“… folly for t[w]o …”: Samuel Beckett's What is the Word and György Kurtág's mi is a szó Opus 30

Abstract

This article examines the genealogy of György Kurtág's Op. 30a and b, and their textual source, Samuel Beckett's What is the Word. Beckett's attempt at a complete withdrawal from speech and at writing the absence of the subject is paralleled in Kurtág's own struggle with musical language and identity. Beckett's withdrawal behind a literary predecessor (Joyce) similarly has echoes in Kurtág's use of material from Bartók, but while Beckett's exploration of the endpoint of language is primarily an artistic exercise, Kurtág's attempts to simulate the real experience of legesthenia through the use of the (remembered) stuttering of the actress Ildikó Monyók as reciter. Op. 30b creates a larger scale piece, but maintains the stuttering formal gesture of the earlier piece, and instead of a large-scale form, uses musical palindrome to evoke the paradox of the need to speak combined with the impossibility of speech at the vanishing point of language.