Chapter 11
Mary Bryden
Many people are familiar with that great hymn to the ego, the popular song ‘My Way’. In lyrics of what John Sutherland has termed ‘ineffable banality’,1 the song’s narrator is at the end of his life, facing ‘the final curtain’ of his own mortality. Looking back, his life appears to be full of setbacks. There were times, he recalls, when he ‘bit off more than I could chew … ate it up … spit it out … faced it all … and did it my way’. Although innumerable artistes have performed and recorded the song, the Canadian song-writer Paul Anka wrote the English lyrics with Frank Sinatra in mind. The song became irrevocably associated with him, partly because Sinatra had by then (1968) actually lived the kind of life described in the song. Nevertheless, the song had originally sprung from a French collaboration between the flamboyant singer Claude François (who recorded it in 1967), Jacques Revaux and Gilles Thibault, under the title ‘Comme d’habitude’. In fact, the French predecessor is a much more gentle and wistful song, in which the motif ‘comme d’habitude [as usual]’ punctuates a reconstruction of a typical day in the life of a couple in which one partner offers habitual tenderness while the other offers habitual indifference. Thus, whereas the English song is an inflated retrospective, looking back over an entire life, the French original is written entirely in the present and future tenses, tremblingly anticipating the small instances of rejection which lie ahead at different points of the day.
Much less well-known than Sinatra’s ‘My Way’ is Samuel Beckett’s ‘my way’. I refer here to the short poem, ‘my way is in the sand flowing’, written in the late 1940s.2 The poem is also anticipating an end – a cessation to all the ‘harrying’ and ‘fleeing’ – but its context could hardly be more different. While Sinatra’s song looks back across all the blows and brawling and proclaims that ‘each careful step along the byway’ had been ‘planned’ and ‘charted’, Beckett’s poem traces a meandering, uncertain trail, where footsteps are hidden in sand and water. Within these moist environments – sea, rain and mist – the human organism becomes subject to a similar dissolubility. Living takes place in the interstices between brief openings and closings, ‘between the shingle and the dune’. Meanwhile, the shifting sand, evoking hourglasses, also marks out the unremitting passage of time.
Written not long before En attendant Godot, this poem may readily be aligned with the womb/tomb tropes to be found in that play, as also in many other areas of Beckett’s output. However, rather than manifesting a conventional disquiet in the face of the transience of time and the ephemerality of the world, the voicer of this poem derives a paradoxical sense of fulfilment from being cast adrift between the first tread and the last. The second stanza replaces ‘my way’ with ‘my peace’: ‘my peace is there in the receding mist’. Thus, the poem proclaims first an attachment to the cessation of the shuttling between apertures – ‘these long shifting thresholds’ – and then an accommodation to the image of that aperture being not only closed, but being welcome to be closed: ‘live the space of a door/that opens and shuts’. The French original is even more hospitable towards the notion of closure. Its direct address to the passing instant – ‘cher instant je te vois [dear moment I see you]’ – is a lyrical apostrophe to a moment in the future achieved by living through moments as yet still murkily impending. Nevertheless, as will be examined later, the poem manages to keep both modes in play. While it caresses the idea of a definitive full stop, such closure is held at bay by the persistence of movement.
Beckett’s attunement to musicality and sound is particularly apparent in the French original of this poem, and especially in its masterly first line, with its rhythmic succession of sibilants: ‘je suis ce cours de sable qui glisse’.3 Reminiscent of Krapp’s savouring and elongating of the word ‘spooool’,4 the poem is strung between an extraordinarily rich series of vowel sounds built upon ‘ou’ and ‘u’, including ‘suis’, ‘cours’, ‘dune’,‘pluie’, ‘fuit’, ‘poursuit’, ‘jour’, ‘brume’, ‘recule’, ‘fouler’, ‘mouvants’, ‘s’ouvre’. These sounds encourage lingering, suggesting that the ideas they denote are allies rather than aliens. They are, nonetheless, intersected by harsher elements: the plosive ‘p’ of the hammering rain, in ‘la pluie d’été pleut sur ma vie [the summer rain rains on my life]’, and the alveolar consonants of ‘d’été’, which can be spat out. There is, in addition, a cutting, painful edge supplied by the repeated ‘ee’ sound, which Ruby Cohn has termed ‘the repetitive long “i” keening vowel, eliciting sadness’.5
The English translation of the poem has a much more spiky and uncertain character than the French original. Instead of two five-line stanzas, it offers a five-line stanza followed by a four-line second stanza, containing an emphatically lengthy and somewhat awkward 13-syllable second line. In contrast to the pulsing ‘longs seuils mouvants’ of the French, this line ends with ‘these long shifting thresholds’. However, the English translation accentuates a tendency already there in the French. Although the poem appears to culminate with the image of a closing door, it is the notion of shifting and transiting which preoccupies the attention throughout and which gains ascendancy over the notion of finitude. Notably, the ‘harrying fleeing’ of the voicer’s life is said to occur not ‘from its beginning’, but, in a more cyclical way, ‘to its beginning to its end’ (my italics). Moreover, in the French original, the door does not simply close (‘ferme’), but ‘se referme’, the verb’s prefix ‘re’ acknowledging the movement’s infinite availability for repetition.
Hence, the prominent line-end placement of the word ‘thresholds’ in the English version is significant. A threshold is neither inside nor outside and can offer no more than a temporary home. Moreover, since the thresholds themselves are ‘long’, ‘shifting’ and multiple, there is a sense in which the whole poem becomes a kind of threshold art. In this respect, it could be said to resemble music, which offers identifiable steps and progressions towards other such steps, but never on a durable or fixed basis. As Alfred Döblin wrote of music in 1910: ‘Le son est achevé, rond, lisse, on peut le retenir; il retentit, passe et a bientôt disparu sans laisser trace; il est saturé, masse sans vie, il n’indique ni passé ni avenir, n’a ni parents ni enfants. [The sound is completed; rounded and smooth, it can be held on to; it rings out, passes, and has soon disappeared without trace; it is saturated, a lifeless mass, it indicates neither past nor future, and has neither parents nor children.]’6 Each sonic step, he goes on to observe, is devoid of inbuilt value; it can accrue significance only by means of the passage from one to another: ‘La cohérence des sons réside entièrement dans le mouvement de l’un vers l’autre; le son particulier n’a de sens que comme porteur et transmetteur d’un mouvement. [The coherence of sounds resides entirely in the movement from one towards the other; the particular sound has meaning only as conveyor and transmitter of a movement.]’7
Beckett’s poem thus offers a paradox which is also offered by music: it breaks the silence by its articulation, by its apparent selection of one ‘way’ rather than another, and yet its transient dynamic also dissolves the basis upon which ‘my way’ could achieve any kind of settled context or identity. Some exploration of this may be seen in the composer Rhian Samuel’s 2006 setting of ‘my way is in the sand flowing’ for baritone and piano.8 In the piece, which begins with the elastic direction, Con moto, ma molto rubato, Samuel succeeds in highlighting key words by either tipping down or rising into them by means of an abrupt and extended pitch interval. In the first stanza, the words ‘sand’, ‘shingle’, ‘dune’, ‘rain’, ‘me’ and ‘life’ are all picked out in this way. Then, after a crescendo and an acceleration in tempo, the words ‘harrying’ and ‘fleeing’, rapidly repeated, are shot out like bullets, hustled along by coursing piano triplets. In the second stanza, the voice reaches higher than ever before for the words ‘long shifting’, then to fall away steeply once again for the sustained word, ‘thresholds’. However, as the voice approaches the final image of the door, the prevalent pattern is disrupted. A pause ensues after ‘opens’, giving way to a three-bar piano passage filled with variations in structure, time signature and volume. It is as if a multitude of human transactions have been condensed into a brief but intense episodic unit. Finally, after a tumult of rising demisemiquavers on the piano, the voice resumes with the connective ‘and’, creating expectations of another downward (and this time definitive) leap towards closure. Yet, this time, the voice unexpectedly slides not downwards but upwards, from D to E, ending with a curtailed and staccato note on the word ‘shuts’. By allowing the poem’s last word to bounce into the air in this way, Samuel perfectly respects the manner in which Beckett’s poem refuses to impose any simple linear development between opening and closing, beginning and ending.
In this context, it may be observed that Beckett’s door in ‘my way is in the sand flowing’ is not a revolving one, which simultaneously admits and ejects. It is a door which is capable of providing a blockage to a wayfarer. In many of Beckett’s late works, sparse and austere chambers with closed doors provide a space of enclosure, willed or otherwise. The Austrian composer Heinz Holliger once said:
As a musician, I’m also attracted by the musicality of Beckett’s texts, even if this musicality seems to exclude any added music. Sometimes, it all seems to take place in an empty room, from the acoustic point of view. No sound can penetrate it; it’s a completely closed universe, where you can’t hear any echo, not even your own voice.9
Yet, can this perception hold good for long? Even while apparently sealed within a space, the figures in Beckett’s plays are repeatedly attuning themselves to an offstage space or focusing on an aperture (doors or windows) through which sounds could conceivably penetrate. In the television play Eh Joe, while never leaving his room, Joe parts or opens every movable partition (door, window, curtain, cupboard) in an intensity of looking and a ‘mounting tension of listening’10 for the woman’s voice which addresses him. The woman’s voice in the stage play Rockaby is heard telling of lingering ‘quiet at her window facing other windows’,11 straining for sight of another, while Reader in the stage play Ohio Impromptu speaks of the intensity of waiting for intimations of sound or light from beyond. The declared absence of these elements – ‘Through the single window dawn shed no light. From the street no sound of reawakening’12 – serves only to draw attention to their hypothetical presence.
There is, however, a profound ambiguity attaching to these apertures, as with the door and opaque window in the television play Ghost Trio (1977), which are both ‘imperceptibly ajar’ and yet have ‘No knob’13 with which to manipulate them. Ghost Trio takes place in a rectangular room, though with access to other zones: a corridor beyond the door, a window, and a mirror (replicator of space). Within this permeable space, a male figure appears to be waiting for a woman known to him.14 The triadic structure of the play is made up of the ‘Pre-action’, in which a female voice describes the elements of the chamber; the ‘Action’, in which, the female voice having announced that ‘He will now think he hears her’, the male figure tenses and moves about the room before settling back on a stool; and finally the ‘Re-action’, in which the expectant male figure is visited by a small boy who shakes his head, presumably indicating that the woman will not appear. During the play, surges of music are heard at prescribed points, the extracts being taken from the largo of Beethoven’s Fifth Piano Trio, op. 70, no. 1, commonly known as the ‘Ghost Trio’. The use of Beethoven’s ‘Ghost Trio’ was not, according to Beckett, at the origin of his composition. What he was wrestling with was the need to render apparent a sudden mental turmoil, as he told Ruby Cohn: ‘I wanted a calm scene which revealed an inner storm as the camera approached’.15 The problem is a challenging one: how may an ‘inner storm’ be made perceptible on stage in a still, seated figure? Beckett’s solution, he said, was to set up a relationship between the figure and the geometrical zones surrounding him: ‘the figure resisted me, so I resorted to rectangles’.16 These rectangles are multiple – the door, the window, the pallet, the mirror, the cassette player, the room itself – but two of them, the door and the window, are especially significant because they are apertures to without.
The fact that the door and window are agents of negotiation with external spaces emerges only gradually in the course of the play. In the second part of the play, the male figure first ‘listens with right ear against door’ and then ‘pushes door open half-way clockwise, looks out’.17 Afterwards, he moves to the window and ‘pushes window open half-way clockwise, looks out’,18 while in the third part he opens the window again, admitting ‘faint sound of rain’.19 However, the first non-verbal sound, the ‘Faint music’, is heard in relation to the door. Insofar as the door constitutes an opening, we might draw attention here to the derivation of the musical term ‘overture’ from the late Latin apertura (opening). On its passage into English it relates also to the French noun ouverture, which, as well as denoting an opening, can mean an openness, a making-available of oneself for the reception of some external event or atmosphere.
Ghost Trio brings together all these associations. In the first place, Beethoven’s piece, with its tremolo, pulsing qualities and startling dynamic contrasts, already contains haunting resonances which led to its nickname the ‘Ghost Trio’. As Lawrence Kramer remarks, ‘this slow movement is so very extraordinary, so deliberately out of the ordinary that it seems to be challenging the very conception of ordinary life’. Strindberg’s play The Ghost Sonata also nods towards Beethoven, and Kramer observes of Strindberg that: ‘clearly the sound of Beethoven’s slow movement was echoing, ghostlike, in his ears, and it is still possible, another century later, to hear it on the same spectral terms’.20 Beckett was aware that Beethoven had included, on the same compositional sheet, not only sketches for the slow movement, but also for a planned opera based upon Shakespeare’s Macbeth, which would feature a chorus for the trio of witches. Beckett acknowledges this additional supernatural association by writing in the margin ‘Macbeth theme’ at specific points of his typescript.21 As James Knowlson remarks, ‘“The Ghost” retained for Beckett something of Macbeth’s doom-laden atmosphere and involvement in the spirit world’.22 Indeed, in relation to the failed encounter which lies achingly at the heart of Ghost Trio, Graley Herren observes that: ‘the choice of “The Ghost” as theme is also significant because it implies from the start that F’s [the male figure’s] anticipated tryst will not take place, at least not in the material world, because his lost love has joined the spirit world of the dead’.23
The ‘Ghost Trio’ first occurs in the play in relation to an aperture (the door) and is moreover reliant upon an act of intense openness on the part of the listener. It attaches to, is even generated by, the encounter with the door. As the play progresses, the male figure is repeatedly drawn to the door as a site of expectation, only to return to hunch over the cassette player. Meanwhile, short extracts of the ‘Ghost Trio’ are heard, though the fact that they are non-consecutive24 implies that they are playing in a wider field of affect and memory than that which would be produced by purely mechanical means. In noting the relationship between the trudging of the male figure between door and cassette player on the one hand, and the progression through different parts of the music on the other, the words of David Lidov are apt: ‘Motion is one of the essential illusions of music, like the closely related one of reappearance. (We do not say that a theme “recurs” but that it “returns” – as if it had been staying somewhere else in the meantime).’25 Insofar as the playing of the music seems to be closely connected to a desired or anticipated event over which the listener has no control (the arrival of ‘her’), it indeed seems to go through cycles of fading and then resurfacing. In the light of the ghostly resonances associated with the Beethoven piece, its reappearances might be likened to the French ‘revenant’ which, as well as being the present participle ‘returning’ or ‘coming back’, is also a noun meaning ‘ghost’.
There is undoubtedly a restrained and remote quality to Ghost Trio, especially since its central male figure is mediated to the audience by a separate, female voice, as outlined earlier. The voice describes itself as ‘a faint voice’, the light is ‘faintly luminous’,26 the music is ‘faint’, and when the small boy appears at the end, after ‘Faint sound of steps’ and ‘Faint sound of knock’, he simply ‘shakes head faintly’ before receding into the dark.27 However, this faintness is not to be mistaken for numbness or insentience. On the contrary, though he is prone to uncertainty and irresolution, the male figure is caught up in an act of engrossed listening, which the strains from the ‘Ghost Trio’ seem to accentuate. The music, then, participates in a wider phenomenon of acute attentiveness, where the ear is attuned for the slightest variation in the ambient soundscape. Picking up on Curtis Roads’s work on transient auditory phenomena,28 David Toop writes of those microsounds which are
audible but in their brevity as micro-events, their infinitely subtle fluctuations, or their placing at the threshold of audible frequencies, they lie outside the conventional notion of pitch, tone and timbre. They are difference; the differentiation of one voice from another, or the activation of one instrument from another.29
The male figure in Ghost Trio is, as his ‘tense pose’ indicates,30 indeed listening for difference and seemingly using music as some kind of vehicle for that differentiation. Yet, as the music surges and then ebbs, he seems to be straining to hear something which is barely distinguishable from silence – a silence with impetus, similar to that described by David Toop: ‘Silence can occupy space with the stealth of fine white sand in subtle movement, an unoccupied chair in an empty room, an abandoned car, sifted flour falling on a chopping board, the cooling of boiled water.’31 In the silence, the male figure can ‘sound out’ his environs, moving to listen intently at the opening: ‘The phrase [sounding out] gives a sense of outer movement counterbalanced by cautious ingress, which is to listen and investigate with openness’.32 ‘Ouverture’, in other words, is here seen in association with aperture.
The version of ‘Ghost Trio’ Beckett owned was the performance by Daniel Barenboim (piano),33 with Barenboim’s then wife Jacqueline du Pré (cello) and Pinchas Zukerman (violin), recorded in 1970,34 which was used for the BBC2 recording of the play in 1976 (broadcast in 1977). By the time Beckett wrote Ghost Trio in 1976, du Pré had already been stricken with the illness from which she would eventually die in 1987 when only in her early forties. The collaboration of the three musicians produced a performance of riveting intensity, uncanny in its evocation of a spirit world, and, over 40 years later, a cult item on YouTube. One of the salient characteristics of the performance is a refusal to domesticate the piece or to make bearable its unbearable qualities. For Barenboim, to play Beethoven does require an act of courage. As he told Edward Said: ‘The element of courage is the most important. … [I]f you have a crescendo in Beethoven that goes to the end, and then there is a subito piano that creates the illusion of a precipice, you have to do that. You have to go to the precipice, to the end, and then not fall.’35
That sense of risk, of sound always being preyed upon by silence, is palpable in Barenboim’s performance of the ‘Ghost Trio’. It is also apparent in much of his own commentary on sound:
Sound … is not an object, such as a chair, which you can leave in an empty room and return later to find it still there, just as you left it. Sound does not remain in this world; it evaporates into silence. Sound is not independent – it does not exist by itself, but has a permanent, constant and unavoidable relationship to silence.36
Unless sound is prolonged by the infusion of additional energy or by intervening techniques (the sustaining pedal on the piano, the use of legato, the reversing of bow direction for the violin, and so on), it will be swallowed up by silence: ‘After the sound is produced, it immediately begins to decay. … Sustaining the sound is in any case an act of defiance against the pull of silence, which attempts to limit the length of the sound.’37 However, if sound always either ‘interrupts the silence or evolves out of it’ and then gives way to silence in ‘one last moment of expressivity’, there is nevertheless an unparalleled peace to be found in playing it, insofar as ‘one can control, through sound, the relationship between life and death’.38
The idea of moving from silence to silence, and, by extension, from cradle to grave, has an obvious Beckettian resonance. Beyond this, however, what, in the light of Barenboim’s observations, is the status of the recorded music in Ghost Trio? On one level, Beethoven’s ‘Ghost Trio’ may be thought of as a constant, or at least recurrent, companion to the stage transactions. It makes itself heard in insistent fragments, and the conclusion of the piece (from bar 82 to the end) coincides with the conclusion of the play, succeeded by a final silence and fade.39 On the other hand, the extracts specified by Beckett are not consecutive. They fold back on themselves and then roll forward again. Thus, one cannot think of the piece as a kind of continuo, accompanying the action in a constant and subliminal way, despite being inaudible in parts. On the contrary, the music is very carefully apportioned, as is its volume, which ranges variably between ‘faint’, ‘progressively fainter’, ‘audible’, ‘slightly louder’, ‘louder’ and ‘growing’. Though avoiding properly musical terms for the music, Beckett, in acknowledgement of the full sonic repertoire he has put together, reserves these directions for the sounds made by the apertures, for example ‘Crescendo creak of door opening’ and ‘Decrescendo creak of window slowly closing’.
The fact that the male figure appears to be transfixed both by the music and by the need to check for any sign of the woman’s approach suggests a link between the music and the woman. Does the music generate the possibility of the woman’s appearance? Or does the music provide an alternative resource, one which somehow absorbs the space left empty by the woman? It might be imagined that the male figure is able to engineer the interventions and impact of the music. He does, after all, sit in intimate proximity to the cassette player, in a manner reminiscent of Krapp with his tape recorder. Yet the music appears to play unreliably; moreover, at the close of the second part of the play, it is the female voice commanding ‘Stop’ which halts the music.40 Despite this, her succeeding interjection ‘Repeat’ in fact results not in a repeat but in a looping-back of the music to a much earlier point.
Even the assumption that the musical extracts heard by the audience are matched in their volume and duration by what is heard by the protagonist cannot exceed the status of an assumption. What does seem clear is that the music in Ghost Trio, though tightly rationed by Beckett and repeatedly curtailed on stage, is a site of radical possibility and unpredictability, operating in fields which only partially conjoin the ambit of the male figure. As Franz Michael Maier has argued:
The music … is much more energetic and lively than the protagonist who is introduced by the voice simply as the ‘sole sign of life’. Silently cowering, he appears as a mere sign, whereas the music becomes audible in its own right. Following its own independent rules, it cannot be limited to a simple link in the sequencing of actions.41
Moreover, though visual information is available in Ghost Trio, clues have to be actively sought among ‘shades of grey’,42 layers of dust, and silent gestures (the head-shaking of the small boy). Sound, on the other hand, as Barenboim points out, ‘penetrates the human body and is therefore more directly connected to it’.43 Notably, just three years before he began to write Ghost Trio, Beckett told Charles Juliet that ‘l’ouïe prend de plus en plus d’importance par rapport à l’oeil [the sense of hearing is increasingly becoming more important than that of sight]’.44
The visit by the small boy in Ghost Trio does not bring resolution, but only an apparent deferral. Though he stands ‘before open door’,45 the oilskin-clad boy does not enter the room, and the male figure himself remains on the threshold. With the wordless encounter at an end, a divarication is implemented as the boy recedes along the corridor and the protagonist slowly closes the door and reinserts himself into the room and the music. Yet if the boy’s visit does not bring fulfilment, neither does the music act as an agent of resolution, even though its playing seems to be imperative to the protagonist. Insofar as the absent woman is able to summon expectation, one may presume her anterior existence. As such, the music appears to participate on some level with an act of memory. As Barenboim observes, ‘the importance of the ear cannot be overestimated. … It forces us to remember with thought. Recollection, after all, is memory with thought; a young man remembers, an old man recollects’.46
Beyond this, may anything secure or worthwhile be said about the function of music in Ghost Trio? First, that perhaps music is an ally in the avoidance of resolution, which may constitute an unwanted form of closure. This observation would not apply to all acts of music. It would need to be the kind of music which itself has apertures, which is ‘leaky’ and permeable. The apertures of Ghost Trio – the door and window – might usefully be aligned with the wider context of what Lawrence Kramer has termed ‘hermeneutic windows’, which provide
sites of engagement through which the interpreter and the interpreted animate one another. What we see or hear at such windows can, of course, always be recuperated for the symbolic order. But by resisting or deferring that recuperation, … we can understand more than the symbolic order allows.47
The symbolic order of language indeed seems unequal to the task of analysing this enigmatic collaboration between Beckett and Beethoven. This hope seems in any case to be a forlorn one in many musico-literary contexts, since, as Kramer asserts, ‘the very premise of musical narratology is the recognition that music cannot tell stories’.48 Yet music can intersect with internal narratives and ‘embody a certain relationship to the signifying process’.49 This relationship may usefully be aligned with Julia Kristeva’s concept of the semiotic. This precedes the imaginary and the symbolic, which both rely upon a separation of subject and object. The semiotic drive, on the other hand, ‘is impulsive, rhythmic, dynamic, plural, untotalized, supercharged. In these respects it is very like music when music excites us most’.50
Ghost Trio is built upon a very specific piece of music. It is specific to the audience, but it is also (seemingly) specific to the protagonist. For him, it may be presumed to embody the ‘pulsion’ of the semiotic. As Kramer observes:
Only the music that listeners identify closely with their own lives, music they find meaningful, can do this. The semiotic is articulated as an immediacy only through an already-significant symbolic that endows the immediacy of the semiotic with an already-reflective meaning.51
The audience witnesses this apparently semiotic connection between protagonist, music and absent woman. At first they do this vicariously and remotely, but, as the aural and spatial negotiations across opening and closing portals unfold over time, their involvement is more intimately recruited.
The two works which have formed the principal focus of this chapter – ‘my way is in the sand flowing’ and Ghost Trio – are separated by almost 30 years and represent two very different genres: poetry and television drama. Yet both focus on human wayfarers driven by an inner compulsion to move between points which are only temporarily fixed, whether they be ‘the shingle and the dune’ of the poem, or the pallet and stool of the play. On one level, these wayfarers are beset by environmental adversity. The voicer of the poem reports that ‘the summer rain rains on my life’, just as the male figure in Ghost Trio peers from the open window at ‘[r]ain falling in dim light’.52 Nevertheless, both works attach significance to apertures as sites of dynamic interchange. In ‘my way is in the sand flowing’, the door is not the ‘final curtain’ of Sinatra’s ‘My Way’. Rather, ‘the space of a door that opens and shuts’ is one which is predicated upon the subjunctive mood – ‘when I may cease’ – and such cessation is constantly deferred by the ‘long shifting thresholds’. In Ghost Trio, the door and the window offer some form of transit or communion, and the ending of the play does not suggest that the male figure’s threshold encounter with the small boy, his ‘hood glistening with rain’, is a final one.53 Moreover, this impression is facilitated by the interventions of the music, which does not provide a finale or coda, but, rather, persistently threads through the affective transactions taking place on stage. In this sense, music in both cases unsettles finitude and renders it inconclusive. In ‘my way is in the sand flowing’, the poem’s aural and rhythmical qualities seem to outweigh the conceptual status of closure, as Ruby Cohn describes: ‘The flow of sound enhances that feeling of entropic infinitude’.54 In Ghost Trio, the ‘flow of sound’ survives its moments of faintness and intermittence. Daniel Barenboim points out that, while total silence can ensue within a piece of music, ‘it is temporary death, followed by the ability to revive, to begin life anew. … In the world of sound, even death is not necessarily final.’55 In these as in many of his other compositions, Beckett demonstrates that ‘my way’ traverses spaces in which apertures are never irrevocably sealed, and sound is never definitively abated. Like the ‘sand flowing’ in the hourglass, the investment of energy may appear infinitesimal, but it is always sufficient to generate a reprise.
1 John Sutherland, ‘Frank Sinatra’s My Way: The Song that Refuses to Die’, The Guardian (15 Oct. 2012).
2 Samuel Beckett, ‘my way is in the sand flowing’, in Collected Poems: 1930–1978 (London, 1984), pp. 58–9. In this edition, as in their first publication, the French original and its translation are set out on facing pages.
3 The dual meaning of ‘je suis’ (‘I am’ and ‘I follow’) cannot be captured by the English translation, though it could be argued that ‘my way’ encapsulates notions both of being (the ability to utter a possessive pronoun being reliant upon a being capable of possessing) and of movement (wayfaring).
4 Samuel Beckett, Krapp’s Last Tape, in Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett (London, 1984), p. 56.
5 Ruby Cohn, A Beckett Canon (Ann Arbor, MI, 2001), p. 158.
6 Alfred Döblin, Sur la musique, trans. Sabine Cornille (Paris, 2002), p. 55.
7 Ibid., p. 60.
8 Rhian Samuel, The Flowing Sand (London, 2006). The piece was commissioned by the School of European Studies, Cardiff University, with funds from the Arts Council of Wales.
9 Philippe Albèra, ‘Beckett and Holliger’, trans Mary Bryden, in Mary Bryden (ed.), Samuel Beckett and Music (Oxford, 1998), pp. 87–97 (p. 94).
10 Samuel Beckett, Eh Joe, in Collected Shorter Plays, p. 202.
11 Samuel Beckett, Rockaby, in Collected Shorter Plays, p. 277.
12 Samuel Beckett, Ohio Impromptu, in Collected Shorter Plays, p. 287.
13 Samuel Beckett, Ghost Trio, in Collected Shorter Plays, p. 248.
14 At draft stage, the play appeared under the title ‘Tryst’ (see the notebook: University of Reading, MS 1519/1).
15 Cohn, A Beckett Canon, p. 339.
16 Ibid, p. 339.
17 Beckett, Ghost Trio, p. 250.
18 Ibid.
19 Ibid., p. 252.
20 Lawrence Kramer, ‘Saving the Ordinary: Beethoven’s Ghost Trio and the Wheel of History’, Beethoven Forum 12/1 (Spring 2005): 50–81 (p. 52).
21 For more detail on the stages of the draft work, see Mary Bryden, Julian Garforth and Peter Mills (eds), Beckett at Reading: Catalogue of the Beckett Manuscript Collection at the University of Reading (Reading, 1998), pp. 44–6.
22 James Knowlson, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (London, 1996), p. 622.
23 Graley Herren, Samuel Beckett’s Plays on Film and Television (New York and Basingstoke, 2007), p. 77.
24 The relevant bars are stipulated by Beckett in a note at the end (Ghost Trio, p. 254).
25 David Lidov, Is Language a Music? Writings on Musical Form and Signification (Bloomington, IN, 2005), p. 146.
26 Beckett, Ghost Trio, p. 248.
27 Ibid., p. 253.
28 Curtis Roads, Microsound (Cambridge, MA, 2004).
29 David Toop, Sinister Resonance: The Mediumship of the Listener (New York and London, 2010), p. 60.
30 Beckett, Ghost Trio, p. 250.
31 Toop, Sinister Resonance, p. 63.
32 Ibid., p. 63 (my italics).
33 See James Knowlson: ‘When I asked [Beckett] directly what he meant by this note [‘Macbeth’ written on the first typescript], he explained that the record sleeve of his own recording (the version made by Daniel Barenboim) linked this Piano Trio with Beethoven’s music for an opera based on Macbeth’ (Damned to Fame, p. 621).
34 A film of Barenboim, du Pré and Zukerman performing the ‘Ghost Trio’, directed by Christopher Nupen, was re-released on DVD in 2004 (Opus Arte/Allegro Films).
35 Daniel Barenboim and Edward W. Said, Parallels and Paradoxes: Explorations in Music and Society (London, 2004), p. 62.
36 Daniel Barenboim, Everything is Connected: The Power of Music, ed. Elena Cheah (London, 2008), p. 7.
37 Ibid., p. 8.
38 Ibid., pp. 8–10.
39 For a close analysis of Beckett’s progressive intensification of the musical engagement in Ghost Trio, across different stages in the work’s genesis, see Franz Michael Maier, ‘Geistertrio: Beethoven’s Music in Samuel Beckett’s Ghost Trio’, in Angela Moorjani and Carola Veit (eds), Samuel Beckett: Endlessness in the Year 2000, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui 11 (Amsterdam and New York, 2001), pp. 267–78.
40 Beckett, Ghost Trio, p. 251.
41 Franz Michael Maier, ‘Geistertrio: Beethoven’s Music in Samuel Beckett’s Ghost Trio (Part 2)’, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui, 12 (2002) pp. 313–20: p. 316.
42 Beckett, Ghost Trio, p. 248.
43 Barenboim, Everything is Connected, p. 25.
44 Charles Juliet, Rencontre avec Samuel Beckett (Paris, 1986), p. 31.
45 Beckett, Ghost Trio, p. 253.
46 Barenboim, Everything is Connected, pp. 25–6.
47 Lawrence Kramer, Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1995), p. 21.
48 Ibid., p. 110.
49 Ibid., p. 20.
50 Ibid., p. 19.
51 Ibid,. p. 20.
52 Beckett, Ghost Trio, p. 253.
53 Ibid.
54 Cohn, A Beckett Canon, p. 158.
55 Barenboim, Everything is Connected, pp. 10–11.