Gyorgy Ligeti On His Ancestor The Great Violinist Leopold Auer, And His Father's Utopian Socialist Dreams, And The Poet Sandor Veres, And Ornaments..

After all, music is not a science.
Gyorgy Ligeti

Also I like very much to play the piano - but for myself.
Gyorgy Ligeti

Auer in German means pasture or meadow, and so it became Ligeti because Ligeti in Hungarian means about the same thing.
Gyorgy Ligeti

Because I am pro-capitalist.
Gyorgy Ligeti

But I do not want to use Hungarian verses for British people.
Gyorgy Ligeti

But if you go from Moscow to Budapest you think you are in Paris.
Gyorgy Ligeti

But the money is more for the young.
Gyorgy Ligeti

But then, in the last generation, it became common for Hungarian Jews to change their names to Hungarian names.
Gyorgy Ligeti

Cezanne is one of my favorites.
Gyorgy Ligeti

First of all I listen to music. I like music.
Gyorgy Ligeti

For the past ten years I have had no financial problems.
Gyorgy Ligeti

Gesualdo was very important to me, I wanted to do something which corresponded to him.
Gyorgy Ligeti

Hungary has very beautiful folk poetry.
Gyorgy Ligeti

I don't read such boring things. Life is too short.
Gyorgy Ligeti

I don't really use bars.
Gyorgy Ligeti

I don't use old music.
Gyorgy Ligeti

I have always had an interest in picture puzzles, paradoxes of perception and ideas.
Gyorgy Ligeti

I know already the music I will write. But the words? I have not yet decided.
Gyorgy Ligeti

I like to stay home and listen to recordings.
Gyorgy Ligeti

I listen to all kinds of music - new music, old music, music of my colleagues, everything.
Gyorgy Ligeti

I lived under the Nazis and under the Communists.
Gyorgy Ligeti

I only want to give a metaphysic for my music.
Gyorgy Ligeti

I spent my first six years in Dicsoszentmarton, in the heart of Transylvania.
Gyorgy Ligeti

I was very critical of my father's Utopian dreams. I knew would be very worried if he had to live in such a world.
Gyorgy Ligeti

I write bars, for the musicians, because they have to be together.
Gyorgy Ligeti

If you come from Paris to Budapest you think you are in Moscow.
Gyorgy Ligeti

In my piano concerto I developed this polyphony to much higher complexity.
Gyorgy Ligeti

My father was a bank clerk. He was also a Utopian Socialist and he wrote a Utopian novel. It was a kind of allegory or fairy tale.
Gyorgy Ligeti

My father's name was also Auer.
Gyorgy Ligeti

My grandfather was not a musician but he was an artist - a painter, a decorative painter.
Gyorgy Ligeti

New York is the dream world, the center of jazz and rock.
Gyorgy Ligeti

Once, in London, the BBC asked me what was my favorite English book. I said Alice in Wonderland.
Gyorgy Ligeti

People often thought Leopold Auer was Russian because he lived in St. Petersburg so long, almost fifty years.
Gyorgy Ligeti

Perhaps the better word is emotional yes, I am an emotional man.
Gyorgy Ligeti

Steinberg is great. I should like to meet him.
Gyorgy Ligeti

Stravinsky used Mother Goose. He was influenced by Mother Goose, indirectly, but very beautifully.
Gyorgy Ligeti

Then, after the war it was impossible to travel, after so many years of Hitler and Stalin.
Gyorgy Ligeti

There is a great living writer - I know him personally - Sandor Veres. One of the greatest poets, like your. . . but I don't know any great living English poets.
Gyorgy Ligeti

There is a wonderful Hungarian literature, especially in lyric poetry.
Gyorgy Ligeti

There was a very famous musician in our family. He was a great violinist, an internationally known teacher. He was Leopold Auer.
Gyorgy Ligeti

They are the most complex of ornaments in the arts, like small sea horses, like the Alhambra where the walls are decorated with geometric ornaments of great minuteness and intricacy, or like the Irish Book of Kells, those marvelously decorated borders and capitals.
Gyorgy Ligeti

When I was six we moved to Kolozsvar, which was always one of the centers of Transylvanian life, even in those days, and so I went to primary and secondary school there.
Gyorgy Ligeti

When I was younger I was completely without money - when I was studying in Budapest, when I was a refugee.
Gyorgy Ligeti

Yes, fractals are what I want to find in my music.
Gyorgy Ligeti

Source: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/g/gyorgy_ligeti.html





















The great violinist and teacher Leopold Auer (1845-1930), who taught at the Music Conservatory in Saint Petersburg, Russia for 49 years (1868-1917). He was Gyorgy Ligeti's great uncle, and the teacher of Elman, Heifetz, Zimbalist, Milstein, and many other distinguished violinists. In 1918 he moved to the United States of America, eventually teaching at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia.

Auer was born in Veszprém [one of the oldest towns in Hungary, and one of the first Hungarian cities to have an university where students studied law and arts], the Austro-Hungarian Empire to a Jewish family, but became a Christian later in life. He died in Loschwitz, a suburb of Dresden, Germany; and he was buried in Hartsdale, New York.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopold_Auer

Photo credit: The Voice of Russia: Petersburg Conservatory Professors. With thanks.

www.vor.ru/English/ tales/tales_014.html

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Soon to be playing: Tabea Zimmermann performing the late "Sonata for Solo Viola" (1991-94), which Ligeti wrote expressly for her. Ms Zimmermann is professor of viola and chamber music at the Hanns Eisler Academy of Music in Berlin, Germany.