Ligeti continues to be one of the most prominent figures in twentieth-century music: he was honoured widely after his death in 2006, and scholarly interest in his music has since shown no signs of abating. In this recent monograph, Amy Bauer provides close readings and analyses that cover the entire chronological span of Ligeti's output, her breadth as a scholar evident in her thorough assimilation of both the secondary literature on the composer and a wide range of critical theory. She goes some distance towards capturing the truly multifaceted nature of Ligeti's œuvre, paying attention to pieces that display variously the influences of Eastern European folk music, the abstractions of the mid-century avant-garde, minimalist and pattern-meccanico techniques,Footnote ¹ ironic and grotesque hyperbole, and neo-tonality. She does so with the overarching thesis that ‘lament’ is of fundamental importance to Ligeti's work and unifies his music beneath these stylistic changes (3).Footnote ²

For Bauer, Ligeti's laments are his way of addressing, albeit obliquely, the traumas of the mid-twentieth century, the musical past more generally, and Others, be they cultural (non-Western) or psychological in nature. ‘Through lament’, she suggests, ‘Ligeti bridged the gulf between a self-reflective musical persona characterized by irony and alienation and an authentic voice of mourning. […] [L]ament [functions] as meta-narrative that attempts to contain a subject divided by geography, language, history, and culture’ (4–5). Part and parcel of this thesis is Bauer's desire to reclaim the three terms listed in her subtitle: ‘nostalgia’, ‘exoticism’, and ‘the absolute’. She suggests that these concepts are, for present-day scholars, either quaint and outmoded or tainted and discredited. They conjure up notions of conservative or reactionary neo-tonality, of orientalism in an age before the hegemony of the West came under critical scrutiny, and of a ‘spiritual ideal innocently pursued’ in music (17). To succumb to the lure of nostalgia, exoticism, or the absolute seems foolhardy, if not impossible, in the post-Adornian age. Bauer's argument is that Ligeti agreed: his thought was in fact deeply indebted to Adorno's critiques of these or related notions. For Bauer, Ligeti's understanding of nostalgia nuances the concept towards modernist melancholy; his exoticism is a cosmopolitan and self-conscious acknowledgment of the Other; his approach to the absolute positions it as a lost goal (17). Ligeti's compositional language opens up gaps, paradoxes, and contradictions, which in turn admit the possibility of irony. These manœuvres towards alienation and irony nuance the more simplistic interpretations of concepts such as nostalgia, and allow Ligeti's unique compositional voice to emerge. But beneath it all – and striving towards an impossible authenticity – is the theme of lament. This is a smart reading of the paradoxes that Ligeti's œuvre and his individual pieces always contain, and fits well within contemporary readings of Ligeti's compositional poetics.Footnote ³

The question is, what is the lament? This is where things get complicated. Early on in the book Bauer announces that the lament will be identified in different ways at different times: as the melodic trope of a descending scale fragment often treated as a three-part phrase; as a contrapuntal and harmonic device, as in the lament-passacaglia form; as a disruption in formal continuity, ‘a rhetorical apostrophe or exclamatory passage addressed to an absent or mute audience’ (3); as a reference back to East European folk influences; as a homage to Baroque genres; and as a stain of mourning that ‘attempts to represent that which resists all representation’ (4). This is an awful lot of weight to put on the notion of lament, as if it is being called upon to be all things to all people.

Throughout the book, lament is treated on the one hand as a real musical device, and on the other as an interpretative metaphor, with the ground between the two remaining slippery and, at times, unclear. A good example of the metaphorical invocation of lament is Bauer's description of the ‘whisper cadenza’ of the Cello Concerto (fingers moving on the fingerboard, but no bowing) as a ‘final, definitive lament, moving beyond the pianto to voiceless expression’ (72). Her readings of Apparitions (1957–8), Lontano (1967), and the Piano Étude no. 7 ‘Galamb borong’ (1988–9), on the other hand, have many interesting things to say about the structure of the works themselves, but only a relatively weak connection to the overarching thesis of lament, though they do relate to the subsidiary ideas of nostalgia (for the nineteenth-century orchestral and pianistic traditions) and exoticism (by way of Balinese gamelan and African polyrhythm). Here lament is not a topic to be found on the musical surface, but rather a metaphor to be invoked, in the sense of a generalized longing. Bauer's work is arguably strongest and at its most grounded when it proceeds from the identification of lament as topic or musical form to an interpretation of the relevance of these musical references. In these moments Bauer begins to treat Ligeti's pieces as truly intertextual objects, in which the observable musical features of lament topics and passacaglia forms not only have consequences for the work's structure but, furthermore, point beyond the work as well.

Readers will probably be most familiar with lament as topic, manifested in essentially motivic form. In The Sense of Music, Raymond Monelle describes musical topics as ‘general types, capable of being represented by particular tokens’.Footnote ⁴Topoi – musical portrayals of horn calls, waves, storms, clouds, horses, gigues, or military marches – must be shared among an interpretative community, where they can call up associations for listeners. An early example in Monelle's book shows how a cuckoo call rendered musically can function as a sign pointing to (a memory of) a cuckoo (the iconic function of the topic) and can also call up associations more generally of springtime, walking in the woods, or nature (the indexical function of the topic). With regard to the lament, Monelle suggests that the topic pianto, or falling minor second motive, began as the literal musical equivalent of weeping and was often texted either as pianto (weeping) or lagrime (tears) in Italian madrigals of the sixteenth century.Footnote ⁵ But, extending beyond this iconic or direct signification, the indexical function of the pianto topic ‘soon began to signify merely grief, pain, regret, loss’.Footnote ⁶ That is to say, by the seventeenth century the falling pianto motive had become symbolic of emotions of lamenting more generally: ‘The lament of Dido in Purcell's Dido and Aeneas makes no mention of tears or weeping, but the general sentiment of grief is enough to yield the pianto motive within the very first gesture.’Footnote ⁷ Bauer traces the pianto and lament topics into the secondary literature from here, giving a sense of how they appeared and functioned in the music of Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, and Liszt, among others.

This attention towards the motivic lament-as-topic guides Bauer's approach to a number of pieces composed between the early 1950s and the late 1960s. Convincingly, she reads nos 2 and 5 of Musica Ricercata (1953–5) as obsessed with the falling semitone motive that saturates their musical surfaces. She finds a middleground rendering of the descending semitone motive in the microtonal string orchestra piece Ramifications (1968–9; bars 76–9), which seems to compose out the lament-like descending trichordal and tetrachordal motives that pervade the foreground of the opening section (bars 1–10). She also finds a lament topic near the end of Ramifications: ‘A semitonal descent in bass [sic] from B to F – marked minaccioso, brutale, fffff possibile – survives as the last fragment of lament’ (73). This raises the question of whether any descending semitonal motive – even one played fast, menacingly, and brutally – is an invocation of the lament topic. I found myself mulling similar reservations during her analysis of the ‘Lacrimosa’ movement of the Requiem (1963–5), a piece that ought to be fertile ground for the lament topic. Bauer neglects the more obvious lament-like motivic descent f♯²-f²-e² of the opening piccolo melody (bars 2–4), finding instead a more obscure lament bass beginning at rehearsal letter E (bar 28). This bass descent is frequently interrupted, however, either by changing registers and orchestration or by skips or ascents in the scalar descent. The closing bass lament, doubled in octaves above f¹-e¹-e♭¹-d♭¹, which according to Bauer lends ‘a nostalgic, ironic glow to the final strophe’ and ‘upsets the balance of the Requiem’ (70), is scarcely identifiable as such, scored as it is by means of ethereal string harmonics.

More problematic is Bauer's interpretation that the motivic lament topic in these mostly instrumental works of Ligeti's early-to-mid career functions as a ‘rhetorical aside, a passage technically and affectively distinct from, but with the power to completely alter, its musical context’ (57). The moments when a descending motive genuinely seems like a musical apostrophe or rhetorical aside, as at the end of Ramifications, were those at which I became unsure that the motive was a lament topic at all. On the other hand the pervasiveness of lament-like topics elsewhere in these works (from the Musica Ricercata to the micropolyphonic ‘Lacrimosa’ and Ramifications) suggests that they form an integral part of the musical surface. In such cases the lament topic is not therefore an interruption to the main trajectory of the music: it is the music.

Bauer begins to take on the formal implications of the lament when she discusses a number of ground-bass variations from the mid 1950s to the late 1980s. Her analysis of Ricercare per organo (1953) shows how Ligeti's piece makes reference to the subject of Frescobaldi's ‘Recercar cromatico’ specifically and, in its relentless restatements of the subject, to the Baroque fugue more generally. The connection with the Baroque instrumental lament is not hard to discern here, since the wedge-shaped subject contains many descending semitone passages reminiscent of the lament topic, and the countersubject is a ‘chromatic scale trapped in an inexorable descent’ (78). The consistent repetition of the fugue's theme – as Bauer notes, there are no episodes – places the piece firmly in the neo-passacaglia tradition of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which emphasized the repetitive ostinato bass often with a continuous theme-and-variations approach, to the exclusion of other features of the genre.Footnote ⁸ Bauer connects this relatively clear invocation of lament topoi and passacaglia-like repetition to neo-Renaissance color and talea techniques in ‘Monument’ from Drei Stücke für zwei Klaviere (Three Pieces for Two Pianos, 1976), a move that emphasizes the repetitive structures in Ligeti's pattern-meccanico works more than it shows his ties to historical passacaglia forms.

She ends up with the Piano Études (1985–2001), where she finds that no. 1 ‘Désordre’ and no. 9 ‘Vertige’ are particularly concerned with the pattern-meccanico expressions of ‘lament-as-drive’ (76). Here again we may notice the slippage from analysis of actual neo-passacaglia elements in Ligeti's works to lament-passacaglia as an interpretative device, as a way of gathering pieces with repetitive elements (be they color and talea structures or pattern-meccanico textures) under one umbrella. Thus Bauer suggests that ‘Désordre’ contains a ‘lament melody’, even though the motivic figures all rise. Her analysis is concerned with fractal elements and chaos theory readings, in keeping with the other literature that indicates Ligeti's new-found interest in these topics in the 1980s. ‘Vertige’ is more receptive to a lament connection, since it features a sixteen-note chromatic descent in constant, overlapping restatement. However, Bauer's analysis focuses on the ‘acoustic homage to Shepard's tones’ (89), an important and likewise roughly contemporary discovery.Footnote ⁹ The chaos theory and perceptual illusion readings of ‘Désordre’ and ‘Vertige’ are convincing, but perhaps do not contribute significantly to the lament theme of the book. Is it not possible that Ligeti was interested simply in Shepard tones or in chaos theory, and worked those topics out musically? It strikes this reader as forced to interpret every instance of repetitive form or chromatic descent as an ‘ahistorical kernel of lament’ (90), a problematic abstraction not least because twentieth-century invocations of lament topoi and passacaglia forms ought always to be treated as historical references.

Bauer confines her remarks about the 1978 pair of harpsichord works Passacaglia ungherese and Hungarian Rock: Chaconne, which explicitly take up both Hungarian folk and ground-bass elements, to asides (166, 170). She does, however, devote Chapter 6 to the Horn Trio (1982), a piece that is well known for its passacaglia and lament elements.Footnote ¹⁰ To Stephen Taylor's succinct reading of the structural weight of the passacaglia cycles and David Metzer's trifold parsing of lament topoi as descending melody, drone, and passacaglia bass, Bauer adds a distinct layer of intertextuality. She shows that the fourth movement's descending passacaglia chords (minor third, tritone, minor sixth, perfect fifth, major third) reference the first movement of the Horn Trio, with its ‘lopsided horn fifths’ motiveFootnote ¹¹ (major third, tritone, minor sixth), ‘as though the narrative of the [first movement] Andante con tenerezza's opening 12 measures were re-envisioned in the context of a Baroque lament’ (170). Ligeti's Horn Trio not only refers back to its own earlier movements, but contains ‘submerged allusions’ to Beethoven, Brahms, and Bartók (170), as well as Transylvanian laments, Monteverdi, and Bach (171–3). While Bauer notices these many intertextual references, she gives relatively little analytical attention to them. There are no examples that compare musical details or motives from, for instance, Beethoven's ‘Les Adieux’ sonata, Brahms's Op. 40 Horn Trio, or Bartók's For Children, despite the fact that these pieces weigh heavily in the intertextual scheme; nor are we told what pieces by Monteverdi or Bach are recalled or what aspect of the Transylvanian lament is implicated.Footnote ¹² By the time we have reached the later chapters in Bauer's book, Ligeti's ‘postmodern’ works have simply come to appear like rolling stones that have gathered quite a bit of moss. Bauer calls forth an impressive web of associations, one that will stretch the reader's knowledge of both Ligeti's œuvre and the Western music canon in general, but she also risks mapping onto the former too many associations with too few substantial ties.

Bauer's final chapter, ‘Lament as Genre’, deals with the Piano Concerto (1985–8), the Violin Concerto (1989–93), and the Viola Sonata (1991–4), weaving observations about their subtle folk elements with analytical emphasis on the movements that display neo-Baroque passacaglia forms. Bauer writes:

Defining genre in music is a tricky proposition, one that Bauer does not explicitly take up. Musical genre depends on repetition and convention at the musical level (details such as form, metre, tempo, phrase lengths, and rhythms) as well as the social level (details such as performers and instrumentation, socioeconomic class of patrons, performers, and audiences, and likely performance space and social function).Footnote ¹³ In suggesting that Ligeti's laments propose a contract between composer, performer, and listener, she adopts literary critic Heather Dubrow's notion of the ‘generic contract’, according to which genre ‘functions much like a code of behavior established between the author and [the] reader’.Footnote ¹⁴

In considering lament a genre, Bauer is clearly following David Metzer, whose understanding of the lament-as-genre draws together a variety of traditions: ‘By lament, this study refers to a wide range of works or rituals, including ancient Greek mourning rites, Eastern European folk songs, and Baroque basso ostinato arias.’Footnote ¹⁵ But other scholars, such as James Porter, question whether lament can properly be considered a genre at all. Certainly laments ritualize, but what and how they ritualize depends on context and culture. For Porter, lamenting is ‘a style as much as a genre’.Footnote ¹⁶ Bearing in mind these disagreements, we ought to tread carefully into the proposed alliance between lament and genre.

One place where the alliance works is in Bauer's reading of Ligeti's only opera, Le Grand Macabre (1974–7, rev. 1996). Given the well documented history of the Baroque lament aria – famous examples appear in Monteverdi's Orfeo, Lully's Armide, and Purcell's King Arthur and Dido and Aeneas – the opera aria is a fruitful place to explore intertextual generic implications. Bauer analyzes explicit examples of lament bass ostinatos and passacaglia forms in many parts of Le Grand Macabre: namely Nekrotzar's prophecy at rehearsal Fig. 59, Mescalina's lament at Fig. 153, and the closing Finale-Passacaglia at Fig. 674. This convincing progression suggests that the allegorical invocation of Baroque lament-aria becomes more explicit as the opera progresses. Along the way Bauer traces both surface and more deep-rooted allusions to Verdi's Falstaff, Mozart's Don Giovanni, and Monteverdi's Lamento d'Arianna, among many other smaller references. She does an impressive job of showing the ways in which seventeenth- and eighteenth-century operatic genre conventions are refigured in Le Grand Macabre, for the purposes of parody or allegory, or both. Bauer implicitly acknowledges the important generic contract operating between composer/performer and audience, writing that ‘Macabre recognizes the blood lust of a jaded contemporary audience, expecting every convention to be overturned, yet secretly yearning for the moral tale, the grand chorus, and the happy ending’ (120). It is, of course, Ligeti's manipulation of this generic contract that allows Macabre to signify on multiple levels: as alluding to particular composers and scenes; as a parodic critique of operatic conventions more generally (110); and as a meditation on cultural values, social order, and transgressions (137–9).

As Bauer writes, ‘Macabre incorporates quotation and allusion on a dizzying number of levels’ (109). While this is particularly true of a piece as intertextually rich as Le Grand Macabre, Bauer shows more broadly that Ligeti's œuvre signifies on multiple levels. Her intention in the book is certainly to reframe our entrenched readings of Ligeti pieces in which lament does not initially seem to apply. At times she sacrifices coherent alignment with her central thesis, but at others her close readings offer new insight into his compositional poetics. Ligeti's life experiences – loss of homeland and family members, persecution by the Nazis and later the communist régime – are notoriously difficult to pin down in his compositional language, in part because the travesties of the mid-century are truly unspeakable and in part because Ligeti steered around these topics in careful, controlled discourse about his music.Footnote ¹⁷ In this sense Bauer's unifying attitude towards lament (figured alternately as topic, form, genre, or metaphor) brings some degree of interpenetration of biography and structural analysis. Although the analyses are complex, we can be confident of being rewarded by careful reading and re-reading of Bauer's work.