Soulmates Kurtág’s Kafka Fragments
Thomas May
Last November at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan, György Kurtág made his long-awaited debut on the operatic stage with Fin de partie—at the age of 92. Few composers can match the infinite, painstaking care over the minutest gesture that Kurtág has devoted to his art throughout his lengthy career. He was already 60 when he was completing his Kafka Fragments in 1987: a pivotal achievement in his oeuvre and one for which his unique aesthetic seems almost predestined. Indeed, finding his way has never been easy or straight forward for this highly self-critical composer, whose catalogue had arrived at the modest number of two dozen works with Kafka Fragments. (A total of 71 compositions are currently listed on the music publisher Boosey & Hawkes’s website.) In this context, the words of the 20th number in the cycle— “Der wahre Weg” (“The True Path”), which comprises Part II and which is dedicated as an “hommage-message” to Pierre Boulez—seem especially resonant: “The true path goes by way of a rope that is suspended not high up, but rather just above the ground. Its purpose seems to be more to make one stumble than to be walked on.” The multifaceted layers of suggestion that emanate from these texts provide an uncannily apt analogue for the deceptive simplicity of Kurtág’s own style. Like fellow Hungarian and close friend György Ligeti, Kurtág has never lost his sense of wonder at the most basic acts of musical speech—at the phenomenon of sounds put together to make something beyond themselves. Epiphanies in Paris Born to Hungarian parents in a part of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire that was ceded to Romania after the First World War, Kurtág grew up speaking Hungarian 13
