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
In January 1944 I was called up by the Forced Labor Service, but I deserted on October 10, 1944.
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.
My grandfather was not a musician but he was an artist - a painter, a decorative painter.
There is a wonderful Hungarian literature, especially in lyric poetry.
I don't read such boring things. Life is too short.
First of all I listen to music. I like music.
If you come from Paris to Budapest you think you are in Moscow.
In my piano concerto I developed this polyphony to much higher complexity.
Yes, fractals are what I want to find in my music.
I know already the music I will write. But the words? I have not yet decided.
For the past ten years I have had no financial problems.
I think a composer is always interested in his last work.
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.
However, I began composing as soon as I started taking piano lessons.
People often thought Leopold Auer was Russian because he lived in St. Petersburg so long, almost fifty years.
Steinberg is great. I should like to meet him.
I like to stay home and listen to recordings.
Then, after the war it was impossible to travel, after so many years of Hitler and Stalin.
I don't use old music.
I write bars, for the musicians, because they have to be together.
But I do not want to use Hungarian verses for British people.
I lived under the Nazis and under the Communists.
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.
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.
Perhaps the better word is emotional yes, I am an emotional man.
New York is the dream world, the center of jazz and rock.
Once, in London, the BBC asked me what was my favorite English book. I said Alice in Wonderland.
I listen to all kinds of music - new music, old music, music of my colleagues, everything.
But if you go from Moscow to Budapest you think you are in Paris.
Gesualdo was very important to me, I wanted to do something which corresponded to him.
I only want to give a metaphysic for my music.
Stravinsky used Mother Goose. He was influenced by Mother Goose, indirectly, but very beautifully.
When I was younger I was completely without money - when I was studying in Budapest, when I was a refugee.
