The Hungarian composer György Ligeti

György Ligeti

György Sándor Ligeti was a composer of contemporary classical music. Born in a Hungarian Jewish family in Transylvania, Romania, he briefly lived in Hungary before becoming an Austrian citizen.-Early life:...

 composed a cycle of 18 Étude

Étude

An étude , is an instrumental musical composition, most commonly of considerable difficulty, usually designed to provide practice material for perfecting a particular technical skill. The tradition of writing études emerged in the early 19th century with the rapidly growing popularity of the piano...

s for solo piano between 1985 and 2001. They are generally seen as one of the major creative achievements of his last decades, and one of the most significant sets of piano studies, combining virtuoso technical problems with expressive content, of the 20th century, following in the line of the études of Frédéric Chopin

Frédéric Chopin

Frédéric François Chopin was a Polish composer and virtuoso pianist. He is considered one of the great masters of Romantic music and has been called "the poet of the piano"....

, Franz Liszt

Franz Liszt

Franz Liszt ; ), was a 19th-century Hungarian composer, pianist, conductor, and teacher.Liszt became renowned in Europe during the nineteenth century for his virtuosic skill as a pianist. He was said by his contemporaries to have been the most technically advanced pianist of his age...

, and Claude Debussy

Claude Debussy

Claude-Achille Debussy was a French composer. Along with Maurice Ravel, he was one of the most prominent figures working within the field of impressionist music, though he himself intensely disliked the term when applied to his compositions...

 but addressing new technical ideas as a compendium of the concepts Ligeti had worked out in his other works since the 1950s.

Scope of the work

There are 18 Études arranged in three books or Livres: six Études in Book 1 (1985), eight in Book 2 (1988–1994), four in Book 3 (1995–2001). Ligeti’s original intention had been to compose only twelve Études, in two books of six each, on the model of the Debussy Études, but the scope of the work grew because he enjoyed writing the pieces so much. Though the four Études of Book 3 form a satisfying conclusion to the cycle, Book 3 is in fact unfinished, in that Ligeti certainly intended to add more, but was unable to do so in his last years, when his productivity was much reduced owing to illness. The Études of Book 3 seem generally calmer, simpler, more refined in technique than those of Books 1 and 2.

Titles

The titles of the various études are a mixture of technical terms and poetic descriptions. Ligeti made lists of possible titles and the titles of the individual numbers were often changed between inception and publication. Often Ligeti did not assign any title until after the work was completed.

Book 1

• No. 1: Désordre. Molto vivace, vigoroso, molto ritmico: A study in fast polyrhythm
  Polyrhythm
  Polyrhythm is the simultaneous sounding of two or more independent rhythms.Polyrhythm in general is a nonspecific term for the simultaneous occurrence of two or more conflicting rhythms, of which cross-rhythm is a specific and definable subset.—Novotney Polyrhythms can be distinguished from...
  
  s moving up and down the keyboard. The right hand plays only white keys while the left hand is restricted to the black keys. This separates the hands into two pitch-class fields; the right hand music is diatonic, the left hand music is pentatonic. This étude is dedicated to Pierre Boulez
  Pierre Boulez
  Pierre Boulez is a French composer of contemporary classical music, a pianist, and a conductor.-Early years:Boulez was born in Montbrison, Loire, France. As a child he began piano lessons and demonstrated aptitude in both music and mathematics...
  
  .
• No. 2: Cordes à vide. Andantino rubato, molto tenero: Simple, almost Satie-esque chords become increasingly complex. These chords are built primarily from ic5.. This étude is also dedicated to Pierre Boulez.
• No. 3: Touches bloquées. Vivacissimo, sempre molto ritmico - Feroce, impetuoso, molto meno vivace - Feroce, estrepitoso - Tempo I: Two different rhythmic patterns interlock. One hand plays rapid, even successions of notes while the other hand 'blocks' some of the keys by holding them pressed down. This is the last étude Ligeti dedicated to Boulez.
• No. 4: Fanfares. Vivacissimo, molto ritmico, con alegria e slancio: Melody and accompaniment frequently exchange roles in this polyrhythmic study which features aksak-influenced rhythms and an ostinato in 8/8 time, dividing the bar of 8 eighth notes into 3 + 2 + 3. This étude is dedicated to Volker Banfield
  Volker Banfield
  Volker Banfield is a German pianist.He studied at the Nordwestdeutsche Musikakademie in Detmold, beginning at age 14. Afterward he moved to the United States and studied at the Juilliard School and at the University of Texas . He then returned to live in Germany and toured extensively...
  
  .
• No. 5: Arc-en-ciel. Andante con eleganza, with swing: The music rises and falls in arcs that seem to evoke a rainbow. This étude is dedicated to Louise Sibourd.
• No. 6: Automne à Varsovie. Presto cantabile, molto ritmico e flessibile: Its title, Autumn in Warsaw, refers to the Warsaw Autumn
  Warsaw Autumn
  Warsaw Autumn is the largest international Polish festival of contemporary music. Indeed, for many years, it was the only festival of its type in Central and Eastern Europe. It was founded in 1956 by two composers, Tadeusz Baird and Kazimierz Serocki, and officially established by the Head Board...
  
  , an annual festival of contemporary music. It consists of a continuous transformation of the initial descending figure, ending up at the bottom of the keyboard. This étude is dedicated to Ligeti's Polish friends.

Book 2

• No. 7: Galamb Borong – the title is in 'nonsense Balinese'. The shifting rhythms evoke the sounds of the Bali
  Bali
  Bali is an Indonesian island located in the westernmost end of the Lesser Sunda Islands, lying between Java to the west and Lombok to the east...
  
  nese gamelan
  Gamelan
  A gamelan is a musical ensemble from Indonesia, typically from the islands of Bali or Java, featuring a variety of instruments such as metallophones, xylophones, drums and gongs; bamboo flutes, bowed and plucked strings. Vocalists may also be included....
  
  .
• No. 8: Fém – the title is the Hungarian
  Hungary
  Hungary , officially the Republic of Hungary , is a landlocked country in Central Europe. It is situated in the Carpathian Basin and is bordered by Slovakia to the north, Ukraine and Romania to the east, Serbia and Croatia to the south, Slovenia to the southwest and Austria to the west. The...
  
   word for metal. Based on chords of the open fifth, with short, irregular, asymmetrically grouped melodic fragments playing off one another.
• No. 9: Vertige - widely-separated hands use chromatic scales to create the effect of endless, falling movement
• No. 10: Der Zauberlehrling (The Sorcerer's Apprentice) – a dancing melodic line is kept in perpetual motion by irregularly dispersed staccato accents
• No. 11: En Suspens – six beats per bar in the right hand, four in the left hand, irregular phrase-lengths and accents in both, weave an ethereal and rather jazz-like web of harmony
• No. 12: Entrelacs – criss-crossing rhythmic patterns, increasing in dynamics as they traverse the keyboard from left to right, creating up to seven different metrical layers.
• No. 13: L'escalier du diable (The devil’s staircase) – a hard-driving toccata
  Toccata
  Toccata is a virtuoso piece of music typically for a keyboard or plucked string instrument featuring fast-moving, lightly fingered or otherwise virtuosic passages or sections, with or without imitative or fugal interludes, generally emphasizing the dexterity of the performer's fingers...
  
   that moves polymetrically up and down the keyboard and then turns into an impression of bells ringing in different registers and times
• No. 14: Coloana infinită (Infinite Column) is named for Constantin Brâncuși
  Constantin Brancusi
  Constantin Brâncuşi was a Romanian-born sculptor who made his career in France. As a child he displayed an aptitude for carving wooden farm tools. Formal studies took him first to Bucharest, then to Munich, then to the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris...
  
  's sculpture of the same name, a repetitive series of expanding and contracting pyramidal shapes, and features loud, ascending chord-sequences that overlap giving the impression of constant upward motion. This piece is a revised version of the etude later published as No. 14A: Coloana fara sfârşit (see 'Related Works' below)

Book 3

• No. 15: White on White – a white-key study except for the very end, beginning with a serene canon and with a whirling fast middle section
• No. 16: Pour Irina – another étude with a gentle beginning, becoming more and more frenetic due to the introduction of progressively shorter note-values and additional pitches
• No. 17: À bout de souffle (Out of Breath) – a manic two-part canon
  Canon (music)
  In music, a canon is a contrapuntal composition that employs a melody with one or more imitations of the melody played after a given duration . The initial melody is called the leader , while the imitative melody, which is played in a different voice, is called the follower...
  
   that abruptly ends with slow pianissimo chords
• No. 18: Canon – a short canon between the hands, played once vivace and then a second time presto impossibile, with a slow quiet chordal canon to finish with

Related Works

Étude No. 14A: Coloana fara sfârşit (Column without End) was the first version of Etude 14 but was judged too difficult for a human player, so Ligeti recomposed it, changing the harmonic structure as he reduced the number of pitches in each hand. Subsequently the original form was arranged as a separate étude for player-piano by Jürgen Hocker, but some pianists have in fact played it. The single piano piece L’arrache-coeur (1994) was apparently originally intended to be Étude No. 11 but did not become part of the cycle.