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Wiener Staatsoper

Tenor (+3)

Charles Workman

Nagg

Contralto (+7)

Hilary Summers

Nell

Bass-baritone (+2)

Philippe Sly

Hamm

Baritone (+8)

Georg Nigl

Clov

Stage director

Stage director (+5)

Herbert Fritsch

Costume designer

Lighting designer

Friedrich Rom

Orchestra

Vienna State Opera Orchestra

Conductor

Conductor (+3)

Simone Young

Vienna State Opera

Four figures vegetate in a hostile, almost uninhabitable landscape: Clov and Hamm, Nagg and Nell.

Hamm, in a wheelchair, is served by Clov, who can still walk a little. Hamm's parents Nell and Nagg have been living in (garbage) bins since they lost their legs in a bicycle accident. These four move between the continuous return of the unchangeable and the memory of "the past" by tyrannizing and flattering each other, begging and cursing, telling and interrupting.With his "Scènes et monologues", György Kurtág succeeds in creating a stunning variation on Samuel Beckett's absurd play. His orchestra, which is in the largest (and unusual) line-up and is forced to play the quietest, often chamber music-like moments, is in dialogue with just four soloists, for whom the composer has achieved something that was perhaps only possible through decades of work on Beckett's play: an incredible precision in the expression of the incomprehensible as a musical penetration and reflection of language. As if by the way, Kurtág gives justice to that aspect of Beckett's text that has often had a hard time in the existentialist performance tradition: the pitch-black, profound humor.
György Kurtág had seen Beckett's Fin de Partie in Paris in 1957, the year it was premiered, and since then he has been working on the work, which he once said, along with Waiting for Godot, was his "bible". Kurtág wrote for the opera between 2010 and 2017, and the work was premiered at La Scala in Milan in 2018. Kurtág, who made his operatic debut with Fin de Partie at the age of 92, described the premiered version as a "versione non definitiva". The composition, which was also dramaturgically convincing, was based on around two-thirds of Beckett's play; the composer wanted to reserve the right to set other parts of the text, which was so important to him, to music. The Austrian premiere at the Vienna State Opera in September 2024, the third new production of the work, is also based on the "versione non definitiva": It cannot be ruled out that Kurtág, who continues to compose regularly, will set further "scenes and monologues" from Beckett's play to music.

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