Evocations of China in the Music of György Ligeti

This paper traces the shifting significance of China in the music of Hungarian composer György Ligeti (1923-2006). In early instances of chinoiserie from the 1940s—including a black-key piano exercise and incidental music for the puppet play Spring Flower—Ligeti resorts to pentatonic essentializing to evoke childlike visions of a fairytale Orient. A half-century later, in his 2000 song cycle Síppal, dobbal, nádiheged vel, China reemerges as a far more nuanced, though no less imaginary space. Ligeti’s settings of Chinese-themed verses by Hungarian poet Sándor Weöres function as coded expressions of alienation and foreignness from an exile composer separated from his homeland.