On a Sunday afternoon we went to hear a staged performance of Kurtag's "Kafka Fragments" for soprano and violin, done by a new company in New York called Heartbeats Opera. The piece, written as a concert work, is a setting of 44 very different short fragments from Kafka's writings. It was not conceived of as a theatrical work, but this was not its first theatrical realization. Peter Sellars (with Dawn Upshaw) among others, has staged this work. (I have no idea what the composer thinks of the idea of staging the piece.)
The musical performance of this very demanding work (a virtuoso violin part, and lasting about 70 minutes) was close to excellent, but the staging was, in my opinion, entirely misguided. Where to begin? To begin with, the music itself is vivid and imaginative throughout; it really does not need anything else to come across. That's how Kurtag wrote it. But OK, so people want to stage it. So what should the violinist do? Singers are naturally acting on stage; but violinists are to busy fiddling to do much. In fact the violinist spent far to much time gazing into the eyes of the soprano; to me it started to look like those violinists who play in restaurants and approach the customers (women) and play romantic music while gazing with amorous desire. Not good. Or, in the midst of looking intently at the singer, he has to deal with a few loose hairs on his bow. Other problems include a far too literal interpretation of the text. A fragment mentions "a great horse', and out comes a small model horse. A fragment mentions a seamstress, and out comes a spool of thread. Ugh! Between each section (there are four parts), the director had the idea of playing very loud white noise out of speakers while the set changed when all my ears wanted (and the music demanded) was a bit of silence. Why the noise? And some more Kafka visual clichés; a dark and dirty hotel room with one hanging lightbulb, an old TV set with nothing but static on the screen, travelers with old suitcases, etc. And while it was nice to have the text displayed, the projections were often ill-timed with the singing.
And finally, for me the most bothersome thing was that we lost the sense of the fragmentary nature of the piece by having a continuous visual narrative. The piece is really structured around these short, seemingly unconnected fragments of Kafka, operating as distinct elements. It's not meant to be continuous. The fragmentary nature of the texts is a big part of what makes them expressive. (I read of one staged version that used blackouts between each fragment. Seems like a good idea.)
Though, I do have to say that hearing the music performed live with intense commitment and skill on the part of the performers was a treat, and I admire the company for doing such a difficult piece. I just wish that directors would have a more sophisticated and thoughtfully considered approach to staging musical works. (They have the same problem at the Metropolitan Opera.) Few directors these days seem to trust the music, or have a very sophisticated knowledge of how it works.
