DESCRIPTION:
String Quartet No. 2 (1968)

I. Allegro nervoso
II. Sostenuto, molto calmo
III. Come un meccanismo di precisione
IV. Presto furioso, brutale, tumultuoso
V. Allegro con delicatezza

Arditti String Quartet

Near the very end of György Ligeti's Second String Quartet, there's an uncanny moment -- far too private to be the icon it should be -- where the work's previous 20 minutes suddenly seem to vanish, and the spirit reveals itself. Four and a half movements of the most myriad variance have passed; all manner of texture and timbre, acrobatics, and still scenes have been put forth; and after a collective "whisper" cadenza of extreme, suppressed virtuosity, comes this sad, hobbled musical sigh, rolling in and out like a Viennese fin de siècle tumbleweed. The moment, marked by such Sphinx-like tenderness, casts an equivocal light on all the Quartet's past mechanics, as if it were flowing silently underneath them like a grieving ghost, and only at this very instant allowed itself a fleeting incarnation. The whole incident happens in the wink of an ear, and soon enough this elusive work ushers itself out with not so much as a clipped breath.

Upon hearing this episode, one might interpret Ligeti's Second Quartet as a strange set of transformations on something inexpressible in its original form. Perhaps it's a record of strategies for a nonexistent game; or an array of snapshots of an imaginary and highly mobile object; or possibly it's a collection of chemical changes and altered states in the life of a periodic element yet to be discovered (Ligetium 90?). Whatever the case, the sense looms that a secret moves with uneasy persistence through this music, and that its extraordinary differentiation is a kind of expert evasion of a simple but unapproachable truth -- perhaps that sad, hobbled sigh which pokes in at the end. But for this moment, "quality" is replaced by "quantity": the object (melancholy, blue-ness, nostalgia) becomes the flow of numbers and forces (fast-faster, bright-dark, mechanized-organic). Indeed, one could argue that, save for this now-belabored "sigh" incident near the work's end, this Quartet is the anti-object. Ligeti himself confessed a desire to create a music in which "there is no longer any motivic writing...no contours, only sound textures, which are sometimes frayed and almost fluid...and at other times grainy and machine-like." The composer continued "how, I asked myself, can color replace contours, how can contrasting volumes and weights create form?"

This quest -- to eradicate the hard bit, to liquidate material into chemistry-at-work -- arguably engendered some of Ligeti's greatest music; the Second Quartet has gone down as a classic of twentieth century chamber music, an anthem to its time. But to ask the question "Why liquidate?" is a different breed of exploration, open only to hypothesis. If it's not too vulgar to venture, perhaps the making of a purely "texturizing" music was a kind of era-therapy for the European mind, a deliberate blanching of recent ruins, a "melting of solids into air." A perfect inversion of Emily Dickinson's famous image -- "After great pain, a formal feeling comes -- /The nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs..." Here the nerves rise from their graves into ether; here great pain casts formality into a formula far more fluent. [allmusic.com]

Art by Roger Hilton