Kafka fragments
György Kurtág’s compositions for excerpts from Franz Kafka’s letters and aphorisms is both a walk through them as well as at the same time a walk past them. He stops at a few of them and connects them to his own life. György Kurtág’s Kafka Fragments is a work that suddenly places us deep into the maze of early 20th century culture in Central Europe, into a world where everything seems at one and the same time too present yet never there, both intense and indirect, displaced and deferred.
So Kafka is the starting point, or more precisely: the experience of reading Kafka, through the author’s diaries, the ones published posthumously as Hochzeitsvorbereitungen auf dem Lande. In fact, the starting point for Kurtág is much more indirect: this is music based on his own notes from the letters. This might remind of Passagen-Werk by Walter Benjamin, and his collagelike, literary wandering through the Parisian arcades. Then Benjamin is a character close to this project. There is something collectorlike, mysterious, deeply melancholic and at the same time exeptionally expressive in the Kafka fragments.
Kurtág found his way to these pieces of Kafka’s letters through music, and in a crucial period of his career. In 1957-58 he lived in Paris, a great distance from the Hungary where the riots of 1956 had been crused. He studied with Olivier Messiaen and Darius Milhaud and worked with psychologist Marianne Stein. He heard Webern, he read Beckett — and later also Kafka, on the recommendation by fellow composer György Ligeti.
These were important parts of his ballast when he returned to Budapest in 1959. Only a long time after this, in the mid-1980s, would he fetch out his Kafka collection again and become more or less obsessed with putting music to it all, every piece of it.
Even if the fragments in themselves are untouched texts, like objects in a museum, the composition is formed by Kurtág’s wandering past and between them, and by the fact that he stops beside some of them, tying them up to his own life. He himself has emphasised how this music-making, the dramatisation of another man’s diary, goes deep and is really autobiographical. The last of the fragments, ”Es blendete uns die Mondnacht …” (”The Moon Night Blinded Us…”) has had an added subtitle: ”… a couple of snakes crawling in the dust: Márta and I”. Márta is Kurtág’s wife, the pianist; this text is not sung, but undoubtedly played, it is present as it forms a part of the intensity of the work.
But other fragments also have dedications: the other main part only consists of one, ”Der wahre Weg” – ”The True Road” – and is a ”hommage-message”, a tribute-message, a subtle one, to Pierre Boulez. Boulez might be saluted as one of the people making way for a “true” road for new music in post-war Europe. But for Kafka, this of course is about something different: about the thought of, hidden from everyone else, that there are “good men” maintaining life and bouying up the world by sticking to the true road.
Already in the first fragment, we are introduced to them: ”Die Gute gehn im gleichen Schritt …”: ”The good ones walk in the same pace. Without knowing them, the others dance the dance of time around them.” It is beautiful; it is closely connected to Jewish legends that both Kafka and Benjamin were familiar with and passionate about, at the same time, and between this opening and the end, it is warmly connected to Márta: where the two of them are snakes crawling in curved lines down there, they know about the good men, but can still not move in straight lines, but just be there, hope for all the good things to be close to them, but in the end, everything is fragments, memories, the half forgotten: Kurtág is above all the composer of the unclear memory, dramatically revealed here, this silent will to search back into one’s own past through another man’s remembrance and dusty collections.
Text: Erling Sandmo
Photo: Pascal Victor