This musical suite is a series of forty short pieces for the violin and a soprano singer, each inspired by a story, novel or letter of Kafka's. The Hungarian composer Gyorgy Kurtag completed this work in the late 1980s - just around the time that the Soviet Union was beginning to loosen its grip on Eastern Europe and Kafka's works became more widely available.
The Danish composer Poul Ruders created this opera, which meshes Kafka's biography with scenes from his novel about a lawyer inexplicably persecuted by the law. Composer Ruders wanted the opera to be a comedy in the style of Kafka - that is to say, a little nightmarish and not really funny at all.
Violinist Nigel Kennedy is a former child prodigy who has now established a career as a mature musician. The songs on this album of acoustic and electric violin vary wildly in genre from jazz to Middle Eastern to heavy metal. The connection to Kafka? Well, that's for Kennedy to know and you to try to figure out while you listen.
The Live Project Band is an experimental rock band based in Athens, Greece. Their 2007 album, Kafka, is a double-disc set of songs inspired by Franz Kafka. Like the author himself, the songs defy easy categorization.
"Kafka" is a song off the first album of the quirky Australian band Lost Valentinos. It uses Kafka's death as a metaphor for the pain of a breakup. Heavy.
They really love Franz K. Down Under. Kafka is a funk band (the exact number of members fluctuates) out of Brisbane, Australia. According to the band's MySpace page, its founders came together out of shared admiration for "jazz, funk... and 18th Century Russian and Czech writers." We dig it.