The LIGETI’S “LE GRAND MACABRE” is a postscript portraying historical murder and is set on a fictional city of Breughelland, a banana republic. From the early 1960s, Ligeti toyed with the idea of composing a piece of stage work, and he also produced an original experimental music theatre. Le Grande Macabre premiered on 12th April 1978 in Stockholm and has received over 30 productions since then. On 18th February 2017 Ligeti’s “anti-anti-opera” Le Grande Macabre concert directed by Peter Sellars was set at Philharmonie Berlin. Ligeti had a perfect sense of humour as reflected in the opera Le Grande Macabre in which Simon Rattle performs with resemblance of the singers. The work was an intrigued grotesque parable that depicted war and enriched with elements of the mediaeval dances, wild carnival and death.
Overall Performance
The Le Grand Macabre – Berlin Philharmonic set starts with a conventional prelude idea and instead of being played by the orchestra had a set of 12 car horns that were performed by hands and feet. It starts with a coup de music and a perennially pissed person named Piet the Pot, a pair of sex-obsessed lovers, layabout, sadomasochistic astronomer and a couple of sinister politicians. All are subject to Le Grande Macabre had visited the people of Breughelland. The landscape was entirely run-down, but all staged, and opera set to roll. Nekrotzar faces defeat, he gets drunk, and instead of commanding the minions to raze Breughelland, he messes as a result of being drunk and falls off a rocking-horse. The musicians had an excellent performance in the sense that they had a well-planned storyline and highly entertaining mix of black humour, medieval mystery play and an absurd slapstick. Even thou grotesquely excessively exaggerated musical devices; this affected both the music and set stage action at all levels.
Analysis of Concert’s Pieces
Use of car horns as a musical piece in Le Grande Macabre contrasted that of Monteverdi’s Orfeo. When Ligeti was composing a masterpiece of musical anti-theatre, he named it “anti-anti-opera” since the other two sets “antis” had cancelled. Different passages set and send Mozart, Pilfer and Rossini and take the Verdi out of the avant-garde. It also featured various gestures of defiance and to the ideologues of the forefront. The chaotic music on the surface is rigorous and fully controlled by Ligeti. Another piece that contrasted the car horn was the doorbell prelude and the instrumentals used in scene 3 of the interlude mirror canon. In the 1960s Ligeti composed and performed one of his seminal works of experimental music theatre, Nouvelles Aventures and Aventures. This creative journey leads to some of the wealthiest music of the 20th century, and it revealed high power and an imaginative variety of music. Among all the 1950s and 1960s characters, Ligeti was the best player who composed amazing music that revelled complexity in rhythmic glitter and complexity. These are mostly observed and contrasted in the first piano etude and the warped harmonic world that belonged to Horn Trio such as looking at Schumann and Brahms through a distorted mirror.
There are various constants related to Ligeti’s musical imaginations, and he is widely known for leading the principle of resistance of system for the entire system. In his other pieces of work like the shinning and a space Odyssey, Ligeti’s used in both parts his song the alien – the music of teeming, unearthly intensity and horrifying vastness. Sound resemblance is experienced in the shinning compared to the of Jack Nicholson. Real distinctiveness of Ligeti’s unique music and is much more vibrant than what Kubrick had heard before. Orchestral performance from the 50s and early 60s atmospheres and apparitions were a sign of new ways of structuring and composing music. Ligeti’s main idea was to transform music and create what he called micro polyphony of dense musical lines so that the listener can be more aware of the changing amorphous clouds of music than the movement of a single voice or instrument.
General Reaction/Conclusion
In my opinion, Ligeti was the man creative musician and against the ideological doctrines in all forms. Le Grand Macabre has teemed with various characters that satirize systems, people and political profiles and affiliations that negatively terrorized Ligeti’s life in one way or another. Basing from his background and his childhood life, Ligeti was a strong personality no wonder his name and pieces of music are still present to date. To him, it seemed crazy when he met a group of composers who were desperately shackling to compositional and musical dogmas. In my view, I find that the pieces of La Grande Macabre met my expectations since it shows vocal transformations and ingenuity that Ligeti applied in rewriting the historical article. This concert made the most reliable impressions due to the unique interconnection of sets, pieces that up to date there has not been perfect resemblance in the musical industry.
Reflection
The interconnection between music that performed and the community that it served is the reflective nature of the music on cultures of the city. Musical concert helps in generating almost all kinds of social structures, including religion, economy. In my view, music performances have the potential to act as the principal agent of social transformation. It can be supported by the fact that musical performances have always used as a universal tool on social grounds all around the globe. I find that there has been an improvement in terms of musical performance in terms of structure and instruments. I feel technology has played a huge role and impact on these improvements, mostly in terms of the evolution of musical instruments. There has therefore led to development mainly basing on previous concerts that I attended compared to the past shows. The concepts of change and transformation in classical music led to overall improvement and understanding as illustrated and explained from the course. Finally, I would argue that more needs to be implemented and done so to note more musical transformation soon.