One of the world's most important composers from the second half of the 20th century, Gyorgy Ligeti, who won the Polar Music Prize in 2004, basically the Nobel Prize for Music, was born and lived the first six years of his life in a small house in the town of Tarnaveni, just a few metres far from the synagogue there, which is now being turned into a small crackers factory.

Although his notoriety among the general public was mostly due to the fact that he wrote the music for a series of very successful films such as "2001: A Space Odyssey," "Shutter Island," "The Heat" or "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory," the name Gyorgy Ligeti was forgotten in his hometown, Tarnaveni.

Only after a series of foreign journalists inquired about the great composer's childhood in this city, the authorities began to look for documents to see his history and where he lived. Later, photographs of Ligeti began to appear in the Tarnaveni Museum and the house where he grew up was located right in the centre of the town.

Tarnaveni mayor Sorin Meghesan said that the municipality tried to make an offer to the current owners of the Gyorgy Ligeti's house, in order to turn it into a museum, but the offer was turned down and the building is now famous for the crackers that are being produced there.

Gyorgy Ligeti was born on May 28, 1923, in Tarnaveni, and died at the age of 83, on June 12, 2006, in Vienna. He had an extremely difficult life, but he left behind a grandiose work, being recognized among professionals for numerous monumental compositions, such as "Aparitii' [Apparitions], "Atmosfere," [Atmospheres] "Lux Aeterna," "Volumina," "Requiem," "Lontano," "Ramification," "String Quartet no.2," "Le Grand Macabre," being the winner of 26 international awards.

After leaving Tarnaveni, at the age of 6, Ligeti studied in Cluj-Napoca, completed his studies in Budapest, was sent to forced labour during the Second World War, lost his brother and father in the concentration camps, and during the Hungarian Revolution of 1959 he had to flee to Vienna, where he died in 2006.

And yet, the fact that Ligeti was born in Tarnaveni was not completely forgotten. In 2003, three years before he died, the composer received the title of honorary citizen. Gyrgy Ligeti never managed to collect his diploma leaving Vera Ligeti, his widow, to collect, in 2016, 10 years after his death, in a ceremony organized in Tarnaveni, the title that the municipality bestowed on the composer since 2003.

On that occasion, many big names visited Tarnaveni, such as professor Manfred Stahnke from Hamburg, disciple of Gyorgy Ligeti, Mike Searby from Kingston University London, Marton Kerekfy, from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, specialist in the music of Ligeti and Kurtag, Julia Heimerdinger from the University of Music in Vienna, Heidy Zimerman, responsible for the Ligeti manuscript collection at the "Paul Sacher" Foundation in Basel, Wolfgang Marx from the University of Dublin, Louise Duchesneau (Hamburg), and from Romania, Cornel Taranu, Adrian Pop, Pavel Puscas, Tatiana Oltean, Amalia Szucs Blanaru.

Gyorgy Ligeti had a prestigious academic career, being a professor of composition at the Academy of Music in Stockholm, at Stanford University California, at the Hamburg Conservatory, which explains the presence of the representatives of these universities in Tarnaveni.

In 2016, when presenting the title of honorary citizen to Vera Ligeti, composer Manfred Stahnke, Gyorgy Ligeti's disciple, told AGERPRES that his mentor was an extremely intelligent man, who had a quick mind and an extremely personal approach of what the piece his students were working on should be.

"He had a special talent in communicating with people, showing them the final result he wanted to achieve, but also the results he wanted his students to achieve. His mind constantly processed all the possibilities and impossibilities, which made him a good, but demanding teacher, who did not shy away from telling us "it's not OK to do this, many before you have done exactly the same." We were always very careful when composing, not to make mistakes. (...) I have the first memory of him from the entrance exam, when I had a discussion with Ligeti about Richard Wagner and the classical way of composing music. He always wanted to keep a link with this classicism, he did not consider avant-garde to be only doing something that had not been done before, but basically eh though avant-garde meant to infuse the old, the classic, in a modern form," said Manfred Stahnke.

Museographer Lucia Petru from Tarnaveni is the one who followed in Ligeti's footsteps to document his life and work.

Starting with the year 2012, it was slowly discovered that he lived just a few metres far from the synagogue in Tarnaveni, that he came from an elitist family, with a father of Jewish origin - born Auer, but forced to take a Hungarian name - and, in addition, he had a famous uncle, Leopold Auer, a good friend of Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky.

"At some point, I happened to meet a persons from the UK, who was passing through Tarnaveni and whose passion seemed to be Ligeti. Who is Ligeti? While I was now someone who knew a lot about music, I tried to recreate a personality I did not know, by following into his footsteps, to find out what are the reasons why a poor Jewish child, who passed through Transylvania and Hungary, through forced labour camps, will accompany the Holocaust? Who is the child, the young man, the man who wanted to study the exact sciences, while the brutality of another system will randomly and brutally transform his life? Ligeti - the one born of a love that we can only guess, settled in a status quo given by his condition and conditions, a repetition of to all those in his condition," museographer Lucia Petru pointed out.

She said that Ligeti's time was measured between the Holocaust and a miraculous survival from this inferno.

"Ligeti's time begins in Tarnaveni, on May 28, 1923, the son of parents Alexander (born Auer) and Ilona (born Somogyi), he steppes into life in a permissive environment free from professional ethical constraints. The father is the one who chooses the patronymic Ligeti, by Hungarianizing the name Auer. The father studies at the University of Budapest and represents Hungarian financial interests in Tarnaveni, where he held the position of director of the Central and Industrial Bank of Valea Tarnavei, between 1920-1929. Here he meets Ilona, Gyorgy's mother, who was an ophthalmologist. Their two children, Gyorgy-Sandor and Gabor, are born in Tarnaveni. One of the paternal descendants, originally from Veszprem (Hungary), grandfather's brother, was a great violinist, Leopold Auer (in Hungarian Auer Lipot, who lived from June 7, 1845 to July 15, 1930), a close friend of Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, who dedicates a violin concerto to him. In 1929, the family left Tarnaveni and settled in Cluj, where Gyorgy attended primary and secondary school at the school that today bears the name of Emil Racovita. The adolescent Ligeti, in 1937, begins to study the piano, and in the years 1938-1939 he composes his first works: Sonantina for a string quartet and Mic canon for a Romanian Christmas song, a miniature for piano, the adaptation of the well-known carol 'Oh, what wonderful news!," said the curator.

In the midst of the war, in the fall of 1941, Ligeti began to study composition at the Cluj Conservatory in the class of professor Ferenc Farkas, the director of this institution, and, paradoxically, in 1941, Gyorgy Ligeti wanted to obtain a degree in...physics.

"He was rejected on the basis of a numerus clausus so that the Conservatory seemed like an alternative solution, for the situation and not necessarily for his vocation. He spent the holidays of 1942-1943 in Budapest, where he studied privately with Professor Pal Kadosa (1903-1983). In the new academic year, the destructive system of power sends Ligeti to forced labor for the benefit of the Hungarian Army, after which the Hungarian Horthyist regime will act according to German directives throughout the country, while the Jews of Hungary and the ceded territories of Transylvania will be transferred, slowly but surely, to the death camps. From the Ligeti family, brought to the brink of extermination, only the mother will survive," the researcher pointed out.

Gyorgy's brother, Gabor, who was only 16 at the time, was sent to a forced labor camp at Mauthausen-Gusen and never returned, as was his father, who was deported to Auschwitz.

The museographer also discovered that, after this dark period of his life, when his family was decimated in the death camps, Gyorgy Ligeti obtained his license at the "Franz Liszt" Academy of Music in Budapest, in 1949, and then had two marriages. Another turning point in his life was the 1956 Revolution in Hungary.

"Following the reprisals, the Ligeti family chooses to take refuge, fraudulently crossing the border with Austria, crammed into the mail bags of a railway company. They requested and received political asylum and settled in Vienna, and in 1967 they obtained Austrian citizenship. This is where his son, Lukas, was born, today an appreciated composer and percussionist,'' Lucia Petru tells.

"His early works are tributary to Bela Bartok, whom he admires and seeks in a common place, the traditional music of Transylvania, in its entire ethnic mosaic. Representative for this period are the 'Romanian Concert for Orchestra' from 1951, 'Six bagatelles' and 'Nocturnal Metamorphoses' in 1952-1953. With time, his musical language becomes distinct, in a personal style, he composes fantastic creations, complex and fascinating musical jewels: 'Appearances' in 1959 and 'Atmospheres' in 1961 bring him European reputation. His originality, being a musician educated in a traditional school, but prone to experiment, is vividly described in an interview given by the composer to the New York Times in 1993: 'I'm in a prison, in the wall is the past and in the other, the vanguard. I want to escape!' (...) In the work 'Reflections on Music', Stefan Niculescu said that 'Ligeti is an inventor of ingeniously colored structures, and the perfect form results from joining the structures in an unpredictable way, like the events of a dream','' the museographer added.

In her study she also presented a last interview given by Ligeti to the foreign press, in which he admitted that he is completely alone, without a homeland and that he misses his hometown, his old friends.

Perhaps for this reason, Gyorgy Ligeti is characterized as the 'man of pain and exile', who carried with him the 'self-awareness of the eternally threatened Jew' and who transposed the 'general human concept of Jewishness' into his compositions.

10 years after the great composer's death, on his house, near the synagogue, the municipality and the 'Gheorghe Dima' Music Academy in Cluj-Napoca unveiled a commemorative plaque. AGERPRES(RO - author: Dorina Matis, editor: Georgiana Tanasescu; EN - authors: Cristina Zaharia, Bogdan Gabaroi, editor: Adina Panaitescu)