György Kurtág - Fin de Partie

ONP Garnier, Thursday May 5 2022

Conductor: Markus Stenz. Production: Pierre Audi. Sets and costumes: Christof Hetzer. Hamm: Frode Olsen. Clov: Leigh Melrose. Nell: Hilary Summers. Nagg: Leonardo Cortellazzi. Orchestra of the Opéra National de Paris.

Photos: Sébastien Mathé/ONP

As I may well have said before on this blog, I try to have one or two new or newish works each season, and find them more often rewarding than not. Despite a well-meaning friend's injunction, 'Don't go!', Kurtág's Fin de partie was no exception: I felt privileged to have seen it in Paris, in Pierre Audi's handsome, dark production, the same as at the La Scala premiere, four years ago, then in Amsterdam.

It’s perhaps surprising Kurtág was persuaded to make an opera of Beckett's play, knowing both the author’s opposition to adding music to his works and the esteem the composer holds him in. But the composer's respect for and attention to the text is obvious: a chef d'oeuvre of word-setting, you might say, always in synch both rhythmically and in tone, and preserving and echoing the dark humour found in the play. As Audi's staging was equally attentive to both words and score, the result was an unusually fine, coherent production.

Audi uses a single set: a small, simple house with a scuffed, silvery finish, inside a dark and cavernous, barn-like space that hints of a house-within-a-house, enclosed oppressively, ad infinitum, Russian-doll style. Hamm is in his wheelchair, and Nell and Nagg in their bins (like Bill and Ben the flowerpot men), as stipulated, and the stuffed dog runs out of the house on wheels. Near-vertical lighting forms rectangles of light on the ground, and light from the side casts stark shadows. During pauses - unaccountably long ones that somewhat broke the evening's momentum - with the curtain down, the little house turned this way or that, appearing at a new angle, with or without its twin bins.

The acting is a tour-de-force, especially by the immensely charismatic Leigh Melrose, who dominates the production dramatically and vocally, though there's a good contrast in voice types all round: Frode Olsen dark and smoky, Leonardo Cortellazzi bright and edgy, Hilary Summers perhaps a little too mezza voce and underpowered. On the night I was there, the orchestra didn't seem as fabulously precise and together as the French press would have it, but when you're hearing a contemporary score for the first time, you can't necessarily tell what they're supposed to be doing - though you can tell when the horns are fluffing their notes.

Cleverer people than I am have written in-depth analyses of the work. There is, of course, an introduction to Kurtág, his life, style and works, on Wikipedia. As usual, 'Wanderer' has written a long account in French, and I agree pretty much with all of Opera Online's excellent report, also in French, from which the following is a machine-translated excerpt (I use DeepL):

The voice/orchestra balance is prodigious. Using a spoken-sung style, Kurtag keeps as close as possible to the words, and one is immediately reminded of Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande with this prosody which manages, with extreme sensitivity, to make us hear all the emotions permitted by the spoken word: laughter, confessions, jokes, cries... Of course, those who expect great operatic spectacle will be out of pocket: there is very little going on in the libretto, and Fin de partie has nothing of the character of an operatic blockbuster. The orchestra (admirably conducted by Markus Stenz) is used extremely sparingly and the symphonic fabric is punctuated by silences. But Kurtag succeeds in creating an instrumental part that is both integrated with the voices (the pit extends and helps what the singers say) and at the same time perfectly independent. This organic relationship between voice and orchestra, constantly renewed, is perhaps what explains why one remains intensely hooked on these long duets or monologues which in other hands might seem tedious. Beckett's devastating humour is also present in the opera, Kurtag not hesitating to draw the duets between Nagg and Nell towards operetta. With modern means, Kurtag seems here to realize the (funny and depressive) opera that Debussy failed to do after Pelléas based on the novels of Edgar Poe.

It’s also up to better-qualified people than I am to decide if this work is a masterpiece, but as an ordinary, regular operagoer I reckon it’s a strong candidate, and my companions, one of them a relative 'opera newbie', both agreed. It was, however, ridiculously ill-attended (so it will have done nothing, I'm afraid, for the ONP's post-Covid finances), and I guess it came as quite a surprise to the tourists able, as a result, to get tickets. I'd personally be very happy to see it again if it returns in a couple of years. I'd also expect it to travel and enter the repertoire, though of course it's unlikely to shoot up the annual performance rankings to rival Carmen and La Bohème at the Met.