Gyorgy Ligeti Quotes

#1. I don't read such boring things. Life is too short.

Gyorgy Ligeti

#2. I only want to give a metaphysic for my music.

Gyorgy Ligeti

#3. Stravinsky used Mother Goose. He was influenced by Mother Goose, indirectly, but very beautifully.

Gyorgy Ligeti

#4. Steinberg is great. I should like to meet him.

Gyorgy Ligeti

#5. Once, in London, the BBC asked me what was my favorite English book. I said Alice in Wonderland.

Gyorgy Ligeti

#6. Well I live in Vienna with my wife and son, and I teach in Hamburg, there will be no changes in that respect.

Gyorgy Ligeti

#7. New York is the dream world, the center of jazz and rock.

Gyorgy Ligeti

#8. Then, after the war it was impossible to travel, after so many years of Hitler and Stalin.

Gyorgy Ligeti

#9. I listen to all kinds of music - new music, old music, music of my colleagues, everything.

Gyorgy Ligeti

#10. First of all I listen to music. I like music.

Gyorgy Ligeti

#11. I continued to study Math and Physics on my own, but one and a half years later I realized that I did want to be a composer, and after that I never changed my mind.

Gyorgy Ligeti

#12. Perhaps the better word is emotional yes, I am an emotional man.

Gyorgy Ligeti

#13. I know already the music I will write. But the words? I have not yet decided.

Gyorgy Ligeti

#14. I lived under the Nazis and under the Communists.

Gyorgy Ligeti

#15. When I was younger I was completely without money - when I was studying in Budapest, when I was a refugee.

Gyorgy Ligeti

#16. I was fifteen years old, and I hardly knew how to play a simple Bach prelude on the piano when I began to compose music, and at the most advanced level. I had never studied such things as harmony.

Gyorgy Ligeti

#17. I think a composer is always interested in his last work.

Gyorgy Ligeti

#18. I write bars, for the musicians, because they have to be together.

Gyorgy Ligeti

#19. Gesualdo was very important to me, I wanted to do something which corresponded to him.

Gyorgy Ligeti

#20. If you come from Paris to Budapest you think you are in Moscow.

Gyorgy Ligeti

#21. It isn't false modesty when I say this, but although I am supposed to be a famous person it doesn't mean anything to me. I just sit at home and work.

Gyorgy Ligeti

#22. I think it was when I was nineteen, by that time the Jewish laws were already in force and the split was beginning to come about which isolated the Jewish culture.

Gyorgy Ligeti

#23. However, I began composing as soon as I started taking piano lessons.

Gyorgy Ligeti

#24. For the past ten years I have had no financial problems.

Gyorgy Ligeti

#25. But if you go from Moscow to Budapest you think you are in Paris.

Gyorgy Ligeti

#26. Yes, fractals are what I want to find in my music.

Gyorgy Ligeti

#27. There is a wonderful Hungarian literature, especially in lyric poetry.

Gyorgy Ligeti

#28. My grandfather was not a musician but he was an artist - a painter, a decorative painter.

Gyorgy Ligeti

#29. I don't use old music.

Gyorgy Ligeti

#30. In January 1944 I was called up by the Forced Labor Service, but I deserted on October 10, 1944.

Gyorgy Ligeti

#31. People often thought Leopold Auer was Russian because he lived in St. Petersburg so long, almost fifty years.

Gyorgy Ligeti

#32. But I do not want to use Hungarian verses for British people.

Gyorgy Ligeti

#33. I like to stay home and listen to recordings.

Gyorgy Ligeti

#34. In my piano concerto I developed this polyphony to much higher complexity.

Gyorgy Ligeti

#35. Now there is no taboo; everything is allowed. But one cannot simply go back to tonality, it's not the way. We must find a way of neither going back nor continuing the avant-garde. I am in a prison: one wall is the avant-garde, the other wall is the past, and I want to escape.

Gyorgy Ligeti