György Kurtág’s Kafka
Alienation and Consolation in Kurtág’s Kafka Fragments for Soprano and Violin

William Kinderman in conversation with Malcolm Miller

György Kurtág, now 97 years old, is the last remaining active and influential European avant-garde composer of his generation. Kurtág’s magnum opus from 1986, the Kafka Fragments, has achieved an honored and conspicuous place in the musical repertory, and incorporates in its hour-long cyclic structure a far-reaching interpretation of literary fragments from Kurtág’s fellow Jewish artistic predecessor, Franz Kafka. This presentation explores Kurtág’s ingenious musical rendering of these precious fragments, and will be richly illustrated by video performance excerpts by Tony Arnold, soprano, and UCLA violin professor Movses Pogossian, musicians who have worked closely with the composer.

William Kinderman is professor and Krown Klein Chair of Performance Studies, Herb Alpert School of Music, UCLA. As a pianist, he has recorded Beethoven’s last sonatas and Diabelli Variations. Kinderman is author of many books, including The Creative Process in Music from Mozart to Kurtág, and most recently, Beethoven: A Political Artist in Revolutionary Times.

Malcolm Miller, musicologist and pianist, is Honorary Associate and Associate Lecturer at the Open University, UK and teaches at the City Literary Institute and Morley College. He has published widely on 19th-21st century music including Beethoven, Wagner, and Jewish and Israeli music. Book chapters include ‘Friendship and Exile: The Correspondence between Paul Frankenburger/ Ben-Haim and Otto Crusius, Friedrich Crusius and Otto Eduard Crusius’ in Jüdische Musik im süddeutschen Raum/Mapping Jewish Music of Southern Germany (Allitera Verlag, 2021), ‘Music as Memory’ in The Impact of Nazism on Twentieth-Century Music (Bohlau, 2014), ‘Bloch and Wagner’ in Ernest Bloch Studies (CUP, 2016) and ‘Ancient Symbols, Modern Meanings: The Use of the Shofar in Twentieth and Twenty-first Century Music’ in Qol Tamid: The Shofar in Ritual, History, and Culture (Claremont Press, 2017.).