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Volumina (1962), for solo organ, uses similar means and it was memorably performed at the 1978 Proms — the Albert Hall organ wheezed admirably when switched off, as required, over a sustained cluster.

That Ligeti was capable of self-ridicule is proved by his account of the first performance of the ironically titled Poème Symphonique, a work for 100 metronomes which did not amuse the pompous audience in Hilversum City Hall for the final civic reception of the Gaudeamus Music Week.

Aventures and Nouvelles Aventures are quintessential Ligeti, together an opera buffa for three singers and small ensemble. The “text” consists of nonsense words and sounds, often anarchic and bizarre. Instead of slowly moving clusters there are abrupt changes and sudden silences. The effect, as in much of the best of Ligeti, is both comic and serious. ()

Wholly serious, however, was the Requiem, first heard in Stockholm in 1965, whose impact was so powerful that William Mann, The Times’s chief music critic, declared that he would “gladly have forgone Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony after the interval”. First contemplated before the war, the work had passed through two earlier attempts and had drawn upon the composer’s own vision of the Day of Judgment, upon Flemish polyphony and Bach, upon Bruegel and Bosch — sources of inspiration which would also nurture his opera, Le Grand Macabre.

Exceedingly difficult to perform accurately, it has had relatively few performances. But it was a milestone in Ligeti’s development for it caused him to “distance” himself from clusters, a change apparent in Lux Aeterna (1966) and the Cello Concerto (also 1966). This new idiom became even more manifest in a big orchestral piece, Lontano (1967).

Ligeti’s international status received a backhanded compliment when, in 1968, Stanley Kubrick appropriated — without the composer’s knowledge or consent — large parts of three recently recorded works for the soundtrack of his film, 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Eventually Ligeti was paid a paltry sum by MGM, but he undoubtedly benefited from the publicity attendant on the success of the film, and Kubrick used more of his music in later films, paying appropriately.

Also in 1968 Ligeti completed what he would later describe as the most important work in his oeuvre, the Second String Quartet, which was described by one pundit as “livid, hectic and freakish”. Ferociously difficult to play (its preparation took the Lasalle Quartet a year), it makes extensive use of harmonics.

After a number of orchestral works — Ramifications (1969). Melodien (1971), the Double Concerto for flute and oboe (1972), Clocks and Clouds for female voices (1973) and San Francisco Polyphony (1974) there came Le Grand Macabre, premiered by the Swedish Royal Opera in 1978 under the British conductor Elgar Howarth. Its underlying theme is death, but its message is “gather ye rosebuds” — through politics, drunkenness and sex. Ligeti described the style of the piece as “some kind of flea market half real, half unreal . . . a world where everything is falling in”. In a revised version it was heard at the Salzburg Festival in 1997.

Works on a small scale followed, among them the Horn Trio (1982), which was inspired by Brahms, and, in 1985, the beginning of the Piano Etudes which, by 2001, had reached 18 in number. Formidably difficult (one proved unplayable, even by Pierre Laurent Aimard, and had to be rewritten), they nod in the direction of Chopin and Schumann and owe something to the most advanced pieces in Bartók’s Mikrokosmos.

Meanwhile, the Piano Concerto (1988) and the Violin Concerto (1993) had appeared. The Hamburg Concerto, for horn (1999), was heard in London, with Michael Thompson and the London Sinfonietta, before it was revised in 2002.

All of Ligeti’s major compositions have been performed in England. Regular promoters have included the BBC — at the Proms and elsewhere — and the London Sinfonietta. The Philharmonia, under Esa-Pekka Salonen, was involved in a massive Sony recording project, but it foundered (for want of rehearsal time) and was taken over by Teldec, which brought in the Berlin Philharmonic, under the young English conductor Jonathan Nott. But the Philharmonia did salvage a mini-festival entitled Clocks and Clouds.

ENO presented Le Grand Macabre in 1982, though the production, by Elijah Moshinsky, did not please the composer, who described it as “an absolute misunderstanding”. He was happier — not surprisingly — about a grand manifestation mounted by the Royal Academy of Music in 1995, when, in his presence, 32 works were performed at eight concerts, the conductors including Stephen Barlow, Nicholas Cleobury and the ever-loyal Howarth.

At the Huddersfield Festival of 1993 the King’s Singers gave the first complete performance of the Nonsense Madrigals, some of which set words by Lewis Carroll. And, in 2003, Nicholas Kenyon marked Ligeti’s 80th birthday by scheduling no fewer than eight works at the Proms.

Ligeti was a bewilderingly complex personality. Born Hungarian in Transylvania, he eventually became Austrian. For a time he lived in Hamburg. He taught in Sweden and the US. His first wife, Brigitte Löw, he probably married because she was on hand when he returned to Cluj to find his family gone. His second, Vera Spitz, he married in 1952, divorced two years later and remarried, partly for practical reasons, in 1957. She was for many years his “closest friend”. He was undoubtedly a “difficult” man, so demanding that neither Karajan nor Abbado would admit him to their recordings of his music.

And his idiom was constantly in flux. Before 1956 he was influenced by Bartók and by Balkan folk melody. Encountering Boulez in 1957 he rejected serialism and flirted with electronics. Next came clusters and micropolyphony and “mechanic” music. But in due course he rediscovered the value of melody; and he became fascinated by the music of South-East Asia and of the Banda-Linda tribe in the Central African Republic.

Arguably he was a magpie; he shopped — as he himself put it — in the “marché aux puces”. And there were those who, admiringly, called him “mad”. But there was method in his madness: he moved on when he perceived that a particular vein was exhausted; he knew what he could use and what he could not; the “layering” of his music was a constant, as was its theatricality. He knew that to be torn between tears and laughter is the best experience the theatre can offer. He loved the absurd, was a born outsider, witty and self-deflating. He was unique, both quite impossible and very endearing.

He is survived by his wife Vera and by their son Lukas, a composer and percussionist.

György Ligeti, composer, was born on May 28, 1923. He died on June 12, 2006, aged 83.