Le Grand Macabre by Ligeti, From (2024/2024), Directed by Nigel Lowery, Conductor Jiří Rožeň, Státní Opera Praha (The State Opera), Prague, Czech Republic

György Ligeti’s Le Grand Macabre will be staged in Czech premiere. The one and only opera written by the Hungarian-Austrian composer, a major representative of the 20th-century avant-garde, is a truly remarkable work, one that in many a respect surpasses that which is commonly expected from a piece of this genre. Loosely based on the Belgian dramatist Michel de Ghelderode’s play La balade du grand macabre, Ligeti provocatively branded it “anti-anti-opera”. Le Grand Macabre presents an extremely bizarre apocalyptic vision of a world gone mad, teeming with characters of such telling names as Nekrotzar, Piet The Pot, Clitoria, Spermando … Ligeti’s spectacular operatic fresco, set in a fictitious city bearing an equally telling name, Breughelland, not only shocks by featuring harsh, spine-chilling and perverse images, it is also striking in terms of the score, with the musical idiom encompassing conventional instruments, but also giving scope to a large variety of entirely unprecedented sounds, produced by car-horns, electric doorbells, a sledgehammer, an alarm clock, paper bags, a tray full of crockery, a saucepan, a pistol and other items. Le Grand Macabre received its world premiere in Stockholm in 1978. Later on, Ligeti made considerable revisions to the opera for a production at the Salzburger Festspiele in 1997. The production has been financially supported by the National Theatre Benefactors’ Club.