Samuel Beckett and Music, edited by Mary Bryden, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 286pp, £40 in UK.
Music is everywhere in Beckett. Extracts from "The Unbuttoned Symphony" appear in Dream of Fair to Middling Women and More Pricks Than Kicks, Miss Counihan's lingering kiss in Murphy is compared to "a breve tied . . . over bars' times its equivalent in demisemiquavers", while the visit of a pair of piano tuners is one of the highlights of Watt. Music features as a character in the rdio plays Cascando and Words and Music, All That Fall is haunted by Schubert's Death and the Maiden, and Beethoven and Schubert provide the titles for Ghost Trio and Nacht und Traume. A book on the subject was long overdue, and Mary Bryden's collection of essays elegantly fills the gap.
The essays fall into two main categories: scholarly analyses of music in Beckett and musical adaptations of his work and the personal testimonies of the composers themselves. The volume opens with Katherine Worth's account of recording Cascando and Words and Music for the BBC. For Beckett the lesson of the second play was clear-cut: "Music always wins," she reports him as saying. Mary Bryden explores "Beckett and the Sound of Silence", invoking Cage, Stravinsky and Adorno to good effect and reproducing a page from the 1930s Whoroscope notebook in which Beckett copies out Schubert's An die Musik.
John Piling explores the Schopenhauerian basis of the remarks on music in Proust and reveals a surprising level of misunderstanding of witful distortion of the philosopher by the young writer. Arguing that music is not just a literal presence in Beckett's writing but a "structural precedent", Harry White draws convincing parallels between the relationship of Schoenberg and Webern and that of Joyce and Beckett.
A brief intermediate section titled " Memories" offers the reminiscences of the late Walter Beckett and Miron Grindea before we move on to the composers. Here we find interviews with Luciano Berio, Philip Glass and Morton Feldman (for whom Beckett wrote Neither), Leslie Daiken, daughter of Beckett's friend Leslie Yodaiken, discusses setting Beckett's poetry. There are also more avant-garde contributions by Giacomo Mazoni and Clarence Barlow, the latter of whom memorably quotes a pidgin description of a piano as a "Big-Black-Box-He-Got-White-Black-Teeth-All-Time-You-Fight-Him-He-Cry- Out".
But perhaps of greatest interest are the insights we find into Beckete's musical tastes and habits. We learn once more of his hatred of opera (first expressed in Proust), and "dislike of the inexorable purposefulness of Bach". He much preferred Beethoven to Mozart, and considered writing a play about the German composer's deafness. He praised Brahms for his "wary elegance" and was interested in modern music, too (Debussy, the Second Viennese School), but reserved the superlative of "pure Spirit" for the opening of Schubert's A minor quartet D 804. His favourite pianists were Diniu Lipatti, Clara Haskii and Monique Haas. He himself was not just a fine pianist but would occasionally sing Schubert Lieder to his own accompaniment - and not just Schubert, if we are to believe Miron Grindea's talk of "bawdy Irish songs".
There are some unfortunate technical slips in Samuel Beckett and Music (a tritone is an augumented fourth, not a sequence of three notes, and the Lydian mode is not a major scale), and some to the more involved musicology will inevitably defeat non-specialists,. But in these vaporously postmodern times it is refreshing to encounter a volume with as well defined and well-researched a subject as this. Bedkett once called music a "perfectly intelligible and perfectly inexplicable" art. These essays enhance our understanding of music in Beckett and our sense of its mystery, too.
David Wheatley is a poet and critic.