Milan (AFP) – Milan’s famous La Scala on Thursday hosts the world premiere of the first opera by 92-year-old Gyorgy Kurtag, considered one of the greatest living classical composers.
More than seven years in the making, “Endgame” is based on Irish writer Samuel Beckett’s play of the same name, regarded as a seminal work of absurdist theatre.
Italian music critic Enrico Girardi hailed the modern opera as a “masterpiece destined to rewrite the history of contemporary music”.
Kurtag said he had been profoundly marked by the one-act play about blind paraplegic Hamm, his legless parents who live in a bin, and his servant Clov who is unable to sit down.
“I was lucky enough to have seen (Endgame) several months after its world premiere. It was my first big encounter with Beckett,” he told journalists at a recent news conference.
“The impact was enormous. I told myself that if I ever wrote an opera, this masterpiece would be my inspiration,” Kurtag said in another interview with an Italian newspaper.
Born in 1926 in Romania to Hungarian parents, Kurtag started playing the piano as a young boy.
Over the decades, the award-winning musician became famous for composing short yet highly complex pieces.
Like Beckett, who lived and died in Paris, Kurtag also has a passion for the French language.
He had never tried his hand at operas — until La Scala’s tenacious artistic director Alexander Pereira eventually convinced him to do so.
It took Kurtag more than seven years to create the first operatic interpretation of “Endgame” — from understanding Beckett’s text in its most minute details and deciding which parts of the play to keep, to finally writing the partition.
“I wanted to stay 100 percent faithful to Beckett,” Kurtag told the press conference.
Thursday’s opening night in Milan will be attended by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban.
Kurtag and his wife will not attend the two-hour premiere because of their advanced age, but will instead listen to it live on the radio.
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