Karl Katschthaler

Kurtg on Stage? Between Pure Music and Latent Musical Theatre

In July 1985, Kurtg interrupted his work on a piano concerto, which he had started in 1980, in order to give a master class at the Bartk Seminar in Szombathely. At the same time he began to work on Kafka Fragments op 24. This break is visible in the general rest of the Kafka Fragment No. 17 and in its title, beneath which we read: gret Kocsis Zoltnnak: lesz zongoraverseny. 1 From the perspective of the author and the addressee Zoltn Kocsis is this sentence, which in contrast to other annotations is not translated into the scores primary language German, in their common mother tongue, from the perspective of the recipients, who dont speak this language, it is in the secret language Hungarian. In English it would read: Promise to Zoltn Kocsis: there will be a piano concerto. With reference to this history of the Kafka Fragments Alan E. Williams speaks of them as forbidden fruit.2 Following the suggestion by Williams, we can find a further violation of a ban. He referred to an interview, which Istvn Balzs has led with singer Adrienne Csengery in 1985. In this interview, Balzs assumes a latent, or as he puts it, repressed theatricality of the music of Kurtg. Csengery first points out that she and Kurtg have never spoken about this issue and that Kurtg was not interested in the stage at all. In the course of the interview, however, she concedes that Kurtg's music is latently theatrical and even goes so far to speak of camouflaged operas. She confirms Kurtg's interest in opera, even in writing an opera. On the other hand, she speaks explicitly of the prohibition of theatrical means: At the rehearsals of op. 17 Kurtg had regarded all kinds of theatrical and gestural means as forbidden, everything had to be expressed through the voice alone. In "Kafka Fragments", however, Kurtg explicitly calls for the use of gestures, facial expressions and - graphically notated in fragment no. 12 in the third part of the work3 even proxemics.

1 2

Kurtg Gyrgy: Kafka-Fragmente fr Sopran und Violine, Op. 24, Editio Musica Budapest, 1992, p. 18 Williams, Alan E.: Music Theatre and Presence in Some Works of Gyrgy Kurtg, in: Studia Musicologica Scientiorum Hungaricae 43/3-4 (2002), pp. 359-370, here: p. 366 3 Kurtg: Kafka-Fragmente, 1992, S. 44-51

Figure 1: Kurtg: Kafka Fragments, Part I, No. 12: positions

The graphic instruction there can be read as follows: set up two music stands left and right of the singer. The violinist stands initially at right-hand side of the singer from the position of the audience and plays the violin II with scordatura, i.e. in the specified pitch different to the normal one. About halfway through the piece the violinist has not only to replace violin II with scordatura with violin I in normal pitch, but at the same time has to walk around the singer on the stage to access his new location left-hand of the singer. Then of course there is no possibility to retune the violin during the piece, violin I must be already on site 2 throughout the first part of the piece and, so to speak, wait there for the violinist. The violin with the scordatura in contrast has to be laid down by the violinist in the middle of the piece in order to be able to take up the other violin and to continue playing on her. This change of the violin and the site coincides, as Williams observed, with the change between Schumanns famous two characters, the objectiveobserving Eusebius and the subjective-emotional Florestan. But this proxemic direction to change violin and to walk across the stage is not only the visual representation of the two characters, as Williams notes,4 but with the presentation of the waiting violin, the laying down of the first played violin and the picking up of the second it arises a kind of mini-drama about latency and activation.It has to be remembered once again that the "Kafka Fragments" represent a multi-layered, complex autobiographical production including the game with doubles.5 Latency and activation, identity layers figured as doubles are staged both musically as different pitches of
4 5

Williams: 2002, p. 367 Cf. Zenck, Martin: Inszenierung von Authentizitt in den Kafka-Fragmenten von Gyrgy Kurtg nebst einem Prolegomeneon zu einer Theorie der Authentizitt im musikalischen Kunstwerk, in: Fischer-Lichte, Erika et al. (ed.): Inszenierung von Authentizitt (= Theatralitt Band 1), 2. bera. Aufl., Tbingen und Basel 2007, pp. 129146, here: pp. 142, 143

the instrument and proxemic-theatrically as change of the instrument and relocation of the musician. In this way the theatrical comes to the fore in the "Kafka Fragments" in places, as we must emphasize, in order not to create the wrong impression that all or even most of the fragments would contain similar instructions. Nevertheless, it would be wrong to see a simple reversal in this, as it seems to be the case with Williams, when he writes regarding the fourth fragment in the first part:
The only aural contribution the singer makes is the final breathed ruhelos. Thus whereas in the Troussova cycle Kurtg refused all theatrical gesture, requiring that everything should be expressed through the voice alone, here Kurtg allows only the theatrical gesture.6

Of course Kurtg doesnt prohibit the musical and aural in the Kafka Fragments instead of the gestural-visual. The former clearly dominates overall, but even for the 4th fragment Williams can only maintain his reversal hypothesis at the expense of a philological mistake: It is not true that the singer only breathes the word restless at the end of the piece, she sings it before on the three notes b-flat', a' and g-sharp'.

Figure 2: Kurtg: Kafka Fragments, Part I, No. 4, Restless

Since the dynamic indication of this passage is forte with crescendo, there is no reason to believe that the singing here should be inaudible.7 It thus seems plausible to me that the ban is not simply

Williams: 2002, p. 366

repealed and replaced by a new, antithetical one, but that the original ban on the theatrical remains in force, but is violated several times. Op. 30a with the Hungarian title Sikls Istvn tolmcsolsban Beckett Smuel zeni Monyk Ildikval: [Samuel Beckett sends a message through Ildik Monyk in Istvn Sikls's translation] goes far beyond such transgressions in relation to the theatrical, which starts with the fact that it was written for an actress, whose name is mentioned in the title. But already Beckett's English text What is the word, on which the Hungarian translation is based, was written for an actor. The English text again goes back to the French text Comment dire written by Beckett after a hospital stay due to an unspecified illness with aphasia-like symptoms. It was Ruby Cohn, who reading "Comment dire" thought of the actor Joseph Chaikin, who too was suffering from aphasia after an open heart surgery, and suggested that Beckett should write an English version for him. But she had to send Beckett a copy of the French text, as Beckett could not recall having written it.8 Joseph Chaikin was an American actor, director and author, who first was a member of The Living Theatre until he founded his own Open Theatre in 1963, which he disbanded 10 years later. In 1969 he played the role of Hamm in a production of Endgame. Even after the disbanding of the Open Theatre Chaikin staged pieces by Beckett 9 and in 1981 he along with Steven Kent compiled and recited a production with passages from Beckett's prose work entitled Texts for Nothing with the permission of the author. Due to a chronic and ultimately fatal cardiac disease, the result of a rheumatic fever at the age of 6, Chaikin's theatre work was from the start marked by illness and his dealing with it, his physical vulnerability and frailty. During his third open heart surgery in 1984 he suffered a stroke, as a consequence of which he then suffered from partial aphasia. The permeability and keeping open of the border between work

Cf. Kurtg: Kafka-Fragmente, 1992, p. 4. In addition the restless that is to breathe senza voce in the last bar is notated as Sprechstimme in three eighths with decreasing pitch. It is obvious that despite the indication senza voce something should be expressed here by the (failing) voice. 8 Cf. Salisbury, Laura: 'What Is the Word': Becketts Aphasic Modernism, in: Journal of Beckett Studies, Vol. 17, Number 1-2 (2008), pp. 78-12, here: p. 79 9 1979 Endgame, Manhattan Theatre Club, New York, 1990 Waiting for Godot, Taper, Too, Los Angeles, 1994 Waiting for Godot, 7 theatres, Atlanta, Texts for Nothing - with Bill Irwin, The Joseph Papp Public Theater, New York, 1995 Endgame, 7 theatres, Atlanta, 2000 Texts for Nothing, 7 theatres, Atlanta, Georgia, 2002 Happy Days, The Cherry Lane, New York

and life is in the case of Chaikin an important part not only of his view of acting and directing, but also of his artistic practice.10 In this sense, when it comes to Chaikin's recitation of What is the Word, we cant determine, where aphasic performance ends and acting begins. We may also speak of such an aphasic recitation in the case of Ildik Monyk, for whom Kurtg has not only written his opus 30a, but whose name he has integrated in the title of the work. In April 1982 Ildiko Monyk suffered an accident, in which she sustained an injury of her left brain. She stated that after the accident she could not speak coherently, but only say yes and no. She had however been able to sing. Not until 1999 she had been able to talk coherently and fluently in a conversation again.11 Even before that final breakthrough, as Kurtg reports, after seven years of silence, she started to learn to speak again:
The whole Beckett-piece would be unthinkable without the reciter, without Ildik Monyk. She had a car accident after-effects of which remained until today. And after that accident, she fell silent for seven years. Finally with the utmost energy she gathered all her willpower and using some Eastern meditation practices - she walked through the fire barefoot, even several times she in fact got herself back on stage. She played herself, when we saw her for the first time in an avant-garde piece, where she had to stutter. She was fantastic. I came in contact with her and later she sang two of my songs for voice for me. Most fascinating for me were her exciting breaks. And a few days later I received the Beckett-text What is the Word in Hungarian translation. In general, I dont set translations to music, but in this case I immediately started working. 12

This tension rests in Monyk's lecture will be the starting point for the composition of Opus 30a, where in the first eight bars there are long pauses between words or syllables. The whole piece is also to perform at an extremely slow pace. In striking contrast to this drama of unbearable
10

Both can be understood reading his book: The Presence of the Actor (1972), new edition: Theatre Communications Group: New York 1991, where he writes: Acting is a demonstration of the self with or without disguise. Because we live on a level drastically reduced from what we can imagine, acting promises to represent a dynamic expression of the intense life. It is a way of making testimony to what we have witnessed [...] (p. 2) and: When we as actors are performing, we as persons are also present and the performance is a testimony of ourselves. Each role, each work, each performance changes us as persons. (p. 6) 11 This regaining of the ability to speak Monyk describes in a promotional text for a food product of controversial efficacy as a miracle that had occurred several months after taking the product during a conversation with the inventor and distributor. But since this miracle is by no means the focus of the text and especially its pragmatic intention - Monyk then describes 11 more beneficent effects of drugs by the company in question and all this under the heading ankle fracture, which in fact is discussed briefly, but in no relation with the accident of 1982 - the above facts for the accident and the illness seem to be credible to me. See under bokatrs on: http://gportal.hu/gindex.php?pg = 19895089, accessed on 12 September 2009. 12 Dibelius, Ulrich (Hg.): Ligeti und Kurtg in Salzburg. Programmbuch der Salzburger Festspiele, Residenz: Salzburg 1993, p. 76.

waiting is the dramatic acceleration of Kurtg's report on the genesis of the work. First we have after Monyk's accident seven years of silence, then Kurtg sees her on the stage by chance, later she sings two pieces of him and a few days later he accidentally discovers Sipos's translation of Beckett's text. Finally, he writes opus 30a in just three days (13 to 15 March 1990). It almost seems as if he had wanted to rush to help Monyk to put right what somebody else had done wrong to her. Kurtg writes, in an undated letter to Claudio Abbado, who conducted the world premiere of opus 30b, that Monyk's silence was not due to the injury caused by the accident, but to the brutality of a director afterwards.13 In addition to the fact that the somatic disease is reinterpreted into a psychic one, the question of guilt is raised for the first time and with it the question of atonement. If Monyk was not by chance made silent due to an injury because of an accident, but rather because of the independently of his intentions culpable behaviour of a man, then Kurtg appears in the role of the man, who atones for this guilt by seeking to compensate for it, we might say, he appears as the better director. The dramaturgy of unbearable waiting is joined by the dramaturgy of support followed by the piano part. Overall the piece gets an almost ritual character through the acts of atonement and compensation. But it has also ritual character as a kind of rite of passage for Ildik Monyk, at least this is suggested by Kurtgs statement in the documentary The Matchstick Man:
She is allways telling that she lost her possibility of speaking for seven years. Then she returned and she stuttered. Now is the most important thing, I wrote it for her life as a portrait. For to learn this piece she had a very hard working to learn to be herself in art. Its not the same to stutter in life and not the same to do it convincingly in singing, you understand, that was like a kabuki training [Monyk laughes out loud here], really. She is an actress and not a singer. I wanted to have a piece, where I can play it, Im no more pianist, and I can play it with one finger almost of all time, that is simply nothing [].14

13

The letter is in the Kurtg Collection of the Paul Sacher Foundation in Basel. The corresponding passage with Kurtgs view of the real cause of Monyks silence is cited by Kunkel, Michael: Das Artikulierte geht verloren Eine Beckett-Lektre von Gyrgy Kurtg, in: Mitteilungen der Paul Sacher Stiftung 13 (2000), pp. 38-43, here: p. 38. 14 In the documentary on Kurtg The Matchstick Man from minute 44:05, my transcription. Monyk herself says in the documentary that after the accident she felt the wish in her heart that Bartk should write something for her and Kurtg too. She claims that for Kurtg nothing is impossible and that after three years he wrote her a Beckettpiece. (From 42:12). The documentary is available on DVD: Gyrgy Kurtg: The Matchstick Man. Peter Etvs: The Seventh Door. Two documentary films by Judit Kele, Idale Audience International: Paris 2006 (= Juxtaposition 6).

After highly emotional rehearsal excerpts Kurtg speaks about the breaks as the critical element of the piece for the self finding of Monyk on stage as a stuttering artist. Op. 30b, in which op. 30a is integrated as whole, stages the latter in the truest sense of the word. The reciter of Op. 30a, Ildik Monyk or the actress embodying her, is placed together with the pianist on the podium, which Kurtg calls Scne. These actors of op. 30a are joined on this stage by the conductor and four instrumentalists. But most of the musicians are placed in the audience, at the two sides and the rear, if possible at a height so that the audience gets included by the music - an observer of the ritual presented on the stage. If the pianist in bar aaa (after Kurtgs unusual bar numbering method in this work) counts the notes he strikes, until the reciter has to come in, it seems as if he helped her not to miss her entry. He therefore plays the role of an auxiliary conductor and he plays this role effectively in the first place for the audience, because there is a conductor whose job it would be to bring in the reciter. This conductor, however, has not only to fulfil his function, which is indicated by the instruction that he should take a position, where the reciter and the pianist can see him, but has a role to play as well. He should, as Kurtg indicates, conduct towards the hall. This has indeed also quite functional reasons because most of the instrumentalists and the choir are positioned in the hall, but the conductor acts thus towards the audience as well. In this way special emphasis is placed on the theatrical aspect of conducting, the fact that conducting is always a performance for the audience as well. The fact that the conductor in this case is seen as a kind of actor is reflected in the score itself, where there is a separate line for him between those for the drums and the strings, in which it is prescribed with the help of numbers what he has to beat. On the one hand, the conductor becomes here a performer of a voice in the same way as the other musicians, on the other hand, he embodies a role for the audience, i.e., he becomes an actor in the broadest sense of the word. Together with the reciter and the pianist he builds a triangle on stage, on the top of which, there is the pianist pointing towards the hall, who has to perform with his back to the audience. By this arrangement a scene takes place on the stage. The intimacy of the dramatic events that are going on in Opus 30a between the reciter and the pianist is on the one hand preserved on the stage of Opus 30b, since the mimic interaction of reciter and pianist remains partly hidden from the audience, on the other hand it is extended to a triangle by the conductor, representing the 7

musical and spatial expansion of the work on the stage. At the same time, the three actors on the stage are included by instrumentalists in a similar manner as the audience in the hall. But the dramatic events do not remain confined to the stage, but are expanded into the hall. This task falls mainly to the choir, who has to take up position in the middle of the hall. The members of this choir are not specifically instructed to act as actors, to embody roles with the help of facial expressions, gestures, movements, but a set of instructions can be found in the score which read like the secondary text of a play and generate beginnings of elementary roles. These instructions create two levels of theatricality, a theatre of voices and a theatre of emotions, where the latter has to be produced with the means of the first.15 Requested from the choir members voices there are not only extremes of volume and quality, but between them a range of gradations. The volume ranges from barely audible whispers to half-whispered to louder and louder to screeching, but is mainly in the range of the quiet. Even more differentiated is the field of quality which includes singing, various types of speech, but also the imitation of animal sounds. Thus, in bar s the tenor is requested to sound wie ein Froschen-Quak [sic!] like a frogs-croak [sic!]. At this point he croaks what to the almost soundless folly from all this, in the previous two bars the instructions for what is the word are for the bass like a verdict, for the soprano astonished, childlike and for alto and baritone aggressive. On the one hand, the various voices represent here obviously different emotional states, i.e. they latently embody different roles, on the other hand, the frog imitation brings in a comic element, as if the tenor made fun of the others. Such almost crude humour can be found already at the beginning, when the very low and stretched spoken fooo-[a]-lly of the bass is answered by the other voices giggling and bleating (bar d). With the disappearance of folly from the text the funny interjections of the choir also disappear from the piece. Even in bar u it says for the chorus quietly telling, speaking, the legato, dolce singing of the reciter in bars w and x is answered
15

In fact, it is unclear whether the theater of the emotions has to be generated only by the voices or whether facial and gestural devices are permitted. Assuming the role of a concert choir, then the instructions aiming at emotions focus on the voices, but if we imagine the choir as an opera chorus, facial expressions, gestures and movement on stage would get involved, at least if the director is reading the score. Precisely this openness is probably the decisive factor, because opus 30b it is not an opera, but a latently dramatic musical work. It is no coincidence that Martin Zenck just at the end of an essay about Opus 30b came to distinguish between two kinds of music drama, which he calls latent theatre and explicit theatre. (See: Zenck, Martin: Beckett after Kurtg. Towards a Theory of Theatricality of a Non-theatrical Music, in: Studia Musicologica Academiae Scientiarum Hungarica 43 (2002), p. 411-420, here p. 420).

by the chorus almost in a flat voice, in measure z the two finally meet in the doloroso of what is the word. But the chorus interacts not only with the reciter and the individual voices of the choir not only interact with each other, but the choir also interacts with the music. His being shocked at the end of bar f is to be understood as a playful response to the preceding ff of the brass and the sff of the piano, which follows the folly for to prosaically spoken by the soprano. The choirs part ends before the final sequence of the text, which is done by the reciter alone. Between the half-whispered parts, the repetitions of known musical characters and emotional states before and the laid-back singing of the end the arioso of the Omaggio a Bartk appears like an island. This island is initially characterized by silence. The choir has no text to sing, the instruction reads: bocca chiusa, quasi niente. Have it up to now always been different ways of opening the mouth, it is now closed, have the vocal productions of the choir until now been more or less clearly audible, they now approach silence. Paradoxically, the choir says nothing in bar nnn and sings at the same time as musically as never before. After all that Kunkel's remark of Kurtg's realization of his long-suppressed plans for a music theatre piece16 in op.30b doesnt seem exaggerated. However, this is a theatricality, which only partly comes from the outside through the dedicatee and protagonist of the piece. The majority of theatrical elements come from within, from the latent theatricality of the music itself. Therefore op. 30 is not to be considered as a break with the aesthetics of transgression of the ban on the theatrical, but as their consistent development. In this sense, we can actually say: Kurtg has arrived on the stage.

16

Kunkel, Michael: folly for t[w]o : Samuel Becketts What is the word and Gyrgy Kurtgs mi is a sz Opus 30, in: Contemporary Music Review, Vol. 20, Part 2 + 3 (2001), pp. 109-127, here: p. 123