to a new clarity of both texture and form, coupled with a heightened interest in melody. From the airy, serenely floating chords at the beginning to the haunting, spectral harmonies at its close, the Trio teasingly evokes the language of traditional tonality even as it dissipates before our ears. Ligeti coined the term “non-atonal” to distinguish his style from the pre-twelve-tone music of Schoenberg, Webern, and Berg. “My Horn Trio marked a radical break with atonality,” he said in a 1990 interview. “Now I have the courage to be old-fashioned.”
Although Ligeti identified his work as an “Hommage à Brahms,” he conceded that it bore little relation to Brahms’s Horn Trio beyond “a certain smilingly conservative deportment—with distinct ironic distance.”
More pertinent, in Ligeti’s eyes, was the link to Beethoven, starting with an allusion in the first few bars to the “horn call” motif from the “Les adieux” Piano Sonata. Equally “old-fashioned” is the ternary (ABA) form of the Trio’s first three movements. The second, a fast and furious moto perpetuo whose manic energy is interrupted by a recurrence of the mystical “Les adieux” chords in the piano, is followed by a rambunctious march in which the violin and piano remain incorrigibly out of step. The final Lamento, in the form of a majestic chaconne, is based on a descending chromatic motif, a musical emblem of grief since the Renaissance. The Trio ends on a fading, widely spaced chord spelled G-C-A. As Alex Ross points out, “These same notes appear in reverse order at the start of the last movement of Beethoven’s final string quartet, in F major—the music to which the composer attached the words ‘It must be!’”
—Harry Haskell
Violin
Michael Barenboim
Horn
Ben Goldschneider
Piano
Giuseppe Mentuccia
Audio Producer
Friedemann Engelbrecht
Sound
Sebastian Nattkemper
Camera
Henning Brümmer (DOP)
Eric Schulz
Lighting Technician
Marius Adam
Editor
Peter Klum
Video director
Eric Schulz
A Production of the Pierre Boulez Saal © 2020 Pierre Boulez Saal. All Rights Reserved.
Schott Music GmbH & Co. KG, Mainz with kind permission of SCHOTT Music, Mainz