Kafka-Fragmente

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Image courtesy of Liceu

Of today's composers, none is more to the point than Hungarian György Kurtág. With his own highly original aesthetic, his Kafka-Fragmente, written between July 6, 1985 and March 9, 1987, stands out as one of the great lieder cycles. With a duration of 60 minutes, 40 miniatures are grouped into four sections that gravitate round a main motif: the search for a path in the labyrinth of existence.

Written from excerpts from a diary, letters and a posthumous text by the author of the process, the Kafka-Fragmente are presented as an intimate confession without a narrative thread. Kurtág has entrusted a soprano and a violin soloist with this fascinating kaleidoscope of emotional landscapes in which humor, sensuality, desire and tenderness all come to the fore. A rare opportunity to bring Isabelle Faust and Anna Prohaska together on stage, both at the peak of their careers.

Author of a single opera, Fin de partie, premiered at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan (2018) and written from a play by Samuel Beckett, in his Kafka-Fragmente Kurtág pushes the performers to the limit of their interpretative and expressive possibilities. The soprano must bring nuance to all facets of her art, while the violinist must search for colors and textures ranging from stridency to sweetness. Each morceau becomes a cosmos of human emotions and inner states that oscillates between joy and hope, passing through the awareness of living with the certainty of death, humor and irony, an imaginary theatre of existential fragility on the essence of human beings.

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