The Making of an Opera: Samuel Beckett, Fin de partie by György Kurtág

In a gripping narrative, Arnaud Arbet traces the long genesis of György Kurtág’s opera Samuel Beckett Fin de partie, composed between 2010 and 2018 after Samuel Beckett’s play of the same name. For five years, he was the great Hungarian composer’s closest interlocutor. He went over every page of music with Kurtág as the composer played and sang it to him, advised him on French prosody, and encouraged and spurred him on in his tireless quest for expressive truth and perfection. He also took part in choosing the singers, with whom he worked and rehearsed ahead of the premiere. Postponed year after year, it finally took place in November 2018 at La Scala in Milan, and the production was revived shortly afterward in Amsterdam.

The entire narrative is shadowed by the serious health problems of Márta, the composer’s wife and collaborator, which give the work a particularly poignant resonance, so intimately are life and creation intertwined in it. Not only do the characters of Nell and Nagg refer to the couple formed by Márta and György Kurtág, but the composer also projects himself into the figures of Hamm and Clov.

Arnaud Arbet thus takes us into the composer’s workshop and reveals, as closely as possible to its making, the structure and meaning of an opera that stands as a major milestone in the history of the genre. In an appendix, he documents Kurtág’s working sessions with the singers and offers valuable insights for analyzing the work.