Words and Music (play)
Encyclopedia
Samuel Beckett
wrote the radio play, Words and Music between November and December 1961. It was recorded and broadcast on the BBC
Third Programme
on 13 November 1962. Patrick Magee
played Words and Felix Felton, Croak. Music was composed especially by John Beckett. The play first appeared in print in Evergreen Review
6.27 (November-December 1962). Beckett himself translated the work into French under the title Paroles et Musique (Minuit
, 1972).
– so the scene may well be in a castle
with Croak in the role of châtelain
.
Croak is a doddery old man, testy and maudlin. He is never referred to by name in the play itself but he is well named. Joe addresses to him – albeit somewhat obsequiously – as, “My Lord,” since, despite his apparent frailty, he has plainly been someone used to wielding authority. There are only two sound effects used in the entire play, the scuffle of Croak’s feet as he arrives and departs and the thud of his club
reminiscent of the rulers wielded by the Animator in Rough for Radio II
and the music teacher in Embers
. For entertainment, this Beckettian ‘old King Cole
’ has only two old stalwarts left to call on, his minstrel
s, Joe (Words) and Bob (Music).
Alfred Alvarez
refers to him as “a poet” though there is no real evidence to suggest that he is. In fact his utterances throughout the play are terse: moans, groans and murmurings mainly. That said, he appears to appreciate poetry especially when set to music. The theme Croak opts on for the evening’s diversion is love. He is a decrepit version of Orsino with his famous opening line from Twelfth Night
: “If music be the food of love, play on,” a hopeless romantic, in love with love, and melancholy
from the mere thought of it. Croak could almost be the selfsame man, had he never moved from that spot for the rest of his life and now finds himself on the brink of death.
on the unlikely theme of sloth
. The orchestra interrupts him in the middle of his speech and again at the end when he’s straining to hear if their master is approaching. Squabbling servants appear often in the works of Shakespeare
. Joe is much like Malvolio
, the strait-laced steward in the household of Lady Olivia, efficient but also self-righteous, with a poor opinion of drinking, singing, and fun. His priggishness and haughty attitude earn him the enmity of Maria, Olivia’s sharp-witted waiting-gentlewoman.
Croak shuffles into the room and Joe and Bob both become subservient. They’ve probably been together for a great many years, like Hamm and Clov, and rubbing each other up the wrong way has become a means of entertaining themselves when they’re not performing for their master. Croak realizes they will have been bickering and gently reproves them: “My comforts! Be friends.” He apologises for being late and mutters a vague excuse: “The face … On the stairs … In the tower.” He doesn’t need to explain further; Joe and Bob are not expecting any kind of explanation.
. At one point he even stumbles and says ‘sloth’ by mistake. The feeling is that it wouldn’t matter what the theme chosen was this was the speech he was intending to deliver: “‘one-size-fits-all’ verbiage” … Polonius
could not have done better.” Croak is displeased and calls on Bob to play, the theme is unchanged. Croak is still unhappy and wants the music louder. Joe interrupts, overstepping the mark with a jester’s veracity: “What? Is love the word? … Is soul the word? … Do we mean love when we say love? … Soul, when we say soul? … Do we? … Or don’t we?”
Croak finally cries out for Bob’s assistance and the recital turns into a shambles.
Once everything has calmed down he sets a new topic: age.
a second. Does his master mean old age? He’s not sure. His speech falters and Croak doesn’t put up with him for long. It’s unclear is he is trying to mimic an old man’s speech pattern or if has genuinely been caught off guard. Bob’s music is also endured for only a short time. Croak’s solution is a simple one, force the rivals to work together. They object but acquiesce.
Stefan-Brook Grant has proposed the term “fugue
”, an imitative compositional technique, to describe the initial attempts of Joe and Bob to work together. At first Joe offers a few words, which Bob tries to present as a musical phrase
but soon it’s clear that things work better if Joe adds words to Bob’s music. In this way they stumble through the construction of the first “aria
” as Vivian Mercier
refers to each of the two short poems, the first of which was published separately as Song in Collected Poems (1984).
After their initial run through, line-by-line, Bob plays the whole piece and then invites Joe to sing along, which he does his best to. The result is less actual singing than 'sprechtstimme
.' It is a song about age but it is also about lost love. Perhaps his comforts are beginning to grasp what their master really needs to hear. “For the first time Croak [is able to] direct his attention to the subject of the recitation rather than to its form.” “Specifics replace slippery abstractions, the active replaces the passive voice ... clumsy and tentative, Joe has achieved resonance in reaching Croak’s memory.” Croak makes no comment whatsoever after they have finished but one senses approval because he opens up an altogether more intimate topic: “the face”.
lasting about a minute. Joe’s response is poetic enough but his description of the face seen by starlight is presented in “a cold, rather precise and prosaic” manner; old habits die hard. Bob again recommends a softer tone but Joe immediately blurts out the description he believes his master is looking for, that of a young man who, having just experienced an orgasm
, and taken a moment to gather himself, now looks again on the face of his lover lying together with her in a field of rye
.
Croak groans. This is not right. Joe thinks he understands now and tempers his delivery. He describes the woman’s “black disordered hair” and the look of concentration on her face; eyes closed, (Croak calls out in anguish: “Lily
!”) breasts heaving, biting her lip – she is in the throes of ecstasy. Suddenly Bob bursts in and interrupts this scene of coitus at the very point of climax presenting it as a moment of triumph, drowning out Joe’s protestations. Like Henry in Embers, Words cannot express what is beyond words, and so, it is up to Music to communicate the climactic moment.
When Joe gets to speak again he has calmed down. In a gentle expostulatory manner Joe describes the scene as the couple collect themselves before changing his tone to a more poetic one. With the aid of Bob the two compose a second “aria” which they perform together as before describing the man’s eyes move down the woman’s body toward “that wellhead”. “One glimpse of “that wellhead” of another being’s inmost Being
, down there beyond the opened eyes – that is the most [Beckett’s] heroes can even gain and, having gained, forever try to recapture” – like the old men in ... but the clouds ..., Ohio Impromptu
, Ghost Trio
and, of course, Krapp
.
At the end of this Joe looks over at his master and what he sees shocks him: “My Lord!” Croak’s club slips from his hand and we hear it land on the ground but he is not dead; the “‘morose delectation’ of remembered bygone sexual encounters has overwhelmed him”. He gets up and shuffles off leaving his “comforts” alone.
Ultimately most critics agree that Words and Music is a “composition about composition”. Of course, a theme running through all of Beckett’s writing has been the impossibility of meaningful expression through words alone and, in that respect, Joe doesn’t disappoint. Croak wants to feel. He wants to wallow in a moment, exactly as Krapp does. He doesn’t want to know. He doesn’t need to understand. What is there to understand? Viewed purely as a means of communication, people revert to lovemaking to express their feelings, to ‘say’ what words can’t say.
If Croak is a writer, or the personification of the creative aspect of a writer, then he demonstrates precious little control over his thoughts and his feelings. When they eventually do get their “act” together what is produced, which from all accounts is what Croak sought all along, is far too painful for him to bear.
“Words, in the end, are [Beckett’s] material – not as literature but in terms of something akin to silence; the desire is not to control or empower but to listen. Words are a function of listening for Beckett, listening within a silence of being where the world is effaced.”
For Beckett, writing can be equated to seeing, it is a visual art that aspires to the ideal status of music: “music is the idea itself, unaware of the world of phenomena”, “the ultimate imageless language of emotion.” It is not so surprising then, when Katharine Worth asked Beckett about the relationship between the two figures in this radio play, he said: “Music always wins.” Similarly, Beckett told Theodor W. Adorno
“that it definitely ends with the victory of music”. In what way though? They struggle together to get to this point but is it meaning that has finally overpowered Croak or is it his feelings? Is this why Words are rendered speechless by the play’s end?
“The concerns of Words and Music are clearly related to Beckett’s general preoccupation with the limitations of the expressive powers of language. However, the fact that the music could not be composed by Beckett and therefore changes with the individual composer involved in each production has always rendered the word-music opposition, and hence the play as a whole, somewhat problematic. Beckett gives some instructions to the composer regarding the character of the music (asking for responses to specific concepts – ‘Love’, ‘Age’ and ‘Face’ – and demanding music of ‘great expression’, ‘Love and soul music’ and ‘spreading and subsiding music’), but this gives no indication of style or material content.”
What is perhaps most amazing is the lack of input Beckett chose to have. According to James Knowlson, “John Beckett … wrote his music for [this] play, totally independently of Beckett.” Beckett’s conversation with Everett Frost, who directed the play in the 1980s, sheds a slightly different light on things: “Beckett apologised that, now at an advanced age and increasingly in poor health, he felt unable to enter once again into the kind of collaborative or consultative effort that he had once given his cousin, John.
Irrespective of how much support he did or did not get, John became diffident about his score (despite it having pleased Beckett at the time) and, when Katharine Worth asked his permission to use it in a later production she was politely told “that he had withdrawn it.”
Worth approached Samuel Beckett to see “if there was any composer he would care to recommend; he suggested Humphrey Searle
”, one of the UK’s foremost pioneers of serial music
(whom he had met once in Paris
), as a suitable replacement. Much to her surprise, Beckett expressed no pressing need to meet up with him to discuss approaches. “This seemed interestingly,” she writes, “different from the degree of control he had been known to exert over directors and designers.”
For many years the version most readily available on CD, has been Morton Feldman
’s, written in 1987. “The two men had met in Berlin
in 1976. Feldman wanted to do something with Beckett for the Rome Opera
. Beckett indicated that he didn’t like opera
– and Feldman agreed. Out of this understanding grew the collaboration on Neither (1977), and Beckett's pleasure with that work accounts for the fact that he recommended Feldman for the music of Words and Music ten years later.” The noteworthy thing is that when Beckett sent the text of Neither to Feldman he had never heard any of the composer’s music.
Feldman's idiom is slow, shapeless and tentative; his mastery lies in "probing" sound; its material and sensuous characteristics, the haunting suggestion that his notes are surrounded by silences. This alone brings him into the Beckettian domain. In an interview Feldman stated:
Samuel Beckett
Samuel Barclay Beckett was an Irish avant-garde novelist, playwright, theatre director, and poet. He wrote both in English and French. His work offers a bleak, tragicomic outlook on human nature, often coupled with black comedy and gallows humour.Beckett is widely regarded as among the most...
wrote the radio play, Words and Music between November and December 1961. It was recorded and broadcast on the BBC
BBC
The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...
Third Programme
BBC Third Programme
The BBC Third Programme was a national radio network broadcast by the BBC. The network first went on air on 29 September 1946 and became one of the leading cultural and intellectual forces in Britain, playing a crucial role in disseminating the arts...
on 13 November 1962. Patrick Magee
Patrick Magee (actor)
Patrick Magee was a Northern Irish actor best known for his collaborations with Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter, as well as his appearances in horror films and in Stanley Kubrick's films A Clockwork Orange and Barry Lyndon.-Early life:He was born Patrick McGee in Armagh, County Armagh, Northern...
played Words and Felix Felton, Croak. Music was composed especially by John Beckett. The play first appeared in print in Evergreen Review
Evergreen Review
Evergreen Review is a U.S.-based literary magazine founded by Barney Rosset, publisher of Grove Press. It existed in print from 1957 through 1973, and was re-launched online in 1998...
6.27 (November-December 1962). Beckett himself translated the work into French under the title Paroles et Musique (Minuit
Les Éditions de Minuit
Les Éditions de Minuit is a French publishing house which has its origins in the French Resistance of World War II and still publishes books today.-History:...
, 1972).
Synopsis
The play takes place in what Katharine Worth describes as “an unidentified ‘listening’ space,” another of Beckett’s “skullscapes.” The only specific location mentioned is “the tower” – perhaps a follyFolly
In architecture, a folly is a building constructed primarily for decoration, but either suggesting by its appearance some other purpose, or merely so extravagant that it transcends the normal range of garden ornaments or other class of building to which it belongs...
– so the scene may well be in a castle
Castle
A castle is a type of fortified structure built in Europe and the Middle East during the Middle Ages by European nobility. Scholars debate the scope of the word castle, but usually consider it to be the private fortified residence of a lord or noble...
with Croak in the role of châtelain
Châtelain
Châtelain was originally merely the French equivalent of the English castellan, i.e. the commander of a castle....
.
Croak is a doddery old man, testy and maudlin. He is never referred to by name in the play itself but he is well named. Joe addresses to him – albeit somewhat obsequiously – as, “My Lord,” since, despite his apparent frailty, he has plainly been someone used to wielding authority. There are only two sound effects used in the entire play, the scuffle of Croak’s feet as he arrives and departs and the thud of his club
Club (weapon)
A club is among the simplest of all weapons. A club is essentially a short staff, or stick, usually made of wood, and wielded as a weapon since prehistoric times....
reminiscent of the rulers wielded by the Animator in Rough for Radio II
Rough for Radio II
Rough for Radio II is a radio play by Samuel Beckett. It was written in French in 1961 as Pochade radiophonique and published in Minuit 16, November 1975. Beckett translated the work into English shortly before its broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on 13 April 1976. Martin Esslin directed Harold Pinter ,...
and the music teacher in Embers
Embers
Embers is a radio play by Samuel Beckett. It was written in English in 1957 and first broadcast on the BBC Third Programme on 24 June 1959. Donald McWhinnie directed Jack MacGowran – for whom the play was specially written – as “Henry”, Kathleen Michael as “Ada” and Patrick Magee as “Riding Master”...
. For entertainment, this Beckettian ‘old King Cole
Old King Cole
"Old King Cole" is an English nursery rhyme. The historical identity of King Cole has been much debated and several candidates have been advanced as possibilities...
’ has only two old stalwarts left to call on, his minstrel
Minstrel
A minstrel was a medieval European bard who performed songs whose lyrics told stories of distant places or of existing or imaginary historical events. Although minstrels created their own tales, often they would memorize and embellish the works of others. Frequently they were retained by royalty...
s, Joe (Words) and Bob (Music).
Alfred Alvarez
Al Alvarez
Al Alvarez is an English poet, writer and critic who publishes under the name A. Alvarez and Al Alvarez....
refers to him as “a poet” though there is no real evidence to suggest that he is. In fact his utterances throughout the play are terse: moans, groans and murmurings mainly. That said, he appears to appreciate poetry especially when set to music. The theme Croak opts on for the evening’s diversion is love. He is a decrepit version of Orsino with his famous opening line from Twelfth Night
Twelfth Night, or What You Will
Twelfth Night; or, What You Will is a comedy by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written around 1601–02 as a Twelfth Night's entertainment for the close of the Christmas season...
: “If music be the food of love, play on,” a hopeless romantic, in love with love, and melancholy
Melancholia
Melancholia , also lugubriousness, from the Latin lugere, to mourn; moroseness, from the Latin morosus, self-willed, fastidious habit; wistfulness, from old English wist: intent, or saturnine, , in contemporary usage, is a mood disorder of non-specific depression,...
from the mere thought of it. Croak could almost be the selfsame man, had he never moved from that spot for the rest of his life and now finds himself on the brink of death.
Prelude
The going is not easy; from the very beginning it’s obvious that Words and Music do not enjoy each other’s company. The play opens with Music – a small orchestra – tuning up much to the irritation of Words who is trying to rehearse a soliloquyMonologue
In theatre, a monologue is a speech presented by a single character, most often to express their thoughts aloud, though sometimes also to directly address another character or the audience. Monologues are common across the range of dramatic media...
on the unlikely theme of sloth
Sloth (deadly sin)
In the Christian moral tradition, sloth is one of the seven capital sins, often called the seven deadly sins; these sins are called sins because they supposedly destroy the charity in a person's heart and thus may lead to eternal death.-Definition:Sloth is defined as spiritual or emotional...
. The orchestra interrupts him in the middle of his speech and again at the end when he’s straining to hear if their master is approaching. Squabbling servants appear often in the works of Shakespeare
William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon"...
. Joe is much like Malvolio
Malvolio
Malvolio is the steward of Olivia's household in William Shakespeare's comedy, Twelfth Night, or What You Will.-Style:Malvolio's ethical values are commonly used to define his appearance.In the play, Malvolio is defined as a "kind of" Puritan...
, the strait-laced steward in the household of Lady Olivia, efficient but also self-righteous, with a poor opinion of drinking, singing, and fun. His priggishness and haughty attitude earn him the enmity of Maria, Olivia’s sharp-witted waiting-gentlewoman.
Croak shuffles into the room and Joe and Bob both become subservient. They’ve probably been together for a great many years, like Hamm and Clov, and rubbing each other up the wrong way has become a means of entertaining themselves when they’re not performing for their master. Croak realizes they will have been bickering and gently reproves them: “My comforts! Be friends.” He apologises for being late and mutters a vague excuse: “The face … On the stairs … In the tower.” He doesn’t need to explain further; Joe and Bob are not expecting any kind of explanation.
Love
Croak considers for a moment and then announces the theme for the night’s entertainment: love. He calls for his club and thumps it on the ground: “Love!” We now realise that Joe was mocking the old man in his earlier disquisition on sloth. The speech he delivers is practically identical to the one he was rehearsing before; he has simply swapped ‘sloth’ with ‘love’. It is empty rhetoricRhetoric
Rhetoric is the art of discourse, an art that aims to improve the facility of speakers or writers who attempt to inform, persuade, or motivate particular audiences in specific situations. As a subject of formal study and a productive civic practice, rhetoric has played a central role in the Western...
. At one point he even stumbles and says ‘sloth’ by mistake. The feeling is that it wouldn’t matter what the theme chosen was this was the speech he was intending to deliver: “‘one-size-fits-all’ verbiage” … Polonius
Polonius
Polonius is a character in William Shakespeare's Hamlet. He is King Claudius's chief counsellor, and the father of Ophelia and Laertes. Polonius connives with Claudius to spy on Hamlet...
could not have done better.” Croak is displeased and calls on Bob to play, the theme is unchanged. Croak is still unhappy and wants the music louder. Joe interrupts, overstepping the mark with a jester’s veracity: “What? Is love the word? … Is soul the word? … Do we mean love when we say love? … Soul, when we say soul? … Do we? … Or don’t we?”
Croak finally cries out for Bob’s assistance and the recital turns into a shambles.
Once everything has calmed down he sets a new topic: age.
Age
Joe’s words are nowhere near as eloquent here. He had prepared one speech and now has to improviseImprovisation
Improvisation is the practice of acting, singing, talking and reacting, of making and creating, in the moment and in response to the stimulus of one's immediate environment and inner feelings. This can result in the invention of new thought patterns, new practices, new structures or symbols, and/or...
a second. Does his master mean old age? He’s not sure. His speech falters and Croak doesn’t put up with him for long. It’s unclear is he is trying to mimic an old man’s speech pattern or if has genuinely been caught off guard. Bob’s music is also endured for only a short time. Croak’s solution is a simple one, force the rivals to work together. They object but acquiesce.
Stefan-Brook Grant has proposed the term “fugue
Fugue
In music, a fugue is a compositional technique in two or more voices, built on a subject that is introduced at the beginning in imitation and recurs frequently in the course of the composition....
”, an imitative compositional technique, to describe the initial attempts of Joe and Bob to work together. At first Joe offers a few words, which Bob tries to present as a musical phrase
Phrase (music)
In music and music theory, phrase and phrasing are concepts and practices related to grouping consecutive melodic notes, both in their composition and performance...
but soon it’s clear that things work better if Joe adds words to Bob’s music. In this way they stumble through the construction of the first “aria
Aria
An aria in music was originally any expressive melody, usually, but not always, performed by a singer. The term is now used almost exclusively to describe a self-contained piece for one voice usually with orchestral accompaniment...
” as Vivian Mercier
Vivian Mercier
Vivian Mercier was an Irish literary critic. He was born in Clara, County Offaly, Ireland and educated first at Portora Royal School, Enniskillen, Co. Fermanagh, and then at Trinity College, Dublin. He became a Scholar of the College and edited the student magazine T.C.D...
refers to each of the two short poems, the first of which was published separately as Song in Collected Poems (1984).
After their initial run through, line-by-line, Bob plays the whole piece and then invites Joe to sing along, which he does his best to. The result is less actual singing than 'sprechtstimme
Sprechgesang
Sprechgesang and Sprechstimme are musical terms used to refer to an expressionist vocal technique between singing and speaking. Though sometimes used interchangeably, sprechgesang is a term directly related to the operatic recitative manner of singing , whereas sprechstimme is...
.' It is a song about age but it is also about lost love. Perhaps his comforts are beginning to grasp what their master really needs to hear. “For the first time Croak [is able to] direct his attention to the subject of the recitation rather than to its form.” “Specifics replace slippery abstractions, the active replaces the passive voice ... clumsy and tentative, Joe has achieved resonance in reaching Croak’s memory.” Croak makes no comment whatsoever after they have finished but one senses approval because he opens up an altogether more intimate topic: “the face”.
The Face
Bob starts off this time with a “warmly sentimental” melodyMelody
A melody , also tune, voice, or line, is a linear succession of musical tones which is perceived as a single entity...
lasting about a minute. Joe’s response is poetic enough but his description of the face seen by starlight is presented in “a cold, rather precise and prosaic” manner; old habits die hard. Bob again recommends a softer tone but Joe immediately blurts out the description he believes his master is looking for, that of a young man who, having just experienced an orgasm
Orgasm
Orgasm is the peak of the plateau phase of the sexual response cycle, characterized by an intense sensation of pleasure...
, and taken a moment to gather himself, now looks again on the face of his lover lying together with her in a field of rye
Rye
Rye is a grass grown extensively as a grain and as a forage crop. It is a member of the wheat tribe and is closely related to barley and wheat. Rye grain is used for flour, rye bread, rye beer, some whiskeys, some vodkas, and animal fodder...
.
Croak groans. This is not right. Joe thinks he understands now and tempers his delivery. He describes the woman’s “black disordered hair” and the look of concentration on her face; eyes closed, (Croak calls out in anguish: “Lily
Lilium
Lilium is a genus of herbaceous flowering plants growing from bulbs. Most species are native to the temperate northern hemisphere, though the range extends into the northern subtropics...
!”) breasts heaving, biting her lip – she is in the throes of ecstasy. Suddenly Bob bursts in and interrupts this scene of coitus at the very point of climax presenting it as a moment of triumph, drowning out Joe’s protestations. Like Henry in Embers, Words cannot express what is beyond words, and so, it is up to Music to communicate the climactic moment.
When Joe gets to speak again he has calmed down. In a gentle expostulatory manner Joe describes the scene as the couple collect themselves before changing his tone to a more poetic one. With the aid of Bob the two compose a second “aria” which they perform together as before describing the man’s eyes move down the woman’s body toward “that wellhead”. “One glimpse of “that wellhead” of another being’s inmost Being
Being
Being , is an English word used for conceptualizing subjective and objective aspects of reality, including those fundamental to the self —related to and somewhat interchangeable with terms like "existence" and "living".In its objective usage —as in "a being," or "[a] human being" —it...
, down there beyond the opened eyes – that is the most [Beckett’s] heroes can even gain and, having gained, forever try to recapture” – like the old men in ... but the clouds ..., Ohio Impromptu
Ohio Impromptu
Ohio Impromptu is a “playlet” by Samuel Beckett.Written in English in 1980, it began as a favour to S.E. Gontarski, who requested a dramatic piece to be performed at an academic symposium in Columbus, Ohio in honour of Beckett’s seventy-fifth birthday. Beckett was uncomfortable writing to order and...
, Ghost Trio
Ghost Trio (play)
Ghost Trio is a television play, written in English by Samuel Beckett. It was written in 1975, taped in October 1976 and the first broadcast was on BBC2 on 17 April 1977 as part of the Lively Arts programme Beckett himself entitled Shades. Donald McWhinnie directed with Ronald Pickup and Billie...
and, of course, Krapp
Krapp's Last Tape
Krapp's Last Tape is a one-act play, written in English, by Samuel Beckett. Consisting of a cast of one man, it was originally written for Northern Irish actor Patrick Magee and first titled "Magee monologue"...
.
At the end of this Joe looks over at his master and what he sees shocks him: “My Lord!” Croak’s club slips from his hand and we hear it land on the ground but he is not dead; the “‘morose delectation’ of remembered bygone sexual encounters has overwhelmed him”. He gets up and shuffles off leaving his “comforts” alone.
Postlude
“It seems [Joe] has lost his power to express himself through words and, in contrast to his initial protestations during Music's tuning session, he now implores [Bob] to continue, as if admitting defeat. The play ends with what we might perceive to be our own natural non-rational and immediate expression of hopelessness; the word is reduced to a human sigh.”Interpretation
Various readings of what the situation in Words and Music represents have emerged from critical studies of the work:- Vivian Mercier treats the three characters as separate beings, Croak being an “old man who shuffles in” asking Words and Music to be friends.
- Eugene Webb suggests that “Croak is the name the dialogue directions give to the conscious selfSelf (psychology)The psychology of self is the study of either the cognitive and affective representation of one's identity or the subject of experience. The earliest formulation of the self in modern psychology derived from the distinction between the self as I, the subjective knower, and the self as Me, the...
of the artist”.
- Charles Lyons says that “[i]n Words and Music Beckett provides three characters who seem to represent different psychicMindThe concept of mind is understood in many different ways by many different traditions, ranging from panpsychism and animism to traditional and organized religious views, as well as secular and materialist philosophies. Most agree that minds are constituted by conscious experience and intelligent...
functions of a single consciousness … [however] Beckett does not integrate them into the image of a specific, whole personPersonA person is a human being, or an entity that has certain capacities or attributes strongly associated with being human , for example in a particular moral or legal context...
.” Also a number of times Lyons hints at the autobiographical nature of the piece though without providing any real evidence.
- John Fletcher refers to Croak as Beckett's “toppled ProsperoProsperoProspero is the protagonist in The Tempest, a play by William Shakespeare.- The Tempest :Prospero is the rightful Duke of Milan, who was put to sea on "a rotten carcass of a butt [boat]" to die by his usurping brother, Antonio, twelve years before the play begins. Prospero and Miranda survived,...
. . . with Words as his CalibanCaliban (character)Caliban is one of the primary antagonists in William Shakespeare's play The Tempest.- Character :Caliban is forced into servitude on an island ruled by Prospero. While he is referred to as a calvaluna or mooncalf, a freckled monster, he is the only human inhabitant of the island that is otherwise...
and Music his Ariel.”
- Clas Zilliacus proposes that in this play, “a mental process is unfolding,” whereby Croak “instigates two of his faculties, at odds with each other, to provide him with solace and entertainment.” Zilliacus also offers a view of the play in the light of medieval lyric, suggesting that the “master and servant motif familiar from other Beckett works here appears in recognisably feudalFeudalismFeudalism was a set of legal and military customs in medieval Europe that flourished between the 9th and 15th centuries, which, broadly defined, was a system for ordering society around relationships derived from the holding of land in exchange for service or labour.Although derived from the...
costume”.
- Stefan-Brook Grant reminds us too that, “Words and Music was a commissioned work from the Third ProgrammeBBC Third ProgrammeThe BBC Third Programme was a national radio network broadcast by the BBC. The network first went on air on 29 September 1946 and became one of the leading cultural and intellectual forces in Britain, playing a crucial role in disseminating the arts...
. Croak, therefore, can be interpreted as the commissioner of the play, while Words is Samuel Beckett's work and Music, John Beckett's. The two instruments, therefore, actually originate from separate sources, and are required to rehearse and combine forces in order to achieve a satisfactory rendering of certain themes.”
Ultimately most critics agree that Words and Music is a “composition about composition”. Of course, a theme running through all of Beckett’s writing has been the impossibility of meaningful expression through words alone and, in that respect, Joe doesn’t disappoint. Croak wants to feel. He wants to wallow in a moment, exactly as Krapp does. He doesn’t want to know. He doesn’t need to understand. What is there to understand? Viewed purely as a means of communication, people revert to lovemaking to express their feelings, to ‘say’ what words can’t say.
If Croak is a writer, or the personification of the creative aspect of a writer, then he demonstrates precious little control over his thoughts and his feelings. When they eventually do get their “act” together what is produced, which from all accounts is what Croak sought all along, is far too painful for him to bear.
“Words, in the end, are [Beckett’s] material – not as literature but in terms of something akin to silence; the desire is not to control or empower but to listen. Words are a function of listening for Beckett, listening within a silence of being where the world is effaced.”
For Beckett, writing can be equated to seeing, it is a visual art that aspires to the ideal status of music: “music is the idea itself, unaware of the world of phenomena”, “the ultimate imageless language of emotion.” It is not so surprising then, when Katharine Worth asked Beckett about the relationship between the two figures in this radio play, he said: “Music always wins.” Similarly, Beckett told Theodor W. Adorno
Theodor W. Adorno
Theodor W. Adorno was a German sociologist, philosopher, and musicologist known for his critical theory of society....
“that it definitely ends with the victory of music”. In what way though? They struggle together to get to this point but is it meaning that has finally overpowered Croak or is it his feelings? Is this why Words are rendered speechless by the play’s end?
Music
Considering the importance Beckett places on the role of music in this play, it is worthwhile looking at how three of his collaborations were handled.“The concerns of Words and Music are clearly related to Beckett’s general preoccupation with the limitations of the expressive powers of language. However, the fact that the music could not be composed by Beckett and therefore changes with the individual composer involved in each production has always rendered the word-music opposition, and hence the play as a whole, somewhat problematic. Beckett gives some instructions to the composer regarding the character of the music (asking for responses to specific concepts – ‘Love’, ‘Age’ and ‘Face’ – and demanding music of ‘great expression’, ‘Love and soul music’ and ‘spreading and subsiding music’), but this gives no indication of style or material content.”
What is perhaps most amazing is the lack of input Beckett chose to have. According to James Knowlson, “John Beckett … wrote his music for [this] play, totally independently of Beckett.” Beckett’s conversation with Everett Frost, who directed the play in the 1980s, sheds a slightly different light on things: “Beckett apologised that, now at an advanced age and increasingly in poor health, he felt unable to enter once again into the kind of collaborative or consultative effort that he had once given his cousin, John.
Irrespective of how much support he did or did not get, John became diffident about his score (despite it having pleased Beckett at the time) and, when Katharine Worth asked his permission to use it in a later production she was politely told “that he had withdrawn it.”
- “I liked its austerity,” she said, “and touches such as a faint suggestion of plainsongPlainsongPlainsong is a body of chants used in the liturgies of the Catholic Church. Though the Eastern Orthodox churches and the Catholic Church did not split until long after the origin of plainchant, Byzantine chants are generally not classified as plainsong.Plainsong is monophonic, consisting of a...
, which picked up the quasi-medieval notes in the text. It was hard to see why the composer had withdrawn it.”
Worth approached Samuel Beckett to see “if there was any composer he would care to recommend; he suggested Humphrey Searle
Humphrey Searle
Humphrey Searle was a British composer.-Biography:He was born in Oxford where he was a classics scholar before studying — somewhat hesitantly — with John Ireland at the Royal College of Music in London, after which he went to Vienna on a six month scholarship to become a private pupil of Anton...
”, one of the UK’s foremost pioneers of serial music
Serialism
In music, serialism is a method or technique of composition that uses a series of values to manipulate different musical elements. Serialism began primarily with Arnold Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique, though his contemporaries were also working to establish serialism as one example of...
(whom he had met once in Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
), as a suitable replacement. Much to her surprise, Beckett expressed no pressing need to meet up with him to discuss approaches. “This seemed interestingly,” she writes, “different from the degree of control he had been known to exert over directors and designers.”
For many years the version most readily available on CD, has been Morton Feldman
Morton Feldman
Morton Feldman was an American composer, born in New York City.A major figure in 20th century music, Feldman was a pioneer of indeterminate music, a development associated with the experimental New York School of composers also including John Cage, Christian Wolff, and Earle Brown...
’s, written in 1987. “The two men had met in Berlin
Berlin
Berlin is the capital city of Germany and is one of the 16 states of Germany. With a population of 3.45 million people, Berlin is Germany's largest city. It is the second most populous city proper and the seventh most populous urban area in the European Union...
in 1976. Feldman wanted to do something with Beckett for the Rome Opera
Teatro dell'Opera di Roma
The Teatro dell'Opera di Roma is an opera house in Rome, Italy. Originally opened in November 1880 as the 2,212 seat Costanzi Theatre, it has undergone several changes of name as well modifications and improvements...
. Beckett indicated that he didn’t like opera
Opera
Opera is an art form in which singers and musicians perform a dramatic work combining text and musical score, usually in a theatrical setting. Opera incorporates many of the elements of spoken theatre, such as acting, scenery, and costumes and sometimes includes dance...
– and Feldman agreed. Out of this understanding grew the collaboration on Neither (1977), and Beckett's pleasure with that work accounts for the fact that he recommended Feldman for the music of Words and Music ten years later.” The noteworthy thing is that when Beckett sent the text of Neither to Feldman he had never heard any of the composer’s music.
Feldman's idiom is slow, shapeless and tentative; his mastery lies in "probing" sound; its material and sensuous characteristics, the haunting suggestion that his notes are surrounded by silences. This alone brings him into the Beckettian domain. In an interview Feldman stated:
- “I never liked anyone else's approach to Beckett. I felt it was a little too easy; they were treating him as if he were an existentialistExistentialismExistentialism is a term applied to a school of 19th- and 20th-century philosophers who, despite profound doctrinal differences, shared the belief that philosophical thinking begins with the human subject—not merely the thinking subject, but the acting, feeling, living human individual...
hero, rather than a tragic heroTragic heroA tragic hero is the main character in a tragedy. Tragic heroes appear in the dramatic works of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Seneca, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Webster, Marston, Corneille, Racine, Goethe, Schiller, Kleist, Strindberg, and many other writers.-Aristotle's tragic hero:Aristotle...
. And he's a word man, a fantastic word man. And I always felt that I was a note man. I think that's what brought me to him. A kind of shared longing: this saturated, unending longing that he has, and that I have.”
External links
- A PDF version of Catherine Law’s detailed article, Words and Music: Feldman’s Response to Beckett’s Play can be downloaded from Ingenta’s website
- Apmonia’s website contains an extensive article on this piece concentrating heavily on Feldman’s version
- MP3 of the play performed as a a one-person show – Theatre of the Mind (orchestral version)
- MP3 of the play performed as a a one-person show – Theatre of the Mind (piano version)
- MP3 of the play (Theatre for Your Mother)
- Text of the play (Samuel-Beckett.net)