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GEISTER TRIO: Beethoven's Music in Samuel Beckett's Ghost Trio

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GEISTER TRIO: Beethoven's Music in Samuel Beckett's Ghost Trio GEISTER TRIO: 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 com­ plex. 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 pas­ sages 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 tum 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 Traume 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 musi­ cal 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 .
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