| Sumario: | Reviews and articles have generally approached Kurtág's opera by way of the Beckett play on which it draws, a natural consequence of the composer's openly stated admiration for Beckett, and for this play in particular, going back to his attendance at the first production when he was in Paris in 1957. This article surveys his history with Beckett's writing before outlining ways in which the libretto—and still more the opera—depart from the source text, especially in drastically cutting the dialogue between the main characters, Hamm and Clov, but also in adding a Beckett poem as a prologue. Beyond that, ways in which the work is emphatically an opera are considered. Kurtág was well versed in opera from his student time and immediately after, when he served as repetiteur in a provincial theatre. The testimony of people who knew him as a performer or teacher is that opera has remained alive in his musical thinking. Proof of this, though emerging creatively so late, is to be found in his piece—in traditional aspects (e.g. the choice of voice types), in developments of antecedents (notably Monteverdi) and in innovations, such as the use of accompanimental style as a definer of character and situation.
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