The clownishness as a pretext: In his production of “Fin de partie,” Johannes Erath is looking for the theatrical trick.
Photo: Monika Rittershaus
This opera is a double miracle. At first hardly anyone expected it to happen. Intendant Alexander Pereira, the client, had to keep putting off the audience and take the project with him from one of his places of work to the next several times, from Zurich to Salzburg, and finally to Milan, where a “versione non definitiva” premiered at the Scala in 2018 experienced.
György Kurtág was already 92 years old. It also seemed difficult to imagine how the master of miniature, succinctness and omission would be able to write music for a full-length piece. His Beckett cycle “… pas à pas – nulle part…” for baritone, string trio and percussion, completed in 1998, consists of fragments that rarely last longer than a minute. However, with “Fin de partie”, his adaptation of Samuel Beckett’s “Endgame”, Kurtág has created a convincing, theater-ready piece – without any aesthetic concessions.
It is relatively rare that contemporary operas are granted a life beyond the premiere, which is often dutifully completed. Kurtág’s Beckett opera is well on its way to asserting itself in the repertoire. After the German premiere in Dortmund, it also had its premiere at the Vienna State Opera last year (director: Herbert Fritsch, conductor: Simone Young).
At the Berlin State Opera Unter den Linden, where contemporary music is still difficult and not even the premiere took place in front of a full house, Alexander Soddy at the conductor’s podium ensured an exact and nuanced implementation of the score, which included a large orchestral apparatus – expanded to include a cimbalom Hungarian dulcimer, and bayan, an Eastern European accordion – used almost exclusively for chamber music.
This is music on the verge of silence, a long pearl necklace of fragments held together by the robustness of Beckett’s French text, which Kurtág follows meticulously and responds to with rich musical gestures. “The piece is about pauses and the standstill of time,” says Soddy in the program, and he is able to implement this coherently. But the stagnation is countered by composition, as it were, while Beckett’s tragicomic characters invest their remaining energy in power games and humiliations when they are not overtaken by sentimentality.
The wheelchair-bound, blind Hamm (Laurent Naouri), his servant Clov (Bo Skovhus) and the couple Nell (Dalia Schaechter) and Nagg (Stephan Rügamer), who are stuck in garbage cans, are grateful roles that are brilliantly cast in Berlin. The way Kurtág composes for voices, emphasizing the text instead of covering it up with the orchestra, is also almost a miracle.
Samuel Beckett’s plays do not have a good status in contemporary business. Because they have to be implemented precisely, they are not suitable as templates for stage theater and trash orgies. This of course also applies to György Kurtág’s musical theater. You could experience how to bring it convincingly onto the stage in Vienna last autumn: What you could see was a sober, almost abstract spatial situation that underwent subtle changes over the course of the evening, and Herbert Fritsch’s direction impressed with its intelligent direction of characters, used slapstick elements surprisingly sparingly and then all the more effective.
Johannes Erath, on the other hand, the director in Berlin, apparently did not want to accept the immobility of three of the four characters or could not face the task and soon “freed” them from the garbage cans or from the wheelchair. He doesn’t seem to trust Beckett’s or Kurtág’s dramaturgy. The room in which the garbage cans and Hamm’s wheelchair are located and which only Clov can leave is, in Erath, a stage on the stage; films and projections are used – increased to effective arbitrariness when Hamm and Clov appear in the last scene a Ferris wheel tilted on its side, on which light bulbs begin to glow, as the orchestra builds up to one of the rare tutti passages at the end.
Yes, there is something dominantly clownish about Beckett, and the spheres of the fair and the circus were not without their influence on him. Erath, of course, uses this as a pretext for a scenic opulence (stage: Kaspar Glarner) that is not appropriate for the fragility of this opera. He says: »When someone is sitting in a wheelchair or in a garbage can, it seems concert-like on the opera stage, but it is not a scene, no matter how well interpreted it may be. That’s why we have to come up with a trick that contains a theatricality or a newly invented form of absurdity. Better directors have already proven that this is not the case. But the performance history of “Fin de partie” has only just begun.
Next performances: January 15th, 21st and 24th
www.staatsoper-berlin.de
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