Translating Kurtág into Kurtág: from practice to product

Abstract

Kurtág has long been considered out-of-sync with contemporary life in the European mainstream, in part

because of his geopolitical location and his compositional idiom, but also because of his notoriously oppositional stance towards the financial side of musicking. Yet he has now achieved major successes in the cream of European institutions, most recently with the première, and series of performances of his opera Fin de partie in Milan, Paris, Amsterdam, Budapest, Vienna and Berlin. He is one of the most celebrated composers today. In this article I explore the relationship between his idealist compositional ethos and the framework of the industry, taking this opera as a case study. My main sources are archived audiovisual interviews with the primary actors involved in the première, including the publisher of the score, the director, and the singers. I examine these interviews in order to grasp some of the processes that saw Fin de partie emerging from the composer’s studio and arriving on the stage; and I read them through the lens of «translation», drawing on the writing of Dimitri Chakrabarty, Susan Gal, Timothy Taylor and Anna Tsing. This allows me to reveal the social and musical complexity of the relations through which Kurtág works today, and the highly visceral quality of the corporate and musical networks on which his compositional practice ultimately depends. Ultimately the article provides insight into the embodied,

co-creative networks in which composers work today.