While he was an Austrian citizen and died in Vienna, Ligeti was a quintessentially Hungarian composer. He was born in the historically Hungarian region of Transylvania; his music teachers, both in Transylvania and in Budapest, were Hungarian; and the majority of his vocal and choral music is in Hungarian. He kept "Gyorgy" as his first name and didn't change it to George or Georg.

In future years, his name will appear next to other great 20th-century Hungarian composers -- Bartok, Kodaly, Dohnanyi, Weiner. Would the headline writer label William Walton "an Italian composer" just because he lived and died in Italy, or Lord Byron "a Greek poet" just because he died in Greece?

-- Zoltan Bagdy

Germantown

Death and Taxes (Cont'd)

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The comment by Jean Sammon ("The proper name of the tax is the estate tax . . . ") in the June 17 Free For All deserves a reply. IRS Form 706 for 2005 -- United States Estate (and Generation Skipping Transfer) Tax Return -- includes the following lines:

3b: State death tax deduction. 13: Credit for foreign death taxes.

So please, regardless of the name at the top of Form 706, let's call it what it is -- a death tax.