György Kurtág’s first opera, adapted from Samuel Beckett’s one-act play and completed at age 91, is filled with compassion for its four aged characters
Frode Olsen
PHOTO: SEBASTIEN MATHE
By Heidi Waleson
May. 12, 2022 5:16 pm
The bleakness of György Kurtág’s opera “Fin de partie” (“Endgame”), now playing at the Paris Opera’s Palais Garnier, could be a commentary on that theater’s ornamental excess: The opera’s four aged characters, trapped in a claustrophobic existence and waiting for an end that never seems to come, seem like the remnants of a civilization that collapsed under the weight of its own exuberant egotism. Yet Mr. Kurtág, who adapted and streamlined Samuel Beckett’s 1957 play into his first opera, which he completed in 2017 at age 91, has found beauty in that bleakness. The composer has deftly amplified and elaborated on the music of Beckett’s original French text with his own, building a new level of emotional resonance. Beckett’s bitterly comic banter remains, but Kurtág’s version is filled with compassion for these characters mired in exhaustion, desolation and especially old age
Hilary Summers and Leonardo Cortellazzi
PHOTO: SEBASTIEN MATHE
They are not easily lovable. The blind, wheelchair-bound Hamm is a crotchety, self-important bully. He has no patience for his bickering, legless parents Nell and Nagg, who are confined to trash cans, or for the servant Clov, who wearily tends to the other three. Yet in Mr. Kurtág’s hands, we can feel for them. As portrayed by the remarkable bass Frode Olsen, Hamm becomes a tragic, Wotan-like figure, acting powerful, yet utterly powerless. When Nell (the touching contralto Hilary Summers) and Nagg (the beguiling high tenor Leonardo Cortellazzi) reminisce about the past, including the tandem-bicycle accident that cost them their legs, their laughter is built into the score, as is the mutual affection that suffuses their banter. The setting of Nell’s recollection of a day on Lake Como draws out the sound of the French words and phrases, such as “On voyait le fond ” (We saw the bottom), to make it even more wistful and elegiac. And when Clov (baritone Leigh Melrose) finally explodes in frustration about the feelings he’s never understood or expressed, we see the humanity of a character who, up until then, was a limping, awkward drudge.
Under the skilled leadership of Markus Stenz, the orchestra of 67 creates a precisely chiseled sound world, with low instruments prevalent, arranged like chamber music rather than in noisy tuttis. The opera starts with bleats of brass; fragments of melody are interspersed with silences. Individual characters sometimes have orchestral partners, like the bassoon that accompanies Nell or the low brass and muted timpani that take Hamm from domineering posturing to anguish. Instruments not commonly found in opera orchestras—a twangy cimbalom, two accordions, a steel drum—have a bracing, astringent effect, folk-like and ironic at the same time.
Leigh Melrose
PHOTO: SEBASTIEN MATHE
Director Pierre Audi devised the incisive production for the opera’s world premiere at La Scala in 2018. It went next to Amsterdam before arriving in Paris, all with the same splendid singers, who play off one another like a family. Designer Christof Hetzer’s stark, black scenery matches the opera’s tone—it shows the exterior of a simple hut, which rotates for every scene, providing a slightly different perspective—and Urs Schönebaum’s lighting is by turns glaring and gloomy. There are just a handful of props—a ladder, an alarm clock, a pole with a hook on the end.
The performers stand out against this desolate backdrop, their vivacity all the more remarkable since three of them use only their upper bodies. Details neatly reinforce character: Hamm’s sleeveless vest gives him a thuggish air, while Nagg’s hair, standing up in tufts, is of a piece with his comedic demeanor and the lengthy Borscht Belt joke that he tells, complete with voice imitations, about a tailor taking three months to make a pair of pants. Clov’s lurching gait and repetitive movements—in the first scene, he carries a ladder to a window, climbs it, descends, carries it to the other window, climbs, descends—make his ability to walk seem less normal than the stasis of the other three. Mr. Melrose is skilled at being off-kilter: At the end, when Clov has been dismissed and has supposedly left the stage, he stands frozen in place, clutching a suitcase and a sheet, poised for flight, throughout Hamm’s final monologue.
Even with these arresting performances, the piece feels slightly too long at two hours. Yet perhaps this is the point. As Hamm says at the outset: “It’s time it ended, and yet I hesitate to end.” Mr. Kurtág’s alluring score keeps the audience trapped in this suspended moment, in sympathy with these people who, despite the profound limitations and miseries of their lives, still want those lives to continue. The orchestral epilogue, which again begins with a wail of brass and fades into silence, hints scarily at the nothingness that is the alternative.
Ms. Waleson writes on opera for the Journal and is the author of “Mad Scenes and Exit Arias: The Death of the New York City Opera and the Future of Opera in America” (Metropolitan).
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