I recently went to see Sondheim’s Here We Are, and my first thought was “It’s Endgame all over again.” The key components are all there: the sense of doom, the eternal forgetfulness, the characters who are like pawns in a game of chess, their repetitive actions and movements on the stage/board meticulously studied so they can finally break free. And then there’s music… sort of. So, of course I had to spiral a bit more about music in Beckett’s masterpiece. But worry not, a post about Sondheim is coming soon.
It is no mystery that Samuel Beckett cared a great deal about the auditory component of his plays. In a letter to Jean Reavey, the wife of his literary agent, he wrote: “Drama is following music… I never write a word without saying it out loud.”1 From Waiting for Godot, to the less-known Ghost Trio and Nacht und Träume, music is omnipresent in Beckett’s scripts. While in Waiting for Godot the character Vladimir performs a song about a dog coming into the kitchen, the other two plays integrate and are named after compositions respectively by Beethoven and Schubert1.
Endgame was the playwright’s favorite play, or, to put it in his own words, “the one [he] dislike[d] the least.”2 Yet, there is no music in it. Beckett himself highlights the absence of music in the following dialogue between Hamm and Clov.
(Clov goes, humming, towards window right, halts before it, looks up at it.)
HAMM:
Don’t sing.
CLOV (turning towards Hamm):
One hasn’t the right to sing any more?
HAMM:
No.
CLOV:
Then how can it end?
HAMM:
You want it to end?
CLOV:
I want to sing.
HAMM:
I can’t prevent you.
Endgame, Samuel Beckett (24)
This exchange suggests that singing –or even just humming, is forbidden in the apocalyptic world of Endgame.
Although music is not explicitly featured in the play, Endgame still has an intrinsic musicality to it. George Devine notes: “One has to think of the text as something like a musical score wherein the ‘notes’, the sights and sounds, the pauses, have their own interrelated rhythms, and out of their composition comes the dramatic impact.”1 Beckett himself intended his work as “a matter of fundamental sounds.”1 In preparation for the performance of Endgame in Berlin, the playwright held rehearsals specifically for musical aspects like tone, pitch and rhythm, and often spoke using musical jargon like “legato, andante, piano, scherzo and…fortissimo.”1 It results that, rather than featuring music, Endgame “aspires to the condition of music.”3 In particular, the play’s structure, the musicality of language, and the movement of the actors are all aspects that allow us to read Endgame like a musical score.
Looking at Endgame in relation to Beckett’s other works, Courtney Massie points out that the play constitutes an exception to the “double structure of repetition” that dominates Beckett’s drama.2 If Waiting for Godot unfolds in two parallel acts, Endgame has no breaks. It is a “continuous auditory and visual experience,” more similar to a musical performance than a play.2
However, to create that illusion of continuity, music needs to rely on a set of mathematical relationships. It is thanks to the division of the beat into small units, or counts, that a performer can execute a piece without interruptions. Claudia Olk highlights that, like a song, “Endgame follows an equal number of paces in an over-all focus on four-four.”1 The play has four characters –Hamm, Clov, Nagg and Nell, all with names that count four letters. Clov makes exactly sixteen entrances and sixteen exists, and performs four “brief laughs” in the initial tableau. Finally, the frequency of laughter in the play compared to Waiting for Godot is 16:8.1
Another structural element about Endgame that might remind us of music is the presence of repeated statements or lines that give life to a refrain. Endgame features a great variety of refrains, the most common being “is it not time for my painkiller?” Hamm formulates the question five times, and four of those times Clov’s reply is negative. At last, Clov’s response changes:
HAMM:
Is it not time for my pain-killer?
CLOV: Yes.
HAMM:
Ah! At last! Give it to me! Quick! (Pause.)
CLOV:
There’s no more pain-killer. (Pause.)
HAMM (appalled): Good…!
(Pause.)
No more pain-killer! CLOV:
No more pain-killer. You’ll never get any more pain-killer.
Endgame, Samuel Beckett (24)
Beckett, like a composer, creates a sort of crescendo that culminates in a cold ending, a sudden and unexpected interruption: when the audience expects Hamm to finally receive his medication comes the realization that there was no pain killer in the first place.
Being Beckett a playwright/composer, it should not surprise us that he called Endgame “a cantata for two voices”4, a composition where two singers contradict, repeat, and respond to each other.1 There is no doubt that the two voices of Beckett’s cantata are Clov and Hamm, and the song their verbal exchange, the scripted dialogue. However, they do not give life to a song, but to a disharmony. That is because their tones do not match. While Clov speaks in a “toneless way,” and with a “fixed gaze,” Hamm alternates between a variety of tones. For instance, halfway through the play, Hamm starts telling the story of a man visiting him and begging for help. In the stage directions, Beckett describes Hamm’s tone as “animated,” and he makes a clear distinction between his “normal” and “narrative tone.” By doing so, the playwright emphasizes “the dissonance and consonance in [Clov and Ham’s] rapid staccato dialogue.”1
Another aspect that is relevant to the analysis of sound in Endgame is the way Beckett plays with language by using puns. The name of the play itself summarizes the dynamics of the play through an allusion to the game of chess. The phrase “endgame” refers to the last phase of the game, in which a few pieces are left on the board and the king is most vulnerable. Hamm can be seen as a metaphorical endangered king. Clov, on the other hand, is his subject, similar to a knight in the way he moves to and fro, unable to sit still.5
Beckett also put much thought into the names of the characters. For instance, Clov may refer to the spice clove. Ruby Cohn notes that, in Biblical times, corpses were anointed with oil and spices, and that Clov’s name might suggest a parallelism between the character’s role in the play and the act of anointing the dead.5 On the other hand, since Hamm also reads like ham, Beckett might have thought of Clov’s name as an indicator of the two characters’ co-dependency (i.e. food and spices). There are many more readings of Hamm’s name. Some see the character as an Hamletic figure, questioning whether “to be or not to be,” others relate him to the second son of Noah in relation to the Apocalypse, “the greatest ‘Endgame’ of all.”5 An interesting theory is the one that sees all four characters as nails. Phonetically, Hamm reminds of the Latin word for nail, hamus, Nell reads similarly to “nail” in English, Nagg may be derived from the German nagel, and Clov from the French clou. According to this interpretation, “nailhood” stands as a symbol of humanity “whose role is to nail Christ to the Cross,” and pave the way to the Apocalypse.5
During the rehearsals of the play in Berlin, Beckett stressed the importance of a musical “echo principle” in Endgame.6 He stated: “There are no accidents in Fin de Partie. Everything is based on analogy and repetition.”6 The concept of echo as repetition is key to understand the way Beckett establishes precise rhythmical patterns through the movement of characters on stage. To better analyze this idea, it is relevant to refer to the opening of the play:
Clov goes and stands under window left. Stiff, staggering walk. He looks up at window left. He turns and looks at window right. He goes and stands under window right. He looks up at window right. He turns and looks at window left. He goes out, comes back immediately with a small step-ladder, carries it over and sets it down under window left, gets up on it, draws back curtain. He gets down, takes six steps (for example) towards window right, goes back for ladder, carries it over and sets it down under window right, gets up on it, draws back curtain. He gets down, takes three steps towards window left, goes back for ladder, carries it over and sets it down under window left, gets up on it, looks out of window. Brief laugh. He gets down, takes one step towards window right, goes back for ladder, carries it over and sets it down under window right, gets up on it, looks out of window. Brief laugh.
Endgame, Samuel Beckett (1)
Each action performed by Clov can be said to produce an echo, which is both visual (the viewer sees the character performing an action and then mirroring it), and auditory (each action generates a sound which is then repeated). When he performs an action for the second time, Clov moves to the opposite side of the stage, his uncertain footsteps generating a steady rhythm. It is as if Clov’s movements mirrored the one of sound waves, moving in space from A to B, and reverberating when they encounter an obstacle (which, in the case of the play, is the end of the stage). The opening scene continues as follows:
He gets down, goes with ladder towards ashbins, halts, turns, carries back ladder and sets it down under window right, goes to ashbins, removes sheet covering them, folds it over his arm. He raises one lid, stoops and looks into bin. Brief laugh. He closes lid. Same with other bin. He goes to Hamm, removes sheet covering him, folds it over his arm. In a dressing-gown, a stiff toque on his head, a large blood-stained handkerchief over his face, a whistle hanging from his neck, a rug over his knees, thick socks on his feet, Hamm seems to be asleep. Clov looks him over. Brief laugh. He goes to door, halts, turns towards auditorium.
Endgame, Samuel Beckett (1)
Like in the previous section, each action produces a second one that echoes it. However, the entire tableau seems to be an echo of itself. Clov performs three main tasks: he opens the curtains, removes the sheets that cover the dustbins, and lifts the handkerchief from Hamm’s face. All three actions can be interpreted as different variations of a same act. Hence, Endgame becomes a literal echo chamber, where every action must produce an echoing reaction.
Ultimately, Endgame abolishes music only to become music. In The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, Walter Pater wrote “all art aspires to the condition of music.”3 Not only does Beckett’s Endgame aspire to resemble music, it transforms itself into a musical score. The playwright/composer succeeds in this quest by applying musical techniques to three aspects of the play: structure, language, and the movement of the actors on stage.
- Olk, Claudia. “‘A Matter Of Fundamental Sounds’ — The Music of Beckett’s ‘Endgame.’” Poetica, vol. 43, no. 3/4, 2011, pp. 391–410. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/43028518. ↩︎
- Massie C. “‘Something Is Taking Its Course’: Endgames Frustrated Musicality and the Evolution of Beckett’s Late Dramatic Style.” Modern Drama, vol. 61, no. 1, 2018, pp. 41–61., https://doi.org/10.3138/md.0748r2.
↩︎ - Pater, Walter Horatio. The Renaissance : Studies in Art and Poetry. New ed., Macmillan, 1917.
↩︎ - Germoni, Karine, and Pascale Sardin. “Tensions Of The In-Between: Rhythm, Tonelessness and Lyricism in ‘Fin de Partie/Endgame.’” Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd’hui, vol. 24, 2012, pp. 335–50. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41698656. ↩︎
- Levitt, Jesse. “Names in Beckett’s Theater: Irony and Mystification.” Literary Onomastics Studies, vol. 4, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12648/2932. ↩︎
- Lawley, Paul. “Symbolic Structure and Creative Obligation in ‘Endgame.’” Journal of Beckett Studies, no. 5, 1979, pp. 45–68. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/44782904. ↩︎
Giulia Leo 