Kurtág: Fin de Partie. Frode Olsen, baritone; Zsolt Haja, baritone; Hilary Summers, alto; Leonardo Cortellazzi, tenor. Danubia Orchestra; Markus Stenz, conductor. BMC 363. Total time: 114 minutes.
DIGITAL REVIEW — BMC Records, from the Budapest Music Center, has released the inaugural recording of a contemporary masterpiece: György Kurtág’s Fin de Partie, his first opera, adapted from the grim tragicomedy by Samuel Beckett. The album captures a live 2023 performance by the Danubia Orchestra at Müpa Budapest, with three of the four original singers from the work’s La Scala premiere in 2018 and conductor Markus Stenz. It is a resounding success that documents the venerable Kurtág — he turned 100 in February 2026 — at the height of his powers.
The story of the long gestation of Fin de Partie (Endgame in Beckett’s own English translation) has been well documented. Kurtág composed the opera over seven years, completing it at the age of 92. He had been living with the original play since 1957, the year he saw a performance in Paris. The opera’s subtitle is scènes et monologues, meaning that Kurtág, ever the painstaking composer and a master of musical aphorisms, craftily selected the parts most suitable for his operatic vision.
The music is spare and unassuming, reflecting the composer’s knowledge that the smallest and choicest musical configurations and instrumental groupings are ideal for enhancing the emotional resonance of Beckett’s scenes without overwhelming them.
The score calls for a relatively large orchestra, but, true to his style, Kurtág deploys it in Webernesque dabs and occasional bursts, timed with precision to fit the stop-go deployment of the monologues, which make up the bulk of the piece. Patience is both a requirement — from audience and performers alike — and an inherent virtue of the opera. (In the libretto, there are no fewer than 134 instances of the performance direction un temps — a pause.)
The Danubia Orchestra accompanies the singers like a chamber ensemble calibrated to execute a highly pointillistic score from which the main motifs and melodic strands unfurl, some of which are delightfully simple. Take the catchiest of them, a bubbly waltz that gets chopped abruptly, first heard after the prologue — borrowed from Beckett’s later poem Roundelay — and revisited in several guises. It is a “banal melody with intentionally poor harmonization,” writes Gergely Fazekas in his liner notes.
Kurtág makes the woodwinds and brasses most prominent throughout, especially in the low end of their registers, with solo passages for tuba, bassoon, and clarinet in tandem with the voices. The score gains much from the addition of two bayans (Russian accordions), piano, cimbalom, and six percussionists, all performed with precision.
And the story? Can an album version of Fin de Partie, an opera so intimately and painstakingly connected to its source material, stand on its own as pure music? Only if you follow the text and stage directions, which Kurtág keeps in the libretto, adding some of his own. That might be paradoxical, given that not much happens in the way of a traditional plot line. This is the story of Hamm, sung by baritone Frode Olsen; his mother Nell (contralto Hilary Summers); his father Nagg (tenor Leonardo Cortellazzi); and his lackey Clov (baritone Zsolt Haja). If you’re familiar with the devastating beauty behind the tomfoolery and wordplay of Waiting for Godot and the arresting visual design for Play, you know what to expect.
The gag in Fin de Partie, one of Beckett’s many nonsensical portrayals of the meaninglessness of the human condition, is that while Hamm is old and blind and bound to a wheelchair, Clov can’t sit or stand still. The elderly parents are each confined to a cylindrical ashcan, having lost their legs in a biking accident of yore. There is much nostalgia, represented by the incipient waltz motif mentioned above, and a lot of bickering; these are characters who cannot stand each other. But they’re psychologically stuck, unable to break free, till sweet death might one day do them part. Although Nell does die, nothing comes that easy in Beckett’s phantasmagoric universe.
In the notes, Fazekas tells us that during the 2017 rehearsals, Stenz, the orchestra, and the singers (except for Haja, whose Clov was sung by Leigh Melrose) performed the entire piece in the presence of Kurtág. All four singers inhabit the otherworldly dimensions of the opera, equally funny or sad, absurd, and disheartening. It is evident from the recording that they have internalized not only the music but also the wry humor, tone, and rhythms that Kurtág asks for in the score and the libretto, including all the yawns, stuttered syllables, and stipulated vocal mannerisms.
The performances are exceptional, particularly that of Summers, with her dark-hued, glowering tone, and of Cortellazzi, with the multilayered parts for his character. In the comical “The World and the Trousers” section, he sings as the libretto specifies in the literary manner, if you can picture it, of “’Poldy’ Bloom (from Ulysses) singing a Jewish-Irish-Scottish ballad,” pulling off the parodic affectation required.
“Worthless moments, always worthless,” mourns Hamm toward the end. “But they add up, they add up, and bring the story to a close.” Exactly what those moments add up to, in Beckett’s world, is open to interpretation. But from the perspective of the opera, there is no debate: They amount to a perfect fusion of music and drama, only possible through Kurtág’s singular artistic vision.
