György Ligeti (1923–2006) was one of the most original and influential composers in the second half of the 20th century. Born in Transylvania, he studied in Cluj-Napoca and Budapest but left Hungary in 1956 and settled in Vienna. The Bartók legacy initially influenced his art, but by the early 1950s – despite cultural isolation and repression – Ligeti became strongly interested in contemporary Western European trends and began to distance himself from the "New Hungarian School" style. From 1957 onwards, he worked in the Western European New Music centres, where he quickly acquired the techniques and aesthetics of the musical avant-garde. From the mid-1970s, he increasingly turned away from the academic avant-garde. His opera Le Grand Macabre, which premiered in 1978, bears the hallmarks of Pop Art. The works of the 1980s and 1990s show an enormous stylistic enrichment through which a wide range of influences are merged into compositions with a sound of their own. Despite its stylistic turns, Ligeti's oeuvre forms a unity. His work is characterised by an insatiable thirst for research, the crossing of boundaries, a love of the absurd, the grotesque and the fantastic, of illusions and technical perfection.