Kafka Fragments

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 straightforward 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 and Romanian. He became a Hungarian citizen in 1948, two years after settling in Budapest to study at the Franz Liszt Academy, where Ligeti (three years his senior) was a fellow student. Béla Bartók’s stamp is especially evident in his early years, when he earned a reputation as a pianist with his Bartók interpretations in particular.

Kurtág traveled to the West just after the 1956 uprising was crushed by the Soviet Union, spending a period in Paris from 1957 to 1958, when he had the opportunity to study with Olivier Messiaen, Darius Milhaud, and Max Deutsch. While there, he found tremendous stimulation in his discovery of avant-garde trends that had been forbidden back in Budapest—including the music of the Second Viennese School composers at concerts led by the young Boulez. His time in Paris also exposed him to modernist trends in literature and theater: he saw Samuel Beckett’s then-new, landmark play Fin de partie (otherwise known as Endgame) and realized he had found an artistic soulmate, much as he has with Kafka and the poet Friedrich Hölderlin.

Another major epiphany for Kurtág was his life-changing encounter with the art psychologist Marianne Stein. Enduring depression at the time, he went to sessions with Stein in which she guided him through his personal and creative crisis. The composer later recalled: “If my experience with her in Paris was marked by rigor on many levels, she later helped me greatly by doing the exact opposite: by teaching me to take my time and, as it were, to forgive myself. It made me freer.” Stein encouraged Kurtág to compose by going back to the building blocks, and he accordingly found his way into completing his official Opus 1, a string quartet—meanwhile casting aside all of his previous compositions. Kurtág dedicated Kafka Fragments to Stein. Additionally, his evocative, 12-minute orchestral piece Grabstein für Stephan is an elegy for her late husband, the singer Stephan Stein.

Kurtág’s time in the West moreover introduced him to the spatial experiments of Karlheinz Stockhausen, which left a mark. But unlike Ligeti and other colleagues, Kurtág made the decision to return to Budapest. He became a prominent professor in piano and chamber music at the Liszt Academy and is, according to the Kurtág authority Rachel Beckles Willson, “the only composer to have lived through Hungary’s communist regime and still to have achieved international recognition.” That recognition arrived belatedly, and seemingly all at once, resulting in numerous residences in Western Europe—including a period in the 1990s as composer in residence with the Berlin Philharmonic. Kurtág was also named a member of the Berlin Academy of the Arts. He and his wife Márta resided near Bordeaux in the 2000s for over a dozen years but have since returned to Budapest.

In the course of Kurtág’s artistic evolution, another turning point was his discovery of the aphoristic brevity of Anton Webern. Despite any surface similarities to Webern, however, Kurtág’s manner of pared-down expression and fragmentation is completely his own. His music is characterized by a haunting awareness of transience and of the fragility of the effort to communicate.

It’s not surprising that Kurtág has a striking affinity for figures such as Kafka, Beckett, Hölderlin, and Akhmatova. He arrived at his aesthetic of brief, enigmatic, fragmentary yet self-contained utterances not only through an engagement with high Modernism, musical and literary, but—it is worth noting—through the liberating effect of writing educational piano pieces for children, the point of which was to avoid dry method and instead to stimulate the sense of play and fantasy about music-making.

A prominent example is the ongoing collection of piano pieces Jelek, játékok és üzenetek (“Signs, Games, and Messages”), which he began writing in 1973 and performing in recitals, including as a duo with his wife Márta. Later, Kurtág started adding the subtitle “Diary Entries and Personal Messages,” hinting at the self-referential aspect that exists alongside the attitude of creative play and exploration.

Collecting Fragments

During his Paris period, Kurtág also rediscovered the allure of Kafka (especially in The Metamorphosis), who died just two years before the composer’s birth and with whom he shares both his Jewish heritage and his multilingual cultural upbringing. Kurtág saw in him a kindred spirit, and over the following decades he collected random fragments from his writings: not as excerpts from the well-known, published stories and novels, but brief texts that he culled from Kafka’s writing notebooks, diaries, and letters to the Czech journalist and translator Milena Jesenská (with whom he engaged in a soul-baring correspondence). These became the basis for the 40 pieces comprising Kafka Fragments. Kurtág either uses the first words as the title of each piece or appends a title his own invention (for example, “Scene at the Train Station” for No. 10).

With no overarching scheme at first, he began setting a few of these to music in 1985. But soon Kurtág found himself hooked, “like a little boy nibbling at forbidden sweets,” and he completed the work—his longest to that point—on a commission from the Witten Festival for New Chamber Music in 1987. Written specifically for the Hungarian soprano Adrienne Csengery, who with violinist András Keller gave the world premiere at the Witten Festival in April 1987, Kafka Fragments has since become one of Kurtág’s most frequently recorded and performed compositions.

The 40 pieces are divided into four parts, though not symmetrically. About half of the pieces are less than a minute each, while the longest—the above-mentioned No. 20, “Der wahre Weg”—comprises the entirety of Part II.

While Fin de partie, Kurtág’s Beckett opera mentioned above, was so recently introduced, it hearkens back to earlier Beckett-related pieces and, in turn, to a theatricality inherent in Kafka Fragments and even in Kurtág’s purely instrumental, non-programmatic pieces. Indeed, the director Peter Sellars even famously staged Kafka Fragments in 2005 at Carnegie’s then recently-opened Zankel Hall. In an interview with the New York Times, Sellars spoke of Kurtág’s musical universe as Beckett-like in the sense that it expresses “a theater of restraint, of hidden worlds, hidden meanings and hidden emotion, which surface unexpectedly and disappear without a trace.” Kurtág’s instructions call for specific extramusical gestures, such as having the violinist moving between two music stands.

In addition to being regarded as an intimate work of theater, Kafka Fragments might be viewed as at the same time representing a song cycle, a personal diary (for both Kurtág and Kafka), or a duet between the singer and the violinist.

Parallel Universes

Kurtág doesn’t attempt to project an overarching linear narrative onto Kafka’s texts. Instead, his music adds an intensely fascinating layer of commentary on and counterpoint to the Kafka texts, with further “staging” provided by the violin part. Kurtág’s concise gestural language mirrors the narrative economy of Kafka’s sharp perceptions. Both music and words aim an unfaltering gaze into the vulnerable heart of our alienated condition. In similar fashion, the two musicians mutually reinforce their acts of expression of these texts.

They range from miniature parables to imagistic snapshots (“The onlookers freeze as the train goes past” in No. 10, “Scene at the Station”) and brief but indelible flashes of insight (No. 23, “My prison-cell—my fortress”). Stark beauty coexists with the most sardonic humor, and the principle of contrast is countered by a unifying aspect in the recurrent patterns of imagery, such as the metaphor of paths and locomotion. Other images involve the body’s fragility, erotic anxiety, states of exile, and the demands of the creative life. Kurtág’s musical profiles are not bits of old-fashioned “word painting.” They etch out parallel universes of their own. In the very first fragment, for example (“The Good March in Step”), a counterpoint between the simple, mechanical oscillations of the violin and the singer’s freedom of line is established, the latter moving from folksong innocence to giddy leaps. Kurtág alternates between gestures of utmost simplicity and virtuosic extremes that touch on the absurd.

Ghosts from the past also appear—Robert Schumann and J. S. Bach in particular, whose work Kurtág came to know intimately as a pianist—yet always it is Kurtág’s idiosyncratic, strikingly original voice that speaks across the score’s stylistic spectrum: from abrupt, staccato attacks to feather wisps of lyricism, shocking silences to frenzied momentum, folk-like earthiness to ethereal reflection. There are touches of Expressionism (primal shrieks and Sprechstimme) as well as a yearning for a lost Romantic lyricism that successfully avoids sentimentality (No. 18, an homage to Schumann, in the violin’s lofty but aimless flight). Throughout, Kurtág distills a maximum of expressiveness from minimal gestures—while leaving space for the verbal and musical images to reverberate in the private world of each listener.