Alemania

Something out of nothing

Jesse Simon
jueves, 23 de enero de 2025
Erath, Fin de partie © 2025 by Monika Rittershaus Erath, Fin de partie © 2025 by Monika Rittershaus
Berlin, domingo, 12 de enero de 2025. Staatsoper Unter den Linden. Kurtág: Fin de partie. Johannes Erath, director. Laurent Naouri (Hamm), Bo Skovhus (Clov), Dalia Schaechter (Nell), and Stephan Rügamer (Nagg). Staatskapelle Berlin. Alexander Soddy, conductor
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‘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.

Kurtág: Fin de partie. Alexander Soddy, conductor. Johannes Erath, director. Berlin, Staatsoper Unter den Linden, January 2025. © 2025 by Monika Rittershaus.Kurtág: Fin de partie. Alexander Soddy, conductor. Johannes Erath, director. Berlin, Staatsoper Unter den Linden, January 2025. © 2025 by Monika Rittershaus.

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.

Kurtág: Fin de partie. Alexander Soddy, conductor. Johannes Erath, director. Berlin, Staatsoper Unter den Linden, January 2025. © 2025 by Monika Rittershaus.Kurtág: Fin de partie. Alexander Soddy, conductor. Johannes Erath, director. Berlin, Staatsoper Unter den Linden, January 2025. © 2025 by Monika Rittershaus.

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.

Kurtág: Fin de partie. Alexander Soddy, conductor. Johannes Erath, director. Berlin, Staatsoper Unter den Linden, January 2025. © 2025 by Monika Rittershaus.Kurtág: Fin de partie. Alexander Soddy, conductor. Johannes Erath, director. Berlin, Staatsoper Unter den Linden, January 2025. © 2025 by Monika Rittershaus.

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.

Kurtág: Fin de partie. Alexander Soddy, conductor. Johannes Erath, director. Berlin, Staatsoper Unter den Linden, January 2025. © 2025 by Monika Rittershaus.Kurtág: Fin de partie. Alexander Soddy, conductor. Johannes Erath, director. Berlin, Staatsoper Unter den Linden, January 2025. © 2025 by Monika Rittershaus.

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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