ABSTRACT

In Beckett’s works for theatre, as well as in his prose writings and poems, this engagement with music and musicality plays out in implicit and explicit ways. First, and perhaps most obvious, is the way in which his writing refers to and sometimes includes music by canonical composers such as Schubert and Beethoven: All That Fall includes passages from Schubert’s string quartet ‘Death and the Maiden’; Nacht und Träume incorporates the last seven bars of one of Schubert’s songs; and the television play, Ghost Trio, includes passages from Beethoven’s Piano Trio, Op. 70 No. 1, nicknamed the ‘Ghost Trio’. Yet even when simply prescribing the inclusion of music in such a way in his plays, music is, as Mary Bryden points out,

‘delicately woven into its dramatic fabric’.1 It is never simply auxiliary, then, but rather part of the overall composition. Other works demand unspecified music as a compositional element, in dialogue or tension with text and image. In two of his radio plays, Words and Music and Cascando, Beckett engages directly with the tension between music and language, pitting them against each other as characters in the drama. There is also substantial evidence of his attempts to employ musical forms and devices in his prose and dramatic writings, from his first (unpublished) novel Dream of Fair to Middling Women, with its numerous references to musical forms (a digression is described as a ‘cadenza’; repeated passages are ‘da capo’; whispers are delivered ‘pianissimo’; meanings are ‘orchestrated’; particular scenes may be described as ‘duos’, ‘trios’2) and its fanciful conceit of the characters as musical notes to be arranged like a melody, through Murphy, Watt (which contains two musical compositions by Beckett himself) and Molloy (in which the famous sucking-stones episode has been interpreted as a parody of serialism3), to a late work like Quad, described by Beckett as ‘a static fugue’.4