As the first book in English solely dedicated to discussion of György Ligeti's Le Grand Macabre (1974-77, revised 1996), this study offers new perspectives on the opera's ambiguous music-dramatic identity in the context of musical postmodernism. Peter Edwards draws on a range of modernist and postmodernist theories to explore the collision of past styles and genre models in the opera, its expressive states and its engagement with the grotesque. This is ably supported by musical analysis and extensive study of Ligeti's sketch materials held at the Paul Sacher Foundation in Basel. A key reference work in the fields of musical modernism and postmodernism, opera studies and the music of Ligeti.