Death rattle
The Barbican website warns us that Ligeti’s opera Le grand macabre ‘contains very strong language and adult themes’. The strong language consists of the four-letter words that are known to everyone and used by most people, and the adult themes are sex/love and death, which this opera has in common with almost any non-comic opera you can think of, and without which the genre would certainly never have been conceived or added to over more than four centuries. But while love and sex have often also provided the stuff of comedy, death is another matter, and presumably it is Ligeti and Michael Meschke’s robust treatment of this (superbly translated into