György Kurtág (b. 1926)
Fin de Partie, opera in one act (2010-17)
Frode Olsen (Hamm) – baritone
Zsolt Haja (Clov) – baritone
Hilary Summers (Nell) – alto
Leonardo Cortellazzi (Nagg) – tenor
Danubia Orchestra / Markus Stenz
rec. live 12 October 2023, Müpa, Budapest, Hungary
Reviewed from an MP3 download
Text and translations to be made available on BMC website
BMC 363 [2 CDs: 114]

Alex Ross famously dubbed György Kurtág’s Fin de Partie, ‘the final masterpiece of twentieth-century music’. I’ll come back to this epithet later but suffice to say that despite the fact that Ross was writing about a work premiered at La Scala in 2018, it was in no way intended as a backhanded compliment. Indeed, Kurtág’s recreation of Samuel Beckett’s play of the same name (‘Endgame’ in English) has proved remarkably popular since that first performance, receiving by my count at least five further fully staged European productions as well as a number of semi-staged and concert performances, including the UK premiere at the Proms in 2023, and at the Budapest Music Centre later that same year at which this newly issued recording was made.

Gergely Fazekas begins his booklet notes to this release with a meeting between Beckett and Morton Feldman in 1976, which took place in Berlin. It had an inauspicious start when the short-sighted Feldman managed to fall off the stage where Beckett was rehearsing. Things didn’t pick up from there. Feldman recalled: ‘[Beckett] said to me, “Mr Feldman, I don’t like opera.” I said to him, “I don’t blame you!” Then he said to me, “I don’t like my words being set to music,” and I said, “I’m in complete agreement.”’ Feldman went on to compose Neither, for solo soprano and orchestra, with a libretto consisting of only sixteen lines of Beckett’s poetry. Not one of Feldman’s most memorable works, neither (haha) cantata nor opera and lacking any sort of dramatic interest. 

To what extent Beckett’s dislike of opera and settings of his words arose from his earlier experience of working with the Romanian-French composer Marcel Mihalovici on his opera Krapp, ou, La dernière bande is hard to say. Beckett worked closely with the composer, adapting his play Krapp’s Last Tape for the libretto, but the result is again disappointing. In the performances I’ve heard, there’s little artistic justification for turning what is a precisely sculpted piece of dramatic writing into opera, no new insights arise, no aesthetic gains. The piece exists today on the margins of Beckettiana, rarely produced, and not commercially recorded. Maybe if Mihalovici’s approach had been more original, less of its time (early 1960s) and less clichéd, posterity might have been kinder, but I think fundamentally the issue is the perfection of the original, which any composer would have struggled to make ‘more’ of.

I can’t help but think that the inherent unimprovability of many of Beckett’s works for the theatre was also a factor in Kurtág’s finally leaning towards Fin de Partie. It’s difficult to overstate what a bold and courageous choice this was. Even though Kurtág didn’t set the whole play, the opera nevertheless is just under two hours in length, and, as readers will doubtless be aware, the composer is largely known for his exquisite miniatures, generally lasting no more than two minutes, often less. Further, Kurtág had never written an opera before embarking on Fin de Partie at the age of 85 (he was 92 when the work was completed). Unsurprisingly, his earlier interest in Beckett centred on shorter works: Footfalls, Rockaby, and Play. I haven’t seen Kurtág’s sketches for these, dating from the late 1970s, but my opinion as someone who has been immersed in Beckett most of my life is that Footfalls and Rockaby, like Waiting for Godot and Happy Days, are flawless works for the theatre. It’s hard to imagine how an operatic version of any of them would be aesthetically viable, as Mihalovici’s experiment for Krapp bears out.

Kurtág told Fazekas that it was when working on the sketches for the three short plays that he realised that Fin de Partie was ‘the basic experience’ and he therefore wanted to compose that. I haven’t been able to read the full interview that comment comes from, so I’m wary of making erroneous inferences, but it’s true that the seeds of all three of those shorter plays can be found in the earlier work. What’s striking is the contrast between the acuity of Footfalls and Rockaby set against the dramatic inertness of Fin de Partie. Of all Beckett’s major works, I’d argue that it’s the least successful theatrical creation but also one with so much dramatic potential. Kurtág perhaps spotted that potential and knew that his music could realise it.

That transformation begins and ends with Beckett’s text. Kurtág subtitled the work ‘Scènes et monologues’ and set just under half of the play, entire selected scenes without abridgment. His choice of those scenes and monologues (Hamm’s in particular) shows thoughtfulness and dramatic sense. Both characteristics are also evident in how he sets Beckett’s words. He spent two years on the prosody apparently, finding the exact rhythm he needed for every word (a study which interestingly started with familiarising himself with Mihalovici’s Krapp). Having done so, the historical precedents Kurtág then used to frame the work are striking. There’s a formally Monteverdian Prologue for example, delivered with assurance here by Hilary Summers, and there are later musical echoes of Debussy and particularly Pelléas as well as Messiaen and even Mussorgsky. Yet mixed in also are surprising elements of colour, direction, material and structure: that Prologue for example fades into an orchestral transition whose most surprising element is the prominence of two bayans (Russian accordions); Kurtág at one stage asks for a singer to adopt an ‘Afro-Indian tremolo’; and the most prominent musical motif is an unashamedly banal melody, composed by Kurtág in the 1940s. Above all perhaps one is aware that despite the unbroken flow of music there are passages which are structurally at least aria-like. Take Nagg’s ‘trouser song’, for example, wittily rendered by Leonardo Cortellazzi, formidably playing three characters simultaneously, or Clov’s ‘Vaudeville’ song, as well as the demanding and dramatically effective monologues placed throughout. All share a Webernian concision and brittleness of diction that feels like an authentic idiom for Beckett.

The result is a deepening of the dramatic and emotional effect of Beckett’s original, that potential I referred to being unlocked to luminous effect. Let me give the crowning example, an instance of what Fazekas describes as Kurtág ‘translating’ Beckett. He would say that this means Kurtág going beyond simply setting the text but ‘translating’ from one medium to another. I’d go further: the effect is transformational – a more interesting work has been created. In the play Nell’s death is rendered in an almost casual way. She disappears into one of the bins that are the key props present on stage. A few minutes later Nagg bangs on the lid and asks for her, and, when she doesn’t respond, quickly gives up calling for her. He disappears into his own bin commenting, ‘Finie la rigolade’ (‘the fun is over’). By contrast, in Kurtág’s opera Nagg’s realisation that Nell is dead is conveyed by some astonishing music, an overwhelming but never melodramatic portrayal of emotional devastation. Kurtág’s direction for how this should be sung is ‘Shout-glissando, which ends with a sound like the whimpering of a wounded beast’. It has to be heard to be fully appreciated and Cortellazzi here is riveting. What about that phrase ‘Finie la rigolade’? When Beckett himself rendered Fin de Partie into English he didn’t use the literal translation I’ve given above, but used Prospero’s words from The Tempest, ‘our revels now are ended’. In the opera Kurtág has Hamm first speak the words in French and then sing the words in English. It’s a radiant moment, where Kurtág’s compositional skill lights up Beckett’s vision.  

I’m conscious that I’ve written a lot about the work and said little about the performances. In a way, the two are inseparable. With the exception of Zsolt Haja’s Clov, all of the performers here as well as the conductor, Markus Stenz, have lived with the opera since its composition, worked on it with the composer and given numerous performances, including the world premiere. All four singers are magnificent, meeting with skill and flair the score’s technical challenges. Frode Olsen as Hamm commands attention through his various monologues, which are imbued with an infectious compulsiveness. Zsolt Haja has to convey a more excitable – at times hysterical – persona and does so extremely effectively. Hilary Summers and Leonardo Cortellazzi sing more refined vocal parts, inflecting them with colour and lightness. Markus Stenz’s grasp of the work’s structure and textural intricacies is authoritative: he shows that momentum is absolutely key not just to dramatic pacing but to coherence too.                  

The comment from Alex Ross I quoted at the start was really a reference to his view of Kurtág’s work as being the last great work of musical and artistic modernism, not least because of the shadow Beckett’s writing and ‘personality’ cast across the second half of the twentieth century. But in another way Fin de Partie is highly consonant with some of the other successful operas which have appeared in the last 10 years which have ‘translated’ or transformed works they’ve been based on. I’m thinking particularly of Kevin Puts’s The Hours, Mark-Anthony Turnage’s Festen and even John Adams’s Antony and Cleopatra. I admire all these works, but in Fin de Partie Kurtág has produced something exceptional, which thanks to BMC, we can now all experience.

Dominic Hartley 

Buying this recording via the link below generates revenue for MWI, which helps the site remain free