Iterations

Among landmarks of opera, 20th-century Hungarian composer György Ligeti’s “Aventures” (1962) and “Nouvelles Aventures” (1962-5) count as two of the most bizarre. They’re both written for singers and a small (seven-piece) orchestra, but that’s where the concessions to operatic conventions end. The music—with percussion including mallets hitting tables, papers being ripped apart, and, in “Nouvelles Aventures,” plates being dropped—conforms more to the avant-garde idiom of peers like Karlheinz Stockhausen and Pierre Boulez than to the classical operatic style of Mozart or the Romantic music dramas of Wagner. Then there’s the “libretto,” made up entirely of a vocabulary of wordless shouts, groans, giggles, and gibberish. The cumulative effect feels almost primal at times, as if Ligeti were somehow traveling back to an era before language. (No wonder Stanley Kubrick used an electronic transcription of passages of “Aventures” in “2001: A Space Odyssey.”)