IV. Voice As Protagonist

Home , Patrick Magee (actor), Play (play), Words and Music (play)

IV. Voice as Protagonist

1. Voice and Music: Cascando

Recordings and Erasures

The radio play Cascando is a truly European affair. It was written in December 1961, and first broadcast in its original French version on October 13th 1963 on the France Culture service of the ORTF. Roger Blin played “L‟Oeuverer” (Opener), Jean Martin “La Voix” (Voice), and the part of “Musique” (Music) was composed by Marcel Mi- halovici. The first English language production was broadcast on Oc- tober 6th 1964 by the BBC‟s Third Programme.1 Donald McWhinnie directed Denys Hawthorne, who played Opener, and Patrick Magee, who played the role of Voice. Reference will be made to the 1964 BBC production, which has been made available on compact disc,2 and to a more recent recording directed by Everett Frost for The Beckett Festival of Radio Plays in 1988,3 a project carried out with Beckett‟s collaboration. Unfortunately, the first French version is no longer available for audition due to the fact that “the unique original tape was erased”4 after it had been returned to Paris for transmission abroad.

Voice and Music as Dramatis Personae

Cascando was fruit of a joint project between Beckett and the Roma- nian-born composer, Marcel Mihalovici. The French radio station RTF had commissioned a musical score for radio from Mihalovici, and he in turn had asked Beckett to write the accompanying French text. In fact, Mihalovici did not compose the music for the play until a year later, so when Beckett wrote the script in December 1961, he was

1 The length of the productions varied considerably given the brevity of the play, the French version running for 28ʹ00ʺ, the German only 19ʹ00ʺ and the English 21ʹ09ʺ. 2 “Cascando” on Samuel Beckett Works for Radio: The Original Broadcasts, British Library Board (2006). 3 “Cascando” on The Beckett Festival of Radio Plays, Voices International (1988). 4 Zilliacus (1976), p. 144. 108 Say It working with the idea of music rather than an actual score. The radio play that Beckett had written in English for the BBC‟s Third Pro- gramme a month earlier, Words and Music, also took shape in a simi- lar way. Beckett wrote the radiophonic text in November-December 1961 and his nephew, John Beckett, subsequently composed the music.5

What is so innovative in Words and Music and Cascando is that words, voice, and music, are made autonomous members of the cast.6 In Words and Music the roles are specified as „Words‟ and „Music, referred to respectively by a third character, Croak, as „Joe‟ and „Bob‟, and in Cascando the roles are „Voice‟ and „Music‟. True to his name, Words selects, arranges and enunciates lexis, whereas Voice uses words as a vehicle to tell a story. This idea for the dramatic personifi- cation of speech and music may have come to Beckett while he was working on an entirely different project. In 1960 Mihalovici finished a chamber opera based on Beckett‟s French translation of Krapp‟s Last Tape, La dernière bande.7 Subsequently, Beckett worked very closely with Mihalovici and the French actor, Roger Blin (who read the words), to adapt the text to accommodate the music or vice versa. James Knowlson comments that “Words and Music bears the imprint of these struggles to bring the two different elements together”.8 “My comforts! Be friends!” (127), Croak implores. Cascando does not involve such a “struggle”, as Opener, the mediating third character, can combine Voice and Music “at will” (139), draw them together “As though they had linked their arms” (143).

5 Knowlson (1997), p. 497. 6 Michael Bakewell, the BBC producer of the plays, “believed that they pioneered the role of music as an autonomous member of the cast of a play, quite different from its traditional role in radio drama as background music or as creator of mood or atmos- phere”. Knowlson (1997), p. 496. 7 The opera was for broadcast on RTF and the Städtische Bühnen in Bielefeld, Ger- many. When the music had been composed, Beckett and his German translator, Elmar Tophoven, worked with Mihalovici adapting the text to the music. Knowlson (1997), pp. 466-467. 8 Ibid., p. 496.