When experience comes to us in fragments, we often set about building them into a pattern that can be easily and neatly understood. That’s part of our human effort to understand the world: the need to find an interpretive key to a confusing set of experiences, but what if? What if, as in Samuel Beckett’s pathbreaking play Waiting for Godot, the key — like Godot — never comes?
Contemplating a small fragment of information can yield rich discovery, and become in itself the key to enlarged understanding. That’s the duality that makes Hungarian composer György Kurtág’s Kafka Fragments (1985-1986) so evocative and revelatory. Kurtág’s exquisitely detailed gestures, created with startling focus and purity of utterance, suggest much more than they say.
Kafka Fragments comprises of 40 settings of textual fragments from Franz Kafka’s diaries and notebooks, many of which were fragments in their original form. Kurtág gave them titles and structured them into a 70-minute piece for soprano and violinist, dividing the fragments into four sections based on their musical rather than textual relationships.
In a 2005 interview in The New York Times, director Peter Sellars mentioned the connection between Kurtág’s musical language and Beckett’s theatrical style. (Kurtág himself set Beckett texts to music twice in the 1990s.) And there is much in Sellars’ theatrical setting of the work that is reminiscent of Beckett: the spareness and concision, the investigation of the absurdness of a human interior world, and a sense of comic within the profound. As a longtime artistic director and colleague of Dawn Upshaw, Sellars was able to enlist her as a collaborator and performer. The soprano is joined onstage by violinist Geoff Nuttall of the St. Lawrence String Quartet, now in residence at Stanford.
Peter Sellars
Sellars’ staging takes the piece out of the recital hall and onto the stage by giving the performers personas and by projecting a series of still photographs by New York-based photographer David Michalek on a screen behind them. Cal Performances presents the resulting, critically acclaimed work at Zellerbach Hall this coming Sunday and Monday, Nov. 23 and 24.
Accepting the Challenge
As with many contemporary works, the piece demands a lot from its performers. In an interview, Upshaw explained to me why it took several years to agree to sing the work after Sellars proposed the project to her many years ago. "For some of us when we hear something very new, that's in a musical language that is somewhat foreign to us, it takes time for us to understand its mode of expression, and I think that was the case for me," she said. The emotional world the piece evoked was also unsettling: "I could hear a certain amount of pain in what it was expressing."
Dawn Upshaw
Photo by Hiroyuki Ito
Nuttall agreed that the piece is daunting. "It's borderline the hardest thing I've ever played," he admitted. "But it's the sort of 'hard' where you can't get mad at him because it's all playable. It's not like some over-the-top new music that's just an exercise in writing something unplayable."
For Nuttall the difficulties lie in how the piece pushes the boundaries of the violin. He finds that it's a challenge to "come close to some of the pitches and the rhythms. There are four or five fragments that you could spend your whole life working on and still not get them as clean as you'd like, and then there are little moments that go by in a heartbeat that are really tricky but they go by so quickly that you hardly see them, and they're gone."
Upshaw had to not only master the music's complexities but memorize them, as well. "It's essential that I have it memorized, but that's a huge task," says Upshaw. "It's the only way to go in terms of what Peter Sellars is asking of me, and I'm very sure that if I were looking at the text, I couldn't express and really inhabit the text in the way that we've all discussed."
As challenging as the piece has been, both performers agree that
Kafka Fragments is a "magnificent" piece of music. "The detail in it," explains Upshaw, "both the musical detail and the detail of expression, is really astounding." Nuttall finds the music" almost like distilled emotion."
Layers of Fragments
If Kafka Fragments is demanding for musicians, it can be even more unreachable for an audience that hears it only once, and fleetingly, in the concert hall. Photographer Michalek recalls that it was a desire to reach out to the audience and make the music more easily accessible that motivated Sellars' staging of the piece. "He and Dawn felt there was something extraordinary in this piece but that it needed to be contextualized." He remembered Sellars’ description of the soprano’s theatrical role as "some person in her home, which would be described abstractly, perhaps as just a square of light on the floor. And that inside that home she would do all the things that someone does in her home — wash dishes, sweep, sleep, clean."
"It's all housework," added Upshaw, "and as I'm doing these things I am distracted with these thoughts — these fragments — and I respond to them in the moment." She laughs warmly, fully, as she adds, "and that's certainly not what Mr. Kurtág had in mind. But I think it works incredibly well. It's kind of a genius idea."
Geoff Nuttall
Even though the burden of acting is placed on Upshaw, the violinist also inhabits a role. Barefoot and bearded, Nuttall is "supposed to be like a homeless street musician." But this wasn't the original staging plan, which had the violinist hidden behind a screen. Michalek recalls that this changed after the first rehearsal, when Nuttall walked on stage: "His hair was shoulder length and he had a beard ... he was wearing a loose-fitting cowboy shirt ... and with his violin slung over his shoulder like a gun, he looked like Clint Eastwood with a violin." His kinetic playing style gave the visual aspect of the staging an added dynamism. Relaxing in an ice cream shop afterward, Sellars remarked to Michalek, "Well, that changes everything."
And so Geoff Nuttall came out from behind the screen. For the most part, however, it is Upshaw who is acting while Nuttall focuses on the score, remaining outside the square of light that demarks the singer's "home." This allows him to use a digital music pad, a technical aid that helps him discreetly negotiate some 80 pages of score and to remain the musical ballast of the performance. Upshaw comments, "Thank goodness one of us has the score."
Visual Keys
Michalek's photos make up the final layer to Sellars' production. All of Kurtág's music is highly descriptive to the text, beginning with the two-note trudging of the violin that opens the first fragment — "The good march in step. Unaware of them, the others dance around them the dances of time" — and that reappears throughout the work as a kind of human metronome marking the passing of time and of life. The economy and accuracy with which Kurtág composes these descriptions makes them easy to visualize but also endangers the realization of any visualization with the possibility of banal repetition and predictable illustration.
Michalek's photos, like the music, are linked closely to Kafka's dreamlike imagery. Most, but not all, of the photos were conceived and created in concert with members of The Bridge, a day facility for men and women who have been living with severe and debilitating mental illness. The projected black-and-white stills are both delicate and moving in their tonal quality, but their most salient quality is that they are infused with connections — connections to the music, to light and dark, to the human body and its various contexts, such as rooms, objects, the outdoors. Michalek's work is the final layer to a production that picks up on Kurtág's initial impulse to clarify, while deepening by association, enigmatic fragments of human thought and feeling.
As Upshaw explains it, "What Peter, I think, is hoping for in this staged version is this idea that we all can relate to these fragments, and that we can be moved in some way, or that we can connect to the thoughts and ideas that are being expressed. ... It's not so much to tell us about Kafka — and that's not what Kurtág was writing about, either. It's about the sharing of ideas and the expression of thought that touches someone when they hear it or read it, and that changes you somehow. Whether it's an awareness, or a beauty, or a pain, it's something that you somehow honor because you understand it."
Jaime Robles is a writer and reviewer. Over the past 10 years she has worked as a librettist for composer Peter Josheff, and their vocal music has been performed by Earplay, Harvest of Song, and as part of Goat Hall productions, StageMedia productions, and the American Composers Forum Salon. She recently finished a short opera libretto for composer Ann Callaway.
Kafka Fragments comprises of 40 settings of textual fragments from Franz Kafka’s diaries and notebooks, many of which were fragments in their original form. Kurtág gave them titles and structured them into a 70-minute piece for soprano and violinist, dividing the fragments into four sections based on their musical rather than textual relationships.
In a 2005 interview in The New York Times, director Peter Sellars mentioned the connection between Kurtág’s musical language and Beckett’s theatrical style. (Kurtág himself set Beckett texts to music twice in the 1990s.) And there is much in Sellars’ theatrical setting of the work that is reminiscent of Beckett: the spareness and concision, the investigation of the absurdness of a human interior world, and a sense of comic within the profound. As a longtime artistic director and colleague of Dawn Upshaw, Sellars was able to enlist her as a collaborator and performer. The soprano is joined onstage by violinist Geoff Nuttall of the St. Lawrence String Quartet, now in residence at Stanford.
Michalek's photos, like the music, are linked closely to Kafka's dreamlike imagery. Most, but not all, of the photos were conceived and created in concert with members of The Bridge, a day facility for men and women who have been living with severe and debilitating mental illness. The projected black-and-white stills are both delicate and moving in their tonal quality, but their most salient quality is that they are infused with connections — connections to the music, to light and dark, to the human body and its various contexts, such as rooms, objects, the outdoors. Michalek's work is the final layer to a production that picks up on Kurtág's initial impulse to clarify, while deepening by association, enigmatic fragments of human thought and feeling.
As Upshaw explains it, "What Peter, I think, is hoping for in this staged version is this idea that we all can relate to these fragments, and that we can be moved in some way, or that we can connect to the thoughts and ideas that are being expressed. ... It's not so much to tell us about Kafka — and that's not what Kurtág was writing about, either. It's about the sharing of ideas and the expression of thought that touches someone when they hear it or read it, and that changes you somehow. Whether it's an awareness, or a beauty, or a pain, it's something that you somehow honor because you understand it."