One’s musical preferences speak volumes about one’s outlook on life. Beatles versus Stones, Copland versus Schonberg, Biggie versus Tupac, Rodgers and Hammerstein versus Rodgers and Hart: Each offers a digestible (if occasionally — and sometimes self-consciously — misleading) primer on the values and aspirations of the respondent.

But what if the answer is “None of the above”?

Such is the state of the nameless, homeless, and borderline soulless narrator of “First Love,” the pungent 1945 Samuel Beckett novella on shrewd display at the Lincoln Center Festival. The combination of Beckett’s swoon-worthy cadences with the ingratiating lilt of its solo performer, Ralph Fiennes, promises a limpid symphony of language. But in Michael Colgan’s unforgiving staging, the final in a three-play series of fine Beckett adaptations by Dublin’s Gate Theatre, the sadder and not much wiser middle-aged protagonist is not so much tone-deaf as tone-dumb:

“Of all the other songs I have ever heard in my life, and I have heard plenty, it being apparently impossible, physically impossible short of being deaf, to get through this world, even my way, without hearing singing, I have retained nothing, not a word, not a note, or so few words, so few notes, that, that what, that nothing, this sentence has gone on long enough.” (This sentence, it should be noted, began several lines earlier.)

The melodies in question emanate from Lulu, a thick-thighed woman of ill repute who once wormed her way into the narrator’s brittle heart. He alludes to their marriage in the very first line of the story, but this proves to be a rather elastic definition. “First Love” is a sort of boy-meets-girl, boy-writes-girl’s-name-in-cow-manure, boy- loses-girl story, complete with a rain-spattered reunion and an unwanted pregnancy.

This could easily be a recipe for wistful melodrama, but this bracingly earthy tale — one that the Booker Prize-winning author John Banville has called “the most nearly perfect short story ever written” — features a protagonist who is unsentimental even by Beckett’s punishing standards. “It was things made me weep,” he says and, until a final act that still haunts him years later, he admits only to being moved by “something unbeknownst,” by “some chance thing glimpsed below the threshold.” He has no problem discussing his bowel movements or his own epitaph (although he concedes that the latter still needs work), and his tight-lippedness about his and Lulu’s sexual habits would appear to spring less from discretion than from shame. When talking about her becomes too difficult for him, he simply changes her name.

With his rigid stillness interrupted periodically by frantic, mildly grotesque gesticulations, Mr. Fiennes’s masterfully composed creation has the air of a cloistered man-child who has seldom enjoyed the socializing presence of others. He stands with rigid composure for all but a few passages of the 50-minute piece; the transfer of his hat from one hand to the other qualifies as a significant piece of blocking on Mr. Colgan’s part. (The austerity extends to Eileen Diss’s set design, which, except for two intermittently visible signs of domesticity far upstage, consists entirely of the park bench where the narrator and Lulu first met.) Mr. Fiennes has shown a particular affinity for clay-footed protagonists both on stage (“Faith Healer,” “Richard II”) and on film (“Quiz Show,” “The End of the Affair”), and his gifts at illuminating mankind’s less admirable qualities without slipping into caricature are tested to the fullest here.

It is a stunted, even agonizing exercise in restraint, one that nestles alongside the festival’s other two Beckett adaptations — a stricken and silent Liam Neeson in the made-for-television “Eh Joe,” and the superb Barry McGovern barnstorming his way through three novels in “I’ll Go On” — with exemplary force and precision. The chastening music of Samuel Beckett perseveres, even in the debilitated voice of a man who cannot hear or respond to it.

One caveat, however: The consistently high quality of these productions has muffled but not silenced grumblings about steep ticket prices for works that, with the exception of “I’ll Go On,” clock in at less than an hour. Had Lincoln Center programmed them in one evening, the entire trio could have been performed — with two intermissions — in about the same amount of time as “August: Osage County.” Of course, that would mean charging for only one ticket as opposed to three. The final two performances of each piece will be offered Saturday and Sunday in just this format — at no discount whatsoever. All three of these productions deserve to be seen, discussed, and remembered. But theater lovers shouldn’t have to reach so deep into their wallets three times for the privilege.

Until July 27 (Tenth Avenue, between 58th and 59th streets, 212-721-6500).