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 Lament and Unification in György Ligeti’s Horn Trio, Fourth Movement Daniel Miller Lawrence University November 2012 2 Ligeti’s Trio for Violin, Horn, and Piano ends with a compelling fourth movement. In this movement, the longest of the trio, a chaconne ostinato and a falling lamento theme build to a fever pitch before subsiding into the uneasy quietude in which the work ends. Music critic Alex Ross (2010) has described the climax of this movement as “outright delirium,” and Ligeti scholar Amy Bauer (2011) hears hints of the tragic-­‐comic in the same passage. Ligeti returned to the chaconne and the lament bass repeatedly throughout his career. These themes appear in his Violin Concerto and his Piano Concerto, as well as in the piano etude “Automne à Varsovie,” the early harpsichord piece Hungarian Rock, and the Viola Sonata (Ross 2010, 49). In Ligeti’s trio, the chaconne and the lament themes accompany a key moment of unification that partially resolves musical conflicts that have dominated the preceding three movements. The notoriety of the trio consisting of a violin, a horn, and a piano originates with Johannes Brahms’s Horn Trio, op. 40. Ligeti declares his trio to be a “Hommage à Brahms,” but despite certain similarities with the Brahms trio, particularly Ligeti’s use of the natural-­‐horn effect, the composer’s own statement seems to contradict any significant connection between the works: . . . musically this Horn Trio doesn’t have much to do with my opinion of Brahms; what is remembered from Brahms is perhaps only a certain smilingly conservative comportment with distinct ironic distance. . . . (Lichtenfeld 1984) The horn trio, as an ensemble, is a dramatic and well-­‐exploited group, but it suffers from certain orchestrational weaknesses. The ensemble is appealing because of its diverse timbres, its large range, and its lyricism. The most striking member of the ensemble is also its most problematic element, however. Substituting the horn 3 for the piano trio’s cello creates a less homogeneous ensemble, constantly in danger of being upstaged by its brass member. The Brahms trio, written for the natural horn, must have also challenged the composer to integrate the justly tuned intervals of the horn’s harmonic series into the even-­‐tempered idiom of the piano and violin. I will argue that Ligeti exploits the inherent instability of the horn in the ensemble to create a narrative arc throughout the piece, and that this narrative reaches its climax in the exceptional final movement. The transformation of the lamento theme is the primary dramatic impulse in the fourth movement. The simple descending four-­‐note motive, first heard in the piano in m. 6, is developed throughout the movement by changing the order of its constituent pitches, although older versions of the motive are constantly restated alongside new motivic developments. Example 1 shows the resulting change in Example 1. Contour analysis of the development o f the lament movement in Ligeti’s Trio, fourth movement. 4 contour. 1 As the lament theme is played retrograde, the opening motive becomes an ascending scale in mm. 30-­‐31. By reversing the third and fourth elements in the original motive, Ligeti creates a new contour at m. 37, and this is then played in inversion in mm. 57-­‐58. The contour in m. 62 is a rotation of the contour from m. 37, and the final major motivic development is the inversion of this contour that occurs in mm. 89-­‐92. The origins of the lament in Ligeti’s music might lie in the Transylvanian folk music Ligeti heard as a child, suggesting that the expansive development of the motive over many octaves and diminution into a dense cascade of clusters might have referential connotations for Ligeti, besides serving the dramatic needs of the trio (Bauer 2011, 72).2 Example 2. The first four statements of the chaconne in mm. 1-­‐20, showing the descending line, inversion of the chords, and C2 pedal tone in mm. 16-­‐19. Like the lament base, the form of the chaconne, which provides a basic structure for Ligeti’s fourth movement, has popular associations with grief. The well-­‐known lament bass in “Dido’s Lament” from Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas is itself repeated in the form of a chaconne, while the most famous chaconne, the “Ciaconna” 1 My notation of motivic contour is based on Contour Class (CC) notation (Friedmann 1985). The ordered sets, as well as the graphical contours, describe the relative locations of pitches in a phrase. 2 The chaconne too, of course, has its distant origins in an aggressive Spanish folkdance. 5 from Bach’s Partita in D minor (BWV 1004) is commonly associated with the composer’s grief over the death of his first wife, Maria Barbara Bach (Thoene 1994). In Ligeti’s horn trio, the chaconne motive consists of the first five chords of Example 2. Over a held B4 in the horn, the violin con sordino introduces the motive in double stops. In m. 6, the violin starts the second statement of the chaconne motive in inversion. In the third iteration of the chaconne, the motive is inverted again and passes completely into the piano, and in the fourth iteration the motive inverts once more in the piano part and is played over a C2 pedal tone. As can be seen from Example 2, the fourth movement starts with the chaconne motive tumbling down over three octaves. This gesture, as well as the longer falling gesture in the piano which precedes the return to opening material in m. 78, is seen as sloped stratification in Bauer’s pitch-­‐versus-­‐time graph of the movement (2011, 171). This falling gesture is mirrored in the primary melodic material. Beginning in m. 6, the piano introduces the lamento motive: three notes sliding down from F5, a gesture which is immediately repeated in m. 7 and extended in m. 9. The violin echoes the piano in cycle three of the chaconne in m. 14. They begin an imitative dialog, excluding, for the time being, the horn, which continues to hold pedal tones until it dramatically enters the dialog in m. 51. With each statement of the lamento motive it undergoes rhythmic diminution. First stated in dotted eighth notes in m. 6, it becomes an eight-­‐note triplet motive by m. 29, and in the pickup to m. 31, it becomes a sixteenth-­‐note figure. 6 Chaconne statements six and seven, demarcate the end of an introductory section and the beginning of the main body of this movement. The drama of this moment is accentuated by the appearance, for the first time, of a low chaconne motive in octaves in the piano⎯marked “sonorous”⎯and by the introduction of an inverted form of the lamento motive in m. 30. In m. 34, the left-­‐hand of the piano takes the lament motive up to octaves six and seven. Through expanding the total range of the piano part, pushing the violin into higher registers, adding notes to the chaconne motive, and diminishing the rhythmic values of the melodic material, Ligeti sculpts a gradual intensification that propels the music towards the dramatic horn entrance in m. 51. By m. 43, the chaconne has become a series of four-­‐ and five-­‐note chords, and the lamento motive is stated in major sevenths high in the piano register. Coinciding with the start of the eleventh chaconne cycle, the horn professes its own lamento, but as in the first movement, it seems temporally displaced from its compatriots. Its motive is “behind the times,” reminiscent of material from the beginning of the movement, whereas the violin and piano have now developed to the point that the lamento is hardly recognizable; the transparent dialog of the introduction is subsumed by dense, nearly synchronous falling, chromatic scales. Adding to the horn’s alien remoteness is the continuing use of the natural horn, which contrasts starkly with the tempered piano. The climax of the movement occurs in m. 59, where for the first time, the horn and violin perform the lament motive in rhythmic unison. In parallel, octave-­‐
displaced tritones and fifths, the violin and horn seem to withdraw from the piano, 7 which continues its precipitous descent from the highest octaves of the instrument towards the lowest. Also contributing to the climactic nature of this moment is the repetition of a low C in octaves, which Ligeti described as the strokes of a “gigantic imaginary drum” in his program notes to the work (Ligeti 1993). The half-­‐note pulse of these beats creates a polymeter that coincides with the prevailing quintuple meter over four bars, but the start of this cycle is displaced one measure into the twelfth statement of the chaconne so that the rhythmic cycle will coincide with the start of the thirteenth chaconne statement. The occurrence of an important change in the pattern one beat into the chaconne ostinato is reminiscent of the process at work in the opening cycles of the movement.3 In m. 62, the drum motive is diminished by an eighth note, creating a five-­‐note phrase every three bars; the polyrhythm of this phrase increases the tension through the climax of the movement. The cluster-­‐like material in the upper voices of the piano descends into the piano’s lowest octave, as the violin holds an A#7 and the horn descends to an A2 and diminuendos al niente. In the final bars of the piece, the violin and piano return to a modified version of the lament theme from the opening, with the violin in harmonics or sul tasto. The horn descends stepwise and ends on a surprisingly low G1. Clusters in the piano fade out one note at a time, and the movement ends with the 3 The use of polymetric lines is also reminiscent of processes in Ligeti’s early piano music and in Carnatic music, where the unifying tala sam beat is the all-­‐important cadential point of unification. 8 reverberation of an A4 in the piano that is the culmination of a large statement of the lemento theme begun in the “drum motive” in m. 57.4 The fourth movement of Ligeti’s Trio is key to understanding the work as a whole. In this movement, the horn, largely exiled from the dialog between piano and violin in the other movements, is partially reconciled and unified with the other instruments. The three movements that precede the final movement set up a narrative of striving towards fleeting moments of unity. The horn’s isolation from the rest of the ensemble throughout the first three movements takes the form of harmonic, temporal, and motivic displacement. Harmonically, the horn is isolated from the tempered pitches of the other instruments through Ligeti’s use of the natural horn. The clash between these two tuning systems is the most obvious disconnection between the horn and the rest of the ensemble. Temporal isolation occurs when the horn plays material similar to material being developed in the piano and violin but at a displaced temporal location. For instance, in the first movement, the three instruments play similar material but the horn frequently starts its gestures in the middle of a violin or piano motive, and the horn’s material is frequently in a different rhythmic strata (triplets against sixteenth notes in the violin or vice versa, etc.). Similar displacement occurs in the second movement as each instrument, in turn, is isolated from the prevailing rhythmic current. 4 The “drum motive” consists of the repetition of a pedal C in octaves that descends to a pedal B at m. 62. It would be surprising if this striking motive did not complete the three-­‐note lament figure that permeates the melodic material of this movement. For this reason, I believe the final A of the trio is intended to be heard as the culmination of this motive. 9 Motivic isolation occurs when the horn plays material that is not obviously connected with the context provided by the violin and piano. For instance, in the second movement the horn attempts to imitate the material played by the rest of the ensemble, but the horn is increasingly preoccupied with flighty musical digressions. Motivic isolation is even more obvious in the third, Alla Marcia, movement. The violin and piano strive for an imperfect unity as they try to match syncopated rhythms, occasionally tripping over themselves. The horn is entirely excluded until the trio section. The horn finishes the movement in complete isolation, repeating a mournful hunting-­‐horn call over the staccato material in the violin and piano. By the fourth and final movement, a narrative has already been established: In preceding movements, the violin and piano have carried on a motivic dialog; they have sought, and have sometimes established, moments of imperfect textural, motivic, or rhythmic unity. The horn has been largely excluded from this discourse. Until m. 51 in the fourth movement, the horn part is limited to quiet pedal tones while the violin and piano develop the lament theme. The entrance of the horn, with its own version of the lamento theme at m. 51, is the first indication of the climax that has been building throughout the preceding movements. The horn attempts to join the piano and violin in their lamentation, but the microtone-­‐sharp F-­‐natural in m. 51 sounds shocking and grotesque. The horn circles a transposed G5, never going below E5, while the violin and piano build, filling in the harmonies of the chaconne and expanding in range. The long-­‐awaited motivic unification of the horn with the violin takes place just nine measures after its lamento entrance in m. 51. The sense of confrontation is 10 accentuated by the use of the full palette of timbral effects found in earlier movements: bowed tremolo “as dense as possible,” artificial harmonics, and scratch tone on the loudest notes, which is a new effect not heard in previous movements.5 The harmonic conflict between the horn and the violin is not resolved, but in this intense moment, where both the violin and the horn are threatened by the sheer volume and density of the piano clusters, it is the common gesture we perceive most strongly. In this warped, barely controlled lament, the violin and horn can finally reach an imperfect unity; even a flawed alliance is preferable to the threat of chaos and complete disintegration that seems imminent here. In the final measures of the trio we see the violin, for the first time, acknowledging the harmonic paradigm of the horn. The chaotic descent of the piano ends in m. 77 with the performance direction “break off suddenly.” The violin and horn, in the extremes of their range, try to return to the lamento theme of the movement’s introduction. In m. 93 the violin is asked to perform an F6 as a natural harmonic “flatter, like a natural seventh” (Ligeti 2001). This is the only place in the trio where the violin is asked to plays a nontempered pitch. This small concession to the harmonic world of the natural horn represents the new relationship between the horn and the violin. In all previous movements, the horn has sought to ally itself with the sound world of the violin and piano. For the first time, the violin acknowledges the horn’s harmonic material. The relationship between the two instruments has been transformed through the “delirium” of the climax of the fourth 5 Specified in a footnote (Ligeti 2001).
11 movement, yet the trio ends before we can perceive anything more than a hint of what that new relationship would be like. The fundamental narrative conflict within Ligeti’s trio is a reflection of the imperfections within the ensemble itself. The horn’s timbre and harmonic tendencies set it apart from the other members of the ensemble. Ligeti has made a virtue of this seeming weakness by focusing the disparate elements of the first three movements towards a moment of partial unification in the fourth movement. In this unusual final movement, extremes of range, timbre, and dynamics contribute to a sound world that seems headed towards anarchy. Instead, the horn and the violin attain a kind of awkward alliance that we barely glimpse before the work fades away. Unlike the triumphant final movement of the Brahms trio, the Ligeti trio leaves us uncomfortably aware of the flaws that remain in this imperfect resolution. 12 Bibliography Bauer, Amy. Ligeti's Laments: Nostalgia, Exoticism, and the Absolute. Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate, 2011. Friedmann, Michael L., and Arnold Schoenberg. “A Methodology for the Discussion of Contour: Its Application to Schoenberg's Music.” Journal of Music Theory 29, no. 2 (Autumn 1985). Lichtenfeld, Monika. “Gesprach mit Gyorge Ligeti.” Neue Zeitschrift für Music 145 (1984). Cited in Paul Griffiths. Georgy Ligeti. 2nd ed. London: Robson Books, 1997. Cited in Searby 2001. Ligeti, György. Trio für Violine, Horn und Klavier. Facsimile ed. Mainz, Germany: Schott, 1984. -­‐-­‐-­‐-­‐-­‐-­‐-­‐. Trio für Violine, Horn und Klavier. Mainz, Germany: Schott, 2001. -­‐-­‐-­‐-­‐-­‐-­‐-­‐. Program notes for Horn Trio. Yale University (22 March 1993). Cited in Bauer 2011. Morris, Robert D. “New Directions in the Theory and Analysis of Musical Contour.” Music Theory Spectrum 15, no. 2 (Autumn 1993). Polansky, Larry, and Richard Bassein. “Possible and Impossible Melody: Some Formal Aspects of Contour.” Journal of Music Theory 36, no. 2 (Autumn 1992). Ross, Alex. “The Ligeti Lamento.” In Listen to This. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010. Searby, Michael. "Ligeti's Third Way: 'Non-­‐Atonal' Elements in the Horn Trio," Tempo. New series, No. 216 (April 2001). Thoene, Helga. "Johann Sebastian Bach. Ciaconna—Tanz oder Tombeau: Verborgene Sprache eines berühmten Werkes." In Veröffentlichungen des Historischen Museums Köthen. Festschrift zum Leopoldfest (15. Köthener Bachfesttage). Vol. 6. Köthen, Germany: np. , 1994.