GEISTERTRIO : Beethoven's Music in Samuel Beckett's Ghost Trio

GEISTERTRIO: Beethoven’s Music in Samuel Beckett’s Ghost Trio Michael Maier The role of Beethoven’s music in Beckett’s second television play is very complex. In this paper, I first analyze the formal structure of the second movement of the Geistertrio – the Largo assai ed espressivo – that Beckett used in the play. I then describe at what points in the play Beckett introduced the musical passages from this movement. Thirdly, I outline the six stages of development in Beckett’s conception of the role music was to play in his Ghost Trio. This article is a shortened, revised, and translated version of a much longer article (Maier 2000). The second part will appear in the next volume of SBT/A. In Beckett’s Words and Music, the figures of Words and Music appear as dramatis personae who compete with each other in evoking aesthetic images of “Love”, “Age”, “The face”. When Katharine Worth asked Beckett about the relationship between the two figures in this radio play, she was given a surprising answer: “Music always wins,” Beckett told her (qtd. in Worth, 210). Similarly, Beckett told Theodor W. Adorno “that it definitely ends with the victory of music” (qtd. in Zilliacus, 114). Adorno was worried about this answer, with which the poet Beckett opted against his own art. The comment “Music always wins” created not only a paradox for the philosopher Adorno and an aporia for the producer Worth, but it was a problem with which the form-possessed and media- enthusiastic author Beckett had to grapple himself. This paper examines the role of music in Beckett’s television drama Ghost Trio, with special attention to the rewriting of that role during the play’s genesis and in the course of several productions. Victory will not be the issue, but rather the role of music in this very exciting play. In 1976, Beckett wrote the word “Tryst” onto the front cover of the sixty-page notebook into which he was to write down the plot for a television play and notes on particular production details. The play was taped in October 1976 and first televised on BBC2 on 17 April 1977. However, the title of the televised play was not “Tryst”. On Beckett’s notebook, the word was crossed out vigorously and the new title Ghost Trio written next to it. On the title page of the BBC script the same 267 handwritten title change can be found, indicating that it must have been corrected at the very last minute. In a letter dating from January 1976, Beckett wrote of a first draft of a television play in which all of the motifs from his oeuvre had returned: “All the old ghosts. Godot and Eh Joe over infinity” (qtd. in Knowlson 1996, 621). The rendezvous of old ghosts clarifies the title, but only in part, as on another level it refers to the Geistertrio, Beethoven’s Piano Trio in D, Opus 70, No. 1, The Ghost. The change of title is the last and most obvious in a line of steps that increased the significance of music in Beckett’s television play. Nevertheless, the appearance of Beethoven’s Ghost in Beckett’s second television play did not succeed in attracting much attention.1 It is not the case that the music has been ignored; its role is too prominent for that. But at the centre of interest for this play was the determined decision of the seventy-year-old author to turn again to the medium of television, ten years after Eh Joe (1966), his first television play. After the novels, the stage plays and the radio plays, a new group of works began to emerge. Ghost Trio and ...but the clouds... were broadcast in 1977, followed by Quad and Nacht und Träume in 1982 and 1983. Published in one volume by Minuit, the five plays were accompanied by an essay by Gilles Deleuze in which he distinguishes among three artistic languages that Beckett tested in the course of forty years. His “langue III”, a language of images and spaces, is the characteristic feature of the television plays. However, music appears to be of even greater novelty and significance for the television works than the visual dimension to which Deleuze points and its “images sonnantes, colorantes” (72). Beckett’s use of Beethoven’s music is very complex, and we shall explore it in four stages. First, we will analyse the formal structure of the second movement of the Geistertrio that Beckett used in the play. We will then describe at what points in the play Beckett introduced the musical passages from this movement. Thirdly, we will outline the six stages in Beckett’s conception of the role music was to play in Ghost Trio. Finally, we will discuss three aspects of Beethoven’s music in Beckett’s work. Beethoven’s largo movement has a clear binary form followed by a coda. The first part stretches to bar 45; the second part, a varied and harmonically altered repetition of the first part, extends from bar 46 to bar 86. The coda begins with bar 87 and ends with the final bar 96. A transition of eight bars leads to the repetition and another of four bars is a bridge to the coda. As the first transition (bars 38-45) clearly exhibits the whole thematic material of the movement, Donald Francis Tovey inter- 268 prets it as the development, and the fact that the repetition stays in the main key and abandons the contrast between D minor and C minor of the first part led Tovey to describe the whole movement as a sonata form. The inner structure of the largo’s two main parts is also binary. Two subjects are introduced (8+8+1 bars – examples 1 and 2 show these subjects as they appear in Beckett’s play); the first subject is then repeated twice (bar 18ff; bar 26ff.) and stays in the key of C major (8+8+6 bars). The already mentioned eight transition- or development- bars are followed by the first and second subject once again (8+8+1 bars), beginning with bar 46. In the following section (7+7+6 bars) the first subject appears twice in D minor (bar 63ff; bar 70ff.). After four further transition-bars (bar 83ff.) the ten bars of the coda follow. The movement distinguishes itself through the succinctness of the two subjects and the lucidity of its form as well as through the gloomy mood it conveys. The following description is of the Süddeutscher Rundfunk production of Geister Trio in Stuttgart that Beckett directed himself. It was first broadcast on 1 November 1977. Three camera positions are indicated: A is outside the room, providing a general view; B is just inside the room, corresponding to a medium shot of the figure; C is close to the protagonist. At the beginning of the three-part play, the spectator is given a general view of a sparsely furnished room. A woman’s toneless voice asks the spectator to look at “the familiar chamber”. It lists the objects of the interior that have been stylised as grey rectangles, naming each as they are shown in close-up: “floor”, “wall”, “door”, “window”, “pallet”. Another general view reveals a darker rectangle in the back of the room, not far from the door. The voice explains: “Sole sign of life a seated figure” (1986, 409). As the camera moves in very slowly, one can recognise, first in outline, then more clearly, an old man sitting bowed forward, holding something in his hands. At a particular point during the zoom towards position B, a border is crossed, after which, quite unex- pectedly, music becomes audible. Only in retrospect does one realise that the inaudible opening bar of the first subject (bar 18) links the music to the surrounding silence from which it emerges imperceptibly. During the two minutes of the zoom, the bars 19 to 35 of the slow movement of Beethoven’s Piano Trio become audible. The appearance of the protagonist is thus linked to the entrance of the music with a pathos that strangely contradicts the cold scrutiny of the camera and the emotionally detached tone of the voice.2 269 Example 1: Beethoven, Piano Trio, Opus 70, No. 1, 2nd movement: Largo assai ed espressivo, bars 19-26 In the second part of the play, after the camera has returned to its starting position, the voice announces the first action of the protagonist: “He will now think he hears her.” A presumed acoustic impression, which is made visible by the hand that he directs to his ear, startles the old man and sets him off toward the door and the window, both of which he opens and looks out of; he then peers down onto the pallet and into the mirror before returning to sit on his stool. As he takes up his cassette recorder, the two-minute zoom of the first part is repeated, again with the gradual onset of music. One hears bars 64 to 80, the recapitulation of bars 19-35 heard during the previous zoom. Thinking again that he hears her, the old man looks out into the corridor and returns to his place. From camera position A another musical passage is heard: it is the second subject of the movement, which we will call the “cantabile-subject” after Beethoven’s indication (Vortragsbezeichnung) for the violoncello in bar 9. It is heard in the summarising tone that characterises its appearance at 270 the transition to the coda (bar 83ff.).

Load more