«Prehistoric Ligeti». L’opera corale a cappella 1941-1956

This doctoral dissertation examines György Ligeti’s early choral works, composed between 1941 and 1956, investigating how the complex geopolitical and cultural contexts of mid-twentieth-century Hungary shaped his stylistic evolution and musical language. It pays particular attention to his education and early compositional experiences, as well as to how these formative years anticipated aspects of his later production, notably the development of micropolyphony. The study is articulated in three sections. The first analyses Ligeti’s relationship with folk music—rooted in Hungarian and Romanian traditions and deeply marked by the legacy of Zoltán Kodály and Béla Bartók—which in his choral writing acquires expressive connotations ranging from irony to nostalgia, forming a structural component of his language. The second focuses on contrapuntal technique and explores the emergence of polyphony as a defining element of his style, including the first systematic investigation of canonic writing in his early choral repertoire through unpublished manuscripts and sketches. The third examines the influence of war, political repression, and censorship on Ligeti’s aesthetic choices, reconstructing the trajectory from an initial, brief adherence to socialist-realist ideals toward a stance of critical distance and dissent after 1950. The research is based on a wide-ranging bibliography—from the pioneering studies of Friedemann Sallis to the more recent contributions of Márton Kerékfy, Bianca Tiplea Temeș, Anna Dalos, and Simon Gallot—and on primary sources from the Ligeti Archive at the Paul Sacher Stiftung in Basel (October–November 2024). These materials, including notebooks and unpublished compositions from 1938–1945, shed new light on Ligeti’s early learning processes and compositional experiments. An appendix presents an updated catalogue of his a cappella choral works, enriched with previously unknown pieces and fragments, while the concluding section adopts a performance-oriented perspective, reporting the results of a collaboration with the amateur “Vincenzo Gianferrari” Choir of Trento and interviews with conductors Yuval Weinberg and Eric Banks, concerning the interpretation and reception of Ligeti’s early choral repertoire.