About this Piece

In the large swath of European territory that found itself in the Soviet sphere of influence following World War II, leftist parties gradually consolidated their power until, by about 1948, Soviet-aligned socialist and communist governments were firmly in place in György Ligeti’s Hungary and elsewhere throughout the region. At the same historical moment, artistic politics in the Soviet Union took a repressive turn when the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party published its February 1948 attack on modernism, condemning “the cult of atonality, dissonance, and disharmony...confused neuro-pathological combinations that transform music into cacophony.”

The furor was quickly exported to the new Socialist states of the Eastern Bloc. In May 1948, the Russians convened a Second International Congress of Composers and Musicologists in Prague to press their views on their neighbors. The declaration adopted in Prague called for composers to renounce “extreme subjectivism” and to turn from so-called cosmopolitanism to a folklore-inspired, nationalist aesthetic.

Ligeti’s 1951 Concert Românesc (Romanian Concerto) would seem to have fit the new requirements well enough. The work is based in part on actual Romanian folk music Ligeti had studied at the Folklore Institute of Bucharest in 1949, in part on his own folk-like invention “in the spirit of the village bands.” Like his compatriots Bartók and Kodály before him, Ligeti had a genuine interest in folk music. As a child in the border region of Transylvania (an ethnically Hungarian region in Romania), he had encountered local musicians wearing animal masks and playing wild music on violin and bagpipes, a memory that remained vivid even many years later. Yet his concerto’s modestly modern touches, which seem wholly unobjectionable today, were enough to cause trouble: It was banned after a single rehearsal in Budapest, and it did not receive a public performance until 1971.

The concerto’s four short movements follow one another without pause. Of particular interest is the slow third movement, in which (perhaps echoing another childhood memory, of alpine horns heard in the Carpathian mountains) Ligeti instructs the hornists to use natural tuning, without valves, an idea that returned strongly in his music of the 1980s and 1990s, such as the Horn Trio and the Hamburg Concerto. The finale ventures nearer to Bartók, both to his fast, Romanian-inspired dance finales (such as that of the Concerto for Orchestra) and to his garish modernist ballet The Miraculous Mandarin. This atmosphere, too, would return later in Ligeti’s career, as in the finale of his 1992 Violin Concerto. —Steven Stucky