Blog der Beckett-Gesellschaft

Jack MacGowran was a frail-looking, bird-like man, whose frame belied his power and talent as an actor. You’ll recognize him from The Excorcist, where he played alcoholic director Burke Dennings, or perhaps from Polanski’s Cul-de-Sac, or as Professor Abronsius, in The Fearless Vampire Killers.

If Billie Whitelaw was Samuel Beckett’s favorite actress, then MacGowran was his favored actor. The pair met in the bar of a shabby London hotel, an unlikely start to an “intimate alliance” that saw MacGowran collaborate with Beckett on the definitive versions of Waiting for Godot and Endgame. From this, their partnership led to a further legendary collaboration Beginning to End. As Jordan R. Young noted in his book, The Beckett Actor:

…Jack MacGowran in the Works of Samuel Beckett (aka Beginning to End) [is] one of the most highly-acclaimed one-man shows in the history of theatre, [which] changed forever the public perception of Beckett from a purveyor of gloom and despair, to a writer of wit, humanity and courage. It also brought the actor widespread recognition as Beckett’s foremost interpreter. “The first time I saw Jack, in Endgame… I came away haunted by the impression he made on me,” said Paul Scofield. “I have remained so ever since.”

The production was filmed to celebrate Beckett’s sixtieth birthday:

Beginning to End [which] features the peerless Jack MacGowran in his one-man show, devised with Beckett and recorded for RTÉ Television in 1966. “Jack’s stage presence stays with me more than anything,” said Peter O’Toole. “This frail thing with this enormous power. He walked a tightrope as if it were a three-lane highway.” Martin Esslin, in The Theatre of the Absurd, commented on Beckett’s deep affection for MacGowran: “If ever there was a perfect congruence between a great poet’s imagination and an actor, this was it … Jack MacGowran’s individual quality and life story are an essential ingredient in our understanding of the life and work of one of the outstanding creative minds of our time.”

Rarely seen, and long thought lost, this is a must-see, for it is one of the greatest stage performances ever committed to film.

Hier gehts zum Film

Peter Nonnenmacher schreibt in der Wiener Zeitung:

Die Odyssee einer einst abgelehnten Erzählung von Samuel Beckett.

>>Es hatte die letzte Geschichte seines ersten literarischen Großwerks werden sollen. Aber Samuel Becketts Verleger lehnte sie ab. Es tue ihm sehr leid, das Stück nicht zu drucken, schrieb Charles Prentice an den jungen irischen Texte-Lieferanten. Die Geschichte jedoch sei „ein Alptraum“. Beim Lesen bekomme er „Muffensausen“. Veröffentlichung sei schlichtweg unmöglich – sonst würden die Leute auch den Rest des Buches nicht lesen wollen.<<

Weiter hier:

http://www.wienerzeitung.at/themen_channel/literatur/autoren/623346_Ein-Alptraum.html

Am Sonntag, den 13. April, anläßlich des 108. Geburtstages von Samuel Beckett, las Bertram Bock vor einem Bild im Schloß Wilhelmshöhe, Dante und der Hummer. Das Gemälde im Schloß, auf dem ein Hummer zu sehen war und das den Rahmen für die Lesung bildete, hatte eine Besonderheit: Durch die oberste Schicht Farbe war ein darunter liegender Kopf, upside down, war der von Maria zu sehen. Der Kopf schien durch die oberste Schicht hindurch. Das nennt man Pentimento. Lillian Hellman hat das einst eindrucksvoll so formuliert:

“Old paint on a canvas, as it ages, sometimes becomes transparent. When that happens it is possible, in some pictures, to see the original lines: a tree will show through a woman’s dress, a child makes way for a dog, a large boat is no longer on an open sea. That is called pentimento because the painter „repented,“ changed his mind. ((…)) The paint has aged and I wanted to see what was there for me once, what is there for me now.”

Pentimento ist auch der gleichnamige Titel eines autobiografischen Buches von Hellman, der Ehefrau von Dashiel Hammett. Fred Zinnemann hat die erste Geschichte des Buches unter dem Titel JULIA 1977 verfilmt. Der Film beginnt mit dem oben zitierten Monolog: „Old paint on canvas ………..“

Noch vor dem Erscheinen von Becketts Endspiel, noch bevor Adorno überhaupt wissen konnte, dass ein Theaterstück mit solch einem Titel je das Licht der Welt erblicken würde, schrieb er in der Minima Moralia, im Text Nummer 33, in den vierziger Jahren:

„Karl Kraus tat recht daran, sein Stück »Die letzten Tage der Menschheit« zu nennen. Was heute geschieht, müsste »Nach Weltuntergang« heißen.“

Kein Wunder, dass Adorno sich in Beckett wiederfand. Mit dem Streit der Professoren darum, ob Beckett philosophisch war oder nicht, hat das zunächst nichts zu tun.

Beckett habe, so heißt es, die philosophische Dimension seines Werks verneint, worauf die Professoren sich gern berufen, die philosophische Deutungen ablehnen. Dabei könnte eigentlich jeder wissen, der selber Geschichten schreibt, dass ein Autor, hat er sein Werk einmal der Öffentlichkeit übergeben, keine Macht mehr darüber hat, wie es zu interpretieren sei. Ich hatte einst Mitte der Sechziger eine Erzählung mit dem Titel „Der Geier“ verfasst. Ausgangspunkt war die Erfahrung, dass mich die vergebliche Liebe zu einer Mitschülerin aufzehrte, regelrecht auffraß. Andere interpretierten diese Geschichte als das Gleichnis für ein aufreibendes Engagement gegenüber dem Staat.

Lecture delivered in February 2000, at the Kunsthalle in Vienna on the occasion of a Beckett and Bruce Nauman exhibition

HIER

… im Kunstempel: Siehe Bild.

Click to enlarge!

Bryden, Mary, ed. Samuel Beckett and Music. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. $75.00 (Cloth).

The dust-jacket of Samuel Beckett and Music features a drawing by Beckett’s friend Avigdor Arikha entitled „Samuel Beckett listening to music, 9 xii 1976.“ It shows an intent listener who is concentrating on his experience. One wonders to what he might be listening. Schubert, perhaps? Beckett was fiercely interested in music all his life; he grew up with music, became an amateur pianist, married an accomplished pianist, and evidently broadened his musical horizons all the time. He formed friendships with musicians: Marcel Mihalovici and his wife Monique Haas; Morton Feldman, Heinz Holliger. Many of his dramatic works make use of musical passages in a precise and detailed way: Schubert’s string quartet „Death and the Maiden“ in All That Fall; the same composer’s Lied „Nacht und Träume“ in the television play of the same name; Beethoven’s „Ghost“ Trio (op. 70, #1). In two of his radio plays, Words and Music and Cascando, Beckett makes use of Music as a protagonist over Words, characters representing voice or speech. In Happy Days, Lehár’s „Merry Widow“ is utilized as a theme. All of Beckett’s readers are keenly aware of the musicality of the texts. An observation of this kind amounts to no more than a convenient metaphor calling attention to the euphony or sonority, along with some sort of rhythmic profile, of an author’s words. Beckett’s words, their quietly pulsing loneliness, their striving for the solace of silence, are among the most poetic — i.e., „musical“–expressions of contemporary literature. But the question of words and music is more enigmatic. It involves the problematic attitude and relationship of a literary author who is well versed in music, whose work generates its own kind of music, and whose works are strong temptations for composers.

The present volume is a collection of interesting essays assembled by the editor, Mary Bryden, relating to some (but not all) of the above topics. There are two rubrics: Words, and Music, with diverse emphases on the verbal and the compositional aspects of Beckett’s creations as viewed from the vantage point of music and its relation to words and (inevitably), given their point of reference — to words and silence and to music and silence. The essays are all interesting; a number of them are stronger than others. The editor’s „Words for Music, Perhaps“ (on Humphrey Searle’s scores of Words and Music and Cascando) and Catherine Laws’s essay on Neither are outstanding, primarily because they attempt to come to grips with larger issues. The difficulty in assessing some of the other pieces lies in the fact that the reader needs a „sonorous image“ in order to grasp what the discussion aims to establish; musical quotations are generally inadequate for most nonprofessional readers. Luckily, a number of musical settings of Beckett’s dramatic works exist in the form of recordings. It is with these that the remainder of this review will be concerned. The division will be three-fold: (a) two of Beckett’s dramatic works that have been set to music by Heinz Holliger; (b) the two works involving Music as a dramatis personae; (c) the collaboration between Beckett and Morton Feldman on the chamber opera Neither.

In 1978 the Swiss composer and world-famous oboist Heinz Holliger set to music the „dramaticule“ Come and Go. The play is a genuine miniature comprising three elderly female characters who sit on a bench; each one leaves for a moment while the other two exchange whispers about her failing health. In the end they all cross hands, three persons bonded to one another in spite of the ravages of life. Holliger expands this simplest of all patterns instrumentally and vocally. Everything is multiplied by three: nine instruments, nine voices speaking in three languages, and the text is presented three times. The result is triple-Beckett, interesting in its own way but a long distance from what the text offers. Holliger remarked „Beckett would have undoubtedly hated Come and Go because I…

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