Ligeti’s Hora lunga and the Sebaldian Digression

In a 2001-2002 interview, Hungarian composer György Ligeti (1923-2006) expresses a strong aesthetic affinity with the writing of German author Winfried Georg Sebald (1944-2001). This paper examines the striking structural similarities between Sebald’s 1995 novel The Rings of Saturn and Ligeti’s 1994 Hora lungă, the first movement of his Viola Sonata. Sebald’s description of a Suffolk walking tour, punctuated by numerous tangential asides, resembles the Romanian folk form Ligeti employs, with its recurring acoustic-scale motive and intervening improvisatory episodes. But beyond these more obvious comparisons, I consider the function of modal mixture and microtonal deviation in Ligeti’s sonata – features which convey the same sense of loss and decay found in Sebald’s prose and accompanying photographs. Finally, I read the nostalgic allusions to Romanian folk music in Ligeti’s Hora lungă as an indication of the piece’s biographical significance for the composer, who grew up in Transylvania. His lifelong separation from his childhood homeland, which he covertly mourns with a Romanian lament motive, parallels Sebald’s account of a German-Jewish refugee’s fading memories of his pre-migration youth.