2024-10-18 14:12:00
Hungarian György Kurtág is considered a legend among contemporary composers. However, he only composed an opera once: based on Samuel Beckett‘s famous “Endgame”. Now the piece has to prove itself at the Vienna State Opera.
The Vienna State Opera also got help from Donald Trump. “They eat dogs, cats, pets,” he repeats his fake news. “The world won’t last much longer, it will soon end. “Let’s end it, preferably at the opera,” the musical theater commented in a Facebook clip for the publicized premiere of Samuel Beckett’s “Fin de partie”, set to music by György Kurtág.
Unfortunately this is the most original thing that can be said about the Austrian premiere of the now 98-year-old Nestor’s only work on the international composer scene, presented six years ago. Back then, in November 2018, the classical music world gasped. The superintendent Alexander Pereira forced the “Fin de Partie” on those who were always hesitant and, after postponements to Zurich and Salzburg, took him to the Scala in Milan.
Kurtág, for many in the industry the last saint of living composers, had set “Fin de Partie” word for word and nuance for nuance in the original French version. In a dry, clichéd, low-toned chamber music score for 60 musicians that uses almost no bows. They are only needed as a complete body of sound in the post-orchestra period. Here he played the cymbal, there the saxophone, the piano, two accordions, the bells, the tuba.
There has been a lot of time to think in a relaxed way about why a rather boring piece with four elderly people, two of them sitting in barrels, one moaning blindly in a wheelchair and the other limping, might not be a such good work. model after all. But do you really want to blame this on György Kurtág, who was never of this world?
Fittingly, at the end of his life, he invented an end times game. Just as Beckett never intended his work to be interpreted in a concrete way after the Second World War, Kurtág’s faithful setting is positioned in the same way. Like a fight in the room. The Viennese audience can sit there without any disturbance, as can the characters – such as Hamm and Clov, Nagg and Nell. The music slows everything down, and Kurtág cut 14 scenes that now look like vignettes with brittle music.
In Vienna people hoped that clown director Herbert Fritsch would bring a lively revival to the sad original. But even here, where Fritsch, also responsible for the sets and costumes, depicted the events in Beckettian fashion in a spiky cabinet of Doctor Caligari, the costumes are the most colorful thing of the evening.
Nagg (Charles Workman) and Nell (Hilary Summers) are quickly eliminated. Hamm (Philippe Sly) appears and acts like a prima donna. Georg Nigl as the yellow-haired Clov has to do it with complete stage presence.
Even though Simone Young and the State Opera Orchestra put all the sound into the score, it becomes clear that this work by Kurtág is simply not an opera. As usually happens, he limited himself to putting together fragments and miniatures. As musical theatre, this non-dramatic sequence of Kurtág’s typically precious moments has no added value.
#Beckett #Opera #Vienna #tons #Hallelujah