In Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, the appearance of the big black monolith is intensified by strange, ominous music. Voices and instruments cautiously creep outwards from a low B-flat, nervously circling around a few notes. The music gropes its way along, spreading, bifurcating and expanding to fill the sonic space. In no time, it has grown into a complex, teeming mass of sound. This music is the Kyrie from Hungarian composer György Ligeti’s 1965 Requiem, a Latin mass for the dead written by a Jew whose father and brother were murdered in Hitler’s death camps. This Requiem is far from consoling. It is a fierce confrontation with the terrors of the 20th century. A rare performance of the complete work will take place at this year’s BBC Proms, part of the celebrations for the centenary of this shapeshifting musical genius.
Kubrick famously didn’t get Ligeti’s permission to use his music. After initial rancour and threats of litigation, composer and film director eventually reached an uneasy accommodation. Each admired the other’s work and, perhaps, recognised their shared brand of near pathological perfectionism. As well as the Requiem, Kubrick also uses Ligeti’s cloudy orchestral masterpiece Atmosphères as the overture to 2001 and in the trippy Stargate sequence, the ethereal a cappella choral textures of Lux Aeterna to portray the emptiness of space, and an electronically altered version of his mini-opera Aventures/Nouvelles Aventures in the final scene.
