GEISTERTRIO: Beethoven s Music in Samuel Beckett s Ghost Trio. Michael Maier

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 mediaenthusiastic 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 developmentbars 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 unexpectedly, 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, 2 nd 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.). When one knows Beethoven s music one now expects these closing sections. Example 2: Beethoven, Piano Trio, Opus 70, No. 1, 2 nd movement: Largo assai ed espressivo, bars 83-86 The voice interrupts the old man s absorption after a few seconds at the sound of the third quaver of bar 84: Stop. [...] Repeat. In the play s third part, the camera cuts to a close-up of the old man, as music is heard for the fourth time. The old man listens for the presumed sound, then returns to the music, and then we share with him the sound of the creaking door, the view into the corridor, the sound of rain, the view out the window as well as the image of his face in the mirror. As the camera maintains its position at C, a fifth musical passage is heard. After the scene with the messenger, the old man returns to sit on his stool. With the camera at position A, a third zoom begins and with it the cantabile music that was earlier interrupted by the voice. Now uninterrupted we hear the four transition bars, the coda and the ending of the Largo assai ed espressivo. This sixth musical passage is followed by silence. In close-up, the old man lifts his head and smiles faintly at the spectator. The camera zooms back to position A. The screen goes dark. 271

If one could ask Beckett himself about the role of music in Ghost Trio, one could expect two answers: the explanation that he gave James Knowlson and an answer provided by the play itself. Knowlson writes: On the first typescript of Tryst, Beckett wrote in by hand the word Macbeth. When he asked Beckett what this note meant, Beckett pointed out that the descriptive text accompanying his recording of Geistertrio linked this piano trio with Beethoven s music for an opera based on Macbeth (Knowlson 1996, 621). Because of Beckett s remark, Knowlson understands the use of the music in Ghost Trio atmospherically: The Ghost retained for Beckett something of Macbeth s doomladen atmosphere and involvement in the spirit world (1996, 622). In addition to his remark about Macbeth, which gives his impression of the play, Beckett referred to other poetic images during rehearsal, especially from Kleist s Über das Marionettentheater (1810). The role he intended for Beethoven s music, however, can be gleaned from the scripts that detail the stages in the author s conception. This examination is based on the scripts preserved in the Archive of the Beckett International Foundation at Reading, the two productions of 1977 in London and Stuttgart, and the Faber and Faber text (see Beckett 1986). 3 As they differ significantly from the text published by Faber and Faber, I see the two productions of 1977 that Beckett supervised as independent versions of the play. I will outline six stages in Beckett s evolving conception of the role of music in Ghost Trio: Stage 1: The Five-Second Framework The oldest documented layer, which might be called the backbone of the play, appears in the formal order set down both in Beckett s notebook ms. 1519/1 and typescript 1519/2. The play is split into three parts, each of which is structured according to consecutively numbered actions. The course of the play is clocked into intervals of about five seconds. Music is meant to accompany some of these actions and submit itself to the five-second framework. In this draft the music appears as one of several elements; it does not have a particular role, but appears as quiet background music to particular events. It is not clear what music and what bars should be played. Only the note Macbeth gives a coded clue about the significance that the music holds for Beckett. Stage 2: Heard, Unheard Music On page 12 of ts. 1519/2 there are reflections on the distribution of the music in the course of the play. For the estimated seventeen-minute 272

duration of the play (3+6+8), five minutes of music are planned: 178 seconds in the first part, 92 in the second part and 30 seconds in the third part. Beckett splits the music further into Unheard and Heard, with 131 seconds unheard and 47 seconds heard in the first part; 42 seconds unheard and 50 seconds heard in the second part; and in the third part, all 30 seconds are heard. What these calculations may have meant becomes clearer when one takes into account that Beckett considered using music during the opening credits and then as silent background that would become audible only at particular points in the course of the play. A more important role was assigned to music through this synchronisation than to the music-fragments of the first stage. A note that suggests using the beginning of the piece or perhaps a passage from another movement of the same work for the credits implies that the second movement of the Geistertrio had been chosen for the play at a very early stage, even if explicit instructions about composer and work do not appear until the BBC script. 4 Stage 3: First Closing Figure At this stage, Beckett considers summarising the music-fragments into a crescendo: Till final crescendo music faint even at loudest (ms. 1519/1, 22). For the ending he wants the camera to move towards the protagonist, a movement that is to be initiated and accompanied by a crescendo of the music (from bar 70). The return movement to the starting position A is to be coordinated with the decrescendo of the music. The music therefore takes over the direction for this movement. This sequence appears in ms. 1519/1, ts. 1519/2 and ts. 2832 as the following: III. 35. Cut to general view from A. 5. 36. Music audible at A. It grows. 10. 37. With growing music move in slowly to close-up of head bowed right down over cassette now held in arms and invisible. 10 till music swells to ff. 38. Fade out slowly image and sound. One trace of this version of the ending has stayed until the printed edition. In the list of music passages to be played, which is first included at the end of ms. 2833, the last music is assigned to actions III.36 to end (emphasis added). This formulation from ms. 2833, 3, is still in ms. 2831, A10, and remains in the printed edition, although Beckett changed the ending so that the final music is only played in sections III.36 and III.37, followed by III.38 Silence. 273

Stage 4: Second Closing Figure Apparently, it soon became clear to Beckett that his concept of the ending could not be realised. In ms. 1519/3 Beckett gives up the script s timing in favour of Beethoven s music and its timing. He writes: Faint even at loudest till from III.36 onward full volume for the first time. But the ff beginning bar 70 is too brief to cover the 20 or more seconds required by the script and begins to fade of itself before fade direction at III.38 leaving no volume to fade from. [ ] Suggest therefore we change end as follows: hold close-up at III.37 till movement ends with pp pizzicati and then a further 10 seconds in silence. In this final silence the head could be raised and the face seen clearly for the second time. Then slowly back from close-up to A and general view before fade out. Beckett gives in to the idiosyncrasy of Beethoven s Geistertrio movement. He frees the music from its functionality for the play and gives the requisite time for its own final crescendo and decrescendo. For the duration of the music, he freezes the time of the play. This insertion of extra time at the end becomes significant through a note on the penultimate musical passage, in which Beckett shortens the music. Beckett discards a schematic repetition of the third zoom which would have been the consequence of his constructed form because with the closer starting position he has already reached the standstill that would be too long in the close-up position. Concerning the music in III.29 Beckett notes: Strictly speaking equivalent of II.24-30=50! Too long to hold near shot. Better cheat and equate this M with II.29-30 only (10 ) (ms. 1519/1, 15). It is therefore solely the final position that Beckett wants to have elaborated. Only here does he tolerate the continuing close-up. As an instruction, this change cannot be found until the script of the BBC production, ms. 2831, and it is maintained in the printed Faber and Faber text (Beckett 1986). Stage 5: The Entrance of the Cantabile-Subject Beckett continued working on the structure of the end as well as on the course of the crescendo, as the following table, containing all changes of the music in the drafts and the two productions, demonstrates: 274

Table 1: Musical Passages inthe Different Versions of Ghost Trio Note: The actions have been numbered according to the Faber and Faber printed text (Beckett 1986). In the two columns, London production and Stuttgart production, the numbers after the periods indicate the audible semi-quavers of the bar. In ms. 2831, the strikeouts are in black ink; the new bar numbers were added in red ink, and the deletesigns refer to the question marks. In the London production the final musical passage obtains a new significance: the second subject, the cantabile (bar 83ff.) enters with its own summarising gesture. Rather than presenting the music as a uniformly intensifying development, Beckett aims at presenting it as a differentiated feature. The fifth musical passage now refers back to the second. This results in a far-reaching connection, as the second passage recapitulates the first. This is not a tautological correspondence (bar 64 = bar 64); the difference between the bars given in the printed edition and the music actually played at the London production clearly mark the following: by starting only at bar 65, a difference to the second musical passage is established; furthermore the key of C major, which has been reached in bar 67, makes a connection with the climax of the first passage. The fifth musical passage has been shortened in such a way that intensification is the result. The two relationships of musical passages 1-2 and 3-5-6 form step-by-step the enfolded figure of 1-2-5 and 3-6. 275

Stage 6: Interrupted and Uninterrupted Final Music The alterations made to the play s ending in the Stuttgart production lead to further intensification. This version is ten minutes longer than the BBC version: especially the music for actions I. 31-34 and for II. 26-29 (nos. 1 and 2 in table 1) is given more time. The cantabile now appears already as the third musical passage at the end of act 2, and the connection between the third and sixth musical passages has been clearly established. However, at the end of act 2 one hears only one and a half bars before the voice interrupts the music, whereas the entire coda is heard at the end of the third act. By opposing the interrupted to the uninterrupted cantabile, the music becomes part of a line of oppositions that can be found throughout the play: a surprised Ah whilst looking into the mirror as opposed to a toneless No one whilst looking out of the window and door; seeing the messenger whilst looking out into the corridor the second time as opposed to an empty corridor the first time; a direct shot of the protagonist s face after a shot of the face in the mirror; an upright posture of the faintly smiling protagonist during the last shot from position A as opposed to a cowering body during the first shot from this position. No attempt has been made to bring it into line with the finished work, Beckett wrote in a preface to the script of Film (1963) (1986, 322). Bearing this in mind, it is interesting that Beckett marked the alterations for the Stuttgart production of Geister Trio into an edition of Ends and Odds (ms. 4407). Therefore the Stuttgart production of Ghost Trio is set in writing, if not in the Faber and Faber text (Beckett 1986). We have seen that Beckett increasingly laid stress on music in his play through six stages of development. If one looks at the entrances of the music in the final stage, one notices the careful disposition of the three big entrances, each two minutes long: the first one after six minutes, the second one five minutes after the first, the last one eleven minutes after the second; in between these, the four short entrances last about fifteen seconds. Beethoven s Geistertrio music divides into two parts and a coda that is intended as the final climax. Beckett endeavoured to make this intensifying structure effective in his play. To be continued. Translation by Viola Scheffel 276

Notes 1. See the following literature: Esslin, 135f.; Cohn, 136; Brater, 88f.; Russell, 25; Pountney, 201; Fletcher et al., 215f., Gontarski, 124; Knowlson 1986, 201. See also: Ben-Zvi, 22-37; Wulf. 2. See remarks in ms. 1519/1, 3: It [the camera] should not explore, simply look. It stops and stares. [ ] This staring vision essential to the piece. 3. The manuscripts and typescripts are in the order of their genesis: ms. 1519/1 (sketch-book), ts. 1519/2, ms. 1519/3 (single sheet with instructions for a production), ms. 2829 (galley for Journal of Beckett Studies), ms. 2833 (script for the BBC production), ts. 2832, ms. 2831 (corrected script for the BBC production), ms. 4407 (copy of Ends and Odds dedicated to Reinhart Müller-Freienfels). 4. Music to be used with credits (say 1 ). Possibilities: 1. If movement long enough 1 before I.1... 4. Passage from another movement of the same work (ms. 1519/1, 22). Works Cited Beckett, Samuel, Ends and Odds: Eight New Dramatic Pieces (New York: Grove P, 1976)., The Complete Dramatic Works (London: Faber and Faber, 1986)., Ghost Trio manuscripts and typescripts: ms. 1519/1, ts. 1519/2, ms. 1519/3, ms. 2829, ms. 2833, ts. 2832, ms. 2831, ms. 4407, Archive of the Beckett International Foundation, U of Reading. Ben-Zvi, Linda, Samuel Beckett s Media Plays, in Modern Drama 28 (1985), 22-37. Brater, Enoch, Beyond Minimalism: Beckett s Late Style in the Theater (New York: Oxford UP, 1987). Cohn, Ruby, Just Play: Beckett s Theater (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1980). Deleuze, Gilles, L Épuisé, in Quad et autres pièces pour la télévision, by Samuel Beckett (Paris: Minuit, 1992), 57-106. Esslin, Martin, Mediations: Essays on Brecht, Beckett and the Media (London: Eyre Methuen, 1980). Fletcher, Beryl S. and Fletcher, John et al., A Student s Guide to the Plays of Samuel Beckett (London: Faber and Faber, 1978). Gontarski, S. E., The Intent of Undoing in Samuel Beckett s Dramatic Texts (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1985). Knowlson, James, Ghost Trio/Geister Trio, in Beckett at 80/Beckett in Context, ed. by Enoch Brater (New York and Oxford: Oxford UP, 1986), 193-207. 277

, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (London: Bloomsbury, 1996). Maier, Michael, Geistertrio: Beethovens Musik in Samuel Becketts zweitem Fernsehspiel, in Archiv für Musikwissenschaft 57 (2000), 172-94. Pountney, Rosemary, Theatre of Shadows: Samuel Beckett s Drama 1956-76 (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1988). Russell, Catherine, The Figure in the Monitor: Beckett, Lacan, and Video, in Cinema Journal 28.4 (1989), 20-37. Tovey, Donald Francis, Beethoven (London: Oxford UP, 1965). Worth, Katharine, Beckett and the Radio Medium, in British Radio Drama, ed. by John Drakakis (Cambridge 1981), 191-217. Wulf, Catharina, ed., STB/A 4, The Savage Eye/L Œil fauve: New Essays on Samuel Beckett s Television Plays (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 1995). Zilliacus, Clas, Beckett and Broadcasting: A Study of the Works of Samuel Beckett for and in Radio and Television (Abo: Abo Akademi, 1976). 278