Alemania
Something out of nothing
Jesse Simon

‘Nothing is funnier than unhappiness’. The line, spoken a third of the way through Fin de partie, offers a reasonable encapsulation of Samuel Beckett’s œuvre, a world in which the miseries of its characters offer a reliable fount of blackest amusement. Yet a different reading of the sentence reveals an even greater truth: the only thing funnier than unhappiness in Beckett is nothingness itself. There is an enormous trove of humor in the uninflected emptiness that pervades Beckett’s novels, plays, poems, and even his lone foray into film (the appropriately titled Film, starring Buster Keaton), and there are few other authors of the twentieth century who devoted so much effort to discovering just how much of nothing could be placed into works of narrative art.
György Kurtág’s compositions may be less
fixated on absolute nullity, but his spare approach to vocal, chamber and
orchestral music has yielded a corpus of profound economy, in which
understatement and silence can play as large a role as conventional events. In
1991 his long fascination with Beckett yielded What is the Word, a
compelling, tersely-argued fifteen minute work for choir and chamber ensemble, which
was followed a few years later by …pas à pas – nulle part…, a group
of smaller settings for baritone, string trio and percussion.
Yet the obvious affinity with Beckett
displayed in those pieces was only a prelude to Kurtág’s extraordinary
adaptation of Fin de partie, which has spent the years since its
première in Milan in 2018 establishing its reputation as one of the key operas
of the early twenty-first century. After appearing on stages in Paris,
Amsterdam, Dortmund and Vienna, it had its long-awaited Berlin première at the
Staatsoper Unter den Linden in a new production directed by Johannes Erath and
conducted by Alexander Soddy.
Although the opera remains faithful to Beckett’s text in its original French version (Beckett translated the work into English himself), the resulting work is very much Kurtág’s own. Instead of offering a scene-by-scene adaptation, the libretto consists of twelve extended fragments from the play – Kurtág’s own subtitle is ‘scenes and monologues’ – plus a prologue consisting of a setting of Beckett’s poem ‘Roundelay’ and an orchestral epilogue. Kurtág’s choice of scenes necessarily alters the dynamic of the original: while Hamm’s monomania remains at the conceptual (and physical) centre of the opera, the subtle complexities of his relationship with Clov are downplayed, while the reminiscences of Nell and Nagg have commensurately greater prominence. Yet the opera retains an unmistakable kinship with Beckett’s desolate, darkly humorous world in the futility of its action, in its close attention to the sonic possibilities of language, and in its remarkable fidelity to the play’s charged pauses.
The staging of Johannes Erath, although
largely successful in its approach to the drama and frequently dazzling in its
visual imagery, seemed more troubled by the legacy of Beckett: at its best, it
displayed a determination to maintain the story’s sense of the playfully absurd
while breaking away from its inherent inertia and claustrophobia; but for every
inspired flourish, there was a moment, or sometimes even a whole scene, that
used unnecessary visual distractions – mainly pre-filmed video projections – to
the detriment of the opera’s deadpan humor.
The use of three sets – although the first
two were variations on the same theme – had the effect of dividing opera’s
fourteen fragments into three distinct acts. The first set, a small, shabby
room with two dustbins on the side and the wheelchair-bound Hamm in the centre,
could have been lifted directly from Beckett’s own stage directions, and the
action, from Clov’s pantomime to midway through the first appearance of Nagg
and Nell, followed the libretto with reasonable rigor. If Mr Erath was less
concerned with creating an atmosphere of unbearable stasis in the opening
scenes – there was always something going on to upset the stillness – his
ability to enliven the dialogues with stage action was nowhere more apparent
than in the lively bin-bound dialogue between Nagg and Nell.
With the appearance of Nell in the space
between the set and the orchestra – not merely as a torso but a full-figure
character – the staging made a decisive turn away from traditional Beckett
into its own uncharted territory. Nagg was also allowed to appear at the front
of the stage to tell the trouser story, although the backdrop lowered in front
of the set with a large cut-out circle seemed intended to suggest that we were
watching the action from the interior of Nagg’s dustbin. But if the second part
of the staging maintained a thematic connection with the first, by the time the
curtain went up on the third part – in which the stage was dominated by a large
ferris wheel tipped over on its side – it was clear we were never going back to
the hermetic world of the shabby room.
The final scenes, in which Hamm, now
liberated from his wheelchair and dressed in a sparkly dinner jacket, said
farewell to Clov and delivered his final monologue were visually impressive
– the set alone was a notable achievement – but the action felt strangely
disconnected from anything that had come before; it was as though we had been
transported into a different staging. The third part was, admittedly,
preferable to the distracting video projections of the second: indeed, Hamm’s
monologue achieved a stasis that bordered on serenity, and the final flicker of
life that accompanied the epilogue was curiously moving. But for all its
memorable imagery, it was difficult to determine how much the staging was
attempting to take the work in new directions, and how much it was merely
intimidated by the opera’s defiantly untheatrical negation of action.
Although the small cast had no weaknesses,
Laurent Naouri was able to position Hamm at the centre of the evening through
his vocal presence – even immobile in his wheelchair he commanded the stage
– but even more so by means of his remarkable engagement with the textural
details of the role’s vocal part. Hamm’s first monologue was a tour de force of
yawns and groans, all perfectly integrated into the rhythms of Kurtág’s music.
The story of the beggar was no less impressive: Mr Naouri’s articulate
delivery, full of subtle inflection, was supported by an arsenal of equally
nuanced physical reactions. Yet in the final monologue, an extended exercise in
immobility, Mr Naouri managed to captivate the audience through the magnetism
of his voice alone.
Stephan Rügamer, an excellent physical comedian
as well as a versatile character tenor, brought to the role of Nagg an
infectious energy that served as a counterforce to Hamm’s all-consuming tyranny.
Although confined to a dustbin in his first scene, his ability to animate the
character using only head, shoulders and voice was so compelling that it was
almost a shame the director decided to liberate him from his prison. Yet even
when free to roam the stage, Mr Rügamer’s combination of unforced phrasing and deft
comedic timing yielded numerous moments of inspiration: the trousers story
emerged as a perfect anti-joke, there was a notable undercurrent of contempt in
his description of Hamm’s childhood, and he was able to summon genuine pathos
in his discovery of Nell’s death.
Bo Skovhus, as Clov, delivered a very
different kind of physical comedy: the deliberate mannerisms of his movements
– especially in the opening pantomime, which saw him struggle with a
ladder and take exaggerated steps to avoid a creaky floorboard – seemed
indebted to the meticulously orchestrated set-ups of silent film. Yet there was
a malevolent streak in his character that flickered through the opening
monologue and appeared more fully-formed in his farewell to Hamm. And while
Nell may have the opera’s smallest role, Dalia Schaechter was a worthy sparring
partner in the scenes with Nagg, and delivered a distinguished reading of the
opera’s opening poem, evoking the stony stillness of the text.
Throughout the evening Alexander Soddy
maintained a careful control over the score’s subtle events and finely-wrought
pauses. His ability to time the music with the stage action in the pantomime
had the exacting precision of a Warner Bros. cartoon, and his appreciation of
Kurtág’s rhythms allowed the monologues and dialogues to emerge with idiomatic
clarity. If one longed for slightly more lyricism in Nell’s evocation of the
capsized boat, Mr Soddy captured the work’s endlessly varied instrumental
textures and infused the orchestral epilogue with a quiet grandeur.
Indeed, if the staging seemed at times to be struggling against – and occasionally overcoming – the legacy of Beckett, the musical performances served mostly to highlight the singular achievement of Kurtág. While Fin de partie could not be described as conventional entertainment, the economic brilliance of its musical language and the subtle force of its drama make it a remarkably rewarding experience for anyone willing to surrender to its particular vision. It is, one suspects, a work that will continue to reveal different facets on each new encounter.
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