Samuel Beckett and Music (review)

Bryden, Mary, ed. Samuel Beckett and Music. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. $75.00 (Cloth).

The dust-jacket of Samuel Beckett and Music features a drawing by Beckett’s friend Avigdor Arikha entitled “Samuel Beckett listening to music, 9 xii 1976.” It shows an intent listener who is concentrating on his experience. One wonders to what he might be listening. Schubert, perhaps? Beckett was fiercely interested in music all his life; he grew up with music, became an amateur pianist, married an accomplished pianist, and evidently broadened his musical horizons all the time. He formed friendships with musicians: Marcel Mihalovici and his wife Monique Haas; Morton Feldman, Heinz Holliger. Many of his dramatic works make use of musical passages in a precise and detailed way: Schubert’s string quartet “Death and the Maiden” in All That Fall; the same composer’s Lied “Nacht und Träume” in the television play of the same name; Beethoven’s “Ghost” Trio (op. 70, #1). In two of his radio plays, Words and Music and Cascando, Beckett makes use of [End Page 104] Music as a protagonist over Words, characters representing voice or speech. In Happy Days, Lehár’s “Merry Widow” is utilized as a theme. All of Beckett’s readers are keenly aware of the musicality of the texts. An observation of this kind amounts to no more than a convenient metaphor calling attention to the euphony or sonority, along with some sort of rhythmic profile, of an author’s words. Beckett’s words, their quietly pulsing loneliness, their striving for the solace of silence, are among the most poetic–i.e., “musical”–expressions of contemporary literature. But the question of words and music is more enigmatic. It involves the problematic attitude and relationship of a literary author who is well versed in music, whose work generates its own kind of music, and whose works are strong temptations for composers.