Is György Ligeti's Le Grand Macabre (1974–1977/1996) a dystopian work, or rather one of utopia? Traditionally, dystopia and utopia have formed an alternative. Yet Ligeti and librettist Michael Meschke enact an intertwinement of dystopia and utopia, in a series of moves and countermoves: (1) Death threatens to eliminate all life. (2) The earth is saved from the fate of the destruction of life – “Death is dead” (II/4). (3) Yet “Breughelland” is and will remain a crude and cruel tyranny. (4) The farcical character of the whole calls into question whether any of the previous moves can be taken seriously. Ligeti's/Meschke's subversion of the antinomy of utopia and dystopia, introduced in the opening “Breughellandlied,” turns out to be in the spirit of Piet the Pot's namesake Pieter Breughel the Elder, as a closer look at his 1567 painting Het Luilekkerland, an inspiration already to de Ghelderode, reveals. The irritating role thus assigned to consumption, however, seems to trivially lose all ambiguity through the words of the opera's final stanza. While this is a weighty objection to the reading proposed here, the conclusion attempts to outline a rejoinder to it.
Bauer, Amy. Ligeti's Laments: Nostalgia, Exoticism, and the Absolute (Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011).
Edwards, Peter. György Ligeti's Le Grand Macabre: Postmodernism, Musico-Dramatic Form and the Grotesque (London: Routledge, 2016).
Everett, Yayoi Uno. “Signification of Parody and the Grotesque in György Ligeti's Le Grand Macabre,” Music Theory Spectrum 31/1 (2009), 26–56.
Floros, Constantin. György Ligeti: Jenseits von Avantgarde und Postmoderne (Vienna: Lafite, 1996).
Gronemeyer, Marianne. Das Leben als letzte Gelegenheit: Sicherheitsbedürfnisse und Zeitknappheit (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 4/2012).
Horn, Eva. The Future as Catastrophe: Imagining Disaster in the Modern Age, trans. Valentine PAKIS (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2018).
Kaufmann, Harald. “Ein Fall absurder Musik. Ligetis Aventures & Nouvelles Aventures,” in id., Spurlinien:Analytische Aufsätze über Sprache und Musik (Vienna: Lafite, 1969), 130–158.
Konold, Wulf. “Ligetis Le Grand Macabre – absurdes Welttheater auf der Opernbühne,” in Oper heute, ed. by Otto Kolleritsch (Vienna and Graz: Universal Edition, 1985), 136–153.
Laki, Péter, “Le Petit Macabre: The Personification of Death in Ullmann’s Kaiser von Atlantis and Ligeti’s Le Grand Macabre,” paper presented to the American Musicological Society (AMS), Jewish Studies and Music Group, San Francisco, CA, November 10, 2011.
Lichtenfeld, Monika (ed.). György Ligeti: Gesammelte Schriften, 2 vols. (Mainz: Schott, 2007).
Marx, Wolfgang. “‘… denn sicher kommt der Tod!’ Der Tod als das Böse in György Ligetis Le Grand Macabre,” in Böse Macht Musik: Zur Ästhetik des Bösen in der Musik, ed. by Katharina Wisotzki, and Sara R. Falke (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2012), 33–48.
Müller, Jürgen and Thomas Schauerte. Pieter Bruegel: Das vollständige Werk (Cologne: Taschen, 2018).
Nielsen, Kai. “Capitalism, State Bureaucratic Socialism and Freedom,” Studies in Soviet Thought 38/4 (1989), 291–297.
Philippov, Michelle. Fats: A Global History (London: Reaktion Books, 2016).
Seherr-Thoss, Peter von. György Ligetis Oper “Le Grand Macabre” (Eisenach: Karl Dieter Wagner, 1998).
Steinitz, Richard. György Ligeti: Music of the Imagination (London: Faber & Faber, 2003).
Toop, Richard. György Ligeti (London: Phaidon, 1999).
Young, James. A History of Western Philosophy of Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023).
Zimmermann, Heidy. “From Kylwiria to Breughelland. Concepts and Preliminary Stages on the Way to Le Grand Macabre,” in Bianca Ţiplea Temeş, Hermann Danuser (eds.), Thanatos in Contemporary Music: From the Tragic to the Grotesque (MediaMusica: Cluj Napoca, 2022), 239–268.