Nobody familiar with the music of the Hungarian composer György Kurtág would have expected to emerge from his new opera Endgame waltzing down Exhibition Road whistling the tunes. Nor could anyone (except perhaps Kurtág) familiar with Samuel Beckett’s nihilistic play of the same name, on which the opera is based, have imagined that anything operatic, in the conventional sense, could be made of the text.
Kurtág, now 97, worked on the piece for some eight years, and it has been described as the pinnacle of his life’s work. He was too frail to attend either the stage premiere at La Scala in 2018 or last night’s UK premiere. This was billed as a major Proms event, and so it was, albeit a compromised one.
