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Home > Dramatists > Samuel_Beckett
Tuesday, 26 January 2010
UPDATE: The name of the composer in question is
Albrecht Schrade. More on the composition of the score for
Quadrat here.
A true rarity, recently posted at the indispensible UbuWeb: a video of
Quadrat 1 + 2, a piece written and directed especially for
television by Samuel Beckett. The video was premiered on the West
German television network Süddeutscher Rundfunk (SDR) on 8 October
1981.
Additional details are available at the UbuWeb site. More from James
Knowlson's Damned to Fame:
Comic at first, their mobility comes to seem almost manic
because of the speed and repetitiveness of the movements. Whether the
piece reminds the viewer of busy traffic on the place de la Concorde,
rodents in a maze, human beings scurrying frenziedly about their business,
or prisoners exercising desperately in a courtyard, there is something
eminently Dantesque about its imagery, with the figures resembling Gustave
Doré's engravings of Dante and Virgil in Hell. ...
... the most important change came when
[producer Reinhart] Müller-Freienfels took Beckett back home for
dinner after the
completion of the shooting and told him how impressive the piece looked in
black-and-white on the monochrome monitor in the production box.
A friend then proposed that they show the color version first, then the
black-and-white version. Beckett was fascinated by this idea and
asked if they might record another version the next day at a slower speed
and in black-and-white. The fast percussion beats were also
removed, so the only sounds that were heard were the slower, shuffling
steps of the weary figures and, almost inaudible, the tick of a metronome.
Beckett was delighted when he saw this stunning effect, commenting that
the second version (or Quadrat II, as he called it) took place
"ten thousand years later."
The video most uniquely demonstrates the Beckettian theatre's
determination to render through a variety of forms – is this dance,
music, theatre, video? all or none? – a metaphysical construct, quite
sui generis. And still ahead (perhaps ten thousand years ahead)
of its time.
(The music is uncredited; I hope to determine the composer
shortly.)
Home > Dramatists > Samuel_Beckett
Tuesday, 26 January 2010
In regard to my posting of Samuel Beckett's Quadrat
I and II on Sunday, Dr. Ulrika Maude of the University of Durham
and Dr. Gaby Hartel (through the kind offices of Dr. Mark Nixon,
co-director of the Beckett International Foundation) have been
similarly kind enough to provide the following information on the score
for the television play. Their research also provides a glimpse into the
close and precise attention Beckett paid to the soundscapes of his later
work.
Dr. Nixon writes:
My colleagues, Dr. Ulrika Maude at the University of Durham
and Dr.
Gaby Hartel in Berlin, have kindly provided relevant information to your
question. First of all, Beckett's editor at the SWR (now SDR)
[Reinhart] Müller-Freienfels writes that Beckett had written
everything down
beforehand: type of instruments, rhythm, volume. He then set out with his
sound engineer, Konrad Körte, to check the instruments of the
Rundfunkorchester. In the credits of the production, the percussion is
attributed to the four percussionists, Gyula Raez, Hans-Jochen Rubik,
Jõrg Schäfer and Albrecht Schrade, who played two Javanese
gongs, an African wood block and an African talking drum. Of the four
musicians, it was Albrecht Schrade who composed the music, for a fee of
3000DM. This is not attributed in the credits, however.
There is apparently some rehearsal material on tape at SDR
Archive in which they can be seen playing. According to Körte, the
original composition was developed through improvisation etc. In fact,
there is a collection of essays which will be published by Suhrkamp in
Germany later this year, edited by Gaby Hartel, to which Körte has
contributed an account of the way the music was recorded etc.
My gratitude to Drs. Maude, Hartel and Nixon for providing this
information (something, perhaps, of a Beckett "scoop") to me, and now to
you.
Home > Dramatists > Samuel_Beckett
Thursday, 07 January 2010
In the November/December 2009 Boston Review, Roger Boylan writes about Samuel Beckett on the occasion of the
twentieth anniversary of Beckett's death. He also reminisces about his
unfulfilled desire to meet the writer in Beckett's old age, and I must say
his visit to Beckett's Montparnasse grave echoes my own response when I
visited the same grave a few years ago:
I subsequently learned from those who knew him that he was
as content in that nursing home as one of his temperament could be in such
a place: He had plentiful whiskey (Jamesons, Tullamore Dew) and smokes
(Havanitos Planteros cigarillos), a TV, select books (mostly collections
of English verse, plus Dante), a stereo on which he could listen to his
beloved Schubert, and a small ground-floor room facing onto a
courtyard. He reminisced about the youthful days of his walks in the
Dublin hills, according to visitors such as the poets John Montague and
Derek Mahon. Like all old people, Beckett went back, in his mind. Like all
old people — like his own creations Krapp, Winnie, Hamm, etc.
— he was, in the end, alone. And like all old people, he welcomed
the rare visitor. It would have been my opportunity. But I was too young
to understand old age except as something to be pitied. So what would I
have said?
Many years later, I did finally visit him, where his
remains and Suzanne's lie in the Montparnasse cemetery, under a slab of
granite upon which, when I was there, admirers had deposited an unused
Metro ticket; a used Dublin bus ticket, one-way to Foxrock; and a
packet of Havanitos. I left nothing. Except, perhaps, a stain upon the
silence.
Read Boylan's essay here.
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