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Kurtág, Kafka Fragments: Dawn Upshaw, soprano; Geoff Nuttall, violin; staging by Peter Sellars, presented by Cal Performances, Zellerbach Playhouse, Berkeley, California. 24.11.2008 (HS)


With all the best intentions, director Peter Sellars dressed soprano Dawn Upshaw in loose-fitting jeans and a checked shirt and put her to work ironing clothes, scrubbing floors and washing dishes while she sang a 20th-century existential masterpiece. To Upshaw’s credit, she brought tremendous insight, heightened drama and perfect control of her lyric soprano sound to “Kafka Fragments,” singing the challenging atonal music from memory.

Sellars’ staging, done originally for performances in Carnegie Hall in New York in 2005, ostensibly was meant to make the atonal music and the German text more accessible. The director added costumes, props, rear projections and lighting effects to composer György Kurtág’s spare music for soprano and violin, written from 1985 to 1987.Seen in performance at Zellerbach Playhouse at the University of California at Berkeley Monday, these glosses did nothing to illuminate the text, which Kurtág’s spare music accomplishes without any help, and with breathtaking refinement.

There is no story to the text, a collection of 40 random jottings from Franz Kafka’s diaries, notebooks and journals, most dating from around 1910. Some are just a few words. Others go on for a sentence or two. Removed from their contexts and juxtaposed anew, their meanings become enigmatic and emotionally charged. As Sellars staged the piece, these fragments become the interior monologue of a troubled housewife. I wonder what Kafka would think.

Geoff Nutall, principal violin of the St. Lawrence Quartet, negotiated Kurtág’s perilous double- and triple-stops, nervous rhythms and sly obbligatos with ease. The violin comments on the text, sometimes by sketching a literal musical picture, as in the simple see-saw tread to accompany the first words of the piece, “The good march in step.” Sometimes it’s more abstract, as when flashes of lyrical beauty contrast with the prevailing dissonance and change the mood.

The music for voice is not so jagged as the violin’s. It moves easily, though not always in the direction you might expect. Upshaw sings it with her usual tonal purity and care for the text, investing every phrase with her own emotional content. After all the angst, the emotional release of the final nocturne, “The moonlit night dazzled us,” was heartbreakingly beautiful to hear.

In Sellars’ treatment, each fragment is preceded by an English translation projected at the back of the stage. With the music, black-and-white photographs appear, which seem to do little more than repeat what the text says. For that final nocturne, a photograph of the moon and clouds. When the text mentions a train, we see one. If it refers to leaves, we see them. She sings of her ear feeling fresh to the touch. We see a close-up of an ear.

In the first set of fragments are such existential gems as “From a certain point on, there is no going back. That is the point to reach.” She sings them while ironing and folding clothing. She washed dishes in the final set, perhaps to give her a chance to lap at a bowl of dishwater while singing of leopards drinking sacrificial jugs dry in a jungle temple.

There’s more than a whiff of not trusting to the audience to get it when his staging indulges in such obvious extra trappings, or fills in the blanks for us in the central fragment, “The true path.” In it, Upshaw mimes hanging herself with an electric cord as Kafka describes a rope suspended “not high up,” whose “purpose seems to be more to make one stumble than to be walked on.”

I doubt that an unstaged performance of this work would have drawn less audience interest, especially with a star the quality of Upshaw performing it. I could have done without the distractions. To have been able to focus entirely on the music would have been mesmerizing.

Harvey Steiman


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