NICO AND THE NAVIGATORS: POST.KAFKA

György Kurtág's “Kafka Fragments” elevate the fragmentary, unfinished nature inscribed in the work of the poet Franz Kafka, who died in 1924, to a creative principle: in miniatures for violin and soprano, the composer quotes scraps of sentences and thoughts, forming a stream of consciousness that also fascinates and threatens the listener with its whirlpools and shallows beneath the surface.
To mark the 100th anniversary of the death of the author of masterpieces such as “The Trial” and “Amerika”, NICO AND THE NAVIGATORS link the cycle of fragments in POST. KAFKA, NICO AND THE NAVIGATORS link the cycle of fragments 2024 with a large, self-contained text that has also remained unfinished in its effect: Kafka's “Letter to the Father” was famously never sent to the recipient. In combination with the fragments that Kurtág, born in 1926, put together to form a mosaic, this results in an existential self-questioning that goes beyond the person of the author. The “Letter to the Father” can also be read as a harrowing document of a “last generation” - of a son who left no descendants of his own and ordered the destruction of his life's work in his will.
The fact that this wish was not fulfilled and that the reckoning with his own creator was also published posthumously now allows for a production of music, song and language - a continuation of the method first used by NICO AND THE NAVIGATORS in their examination of T. S. Eliot's “The Waste Land”.