GYÖRGY LIGETI was two years older than Boulez and Berio, five years older than Stockhausen, but there was no concurrence between him and them in his formative years.

Ligeti was 33 before he escaped from the tyranny of the Iron Curtain, itself closely preceded by the Nazi tyranny. Moreover he was a Jew. His father and brother died in concentration camps. He himself was one of a Jewish group, used by the Nazis as slave labour, which handled high explosives close to the front line.

He deserted in the confusion of battle and evaded capture by the Russians. Eventually he walked home — the trek took two weeks — to Cluj, in northwest Romania, only to find his family vanished and their apartment occupied by strangers.

He was called up by the Romanians, now under Soviet control, but a tubercular infection put him in hospital. He had been exceedingly lucky; and he was lucky again in 1956, when the Red Army invaded Hungary. He dodged the invaders and escaped to Vienna, making part of his hazardous journey in a mail train, where he lay hidden under the mailbags.

Ligeti was born in 1923 of Hungarian parents in Dicsöszentmárton (now Tirnaveni), a country town in Transylvania, then part of Romania. His family were cultivated people; the eminent violinist Leopold Auer was a great-uncle.

In 1929 they moved to Cluj, which became briefly Hungarian under the Nazis. Here Ligeti learnt Romanian, but he was soon aware of both anti- Hungarian and anti-Semitic prejudice. In his early teens he discovered the cinema — in particular Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton — and Lewis Carroll’s Alice books. Both discoveries fed his vivid imagination in ways which emerged as comedy and fantasy in his music. At 16 he began to compose, Weber, Wagner and Strauss being his chief models, and, about a year later, he first heard Bartók and Kodály.

In 1941 he had a song published by a Jewish organisation and on the strength of this and other compositions he was admitted to the Cluj Conservatoire. There he was a pupil of Ferenc Farkas, a conservative teacher who insisted that he study Bach and Mozart. Privately, he investigated Hindemith and Stravinsky, and in 1945 he was accepted (as was Kurtag) by the Franz Liszt Academy in Budapest.

It was a blow that Bartók, due to return to Budapest that autumn, died in New York, but for three years Ligeti enjoyed a rich musical diet. There was no restriction on the performance of Bartók or Stravinsky; and Peter Grimes was presented just a year after its world premiere.

But in 1948 Moscow issued the infamous diktat accusing Prokofiev and Shostakovich of “formalism” and banning, in its satellites, all “degenerate” Western music. This silenced, among others, Debussy, Ravel, Schönberg, Stravinsky and Britten. Even Bartók was largely proscribed, and Ligeti’s own Cello Sonata was also banned.

Fortuitously he won a scholarship to study folk music in Romania. In 1949 his Cantata for Youth, which he said was in a “sort of Kodály-Handel-Britten style”, was performed in Budapest. In the mid-1950s he began “to come towards a Ligeti style”, and his Six Bagatelles for wind quintet, written in 1953, were heard in 1956, though the last was omitted because of its excessive dissonance.

Then, on November 7, 1956, during the Soviet Union’s invasion and against a background of gunfire, he listened to a Western broadcast of Stockhausen’s Gesang der Jünglinge, the first electronic piece he had heard and an apt prelude to his own escape to Vienna in December.

Once free, Ligeti contacted Stockhausen, who gave him access to West German Radio’s electronic studio in Cologne. There he “soaked up things like a sponge”, discovering Webern among much else and himself composing three electronic works. But, despite his regular attendance at Darmstadt from 1957 to 1966, he did not eventually pursue electronics as a medium, though its possibilities inspired him, as did Bartók, to explore clusters and what he called micropolyphony.

His first big public success came in 1958 with Artikulation, a very short piece which explores the acoustics of the voice and is also funny. It led directly to Aventures (1962) and Nouvelles Aventures (1966), but before them came two big orchestral works, Apparitions (1959) and Atmosphères (1961); the latter quickly achieved multiple performances despite its complexity — a mirror canon in 48 parts which uses both clusters and micropolyphony.