Gyorgy Ligeti Sonata for Viola Solo 1st Movement

Gyorgy Sandor Ligeti was born on the 28 May 1923 in Tarnaveni, which is a small town in the Transylvanian region of Romania and died on the 12 June 2006 in Vienna, Austria. His compositional style has changed over his lifetime. In his early years of composing, he was greatly influenced by Bartok, Stravinsky and Berg but soon enough he started to loose interest and to become dissatisfied of the musical idioms that were available to him. Ligeti was envisaging a whole new world of sounds but he did not how to write them with the available means of composing. Soon as he left Hungary in 1956, within a few years he became one of the leading composers of the 20th Century alongside with Boulez, Stockhausen and Nono. Ligetis first encounter with the viola was in the year 1990 when he went to a concert of Tabea Zimmermann in Cologne. He was so mesmerized by her particularly vigorous and pithy and yet always tender C string1 that he started immediately to work on his new Viola Sonata. His viola sonata has 6 movements. The first movement is called Hora Lunga which means, slow dance in Romanian. It is played solely on the C-string and Ligeti made use of the natural intervals (pure major 3rds, pure minor seventh and also the 11 th harmonic). This movement is a potpourri of Romanian folk music, Hungarian folk music and Gypsy music, which awakens the songs that he heard as a child. Although he did not use any quotations, he tends to make allusions by creating this monophony full of richness, nostalgia and richly ornamented. It is perhaps one of the most beautiful and also in the mean time awkward movements written for Viola solo. The writing on the C-string encapsulates the viola and it unifies it from the rest of the instruments. Ligeti was not too delicate with the players of his sonata, technically wise. All the movements are technically demanding but in special, the first movement requires a very good instrument that can project in the high positions. To comprise everything I have said, Gyorgy Ligetis Sonata for Viola Solo is a piece that every violist should at least have read in their musical life.

Bibliography: Monograph: Ligeti, Gyorgy Preface of the Gyorgy Ligeti Viola Sonata (Schott, 2001, ED 8374) Article on Internet: Laki, Peter Program Notes for the Cleveland Orchestra in Carnegie Hall (4 February, 2009) http://www.carnegiehall.org/article/box_office/events/evt_6189_pn.html? . Gyorgy Ligeti Preface of his Viola Sonata (Schott, 2001) ED 8374
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selecteddate=02042009 (Accessed 17/03/10) Recording: 1998 Sony Music Entertainment SK 62309: Tracks 21-26; Producer and Engineer: Teije van Geest. Recorded at Tonstudio Sandhausen, Germany, November 20-22, 1994: Booklet by Hamburg International; Notes by Ligeti, Gyorgy (player Tabea Zimmermann) Grove Online: Article by Griffiths, Paul for the Grove Online Dictionary; Article about Ligeti, Sandor Gyorgy (http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/16642? q=gyorgy+ligeti+viola+sonata&search=quick&pos=1&_start=1#firsthit) accessed on 17/03/10

Mihai Cocea