Vienna Opera Tickets

Fin de Partie, the opera by György Kurtág after a Samuel Beckett play called Endgame, features as part of the Vienna State Opera's season. This is a one-act opera with a libretto and music written by Kurtág, one of Hungary's most highly regarded contemporary composers. Born in 1926 in Lugos, Transylvania – which lies in present-day Romania – Kurtág entered Budapest's Franz Liszt Academy of Music in 1946 before going on to study in Paris in the 1950s. After many years of work, Fin de Partie – Kurtág's debut opera – premiered at the Teatro alla Scala on 15 November 2018 when the composer was 92 years of age.

Kurtág's operatic version of Endgame – translated into French as Fin de Partie – will be instantly recognisable to anyone familiar with Beckett's absurdist play. The composer's orchestration is voiced with unconventional instrumentation. Despite the larger-than-usual orchestra, musicians are encouraged to tackle the quietest sections in what often sound as though they are closer to chamber music than traditional opera. At times, for example, there are intricate dialogues of music featuring just four soloists, somewhat subverting the norms of opera, just as Beckett had reinvented the conventions of stage plays when Endgame was premiered in London on 3 April 1957. Kurtág saw a production of Endgame when it was performed in Paris later that year. Along with Beckett's other great work, Waiting for Godot, he referred to the play as representing his 'bible' in a creative sense.

The opera features the same four main characters as Endgame. They all occupy an inhospitable landscape together. Hamm is a wheelchair-bound dominating figure who has Clov work for him as a servant, in part because he can move more freely than the others. The remaining two characters are Nagg and Nell, both of whom have no legs, and who seemingly live in their respective rubbish bins. Much of the production unfolds through the interactions between these characters, some verbal and some not. Kurtág's musical precision in expressing some of the deliberately less incomprehensible action not only reflects Beckett's carefully chosen language but of the movement – or lack of it – of the characters, too. More widely, the opera conveys much of what is in Beckett's original text, offering further context to the absurd existential performance tradition he was a pioneer of, not least in the way the music highlights the playwright's darkly subversive humour.

Fans of contemporary opera, absurdist drama and high-quality musicianship will be delighted by Fin de Partie at the Wiener Staatsoper, a sumptuous venue for such a fascinating production.