Death rattle

The Barbican website warns us that Ligeti’s opera Le grand macabre ‘contains very strong language and adult themes’. The strong language consists of the four-letter words that are known to everyone and used by most people, and the adult themes are sex/love and death, which this opera has in common with almost any non-comic opera you can think of, and without which the genre would certainly never have been conceived or added to over more than four centuries. But while love and sex have often also provided the stuff of comedy, death is another matter, and presumably it is Ligeti and Michael Meschke’s robust treatment of this (superbly translated into English by Geoffrey Skelton) that we might need to be warned about. Humour this black isn’t often encountered in opera, perhaps because the idioms of western music, from the Renaissance to the mid-20th century, haven’t been susceptible to that kind of ambiguity or ambivalence. The best that could be hoped for was the kind of grotesque incongruity of Berg’s Lulu, where soaring or searing lyricism is employed for the setting of gruesome sentiments or events.

Ligeti, as a post-second world war modernist, had a much wider vocabulary and battalion of instruments available, and in Le grand macabre he exploits them to the full, and then over and over again, before ending the work with that most archaic of forms, the passacaglia, which comes with overwhelming effect after the non-stop hilarious onslaught of the previous couple of hours. Or would-be hilarious. Some loyal souls in the audience laughed occasionally, but actually the fun is not, in the main, funny. It is ebullient, though, and energising — as much as anything can be in the sauna-like temperature of the Barbican concert hall.