It has its risible moments. When wide-eyed Dawn Upshaw, channeling Kafka via Kurtág, describes “coitus as punishment for the happiness of being together,” one can’t help murmuring to oneself that, perhaps, she’s doing it wrong.
But withal, Kafka Fragments, heard Wednesday at the Gerald Lynch Theatre at John Jay College as part of Lincoln Center’s Great Performers series, is beautiful. It’s inventively and sensitively staged within the score’s sharp limits: and Ms. Upshaw gives a performance as vocally generous as it is emotionally transparent.
Kafka Fragments is less monodrama than atomized Winterriese. Composer György Kurtág takes forty particles, brief and direct as haiku, from Kafka’s diaries and correspondence, and traces their emotions in vaulting, murmuring, or shrieking vocal gestures: against them, a solo violin line (actually, violins: Kurtág calls for several scordatura tunings) fidgets, rotates, drones, and soars. Not all of these texts are despairing: some remember “pathways in autumn, swept clear of autumn leaves,” or flowers “hanging dreamily on (their) tall stems;” and Kafka sketches an endearingly awkward scene of violinists on a tram. But Kurtág sounds little interested in endearment here: and because he scores (and Upshaw performs) the bleaker fragments so much more intensely—you can hardly watch as she screams, “I will dive into my story even if it lacerates my face”—the piece en toto can read as pitch-black. I once heard this seventy-minute cycle in recital in Washington—soprano, blue velvet, score on stand—and about forty minutes into it, the concert, not coitus, felt like punishment.
But Peter Sellars’ perfect choice here was to direct and dress Ms. Upshaw as a wholesome and barefoot housewife in the kitchen of her mind, compete with ironing board, dishrack, laundry, and detergent: and to stage Kafka Fragments as a series of moments in a life of a woman who, like Beckett, can’t go on, but goes on. This choice gives the cycle not a narrative, exactly, but a look, a world, a stance: forty different tiny scenes become forty moments in one scene, and what the texts leave hazy, Sellars and Upshaw focus with precise and telling actions.
And what intelligent use of props! Filled, a laundry basket yields the “overcoat…a lofty dream wraps around a child:” overturned, and placed stoutly on her head, it becomes the Tarn in which Ms. Upshaw’s housewife “(feels) enarmoured.” Broomsticks are imagined as walking sticks: balled socks become thrown stones. The toyland cleverness of this oxygenates the character with desperately needed gusts of humor (detergent bottles fornicate!) but still allows the anguished moments full force and range: it’s with a steam iron that she threatens to, and does, “lacerate her face.”
And Ms. Upshaw is a wonder. Yes, yes, by the standards of those who think of the voice as a luxury vehicle (A Lexus is a Lexus! Who cares if it never leaves the garage?), hers is not an unusual lyric soprano. Sylvia McNair had as pretty a sound: Heidi Grant Murphy still does. But Ms. Upshaw has a genius for innocence. I have no idea what her rehearsal process is like, but if she polishes each moment to a calculated sheen before presenting it to an audience, that audience can’t tell. She seems to live the music. The illusion is that she is not so much performing Kafka Fragments as allowing us to hear her response to it as the music passes through her. And I’ve never heard a performer so clearly unconcerned with vocal glamour sound at once so honest and so beautiful. (Of younger singers, I know of only Hila Plitmann, a soubrette with the heart of a lion, to sing with comparable truth, heart, and force.) In Part IV, Ms. Upshaw sings “In memoriam Joannis Pilinsky,” in which Kafka confesses, “I can’t actually…tell a story: in fact I am almost unable even to speak: when I try to tell it, I usually feel the way small children might when they try to take their small first steps.” To hear Ms. Upshaw, supported by Kurtág’s stutters and pauses, give heartbreakingly accurate timbral contour to a person who can barely speak, let alone sing—while still being aware, dimly, of the musical intelligence and vocal grace that makes each moment possible—is to watch a small miracle of the performer’s art.
Geoff Nuttall, the first violinist of the St. Lawrence Quartet, was, now as at its Carnegie Hall première in January 2005, Ms. Upshaw’s partner during Kafka Fragments: similarly barefoot and buskerish, he gave us in now-wiry, now-voluptuous sound what Ms. Upshaw gave us in sound, word, and gesture. David Michalek asked students of a high school in Brooklyn to respond to the Kafka texts, and a slideshow of his black-and-white photographs of the results made a backdrop to the recital. Ms. Upshaw’s emotional assault on those images projected during “Nichts dergleichen” was riveting: but, withal, combining these images with the onstage process seemed, in chemical terms, more a mixture than a compound. James F. Ingalls gave us silhouette, glare, dream and shadow from his lighting board, and Anna Kiraly’s costumes at all points eschewed the pretty for the true. Ara Guzelimian, who commissioned this staging right before a personal medical crisis three years ago, was there to host the post-concert talk. He seemed both moved and proud. Rightly so, I think.