At the end of April, György Kurtág’s Beckett opera Fin de partie will be premiered in Paris. After Milan, Amsterdam, and Valencia, Paris will be the fourth city to get acquainted with this masterpiece. All these performances were led by Markus Stenz, who recently visited Kurtág in Budapest to get new insights from the composer. Maestro Stenz shared his experiences and thoughts about this opera before the Paris performances.
When did you first have the opportunity to conduct Kurtág’s music?
When I was chief conductor of the London Sinfonietta between 1992 and 1996, we organized a Kurtág festival in London. I remember being fascinated by this music and I remember being stupefied by the notation. I remember thinking: I read music, I hear music, I feel music in this, but it is very loosely notated. I thought: let's do a trip to Budapest. Very generously, György and Márta opened their doors in Budapest for sessions to learn more, and understand more of his pieces. And since then, we have been loosely in touch because I also conducted performances with Ensemble Intercontemporain or Concertgebouw. And just recently, even in lockdown times, I programmed ...quasi and fantasia… in Seoul where we could surround the audience with musicians.
You had a rehearsal with Kurtág today, and many rehearsals earlier, in 2017 and 2018, before the Milan premiere. What were the special experiences that originated directly from the composer?
When you enter Fin de partie, even in Beckett’s original, but definitely in the opera, you enter a world that is self-sustained. It's only inhabited by those four people, and because all four of them are so extreme, they are only thinkable but never could be real. What you're dealing with are extreme emotions. This particular Beckett world is magical and alienating at the same time. Even opening oneself as an artist to that world, I find it difficult. And for people who want to look for the good things in life, it's not a zone you enter so easily: this is the masterpiece for pessimists. Every session I do with György helps me enter that special world. I feel the driving forces, I feel the motor, I feel the raison d’être for the music, the way it's created. Just the fact that with every single session we enter the world that goes beyond notation, is extremely meaningful and always enhances my experience of the piece. While initially we only scratched the surface, with every session we get closer to a deeper understanding of the piece, but we will never be able to catch up with György who has lived with the piece for so many decades as we cannot. He's a bridge builder in those sessions who helps us find the bridge into this special and poetic world.
How do you feel about conducting this opera?
First, I feel honored to be involved in this project. I've had three amazing experiences so far with the luxury of working diligently with György and the cast beforehand, of going through three productions, and of taking the score through three different orchestras. And the thing that's so spectacular and magic about the score is that it's so profoundly musical. Here you have a score where a few notes can mean a world, and you always have the feeling you deal with the nucleus of sound or the nucleus of an idea, and you don't need to force it. You just need to live the emotion. This piece doesn't behave like any other piece I know. It's unique, it's a solitaire. And it’s hard, and because it's hard, it is rewarding. The main feeling is that of ultimate focus. The focus you need to do justice to this particular score is amazing. It's a different kind of focus than in repertoire pieces. For the orchestra, the challenge is extreme because they play for more than 2 hours uninterrupted. I conduct almost 400 pages, and not one single bar has the same speed as the bar before. It’s a stream of consciousness. It’s like you’re talking to the audience, and every word, every phrase, every emotion has a different place and a different meaning. Miraculously, György has found a way of notating it, but beyond the notation, the sheer fact that it is a stream of consciousness means that we need to be ultimately flexible. And the singers have all the liberties to live the emotions of the piece, they can be poetic, they can be sensitive, they can be wicked, they can be charming, and they can be comic. Fin de partie wants your whole personality to be invested in the piece.
How are you looking forward to the Paris premiere? I think Paris has special importance for Kurtág, because the piece is finally coming home to the city where he first saw Beckett’s original drama.
What enhances this sentiment of the piece coming home is for the first time, we will have an entire orchestra that speaks the language that is sung and an entire audience that speaks and hears the language that's sung. I'm expecting an immediacy that we so far did not quite have. Editio Musica Budapest has done a fantastic job of putting every single line of the singer into every part of the musicians, which is a true rarity. I don't know any other opera that has been published this way. It's totally unique. What I'm hoping will happen is that in Paris, the musicians will not only use this as a point of reference rhythmically, in order not to get lost. But to also absorb some of the meaning of the words more directly than people in other orchestras.
Photo: UMP EMB