Gergely Fazekas:a lecture on G. Kurtág’s opera "Fin de partie". "Kirill Gerstein invites"@HfM Eisler

Gergely Fazekas: Kurtág translating Beckett - a lecture on György Kurtág’s opera "Fin de partie". This event took place on June 10, 2020, as a part of "Kirill Gerstein invites" hosted by eislerlab_digital at Hochschule für Musik Hanns Eisler Berlin A “patiently perfect” opera (The New York Times) setting Samuel Beckett’s Endgame “to create an uncompromising work that is utterly distinctive” (The Guardian), a piece which proves its composer “to be Beckett’s equal” (The New Yorker): Fin de partie, the long awaited first opera by the last representative of post-war art music, the 94-year-old Hungarian composer, György Kurtág had its first performance in November 2018 in one of the most prestigious opera houses in the world, La Scala in Milan. The opera makes intensive use of the four-hundred-year-old genre’s well-known techniques, while its musical language is true to Kurtág’s style (some basic elements of the opera’s music can be found already in the earliest pieces of Kurtág written in the late 1950s). Based on interviews made with the composer and using excerpts from a yet unpublished documentary on the opera, the lecture gives an introduction to Fin de partie, to Kurtág’s music and to his more than 60-year old relationship with Beckett’s texts. Musical excerpts used with kind permission of the Editio Musica Budapest publisher. Gergely FAZEKAS (1977) is a Hungarian musicologist and editor, associate professor of musicology at Liszt Academy (Budapest). Between 2012 and 2017 he was the editor-in-chief of the oldest Hungarian music publisher Rózsavölgyi & Co (founded in 1850). He has been publishing scholarly articles in Hungarian, English and French musicological journals on Bach and Debussy since 2007. His Hungarian translation of all the writings and interviews of Claude Debussy was published in 2017, his book based on his doctoral thesis entitled “J. S. Bach and the two cultures of musical form” was published in Hungarian in 2018. He is member of the crew of the documentary on Kurtág’s opera (to be premiered in the fall of 2020). His essay on Fin de partie won the award of the forum of Hungarian editors-in-chief (“Best article of the month”) in December 2018. As a Fulbright visiting professor, he spent the academic year 2017/2018 at Bard College (NY) with his wife and three children. ------ KIRILL GERSTEIN INVITES - a weekly online forum with leading thinkers hosted by #eislerlab at the Hochschule für Musik Hanns Eisler Berlin For more information: https://kirillgerstein.com/ventures/k... To register for upcoming seminars, please go to: https://kirillgerstein.com/newsletter/