The final masterpiece of twentieth-century music had its première last month, at La Scala, in Milan. “Samuel Beckett: Fin de Partie,” an operatic version of Beckett’s “Endgame” by the Hungarian composer György Kurtág, is nominally a product of our time: Kurtág began writing it in 2010 and finished it last year, at the age of ninety-one. Yet the score harks back to the heyday of modernism in the arts, when a figure like Beckett could hold a cultured public tensely in thrall as he tested the extremes. Such authority hardly exists any longer: the age of the dark male genius is past. Given how much brilliant music is being made by new and different voices, the retreat of that cult is not greatly to be mourned. Still, Kurtág’s achievement is stupendous, particularly since this is his first opera and by far the most ambitious undertaking of his career. There are many musical monuments of old age: Monteverdi’s “The Coronation of Poppea,” Verdi’s “Otello” and “Falstaff,” Janáček’s “From the House of the Dead.” But no composer has ever taken so huge a leap so late.
Until now, Kurtág has been best known as a maker of supercharged miniatures. He developed fitfully, struggling through periods of creative block. In the nineteen-sixties, at a time when his compatriot and friend György Ligeti was seizing the world’s imagination with his “Atmosphères” and “Requiem,” Kurtág remained relatively obscure. Ligeti had fled to the West after the suppression of the Hungarian uprising of 1956; Kurtág had remained in Budapest. By the eighties, though, Kurtág’s time had come. Works such as “Kafka Fragments,” for voice and violin, and “Stele,” for orchestra, rose like craggy monoliths above the stylistic landscape of the day. Their musical language was compressed, gnomic, piercingly expressive. “Stele,” whose title means “memorial slab,” begins with an emphatic held G, extracted from Beethoven’s Leonore Overture No. 3, and ends with catatonic repetitions of a ghostly, shiver-inducing seven-note chord.
This aesthetic of shattered lyricism and occluded beauty is ideal for Beckett. At Ligeti’s urging, Kurtág went to see “Endgame” in Paris in 1957, shortly after its première. Fifty years later, he told the critic Jeremy Eichler that it was “one of the strongest experiences in my life.” He set several shorter Beckett texts and dreamed of writing a full-length opera. Although Beckett was an astute music lover, cherishing the songs of Schubert above all, he resisted musical settings of his plays, deeming the words music enough. He might have changed his mind if he could have heard what Kurtág has done with “Endgame.” The opera, which lasts two hours without intermission, contains a bit more than half the play, following the original French line by line. (Although Kurtág gives us the heart of the text, including the beginning and the end, he has indicated that he plans to expand the score in coming years.) The music hovers around Beckett’s language without ever obscuring or upstaging it. Not since Debussy’s “Pelléas et Mélisande” has there been vocal writing of such radical transparency: every wounded word strikes home.
“Pelléas” is one of the models that Kurtág reportedly examined during a long period of preparation for “Fin de Partie.” In his youth, he studied with Olivier Messiaen, who made a specialty of analyzing “Pelléas”; you hear echoes of Messiaen in “Fin de Partie” as well. Two wheezing bayans—the Russian version of the accordion—lend the work a streetwise Parisian flavor, particularly when they are joined to a mangled little waltz melody that recurs throughout. The Frenchness of the opera may come as a surprise, given Kurtág’s Central European background, but he has long-standing Paris associations and lived in the South of France from 2001 to 2015. (He now lives in Budapest, with Marta Kurtág, his wife and artistic partner for seven decades.)
The other musical ghost who haunts “Fin de Partie” is Anton Webern, the supreme aphorist, whose song-length orchestral pieces have the weight of Mahler symphonies. Webern was a Schoenbergian purist, expunging almost all traces of tonality from his music. Kurtág is more eclectic in his approach, making frequent use of tonal elements. But he gives them a hard, enigmatic sheen. That waltz tune keeps stopping short after just two bars, so that its simple, major-key contour becomes one more alienated object in Beckett’s garage sale of the human spirit. The power of Kurtág’s creation derives in part from its fusion of Debussy’s poetry and Webern’s pith.
“Endgame,” like so much of Beckett, presents a condition rather than a plot. The characters are Hamm, a blind old man in a wheelchair; Clov, his long-suffering servant; and Nell and Nagg, Hamm’s ancient parents, who lost their legs in a bicycling accident and are confined to trash cans. Stories are told; resentments are aired; misery circulates; Nell and Nagg die; and, at the end, Clov prepares to take his leave, though he does not actually do so. Outside is a dead, ashen world. Clov declares, “I say to myself that the earth is extinguished, though I never saw it lit.” Pierre Audi, who directed the La Scala production, stayed close to Beckett’s stage directions, though the characters are seen outside a decrepit old house rather than in its interior. The cast—Frode Olsen as Hamm, Leigh Melrose as Clov, Leonardo Cortellazzi as Nagg, and Hilary Summers as Nell—sang magnificently, under the exacting guidance of the conductor Markus Stenz.
Beckett humanizes his desolate scenario with skeletal wit. Kurtág, likewise, proves to be a deft musical comedian. Grunts of tuba and bassoon, scuttlings of strings, a splash of saxophone, and slapstick percussion hint at the vaudeville tradition that informs so much of Beckett’s work. More often, though, the music provokes not outright laughter but a wistful smile—humanization in a different mode.
Hamm, in his opening monologue, says, “No, all is absolute, the bigger a man is the fuller he is. And the emptier. Clov! No, alone. What dreams! Those forests! Enough, it’s time it ended, in the refuge, too. And yet I hesitate, I hesitate to . . . to end.” Kurtág’s setting of these lines exemplifies his method. First, a prowling tuba and eerie whooshes of tam-tam and cymbals evoke Hamm’s solitude. The word “empty” is unexpectedly joined to a low F-major triad, and a solo double bass traces out a plaintive micro-melody in that key area. A solo flute takes up the same motif in the area of D, bathing it in warm light. The mention of dreams and forests—beloved habitats of Baudelaire and the Symbolist poets—triggers hazy, Debussy-like chords in the strings. The harmony darkens again as Hamm speaks of ending it all.
Each page of the score contains happenstance charms and fleeting epiphanies. I especially love the bouncy little march that kicks in when Nagg tells an old Jewish joke about a tailor who exasperates a client by taking too long to make a pair of pants. God made the world in six days, the client says; it takes you months to make a pair of pants. In the score, the episode carries the heading “Poldy Bloom Singing a Jewish-Irish-Scottish Ballad.” When the punch line arrives—“My dear sir, look at the world, and look at my trousers”—Kurtág tells the performers to think of Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition,” and in particular of the movement depicting an argument between two Jews. Kurtág is of part-Jewish descent, and these intertwined allusions to Beckett’s fondness for Jewish jokes, Mussorgsky’s caricatures of Jews, and Joyce’s portrait of Leopold Bloom make one wonder if the composer thinks of “Endgame” as a post-Holocaust work, as Theodor W. Adorno did before him.
Joyce once boasted that the puzzles of “Ulysses” would keep the professors busy for centuries. The same might be said of Kurtág’s “Fin de Partie,” although the self-critical composer is unlikely to say so. The opera is less a translation of literature into music than a kind of posthumous collaboration. And, like Verdi’s “Otello,” it seems the equal of the celebrated text on which it is based. Beckett has been waiting for Kurtág all this time. ♦
