GYÖRGY KURTÁG, THE GREATEST TRANSLATOR OF BECKETT

In 1976, the Teatro dell’Opera in Rome commissioned an opera from American experimental composer Morton Feldman (1926–1987), who then asked Samuel Beckett (1906–1989) to write the libretto.
The composer and the writer met in Berlin, where Beckett was rehearsing his play Footfalls. Feldman, who was extremely nearsighted, approached from behind and missed the edge of the stage, falling to the auditorium floor. After pulling himself together, the long-awaited meeting finally took place. Feldman later recalled their encounter in an interview as follows:

[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.”  - [Quoted by Howard Skempton, „Beckett as librettist”, in Chris Villars (ed.), Morton Feldman Says: Selected Interviews and Lectures 1964–1987 (London: Hyphen Press, 2006), 75.]

This somewhat absurd encounter led to the opera Neither, which premiered in Rome in 1977—if this fifty-minute piece for solo soprano and orchestra, with a libretto consisting of only sixteen lines of poetry and lacking any hint of drama, can be called an opera at all. Fin de partie, which premiered at La Scala in Milan on November 15, 2018, is an opera in the truest sense of the word. The piece, composed by György Kurtág (1926), widely regarded as one of the most important and influential living composers, is not a provocative postmodern anti-opera. It makes extensive use of familiar techniques from the four-hundred-year-old genre and fits naturally into the tradition. 
It is clear that Kurtág drew on several specific models: Monteverdi for the concept of the word-music relationship; Mussorgsky for dramatic impact and atmospheric design; Debussy for French declamation and the sparing use of dramatic means; and even late Verdi – the Verdi of Falstaff – can be sensed in the background, providing some comic elements. This is not to say that Fin de partie is not a unique and exceptionally original work in every respect.
It could not be otherwise, as this is an opera lasting almost two hours, composed between the ages of eighty-five and ninety-two by a composer who had never written an opera before and whose trademark is the musical miniature: typical Kurtág movements are barely one or two minutes long. The story of the work’s creation is equally extraordinary: the world’s most prestigious opera house waited years for its completion; everyone involved in preparing the production showed dedication, commitment, and enthusiasm; and the reception at the first performance was also remarkable. The premiere, a co-production between La Scala and the Dutch National Opera, was attended by more than 70 journalists from around the world. In the week following the premiere, reviews appeared in The New York Times, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, The Guardian, Le Monde, Corriere della Sera, and many other newspapers. Alex Ross, critic for The New Yorker, called it “the final masterpiece of twentieth-century music.” - [Alex Ross, “György Kurtág, with his Opera of Endgame Proves To Be Beckett’s Equal”, The New Yorker (17 December 2018)]

Genesis

It is a striking irony of fate that Kurtág’s Beckett opera premiered at La Scala in Milan, a theater that both shaped and was shaped by romantic Italian opera: Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti, Verdi, and Puccini. This image persists despite numerous respectful attempts to dispel it and the otherwise commendable efforts of the theater’s directors to counter it with occasional contemporary performances in previous decades, such as premieres of works by Henri Pousseur, Luigi Nono, and Karlheinz Stockhausen. 
One example illustrates the difference: Rossini’s opera Aureliano in Palmira premiered at La Scala on December 26, 1813. According to a letter from the 24-year-old composer to his parents, he completed the work on December 4, meaning the singers and the team had three weeks to rehearse and perform the opera. We do not know when Rossini began composing the work, but since he arrived in Milan only on October 4, it is fairly certain that he signed the contract first and only then began work on the piece. In less than two months, he composed almost two hours of music, and this was not even his fastest completed score. Now, two hundred years later, an opera premiered in the same theater that took seven years to complete and two years to rehearse. So much for the world getting faster. Alexander Pereira, then Artistic Director of the Zurich Opera House, approached the eighty-four-year-old Kurtág in 2010 to commission an opera. Kurtág originally wanted to set short Beckett texts to music. As he stated in an interview, he planned to write music for Footfalls, Rockaby, and Play, and in the Kurtág collection at the Paul Sacher Stiftung (Basel, Switzerland), sketches for these Beckett plays can be found dating back to the late 1970s. “While I was working on the Beckett scenes,” Kurtág said in an interview, “it suddenly occurred to me that Fin de partie was the basic experience and then I had the feeling that I wanted to do exactly that.” - [Gergely Fazekas, “To Get into the Convolutions of the Text: A Conversation with Márta Kurtág and György Kurtág”, Contemporary Music Review (forthcoming)].
When Pereira left Zurich after being appointed intendant of the Salzburg Festival, he took the commission for the Kurtág opera with him. The premiere was originally planned for 2013, but the opera was not ready. In the greeting of that year’s festival booklet, written by Pereira and the festival president, Helga Rabl-Stadler, the following announcement appeared:

Harrison Birtwistle’s opera Gawain will open our opera season instead of the planne premiere of György Kurtág’s work, as Kurtág still needs time to complete his score–a risk that must be considered when commissioning a work. Creativity cannot be commanded. - [Helga Rabl-Stadler–Alexander Pereira, „Vorwort”, Oper – 19 Juli–1 September 2013 (Salzburg: Salzburger Festspiele, 2012), 2.]

It is true that creativity cannot be commanded, though at that moment Kurtág might have thought the creator could at least influence it. Hungarian Beckett scholar Anita Rákóczy, who wrote her PhD on the origin of Fin de partie, assisted Kurtág from 2011 by collecting literature on Beckett and comparing different early versions of the text for him. She published an article about her work with Kurtág, which includes notes she made after their phone calls. According to the notes from August 14, 2013:

Kurtág is decided to complete the opera by 2015. He’s concentrating on the more important scenes so that they should be ready. If he has time left, he’ll compose the intervening material as well, but first the key scenes must be complete. He’ll be doing this for the rest of his life. - [Anita Rákóczy, “Story Time: Towards György Kurtág’s Fin de partie”, in Rachel Beckles Willson–Gergely Fazekas (eds.), Perspectives on the Music of György Kurtág – Performance, Language and Memory (Turnhout: Brepols, 2025), 208.]

In the meantime, Pereira left Salzburg and moved to Milan. Beginning in 2014, he became the director of La Scala, but the commission for the Kurtág opera remained with him. In the program for the first season he led, Kurtág’s opera does not appear, but from the organizers’ perspective, the completion of the piece by 2015 seemed secure – perhaps not unrelated to Kurtág’s optimism two years earlier – as they not only announced the premiere date as October 29, 2015, but also released a detailed list of performers and contributors. In the end, the premiere was canceled, and instead, Alban Berg’s Wozzeck was performed  on the scheduled dates with the same artists. Pereira still did not give up. November 6, 2016, was set as the new premiere date and announced, but again to no avail. 
Against this backdrop, Pereira’s appearance at the reception after the premiere – which was more fitting for Ionesco than Beckett – held in the large room behind the scenes, is perfectly understandable. The entire cast and invited guests, at least two hundred people, stood in this room, where the usually gruff and justifiably famous director, relieved of a dreaded burden, shouted into a microphone with an Austro-Italian accent and childlike delight, thanking everyone who made the dream come true.
He then literally danced with joy, pronouncing Kurtág’s and his wife’s first names in his own way: “Gyurrri, Gyurrri, Márrrta, Márrrta!” 
The handwritten inside cover of the full score of the opera indicates that the work was composed in two locations. Kurtág worked on the piece in Saint André de Cubzac in southern France from 2010 to 2015 and at the Budapest Music Center from 2015 to 2017. These two locations mark distinct phases of composition. A profile of Kurtág published in the New York Times a few weeks before the premiere reveals that during the first two years, Kurtág focused primarily on the text:

“I almost obsessively want to remain faithful to his text and his initial concept,” Mr. Kurtag said of Beckett’s play. He added he had spent two years just on studying the playwright’s word choices. What Beckett does, Mr. Kurtag said, “is already music.” - [Palko Karasz, „A 92-Year-Old Composer’s First Opera Is His ‘Endgame’”, New York Times (7 November 2018)]

A year and a half earlier, Kurtág had said the same to a journalist from the Hungarian weekly Heti Válasz: “It took me almost two years just to get to grips with the French text, and I was not even concerned yet with what the play was about.” - [Zoltán Laky, „A komponálás néha fájdalmas” [Composing can hurt somtimes], Heti Válasz 17 (2017)/7, 41.]. If working on the text truly took two years and was done separately from developing musical ideas, then the actual composition began around 2012, with the first phase lasting until the move back home in spring 2015—about two and a half to three years. Although many musical ideas from before 2015 were incorporated into the final form of the opera, the composition was interrupted by Márta Kurtág’s illness in 2015 and the couple’s subsequent move to Budapest.
Since spring 2015, Kurtág and his wife lived in one of the Budapest Music Center’s guest apartments. After Márta’s death in 2019, Kurtág has continued to live there alone, but is surrounded by friends, acquaintances, and occasionally family members. After their return, the pace of opera composition  slowed. András Kégl, librarian at the BMC and responsible for archiving the completed manuscripts, was able to closely follow the development of the opera. He described this second phase of the compositional process as follows:

They moved into BMC in the spring of 2015, and in the early days, many old acquaintances and friends visited them, which made them extremely happy. They were finally able to see people they had not met in years or even decades. However, these visits took so much time and energy away from composing that the opera did not progress as quickly as they would have liked. Then a turning point came, thanks to Márta. They drew a line and shut themselves away from that point on. They established a very strict schedule. In the morning, after getting up, they worked, had lunch around 1 p.m., then slept, rested, and worked again from 6 p.m. until they could no longer continue. As a result, the opera was essentially completed between January 2016 and the summer of 2017. - [Unpublished video interview with András Kégl, conducted by Gergely Fazekas on November 15, 2018. The video is available in the BMC archive.]

The exact chronology of the opera’s creation can only be established through a detailed analysis of the sketches held by the Sacher Stiftung. However, it appears that the compositional process for Kurtág’s opera proceeded at a pace and with difficulties similar to those of his earlier works. Considering the resulting nearly two hours of music, Kurtág may have progressed more quickly than he did with his first major vocal work, the approximately forty-minute-long Bornemisza Péter mondásai (Sayings of Péter Bornemisza), on which he worked for five and a half years, from January 1963 to August 1968.

The drama

Kurtág discovered Beckett in 1957, when he spent a year in Paris to recover after the mental, psychological, and political collapse caused by the failed 1956 Hungarian revolution against the Soviet Union. His friend, another giant of late 20th-century music, György Ligeti (1923–2006), brought the writer to his attention and suggested that he see Waiting for Godot if possible. Although he was unable to see Godot at the time, the thirty-one-year-old Kurtág saw the original version of Fin de partie in the fall of 1957. (Beckett wrote the drama in French and almost immediately translated it into English himself  under the title Endgame; however, the French premiere took place in London before the production was moved to Paris.) As Kurtág did not speak French well at the time, he barely understood the play but was nevertheless captivated by the drama and immediately went to a bookstore to buy the text. At the time, he had no idea that nearly sixty years later he would use this antique copy as the libretto for his first opera.
There are not only legal reasons why few have undertaken the task of writing an opera based on a Beckett drama. Yet it is remarkable that the heir, Edward Beckett – who attended the premiere – not only gave permission to adapt the play Fin de partie into an opera but also allowed Kurtág to use only selected scenes from the original work. The subtitle of the opera, Scènes et monologues, indicates that it is not an adaptation of the entire drama. Slightly less than half of the text was set to music, but all the adapted scenes were included in full and without abridgment. All the key scenes became part of the opera, and because Beckett’s drama lacks a traditional dramatic arc, the original could be transferred to the opera stage without lasting damage.
In Fin de partie, Beckett has reduced the onstage action and events to a minimum in the most radical way. The protagonist is Hamm, a blind, wheelchair-bound writer working on his novel. He lives with his servant Clov, who cannot sit, and his parents, Nell and Nagg, who have both lost their legs and spend their lives in separate dumpsters (the reason for this is not revealed, but the question of “why” makes no sense in Beckett’s universe). So three of the four characters cannot move, while one practically cannot stop moving. The place is unknown and the time is uncertain. Apocalyptic events have apparently occurred shortly before; we are in the final moments before the complete annihilation of humanity. The only notable action on stage is Nell’s death, which appears incidental to the drama (it is possible that Nagg also dies later). Clov wants to leave Hamm but cannot; Hamm cannot stand Clov but is unable to do without him, either physically or mentally. Through fragments of memory, we glimpse shards of past events, yet the relationship between the two protagonists remains unclear. When Beckett was directing the play at Riverside Studios in London in 1980, Rick Cluchey, the actor playing Hamm, asked if Clov was Hamm’s adopted son, as one might assume from Hamm’s monologue. The author responded as follows: “I don’t know whether it is the story of young Clov or not.” - [Ronan McDonald, The Cambridge Introduction to Samuel Beckett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 43.]. The German philosopher Theodor W. Adorno analyzed Fin de partie in a lengthy essay in 1961 and wrote: “To understand it can mean nothing other than to understand its incomprehensibility, or specifically to reconstruct its structure of meaning – that it has none.” - [Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Trying to Understand Endgame’, New German Critique, 26, Critical Theory and Modernity (1982), 121.  Translation by Michael T. Jones.]
The lack of meaning and plot inevitably creates difficulties in the inherently spectacular and entertaining genre of opera, especially if the composer does not intend to create a Feldmanesque anti-opera but remains within the boundaries of the genre and composes its endgame. From Bach to Webern, and from Beethoven to Mahler and beyond, many Western composers have worked within self-imposed constraints and attempted the impossible. Even among them, Kurtág stands out for his seriousness.

The music

The four singers had already learned the musical material of the piece in the fall of 2017 before completing a four-day orchestral rehearsal at the BMC in September 2018. During this rehearsal, conductor Markus Stenz led the Danubia Orchestra Óbuda and was able to conduct the entire piece in the presence of the composer, featuring the four singers of the premiere: Frode Olsen (Hamm), Leigh Melrose (Clov), Hilary Summers (Nell) and Leonardo Cortellazi (Nagg). On the last day of rehearsals, an international press conference was held for journalists invited by La Scala. The work was performed in full, and the singers sang their parts from memory. Such preparations are truly extraordinary. I am not aware of any opera being staged in which the singers have fully mastered their roles two and a half months before the first performance, and the conductor has been able to test the score well before the actual rehearsal period.
The four vocal parts differ according to the distinct characters of the four roles. Hamm’s deep baritone part has a relatively limited range in dynamics and tone (at least by Kurtág’s standards), but the protagonist’s brutality, self-torturing cruelty, and explosive inner tension are always present in the music, either overtly or beneath the surface. From a physical perspective, it is one of the most challenging baritone roles in Western music history: one of Hamm’s monologues lasts almost twenty minutes.
The part of Clov is also baritone, but due to the more hysterical personality, it is more extreme; sometimes Kurtág takes it to the limit of an inarticulate scream. From the perspective of vocal technique, the most refined roles are those of Nell and Nagg, who reside in the bins. As if Kurtág had compensated the singers for being stuck in a bin for over an hour. Nell’s alto part requires a singer capable of unearthly pianissimi and special vocal colors, while Nagg’s tenor part demands the flexibility, lightness, and virtuosity of a Rossini singer. But most important is the vocal chemistry between the two parts: they should sound like two sides of a single musical identity. 
Although the size of the orchestra is similar to that of a symphony orchestra, its composition is unconventional, featuring a strong woodwind and brass section, six percussionists, and several additional instruments, including an upright piano, a cimbalom (a Hungarian dulcimer), and two bayans (Russian accordions). Yet, apart from the final epilogue and some orchestral interludes in which the bayans, tuba, bassoon, or clarinet have an evocative solo, the orchestra rarely functions as an orchestra in the usual sense: the expressive vocal parts are mostly accompanied by single notes or motifs. As in other Kurtág vocal cycles where additional instruments play a role, the musical substance lies in the vocal part, while the instruments are present only to provide different colors. 
There is a recurring musical motif in the opera – a banal melody – that can be heard in pure F major, with intentionally poor harmonization, immediately after the prologue. According to Kurtág, this folk-like tune was composed as a school exercise for Ferenc Farkas, his composition professor at the Music Academy in the late 1940s. In the opera, this motif appears to symbolize the past and nostalgia, mostly associated with Nell’s character. The interval of the pure fifth is also connected to Nell: it has been a symbol of purity in Kurtág’s musical universe since his earliest pieces and plays a crucial role in many piano works written for or about Márta. If one is inclined to look for biographical connections, it is not hard to see Nell as a kind of musical alter ego of the composer’s lifelong companion, whom he lost one year after the opera’s premiere, following a 72-year marriage. 
The opera is a single, uninterrupted dramatic flow lasting almost two hours. Kurtág distinguishes between the scenes but connects them musically, often using densely written silences – a technique for which he is well known. However, some closed numbers can be isolated within the scenes: the section titled Song, in which Nagg tells the joke about the similarities between making trousers and creating the universe while playing three roles simultaneously (each sub-character has a different musical style); the Vaudeville sung by Clov about the meaninglessness of the world; the English song of the prologue; and the closing orchestral epilogue. The last two were originally conceived independently of the opera. The setting of Roundelay, this late Beckett poem, was composed by Kurtág in August 2013 as an unaccompanied vocal solo and dedicated to fellow composer László Vidovszky. “I only came across it by chance,” he said in an interview, “and had the feeling that the essence of Fin de partie was to be found in these few lines. It goes round in circles, just like the structure of the drama. It introduces you to this way of thinking.” The epilogue is the orchestrated version of an elegy composed for piano and dedicated to the late Dutch conductor Reinbert de Leeuw (1938–2020). The piece was published in Volume 11 of Játékok (Games).

Kurtág and Beckett

Fin de partie is not the only Beckett text that Kurtág has set to music. For the Hungarian actress and pop singer Ildikó Monyók (1948–2012), who suffered from aphasia after a car accident, he composed a piece in 1990 based on Beckett’s last poem, What is the Word. The piece, which depicts the physically demanding process of discovering language and expression, is only marginally related to the opera itself, which was conceived from the beginning for professional classical singers at the peak of their vocal and musical abilities. Kurtág’s 1998 song cycle for solo baritone, string trio, and percussion, …pas à pas – nulle part… (Op. 36), based on Beckett fragments, is closer to Fin de partie and can be seen as a kind of preliminary study for the opera. In a sense, Kurtág’s entire body of work could be seen as a preliminary study for the opera. Given the expressive power of his musical language, it is somewhat surprising that he did not write an opera earlier. Nevertheless, he clearly had plans for an opera.
In the 1970s, he wanted to use the 1558 adaptation of Euripides’ Electra by the Hungarian Lutheran preacher Péter Bornemisza (1535–1584) as a libretto. In the 1980s, numerous other opera-related plans emerged. The Sayings of Péter Bornemisza, Op. 7, which premiered in Darmstadt in 1968, can be seen as a preliminary work or a late fulfillment of the unrealized Bornemisza opera. In a 1986 interview, Adrienne Csengery, a singer in several Kurtág premieres, said, “Kurtág himself admits deep in his soul that he is constantly composing dramas. Even when he is composing piano pieces, he is working on operas. Opera is his real genre.” - [István Balázs, „Beszélgetés Kurtág Györgyről Csengery Adrienne-nel” [Conversation with Adrienne Csengery about György Kurtág), in Moldován Domonkos (ed.), Tisztelet Kurtág Györgynek [Hommage à György Kurtág] (Budapest: Rózsavölgyi, 2006), 192.] Whether Beckett would appreciate the way Kurtág has set his words to music is completely irrelevant (Kurtág said at the press conference in September that he was not at all sure). Kurtág’s opera differs from Beckett’s original in many respects. The difference between opera and drama is perhaps most clearly illustrated by the death of Nell. According to Beckett’s text, Nell disappears into the depths of the barrel toward the middle of the play and asks Clov to leave Hamm with his last word: “Desert.” Clov takes her by the wrist, pushes her into the bin, closes the lid, and calmly states, “She has no pulse.” Minutes later, after a long monologue, Nagg bangs on the lid of the dustbin and calls for his wife (“Nell!”), who does not answer. Nagg hits the garbage can even harder and calls for her again (“Nell!”) before retreating into his own garbage can and slamming the lid shut. “Finie la rigolade,” remarks Hamm (“The fun is over”), and the drama continues on its directionless path.
The same sequence of events occurs in the opera – Kurtág never alters the dramaturgical structure within a scene – but thanks to the music, the moment of Nell’s death, or rather the realization of her death, becomes highly dramatic. Nagg’s monologue ends with the word “espoir” (“hope”) on a high G-sharp. In the preceding moments, the accompaniment to the vocal part was sporadic, sometimes even punctual, but here the sound of the orchestra suddenly becomes quite conventional. The entire string section begins to play pianississimo; the flutes and clarinets join in, all playing tremolo, and two slow chords are repeated very softly while Nagg slams the lid of Nell’s garbage can. Suddenly, a dissonant chord sounds on the bayan, like a shocking realization, while the contrabassoon, double bass, and timpani play a low note – an E-flat alternating with an A – like an eerie ticking clock, above which Nagg first screams Nell’s name. This is followed by another, even more dissonant chord on the bayan: the low note is now in a higher register (and a semitone higher), and this E is repeated by the harp, trombone, and cello. Finally, after a dramatic pause, Nagg shouts Nell’s name on a high C-sharp, and the note glides downward with a glissando. Kurtág’s performance instructions for this note are: “Scream glissando, ending with a sound like the whimpering of a wounded animal.” But the scene is not over yet; Kurtág’s magic continues. 
Hamm says the phrase “Finie la rigolade” in prose before singing a few bars of an unaccompanied, unpredictably meandering melody, including a line not found in the original French text: “Mon bisaïeul, Prospero l’a dit: ‘our revels now are ended.’” The quote from Shakespeare’s Tempest was not included in the opera on a whim. Beckett himself translated “Finie la rigolade” as “our revels now are ended,” making Shakespeare’s line his own. At this point, Kurtág juxtaposes the French original with Beckett’s English translation and adds his own words to the Shakespeare reference. It is no coincidence that Kurtág also quotes the English text, as Prospero’s monologue continues in Beckett’s style: “like the baseless fabric of this vision, / The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces, / The solemn temples, the great globe itself, / Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve / And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, / Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff / As dreams are made on, and our little life / Is rounded with a sleep.”
I do not know what Beckett would think of the way Kurtág has combined the French and English versions, the added words, or the emotional intensity given to the moment of Nell’s death, but I do not think it is important. Kurtág makes Beckett’s text deeply accessible, even more so than theatrical performances. To a certain extent, Kurtág did not set Beckett’s words to music; he translated them. By translating Beckett’s lines into the more universal language of music, he interpreted them and  deviated from the original in many respects – he could not do otherwise, like all literary translators. 
The listener does not have the impression that Kurtág has distorted the drama, perhaps because the music clings to the text with full force. The music depends on the text as much as Clov depends on Hamm. Kurtág consistently restrains his musical imagination to ensure his musical ideas do not overwhelm the text. This approach is characteristic of the 17th-century vocal music of Monteverdi, Schütz, and their contemporaries (and perhaps Debussy’s Pelléas and his mature songs), and in this respect, Kurtág’s opera goes beyond the basic operatic repertoire. Even if we do not understand the text of an opera by Handel, Mozart, or Rossini, they still offer a magnificent, though incomplete, musical experience. Kurtág’s opera may work well without the stage, but it does not work at all without Beckett’s text. 
In many ways, Kurtág can be seen as an intellectual relative of Beckett. What John Calder, Beckett’s publisher, wrote about the writer can also be applied to Kurtág: “I have nothing against happiness, Beckett frequently said, I just don’t happen to have a talent for it.” - [John Calder, The Philosophy of Samuel Beckett (London: Calder, 2001), 56.]. The way they use their artistic means is also similar. What the Korean-American composer Earl Kim said about Beckett could also be said about Kurtág: with Beckett, he says, “every detail is reduced to its maximum – only essentials remain.” - [Quoted by Catherine Laws, Headaches Among the Overtones – Music in Beckett / Beckett in Music (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2013), 235.]. Kurtág and Beckett address the same subjects, using the same energy and similar tools. However, while the writer aims to cool everything down, the composer seeks to heat everything up.
When Kurtág sets Beckett’s cold, austere sentences to music, it feels as if this restrained text, which holds human emotions like the memory of a living tree in a piece of charcoal, begins to glow like an ember.
The most moving example of this glow appears near the end of the opera, in one of Clov’s final utterances. “Quand je tomberai, je pleurerai du bonheur,” Clov says before he finally leaves (in Beckett’s translation: “When I fall, I’ll weep for happiness”), although he is unable to leave Hamm at the end. In traditional operas, it is customary to repeat a line of text or a word, sometimes several times; opera composers often allow themselves this freedom. Such repetitions are absent in Kurtág’s opera, with a few exceptions like this one. The motifs for “je pleurerai” and “de bonheur” use large intervals and create a comic effect, but the word “bonheur” is repeated, and on this second occurrence, a hauntingly beautiful C major chord suddenly and unexpectedly appears on the last syllable, supporting the long high E of the singing voice. A few seconds later, the chord fills with strange notes that gradually become distorted before dissolving beyond tonality and returning to Kurtág’s musical language. Never in the history of Western art music was the word “happiness” set to such profoundly sorrowful music.

Gergely Fazekas

Frode Olsen

The Norwegian bass completed his musical studies in his hometown of Oslo. He has performed major roles in the operatic repertoire, including King Marke (Tristan und Isolde), Gurnemanz (Parsifal), Wotan (Die Walküre), Monk Pimen (Boris Godunov), King Arkel (Pelléas et Mélisande), and the in Doctor Berg’s Wozzeck. Recently, he has received numerous invitations to perform contemporary music, appearing in Kurtág’s opera, as well as György Ligeti’s Le Grand Macabre, Boesmans’ Au monde, and Zimmermann’s Die Soldaten. He performs at opera houses such as La Monnaie (Brussels), Vlaamse Opera (Antwerp), Deutsche Oper (Berlin), Semperoper (Dresden), Staatsoper Hamburg, Staatstheater Stuttgart, Volksoper (Vienna), Theater an der Wien, and the Glyndebourne Opera Festival.

Zsolt Haja

The Hungarian baritone was born in Debrecen, where he also completed his higher education. He made his opera debut in 2005 and performed at the Hungarian State Opera House in 2008. In 2006, he won the József Simándy Singing Competition in Szeged; in 2007, the Ferruccio Tagliavini International Singing Competition; and in 2008, he received a special prize at the Hans Gabor Belvedere Singing Competition in Vienna. In 2015, he placed third and received a special prize at the Competizione dell’Opera international singing competition. He is currently one of the most sought-after singers in Hungary and has performed almost every major role in his vocal range. In the 2019/2020 season, he was a chamber singer at the Hungarian State Opera House. His repertoire ranges from Mozart to Romantic composers to modern and contemporary music.

Hilary Summers

This versatile Welsh singer is a leading figure in Baroque, modern, and contemporary opera. She has worked with the finest historical ensembles and conductors, and has also performed works by Boulez, Carter, Eötvös, and George Benjamin. Her voice is featured on the soundtrack of the film The Lord of the Rings. Since 2004, she has had a close working relationship with Pierre Boulez participating as soloist with the Ensemble InterContemporain in the Grammy Award-winning recording of Le Marteau sans maître. She has sung in the cantata Le Visage nuptial, conducted by Boulez, as well as in Stravinsky’s Les Noces and György Ligeti’s Aventures and Nouvelles aventures.

Leonardo Cortellazzi

“The young Italian is a vocal phenomenon. Although he is described as a buffo tenor, and he does indeed joke with a roaring sense of humor, he is also an excellent lyric tenor when he soars to the heights. His voice is exceptional, with a beautiful tone. This handsome man in his thirties is capable of astonishing stage transformations,” wrote Zoltán Farkas after the Milan premiere of the Kurtág opera. Cortellazzi was born in Mantua and studied economics and music in Parma. He is versed in many styles, from Monteverdi to Mozart, from romantic Italian opera to contemporary music. He performs in prestigious theaters in his home country, such as La Fenice in Venice, San Carlo in Naples, Teatro Comunale in Bologna, and the Arena di Verona.

Markus Stenz

The German conductor studied at the Cologne University of Music under Volker Wangenheim and at Tanglewood under Leonard Bernstein and Seiji Ozawa. He has held leading positions with prestigious ensembles such as the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra and the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, and most recently served as resident conductor of the Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra. For eleven years, he was chief music director of the city of Cologne and conductor of the Gürzenich Orchestra. He has made numerous recordings, including several award-winning ones. With the Gürzenich Orchestra, he recorded all of Gustav Mahler’s symphonies, and the recording of the Fifth Symphony won the German Record Critics’ Award. His recordings of Richard Strauss’s symphonic poems (Don Quixote, Till Eulenspiegel) were also widely acclaimed by critics, and his 2015 Schönberg album (Gurrelieder) won the Gramophone Awards choir prize the following year.

Danubia Orchestra

The ensemble was founded in 1993 by Domonkos Héja and his musician friends. Through conscious and meticulous professional work and regular concerts, the orchestra became a recognized presence in Hungarian musical life within a few years, winning the title of National Youth Orchestra in 2001, which it held for three years. In the following years, alongside the most outstanding Hungarian conductors, an increasing number of foreign conductors were guests of the orchestra, including Kenichiro Kobayashi, Yuri Simonov, José Cura, Rico Saccani, and Sir Neville Marriner. An important turning point in the orchestra’s history came in 2013, when Máté Hámori became artistic director, giving the ensemble a new image and strategy.