Ligeti is not known for his sense of humor, having come into the wider public consciousness with his Requiem, which was excerpted in Kubrick's 2001: A space Odyssey. The heavy rhetoric of the Requiem, with its microtonal howlings like voices of the tormented dead, leaves you quite unprepared for Le Grand Macabre, which starts with a prelude for car horns (the kind clowns use) and just gets sillier from there.

The libretto, written by Ligeti with Michael Meschke, is based on a now-obscure play called The Ballad of the Great Macabre. It depicts the misadventures of Nekrotzar, the Quixotic Angel of Death, who is sent to earth in order to destroy it.

Ligeti's score ranges from brilliantly farcical—a doorbell prelude, electric church organ solos, atonal passages for harmonica, belching, etc.—to moments as expressive and stunning as anything in Wozzeck. The shifts from the sublime to the scatological, in the music and in the text, are as instantaneous as they are in the scores for Looney Tunes. Thus Nekrotzar, who keeps re-introducing himself, and proclaiming his destructive mission, declares before a romantic interlude: "Awake, woman! / The goddess [Venus] declares thy wish fulfilled, / here am I, and am well hung!"

One of the reasons Le Grand Macabre is so entertaining—that's the proper word for it—is its constant sonic clarity. The singers, who frequently speak their parts, are often accompanied only by single instruments, or by small colorful ensembles. There are a few duets, choruses, and lively instrumental interludes, as well as some very melodic passages for voice, but no arias as such; the effect is that of an ambitious work of musical theatre. The sung parts, are, however, such that no cabaret performer could ever dream of executing them. When he began the first version in 1975, it was full of long speaking parts which, performance by performance, he's whittled away, to the tight, fast-moving version we have now.

There's a high level of self-mockery, and lightness about the very conventions of "horror music" that Ligeti himself established. A whole range of expressive effects (clichés) of modern orchestral writing get a well earned pie-in-the-face. Ligeti's angular, strident melodic writing, for example, which in other places can be deeply chilling, here becomes a wickedly effective comic device. Le Grand Macabre lends you a different ear for all of Ligeti's work. If he's seemed like some darkly intense figure in music, that Saturnalian pose is so deflated by the figure of Nekrotzar, that we're made better able to hear what Ligeti's really being doing all along: delighting, even when the music has been oppressively somber. He wrote all that terrifying stuff because it sounds great, not because he's squirming in personal anguish.

© All Music Guide