Kurtág: Kafka Fragments, Op. 24

For soprano voice and violin. German.

Václav Havel said of this work: "A true Central European encyclopedia." Kurtág's meeting with Franz Kafka was almost fateful, and the speed with which Kurtág, who has been otherwise a slow composer, created the movements of the approximately one-hour series in the fall of 1985 shows how deeply the composer was touched by the text fragments selected from diaries and letters. There is scarcely another work of Kurtág's in which brevity and elegance combine in such a natural way. The composer's virtuosity is evident in every bar, yet there is no indication of ostentation. Every word and nuance is transformed into a sound picture. Meanwhile, the musical motifs derived from the words are musically complete in themselves. However, the Kafka­Fragmente only forms a perfect unity in the combination of words and music. The psychological and physical worlds meet here, and Kurtág's work achieves the ultimate aim of all music: to add its own existence to the image we create of our own world.Although the composition has been previously performed in several staged versions, since 2019 the composer has contributed exclusively to concert performances.