“Where now? Who now? When Now?” Thus begins Samuel Beckett’s extremely disturbing novel “The Unnamable.” Why quote Beckett at the beginning of an article about Gyorgy Kurtag’s “Kafka Fragments,” instead of the more obvious choice? Because the piece, and especially the version that premiered Monday evening at Zankel Hall, exhibits exactly that touch of absurdist existentialism, rather than the neurasthenic Expressionism we would normally associate with the paranoid genius of Prague.

One of the towering works of the last quarter of the last century, “Kafka Fragments” received a spectacular performance befitting its place in the contemporary pantheon. It is difficult to believe that Mr. Kurtag, Gyorgy Ligeti, Pierre Boulez, and Karlheinz Stockhausen are all hovering around their 80th birthdays, but such is the telescopic nature of the passage of time. Franz Kafka himself may now be as anachronistic a diarist as Samuel Pepys, but many of his messages are timeless, and would seem modern to any generation of lonely individuals.

The piece is thrice 13 songs, which last from just a few seconds to as long as five minutes. There are only two performers: A soprano who does virtually all of the work, and a violinist who maintains a steady obbligato, a high-pitched Jewish equivalent of a sitar drone. The singer must be one of exceptional talent and stamina for the work to be successful.

Dawn Upshaw will be singing Arnold Schonberg’s “Pierrot Lunaire” in just a few weeks with the Metropolitan Opera Chamber Ensemble. The piece is one of her specialties, and the parallels to the Kurtag are many. The major difference is that the Schonberg relies heavily on instrumental tonal color, while the Kurtag leaves the soprano alone in a sterile universe where the only variety is of her own making.

Ms. Upshaw is a consummate artist, often choosing the path of most resistance toward stardom. In addition to her expressive and expansive voice, she is a musician of high intelligence, who salivates at a challenge. She certainly had her hands full this night.

Essentially, the soprano must sing constantly for 70 minutes. There is no pianist to spell her nor, considering the nature of the fiddle part, any relief from the instrumentalist. At one point in this Peter Sellars staging, Ms. Upshaw lies prone on the floor in a Christ like position. She holds this pose for quite a long interval, undoubtedly to increase its dramatic effect, but also allowing her the only opportunity to rest for a minute.

No composer since Mozart has been so demanding on a female voice as Mr. Kurtag is in this setting. Not only do the individual notes occupy some of the most extreme corners of the natural tessitura, both high and low, but the jumps and leaps between any two of them are seemingly not negotiable for a mere mortal. Ms. Upshaw, barefoot and clad in jeans and a flannel shirt, rolled up her sleeves and simply refused to let these difficulties restrain her.

The Sellars staging was brilliant. A bare, “Endgame”-style landscape with minimal props, designed to emphasize the horrors of Sisyphean domestic tasks, allowed Ms. Upshaw to make the most out of ironing or cleaning at the sink. She did a masterful job managing the silence – or what passes for silence at Zankel – between numbers, at one point scouring a pot beyond the limits of the psychically healthy. Her Punch and Judy show with a blue and a yellow bottle of dishwashing soap was accompanied by a look of utter madness that I haven’t seen on the stage since “Marat/Sade” in the 1960s.

Paradoxically, Ms. Upshaw’s talents as an actress of the voice did not always translate well to stage movement, and violinist Geoff Nuttall, the leader of the fine St. Lawrence String Quartet, proved in just a few choreographed steps the wisdom of not developing his character into a more animated presence.

Much less successful was the intrusive imagery that bombarded a big screen behind the duo, with projected English translations of each song in turn. This was fine, although it produced some awkward moments – as, for example, when the fragment “slept, woke, slept, woke, miserable life” elicited a ripple of hearty laughter from the crowd. I experienced my own Kafka moment at this point, wondering who exactly were these people seated all around me.

When the texts disappeared, however, they were followed by an unending series of giant photographs assembled by David Michalek that were at best distracting and at worst pandering. Many images of tsunami scenes seemed especially unnecessary and wrong-headed. While Kafka, Mr. Kurtag, and Ms. Upshaw were all trying to express the pain and meaninglessness of the individual, the MTV-style photos were loudly trying to break our consciousness of small tragedy in order to supplant it with some “higher” sense of empathy.

Carnegie management has finally found a work that is perfect for Zankel Hall. The insistent and incessant rumblings of the neighboring subway simply seemed an element in the general atmosphere of the surrealism of the quotidian.

“Kafka Fragments” will be performed again tonight & January 13 at 8:30 p.m. (Carnegie Hall, 212-247-7800).