Death is a charlatan

In the imaginary Breughelland, a whoring and boozing humanity thrives. Figures swarm and bustle everywhere. The drunkard Piet vom Fass intones the "Dies irae", while the lovers Amanda and Amando look for an undisturbed spot for intimate affection. Then he appears - imperious, megalomaniacal, demagogic: Nekrotzar, who emerges from his grave and announces the end of the world, on the same day at midnight by means of a comet impact. Piet is enslaved and they set off for the court of the baby-like prince Go-Go, where humanity is to await its doom. The court astrologer Astradamor is maltreated by his sadistic and sexually unsatisfied wife Mescalina, Prince Go-Go is tyrannized by his corrupt ministers, and then there is the head of the "Gepopo", the secret political police, who delivers strange and cryptic messages.

György Ligeti's only opera Le Grand Macabre is a masterpiece of the 20th century and a solitaire in the history of opera. This is not only due to the crazy plot and an extraordinary score - Ligeti's entire life and his whole person seem to be reflected in the work: his chaotic and exalted manner, his humor and his vital energy, but also all the horrendous experiences and deep emotional abysses he experienced as a child of the early 20th century. Le Grand Macabre shows the absurdity of human existence and yet leaves us with good news at the end.

Ligeti's opera is bizarre, exaggerated, grotesque. In his memoirs, he wrote: "The plot, situations and characters were to be brought to life by the music, the stage action and music were to be dangerously bizarre, completely exaggerated, completely crazy", the musical and dramatic action "hyper-colored" and "comic-like". It took over ten years from the first ideas for a full-length opera to the premiere. Ligeti rejected his drafts several times and started all over again. Initially, he had a piece in mind entitled Kylwiria, the name of the imaginary country he often dreamed of as a child. Originally, Kylwiria was to have no plot, only absurd, non-conceptual, purely emotional texts. The aim was a perfect fusion of language and music, as he had already tried to achieve in his Aventures and Nouvelle Aventures. He later decided that an opera without a plot would probably not be viable and began a second draft of a musical-dramatic adaptation of the Oedipus saga.

However, he also rejected this subject after his friend and commissioner of the opera, Göran Gentele - director of the Stockholm Opera in the 1960s and briefly director of the Metropolitan Opera in New York in 1972 - died in a car accident. Eventually, a new team came together and a new subject was sought. La balade du Grand Macabre by the Belgian poet Michel de Ghelderode ultimately seemed to Ligeti to be the perfect choice: "An end of the world that doesn't really happen, death as a hero who is perhaps just a little juggler, the broken and yet happily thriving, boozy, whorled world of the imaginary Breughelland" - this was exactly what he had in mind.

Le Grand Macabre 's apocalyptic scenario seems to be hitting a nerve again today. Megalomaniacal and capricious presidents who threaten to lead humanity to the abyss with new scandals every day; pandemics that cost millions of lives, checkmate the social system and call basic democratic values into question; scientific and technological advances that promise us progressiveness just as much as they frighten us and present us with new ethical challenges every day. A look at the film landscape shows the unrelenting enthusiasm for our own potential demise: Mad Max or Matrix, Contagion, 28 Days Later, World War Z or the American film Don't Look Up by Adam McKay, a black comedy released in 2021, not unlike Ligeti's work. There, too, the end of humanity is predetermined by the impact of a comet, albeit by two scientists. There is also a self-obsessed, opportunistic character, in the film the president (we know who is meant), who would rather use the approaching end of the world for her own political gain and to improve her image than take the threat seriously. The end of life on earth as we know it, through natural or cosmic disasters, nuclear destruction, epidemics, zombie apocalypses or the subjugation of humanity by aliens or super-intelligent machines (AI). The big catastrophe lends itself well to the big screen.

In opera, of course, everything is much more difficult. It also manages without images of gigantic explosions or disturbing close-ups of plague-ridden bodies. In fact, Le Grand Macabre is less about the apocalypse itself than about the question of the meaningfulness of death and, of course, of life. Ligeti's Breughelländer are not special people. They are not particularly intelligent or particularly kind. They do not create (in the Sartrean sense of their own transcendence), do not realize themselves, do not use their human potential. They simply live for themselves, almost animalistically - they drink, they eat, they love each other. Do we even want to save this world? The question doesn't matter, Ligeti doesn't judge. The people are simply there, and Nekrotzar is perhaps Death, or perhaps just a charlatan, an imaginary sick person, a juggler. Ligeti leaves it open to us what we want to see in him.

The name of the location, the imaginary Flemish "Breughelland", is of course not chosen at random. Nor is the fact that one of the central characters is called Piet by his first name. Michel de Ghelderode's inspiration for his poetry was Pieter Brueghel the Elder's paintings, in particular The Triumph of Death (1562). Countless figures, motifs and stories come together in this painting to form a teeming, crazy tableau of the grotesque. Skeletons conquer the desolate, withered and destroyed earthly world as an army of death. Some people are slaughtered with weapons, others drowned. Here a skeleton attacks a woman, there the leader, like Necrotzar, rides ahead on a pale horse that tramples the sinners under its hooves. "This very night, at midnight, you will see a pale horse, and its name is Death, and Hell will follow it!" sings Necrotzar to Piet as he announces the end of the world for the first time. It is written in a very similar way in the Revelation of John about the last of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse, who announce the end of the world empires and the coming of the Kingdom of God.

Ghelderode saw the absurdity of his own time reflected in these bizarre, grotesque and chaotic mass paintings of the Middle Ages. Ghelderode lived much later than one might expect; like Ligeti, he also lived in the 20th century, but was only a few years older. Ghelderode experienced a tough upbringing in a Jesuit college, a domineering father, but above all - like Ligeti - the world wars. Death, especially the absurdity of mass death in wars, became an omnipresent theme in art and philosophy during this period, and it is hardly surprising that absurd, tragicomic theater had its roots in this time of death. The meaningfulness of the world and of life is radically questioned in absurd theater, precisely by exaggerating it into the comic and literally reducing it to absurdity: "The situation that I was very often and for a long time on the threshold of death, both collectively and individually, is projected in my music. Not in such a way that the music becomes tragic - not at all. People who have experienced terrible things will not create seriously terrible art. They will alienate them," wrote Ligeti after completing the opera. Ghelderode and other representatives of absurd theater, such as Albert Camus, who, as a representative of existentialism, provided the philosophical basis for absurd theater, certainly felt the same way. For him, the absurd arises from the irreconcilable juxtaposition of the meaning-seeking human being with the meaning-negating world. In other words, the individual search for the meaning of life is literally meaningless, because the world as a collective has none.

In Le Grand Macabre, the catastrophe doesn't come at the end. Nekrotzar gets drunk with Piet and Astradamors and more or less sleeps through the end of the world. He still conjures it up, thinks it's done ... A little later, everyone wakes up and it's just like before. Nothing has happened. And Nekrotzar? He shrinks until he simply ceases to exist. Death itself dies? Wouldn't that be the beginning of "eternal life"? And if so, would that be heaven or perhaps even eternal hell on earth? The absolute meaninglessness of human life achieved at the end, because we can now never die again? Or was death just a charlatan after all, and nothing has changed for mankind?

The end of opera preoccupied Ligeti the longest, as the boundary between life and death was always difficult for him to grasp: "We are not really alive," he writes in an essay about an encounter with György Kurtág in post-war Budapest. "Since the deportation of our families, life and death had become one and the same. Whoever died, died, whoever happened to stay alive, stayed alive." Dead or alive? At the end of Le Grand Macabre, Ligeti opts for a third path: humanity experiences its apotheosis in the triumph of Eros, in the power of love. Amanda and Amando finally emerge from their love nest. They have not witnessed the supposed end of the world. And the final message of the play is clear: fear not! Because death and the whole dark future don't matter. There is only the here and now.