Hungarians in Hollywood: György Ligeti

Not long ago the famed music website Pitchfork published a list of the all-time best film soundtracks. A few names came up again and again: obviously, John Williams, Vangelis, and Tangerine Dream were well represented. But among those luminaries, a Hungarian composer found himself with an outsized place. That is of course György Ligeti, the Central European avant-garde composer whose work was embraced by serious Hollywood filmmakers, most saliently Stanley Kubrick.

Ligeti’s life, though triumphant, was fraught with hardship. Born Hungarian in a Hungarian enclave of Romanian Transylvania in 1923, as Jew, he was poorly positioned to thrive. Indeed, once WWII approached, much of his family was deported to German concentration camps. Ligeti himself was sent to a forced labor camp, an experience he survived. Once the war ended, Ligeti was able to attend Budapest’s renowned Liszt Ferenc Music Academy. With the help of his mentor, composer Zoltán Kodály, he found a position teaching at the academy upon graduation.

Once it was clear Hungarians would be violently suppressed by the Soviets in their homeland, Ligeti fled with his wife to Vienna in 1956. It was there he would embark on a path to being one of the century’s most important composers, teaching and working around Western Europe and the Baltic States. But it would take Stanley Kubrick’s inclusion of his work (at first, unlicensed) in his seminal film 2001: A Space Odyssey to bring Ligeti’s work to the world at large.

Kubrick would return to Ligeti’s work for future films, the most famous of which was The Shining. Other directors like Martin Scorsese and Michael Mann would follow suit, making use of Ligeti’s eerie atmospheric music in films like Shutter Island and Heat. The Killing of a Sacred Deer used his cello concerto and piano concerto and his piece Requiem found its way into the Godzilla soundtrack. That’s a list that is both prestigious and popular. While Ligeti never made it to Hollywood, Hollywood most certainly found Ligeti.

Below find the use of Ligeti’s Atmospheres in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

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