Without Ligeti and without Kagel, the music of this century would undoubtedly have overlooked the great art of the willed error: unplaceable irony, suspicious intentions, double meanings, a sense of the macabre and the surrealist-grotesque.
With his two musical theatre pieces Aventures and Nouvelles Aventures (for vocal trio and instrumental ensemble), Ligeti became the inventor of ‘opera in the twilight zone of language’: in a virtuoso counterpoint of phonemes, of breaths and sobs, the composer scraps any need for text and fiction to create a universe of pure feelings, a scanner of social well-being, funny and cheeky, human to the point of horror (in short, everything that appeals to us).
Kagel's Finale and an excerpt from Ligeti's opera Le Grand Macabre (in chamber version) take great care to make the performance even heavier: the former has a cruel pointe and the latter reaches to the panic - after all, one hears a colouratura soprano, almost in breathlessness, announcing the apocalypse in unending post-Crossinian vocalises.
