Beckett's Musical Paradox: Directorial Control vs. Artistic Autonomy

Beckett's theatrical conduct: different music

Samuel Beckett's references to music during his work as a director reveal complicated views on artistic autonomy, intermedial practice, and music itself—often betraying a fundamental misunderstanding of music's true nature. The ideal music Beckett conjured was supremely formal and beyond interpretation, benefiting from precise notation that guaranteed accurate rendition. Over time, Beckett began regarding his performers as instruments. These ideas, along with the image of Beckett as conductor and his notable distaste for recording technology, feed into a larger debate within Beckett studies about directorial freedom versus authorial control.

If we can't keep our genres more or less distinct, or extricate them from the confusion that has them where they are, we might as well go home and lie down.

The current approach—examining Beckett's theatrical practice through his ideas about music—runs counter to the strong strain in Beckett exemplified by the remark above. The imagined complaint is typically Beckettian in its resignation, yet no less outraged for all that. Though Beckett was speaking specifically about genres within an art form on that occasion, other comments show he felt the same about relationships between the different arts. Opera and ballet particularly failed to engage him because they blended multiple art-forms into an indistinct confusion. They were especially blameworthy when they failed to recognise music's primacy above all else. Beckett expressed this view in a 1934 letter to Morris Sinclair:

It is precisely because the music plays a subordinate role in it that ballet annoys me … To represent music in a particular way through dance, gestures, décors, costumes and so on, is to degrade it, by reducing its value to that of pure anecdote.

Beckett's admiration for music ran so deep that he often violated his own injunction against mixing media when directing his plays. Paradoxically, he frequently introduced concepts borrowed from music to emphasise the formal autonomy of his drama. Such a move is already problematic: drama, while perhaps a purer art-form than opera or ballet, is itself an intermedial hybrid of words and movement. (The fact that this combination existed for centuries before the separate arts emerged as distinct entities does not negate the point.) Yet a more fundamental paradox lies in the position music occupies in all debates about intermediality and artistic autonomy.

As Daniel Albright observed in Untwisting the Serpent: Modernism in Music, Literature, and Other Arts (2000), aestheticians have historically found it difficult to incorporate music into systems of the fine arts and have therefore tended to neglect it. In Beckett and Aesthetics (2003), Albright described and documented the particular piquancy with which the Laocoön problem has been debated within modernism: while what he calls transvestism among the arts drove many modernist developments, others despaired over the mingling of artistic practices:

There is an important tradition of puritanism in the Modernist movement – Adorno and Clement Greenberg are perhaps the main ecclesiastics here – demanding that each artistic medium resist any contamination by foreign media. If painting is about paint, any sort of inclination that a painter may have toward narrative is unnatural, à rebours, a violation of the sanctity of the medium.

Beckett himself often expresses a similar tendency. But, faced with the undeniable gap between Beckett avowed theoretical stances and his distinctly indistinct artistic creations, Albright has to place himself subtly but firmly on the fence:

Beckett clearly had a somewhat puritan temperament, though mitigated by an impulse to shuffle, scatter, overturn: like Mrs. Lambert in Malone Dies, Beckett liked to separate the lentils and the pebbles into neat piles, then blindly to sweep the two together, to undo the work. If voice and music remain apart, on different frequencies, sooner or later it is likely that a ghost signal from one will start to interfere with the other – it is the same dialectic, the dialectic of the disfigured grid, that dominates so much of Beckett's aesthetic formation.

Yet the complexity of Beckett's position stems less from any progressive dialectical intentions on his part than from the paradoxical nature of the debate itself. Albright's otherwise excellent accounts fail to recognise that making claims for any art's autonomy simultaneously commits an intermedial transgression, precisely because music demonstrates formal autonomy most completely and convincingly. To profess adherence to the restrictions and structures of a particular art-form is to adopt and adapt an aesthetic creed first established in the early nineteenth century by instrumental music. One could well argue that this sense of formal autonomy and unworldly self-sufficiency constitutes the enviable condition of music to which, as Walter Pater famously wrote, all other arts aspire.

Through the works of writers as diverse as E. T. A. Hoffmann, Arthur Schopenhauer, Eduard Hanslick, and Friedrich Nietzsche, music had indeed come to be considered the supreme art. With its highly developed notational and theoretical language, and its historical connections to mathematics and cosmic order, music can claim to be the most abstract of the arts. Yet its exemplary status does not rely on its formal qualities alone. It also possesses an undeniable emotional power, and physicality and sensuality are central both to its means of production and to its effect on listeners. This tension between intellectual and physical aspects is shared to some degree by all the arts, but is stretched to its highest pitch in music—the art of arts.

Daniel Albright uses the myth of Apollo and Marsyas as an allegory for the competing claims of abstraction and expressionism in art, but does not capitalise on the fact that their contest is specifically a musical one. With Albright's work in mind, the words of one of Beckett's favourite actors, Billie Whitelaw, become especially apt:

I said nothing, but had the feeling that the guts of the story would come out in the dynamic rhythms of Beckett's word-music.

Whitelaw is describing her willingness, when rehearsing Play in 1964, to go with Beckett's unusual flow—a willingness her co-actors did not always share. Her choice of phrase to describe the main elements of the plot is striking. The "guts of the story" is a starkly visceral image, inescapably expressionistic and sensual even while employed to advocate abstract formalism. Albright has written about the tendency of extreme abstraction and extreme expressionism to flip into their opposites; the contradictory elements are simultaneously present in Whitelaw's words.

In speaking of the dynamic rhythms of Beckett's word-music, Whitelaw proves herself a true disciple of Beckett's directorial style. As a director, Beckett frequently invoked music to emphasise the formal qualities of his plays and to sidestep questions of psychological or emotional interpretation. Music is an extremely unlikely tool for this purpose since, as a practical musician, Beckett would have constantly had to confront the gap between music as it existed in his mind (and in the minds of his beloved composers) and the different music, produced by his hands, that reached his ears. This gap is even more acute for relatively accomplished pianists like Beckett than for beginners. After music, drama can lay claim to being the art in which the tensions between mind and body, abstract and concrete, conception and execution, are most tangible—the same tensions that Beckett encountered privately at his piano would be experienced more publicly in the theatre.

Although Beckett had been deeply involved in several productions of his own work, it was not until 1967 that he made his official debut as a director, with Endspiel at the Schiller-Theater in Berlin. McMillan and Fehsenfeld's Beckett in the Theatre quotes at length from the rehearsal diary kept by Beckett's assistant, Michael Haerdter. In Beckett's remarks to Haerdter, it sometimes seems as though he is trying to convince himself of his distinctive ideas about drama:

Theatre for me is mainly a recreation from working on the novel. One has a given space to deal with, and people in that space. That is relaxing.

No matter how arduous Beckett found working on prose, one cannot help but sense the strain in his characterisation of theatre as relaxing recreation. The effort involved in realising a dramatic text in performance is intense, and Beckett was often dissatisfied with the results. Frequently we find Beckett trying to downplay the potentially messy aspects of theatrical work in favour of its formal aspects. In this instance, "people" pretends to be as unified and unproblematic an element as "space," offering the prospect of pure pleasure in a purely formal activity; in reality, however, this innocent plural noun has a way of manifesting itself as a far more amorphous and complex phenomenon.

Midway through his directorial debut, Beckett hit upon what would become his favourite means of striving for abstraction in the theatre:

Midway during the rehearsal period, after the actors knew the book, Beckett held a rehearsal for tone, pitch, rhythm. Especially in the last two weeks, he tended to comment in musical terms – legato, andante, piano, scherzo, and a rare fortissimo. Often he spoke of "reine Spiel," pure play.

This became a defining characteristic of Beckett's directorial style. According to Knowlson, "While directing his own plays, musical terms like 'piano', 'fortissimo', 'andante', 'allegro', 'da capo', 'cadenza' tripped lightly off his tongue at rehearsals." They tripped off Beckett's tongue especially lightly in response to questions of interpretation. However, this amounts to no real response at all, and Beckett's use of musical language to evade questions should itself be questioned. Within music itself there is no possibility of using these terms to avoid interpretation: since they are often already part of the score, they are themselves objects of interpretation. Moreover, within the realm of music to which Beckett appealed, such terms lack the aura of alien inscrutability they acquired when used in the theatre. Beckettians are familiar with the theory that Beckett's move away from his mother tongue was crucial to accessing otherwise untapped sources of creativity. Much of music's work is conducted in Italian and German; it is perhaps no coincidence that Beckett's unusually unguarded comments about aesthetics were made in German (to Michael Haerdter and Axel Kaun, among others). In the context of the theatre, music's so-called universal language served Beckett as yet another non-mother tongue.

Beckett also appears to have believed that music's language was more accurate than the spoken languages at his disposal. He apparently envied composers what he considered the greater subtlety and precision of musical notation. Whitelaw recounts that Beckett said Happy Days "was a sonata for voice and movement. By that he meant that everything was precisely timed – like notes of music." According to Deirdre Bair, Beckett queried Igor Stravinsky—one of the century's greatest composers—on the possibility of notating tempo in the performance of his plays:

He quizzed Stravinsky on the possibility of notating the tempo of the performance of his plays, and was especially interested in timing the pauses in Godot. Stravinsky liked the idea but thought the circumstances of dramatic production were too variable to make such directions enforceable.

Note that Stravinsky thought Beckett's suggestion impractical not because of some fundamental difference between music and drama; there is no reason why tempo indications or specific measurements of time should not be included in a play script just as they are in a musical score. Rather, Stravinsky's point is that both words and music are inevitably transformed as they move from text to performance—a practical truth Beckett was reluctant to accept. Although detailed notation would not remove questions of interpretation but merely defer them, Beckett never seriously pursued such possibilities. Perhaps the closest he came is the significance of one, two, or three dots in the ellipses of Play or Not I, which produced another remarkable act of loyalty from Billie Whitelaw.

Beckett's envy of musical notation's supposed accuracy reveals a desire to fix performances of his plays to the specifications of their texts. This was a desire that made Beckett uncomfortable, and he sought to dispel the image of himself that went along with it. When Haerdter asked Beckett why he had chosen this play for his directorial debut, Beckett responded that it was his favourite. He then added observations about the preliminary photographs of the first Berlin production, noting the ashbins were separated and Hamm's feet visible and touching the ground. When Haerdter pressed—so you wanted to give Berlin the authentic version?—Beckett replied:

No, I don't claim my interpretation is the only correct one. It's possible to do the play quite differently, different music, movements, different rhythm, the kitchen can be differently located and so on…

The precise relationship between notions of correctness and difference is glossed over here in the flow of conversation. Furthermore, Beckett's examples of different possibilities delineate the narrow range of interpretative questions he considered legitimate—questions of a purely formal kind. In fact, as James Knowlson colourfully relates, Beckett increasingly gained something of a reputation as a tyrannical figure and arch-controller of his work, ready to unleash thunderbolts onto any bold, innovative director unwilling to follow his text and stage directions to the last counted dot and precisely timed pause. Knowlson argues that this is a somewhat distorted picture created by simplistic reporting of a few high-profile cases. That judgement-call will continue to be debated. But what is interesting, especially given Beckett's stated openness to different music, is how many of the examples Knowlson cites involve objections specifically related to music.

Accounts of JoAnne Akalaitis's controversial 1984 production of Endgame have concentrated on her realistic set and the casting of black actors. Yet Beckett was equally irritated by her use of music by Philip Glass as overture and occasional incidental music. Similarly, the precise terms of Beckett's objection to the casting of female actors in De Haarlemse Toneelschuur's 1988 production of Waiting for Godot deserve attention. While Beckett had previously dismissed the idea of a female Vladimir with the plain naturalistic explanation "women don't have prostates," here he gave a different reason:

The lawyer reflected Beckett's own feelings about vocal quality by arguing that replacing men by women was rather like substituting violins for trumpets and that this violated the integrity of the play.

Beckett's framing of the issue purely in terms of instrumental timbre could only have further angered those who wished to use his play to highlight gender issues. From their perspective, Beckett's purely formal, abstract considerations should give way to matters of wider import. Conversely, Beckett's inability or refusal even to acknowledge political concerns indicates just how irrelevant he considered them. Precisely because it was just a technical matter for Beckett, alteration was inconceivable.

This is not the only time we find Beckett thinking of his actors as instruments. Part of the attraction of this image for Beckett appears to have been a belief that instruments are less variable than voices—another notion based on exaggeration, if not outright misunderstanding. Nevertheless, Beckett's favourite directors and actors, including Roger Blin, had no qualms about spreading the word:

Beckett asked that a certain phrase which occurs throughout the text be spoken in exactly the same way each time with the same tone, like a note of music played in an invariable way by the same instrument.

The image carries further consequences. As Billie Whitelaw described it:

Often, when one is sent a play, the first thing that occurs to you is: "What can I do with this to make it different?" With Beckett I learned that you don't do anything with it, you don't try to make it "different," you simply allow your own core to make contact with what comes off the page. Eventually everything then falls into place, the material takes off on its own. If you allow the words to breathe through your body, if you become a conduit, something magical may happen.

In this gesture of surrender, Whitelaw indeed becomes some kind of instrument: a pipe for Beckett's words to play, or a harp through which the wind of his words might blow. It seems that in order to receive from Beckett the gift of creative participation, Whitelaw had first to renounce what many would consider essential attributes of autonomous agency. Paradoxically, by submitting to Beckett's vision of her as mere material or instrument, Whitelaw experienced greater professional and creative fulfilment:

At this point I had no idea that I would ever do another Beckett play, but I was grateful to the man for giving me a certain feeling: that Play wasn't finished—until we'd worked on it. I felt part of that creativity, part of his work-in-progress.

Whitelaw thus confirms the image of Beckett he was eager to project: ultimately open to different possibilities, despite his very real impulses to the contrary.

Beckett's peculiar dramas and even more peculiar directorial practices had Whitelaw reaching across several media for fitting comparisons:

For me, as for him, Footfalls was to be an entirely new creative experience. Sometimes I felt as if he were a sculptor and I a piece of clay. At other times I might be a piece of marble that he needed to chip away at… Sometimes it felt as if I were modelling for a painter, or working with a musician. The movements started to feel like dance.

Ultimately, though, it is a notion that first struck Whitelaw in her initial encounter with Beckett that proved the most satisfactory and lasting. "Working on Play was not unlike conducting music or having a music lesson." This is the metaphor to which Whitelaw and others consistently return.

“Conducting” may be a better word to describe what he was doing as a director (in 1980). Rosemary Pountney observed from behind him, as actors delivered their speeches, his left hand marking out rhythms like Karajan (Knowlson, 668).

Whitelaw’s tentative “not unlike” remark and the inverted commas in these excerpts betray some uncertainty about how well this intermedial metaphor fits. But every metaphor crosses boundaries, and what might make this one seem less appropriate is how closely it resembles a literal picture of Beckett’s working methods.

Actually, “conducting” rather than “directing” fittingly captures the dual pulls in Beckett between demanding exact texts and authoritative renditions, on one side, and interpretative openness, on the other. Whitelaw highlights the mutual quality by saying they were “conducting each other”; yet “directing” (to straighten or correct) is clearly more prescriptive and less cooperative than “conducting” (leading with). Still, eventually there must be just one true leader — and two conductors waving at each other produce no music whatsoever. Though the movements Pountney saw were small, almost personal signals, Karajan was among the most imposing figures ever to take the podium; Pountney was far from alone in drawing that parallel. Consider Beckett’s directing manner during rehearsals for a 1962 production:

Allowed to step in for Devine, Beckett grew more and more troubled as Brenda Bruce fought with lines she’d barely had time to memorize, Beckett trying to get her to follow precise, metronomic timing; at one point he even brought a metronome into the theatre and put it on the floor, stating, “This is the rhythm I want.” To the actress’s shock, he left the device Ticking away and gave Brenda microscopic instructions. It was, said Irving Wardle, like “placing someone struggling with the C major scale under Karajan’s baton” (Knowlson, 501).

Certainly, as the defining conductor of that time, Karajan’s name springs to mind easily as a metonym for a conductor. Yet Wardle’s choice holds a particular interest, because Karajan’s grip and authority stem chiefly from sheer personality, while this story is brought in to demonstrate Beckett’s exacting, mechanistic restraint; we return to the myth of Apollo and Marsyas, the collision of formalism and expressiveness. Beckett’s strangely violent actions, and Knowlson’s pairing of metronome with a conductor, point up an important nuance in Beckett’s conductor image: a conductor does much more than merely beat time. Rather than simply issuing commands, a conductor focuses the orchestra’s interpretation; not so much a Thor figure hurling “fiery thunderbolts” as a lighting rod channeling musical energy (Whitelaw, 120).

Beckett seemed aware of this intuitively. His approach to recording gear reveals how profoundly he understood the process. You might expect a director who craved accurate, faithful performances to welcome a tape recorder. Yet he did not:

Once during Not I rehearsal, I brought a cassette recorder and found it handy co-operating with Sam. He’d sometimes drop an insinuation or subtle point that I’d inevitably forget unless written down; I often lacked time to note it. Seeing the machine, Sam shouted, “What’s that?” I said, “It’s a tape machine,” and he turned white. I only ever saw him near panic once. “Oh dear god, is it recording?” I assured him no, that I used it only to log my remarks. He hated having his voice preserved permanently. Why, I cannot guess — such a pity because he read his work and Yeats’s better than anyone alive (Whitelaw, 137–40).

During rehearsal for …but the clouds… another time, Sam asked if we knew a particular Yeats text. We did not; Sam uttered the entire thing from memory — just paused, no movement, facing the ground for a moment looking inward, and then spoken from deep within. Ron and I were spellbound. I requested permission to record him with my own small machine: he responded as if I had asked for poison. Against a vigorous no-no-no, his recoiled physically — yet again so poignantly that, as I’ve said before, his own and Yeats’s material never came across as meaningfully from another human (Whitelaw, 229).

Perhaps not, these episodes involve W.B. Yeats, who in The Wind Among the Reeds invented a different image, of a magical Aeolian harp without a player, as counterpart to the flayed Marsyas. Exemplifying Beckett’s contrariness: he used the metronome’s technology nearly spitefully, yet he balked at maintaining preserving paraphernalia provided possibilities for a fixed, excellent printed canonization; indeed that small cassette player nearly stood in as torture equipment.

This refraining from fixing his vocal performances seems to go along with the portraits by Whitelaw and himself of a director amenable to various choices and inspirations. But against this, as Haerdter knew: “In certain scenes Beckett repeatedly revives ostensibly spontaneous interludes into patterned scripting as a pre-existing rhythmic configuration” (cited by Mcmillan & Fehsenfeld, 215), so refusing the tape showed no genuine want of open conclusions. That unco-operativeness reinforced legends hidden claims among his offerings ad more aura for what had not record. Impossible versions in timbre bound invisible processes link up an even impossible imperative force of authenticity — which paves inaccessible yet infinite toward ever higher holy might ideal; seldom debated distinct at all. Whitelaw talks about alternative actress to perennially represent idea: that a particular great male own reading qualifies a wick such moment becomes flawless ever. This multiplies meditative example with hint evinced irreversible tautology moving further undisputable as lore accru progress vast removed rest cannot examine and confirm see all.

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