Clov – Bo Skovhus
Nell – Dalia Schaechter
Nagg – Stephan Rügamer
Set designs – Kaspar Glarner
Costumes – Birgit Wentsch
Lighting – Olaf Freese
Video – Bibi Abel
Dramaturgy – Olaf A. Schmitt
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| Images: Monika Rittershaus |
Just short of his 99th birthday, György Kurtág sees Fin de partie, his sole opera to date, receive a new full staging, what I believe to be its third. The first, by Pierre Audi, was seen in several European houses. I reviewed its 2022 French premiere here; it had already been seen in Milan and Amsterdam. Last year, Ingo Kerkhof directed Fin de partie anew in Dortmund, its German premiere; Herbert Fritsch directed the Austrian premiere in Vienna; and both London and Cologne offered semi-stagings. There have also been concert performances in Budapest. There may have been others of which I am unaware. Not bad, then, for a new opera, but to call this crowning masterpiece of the last man standing from what once we called the postwar avant garde ‘not bad’ would be akin to saying that of the Beckett play in which its ‘scenes and monologues’ have their origin. At a point in which the titans of Kurtág’s generation reach their centenary – Nono last year, the unholy alliance of Boulez and Henze this year, Kurtág himself next – the twin urgency and poignancy of this work and others become ever more apparent. The wider musical world at last seems ready to recognise and acknowledge them.
That Paris performance made a huge impression on me. Indeed, it inspired a chapter due to be published later this year by Edinburgh University Press (part of a volume edited by colleagues Christine Dysers, Peter Edwards, and Judith Lochhead, The Music of Absence: An Aesthetics of Loss in the New Millennium). Coming to my second production – if only I had known of the Dortmund staging – following a period of further and, I hope, deeper acquaintance with the work, was necessarily a different experience, as will be the case for all of us as the opera takes its place in the repertoire. (For that reason, I do not intend here to give an account of the work ‘itself’; my initial review may be read for first impressions.) I do not think it was entirely down to me that it seemed more conventionally ‘operatic’ – these things are relative – under Alexander Soddy’s musical direction than when conducted by Markus Stenz, though that may well be part of it. This was for the most part a fluent account, keenly alert, as was the Staatskapelle Berlin, to Kurtág’s colouristic invention. That a sort of Klangfarbenmelodie could and did work motivically was triumphantly affirmed in dramatic context.
Soddy’s conception of the work and his role seemed, moreover, concerned to consider and highlight the role of the singers; indeed, a vocal conception, extending to instruments and their combination, may be a good way of considering it. Taken as a whole, the work’s course seemed more sectional, even on occasion dragging a little, although a sectional quality can work both ways: Kurtág’s description is, after all, of ‘scènes et monologues’. (That may also have been in part a consequence of Erath’s production, conceived more as a succession of scenes than Audi’s.) What I missed above all was a greater sense of the intricacy of texture—even, paradoxically or rather dialectically, when spare. There seems in Kurtág’s writing to be a Beckettian implication of loss or absence, rarely apparent here. How sympathetic one’s response to a performance that came across as locating Kurtág in surprising succession to Verdi – not unlike Antonio Pappano’s Covent Garden occasional forays into contemporary music – may ultimately be as much a matter of taste than anything else, though I think this was also, to its advantage, more conversational than that might imply.
Erath’s staging offered further surprises, perhaps all the more so given not only the familiarity of the play but also the familiarity of what it should look like and how it should unfold, carried forward into the premiere production. I had assumed familiar issues with the Beckett estate had played a part in determining the ‘fidelity’ of Audi’s approach, and perhaps they did; perhaps they even played a part in permitting the transformation into an opera in the first place. I was therefore a little taken aback by a staging that would not necessarily have seemed radical in any other case. Designs from Kaspar Glarner and Birgit Wentsch brought a fitting (in a more meaningful sense, ‘faithful’) sense of vaudeville to proceedings, culminating in visual transformation from living room domesticity to the external, even metaphorical world of a crashed Ferris wheel. That definitely separated Hamm and Clov, only for Nell (at least in the guise of the reader of the opening Roundelay) to reappear at her mound at the close.
There was, then, a strong suggestion something circular, similarly in the emergence of the new, differently apocalyptic scene as if through the looking glass of the dustbin lid. Like Soddy, Erath seemed keen, moreover, to emphasise the opera’s conversational qualities, very much including the crucial blind alleys, non sequiturs, and misunderstandings. Changes of perspective and scale incorporated such disruption, in some ways heightening the episodic sense discussed earlier, though perhaps also helping put things ‘back together’.
A key difference, one of relatively few, between Beckett and Kurtág is the treatment of Nell’s death. What passes unnoticed in the play, Nell unmourned, is signalled by a terrible cry of grief from Nagg and the orchestra in the opera. Soddy treated the latter in duly operatic fashion, whilst Erath hinted at the dislocation between the two genres. having a giant, video-founded Clov take out a body bag – presumably Nell – earlier. Dislocation was the name of the game, or at least of one of the games. Whether in Kurtág, as in Beckett, we can ‘know’ anything beyond the text, whether the question borders on the illegitimate, was a question not only posed but also given a provisional and unsettling answer.
Laurent Naouri’s Hamm is unlikely to have provoked any such controversy. His ready, communicative way with the French text and its musical expression seemed not only to serve Beckett and Kurtág, but also to act as an animating as well as controlling presence for the cast as a whole. Bo Skovhus’s Clov, powerfully physical, not only of gesture but of character too, contrasted with whimsical performances from Dalia Schaechter and Stephan Rügamer as Nell and Nagg, though I confess to missing the deeper and perhaps more deeply familiar tones of Hilary Summers in the former role for Stenz and Audi. That we are already in a position, though, to draw comparisons between different interpretations, even to form views on emergent performance practice, testifies not so much to the work’s stature – there are many fine pieces never heard again – as to its popular acceptance. Endgames may be more ominously apparent than ever in the world around us; this is anything but an endgame for opera.
