War & Peace Quote by Gyorgy Ligeti

A throwaway clause that lands like a locked border gate. Ligeti’s “impossible to travel” isn’t the romantic complaint of an artist stuck at home; it’s the cool, stunned accounting of a Europe where movement itself had been turned into a political privilege. The line’s power is in its blunt sequencing: “after the war” should mean reopening, relief, trains running again. Instead, the sentence keeps shutting doors, piling “after” on “after” until history feels less like an event you exit and more like weather that won’t clear.

The pairing of “Hitler and Stalin” is doing pointed work. Ligeti collapses the supposed moral tidy-up of postwar narratives by naming both tyrannies as consecutive facts of life, not competing ideologies. For someone born in 1923 in Hungary, the subtext is biographical without becoming confessional: fascism, then Soviet domination; extermination, then surveillance; the border as a weapon in two different hands. “So many years” sounds almost casual, which is the sting. The understatement signals fatigue and the normalization of coercion.

As a composer who later became synonymous with radical sonic innovation, Ligeti is also quietly describing the conditions that shaped modernism: the isolation of artists, the scarcity of cultural exchange, the sense that aesthetic freedom had to be reinvented because physical freedom couldn’t be assumed. Travel here is more than geography. It’s access to ideas, collaborators, scores, instruments, careers. The sentence is short, but it contains an entire map of constraints.