Sam's Shambles: Beckett's piano-pedalling technique

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Notes

¹ As the music therapist Juliette Alvin points out, music can also ‘reinforce the process of isolation and thicken the wall between the child and the outside world…. Love of music may offer the child a pathological means of getting involved deeper and deeper in himself’. (Alvin and Warwick 1991 [1978]: 48 – my italics).

² ‘MacGowran Speaking Beckett’ (Dublin: Claddagh Records Limited [CCT3CD], 1966). The musicians are ‘John Beckett – Harmonium; Edward Beckett – Flute; Samuel Beckett – Gong’; Samuel can be heard, in Knowlson's opinion, ‘giving exactly the right weight to each stroke’ (Knowlson 1996: 539).

³ Letter of 29 December 1957. Quoted in, amongst others, Bair 1978: 497, Kalb 1989: 93 and Abbott 1996: 170–1. The full passage reads: My work is a matter of fundamental sounds (no joke intended), made as fully as possible, and I accept responsibility for nothing else. If people want to have headaches among the overtones, let them. And provide their own aspirin. Hamm as stated, and Clov as stated, together as stated, nec tecum nec sine te, in such a place, and in such a world, that's all I can manage, more than I could.

⁴ Tom F. Driver (1961), also quoted in Fletcher 2003: 66–7. The full passage reads: What I am saying does not mean that there will henceforth be no form in art. It only means that there will be new form, and that this form will be of such a type that it admits the chaos and does not try to say that the chaos is really something else. The form and the chaos remain separate. The latter is not reduced to the former. That is why the form itself becomes a preoccupation, because it exists as a problem separate from the material it accommodates. To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now.

⁵ At the end of Proust, Beckett describes ‘the beautiful convention of the “da capo” as a testimony to the intimate and ineffable nature of an art that is perfectly intelligible and perfectly inexplicable’ (Beckett 1999 [1931]: 92).

⁶ A more precise (though less catchy) title would have been Samuel Beckett Listening to Schubert's Piano Sonata in Bb major, D.960, as played by Arthur Schnabel. See Omer (2003: 3).

⁷ Jeans's ‘The Universe Around Us’ is quoted in Beckett's Dream Notebook; according to Pilling, chapter 1 is ‘the only chapter Beckett certainly read’ (Pilling 1999: 145).

⁸ Publication details of all these books appear in the list of references.

⁹ Beckett liked to recall the dying Beethoven's fulsome praise of Schubert: ‘Mit freudiger Begeisterung rief er wiederholt aus: "Wahrlich, in dem Schubert wohnt ein göttlicher Funke!”’ (Beethoven n.d.: 94); ‘Doch sprach er von Schubert und prophezeite, "daß dieser noch viel Aufsehen in der Welt machen werde”’ (Beethoven n.d.: 95). Both comments were taken ‘Aus Schindlers Auflaß in der Theaterzeitung vom 3 Mai 1831.’ (Beethoven n.d.: 95); Anton Felix Schindler (1795–1864), a Moravian violinist and conductor, was one of Beethoven's first biographers, having been to Beethoven as Beckett was to Joyce: his sometime unpaid private secretary (personal rifts notwithstanding).

¹⁰ Gottried Silbermann (1684–1753), German organ-builder and later manufacturer of harpsichords and pianofortes (See Kennedy 1994 [1985]: 814).

¹¹ The ‘Pantalon’ (erroneously so called, after its inventor, the wonderfully-named Pantaleon Hebenstreit [1667–1750]) is an instrument of which I shall have occasion to speak elsewhere, particularly in connection with Hamm's story of the tailor in Fin de partie. See Rowland 1993: 30–1 and Beckett 1957: 36–8.

¹² ‘Today pedals remain the conventional method of activating stops’ (Good 2002: 41–2.).

¹³ ‘During his London visits, Haydn encountered a very different instrument in the Broadwood piano. The “English” action was more resistant to the touch than the Viennese and produced a much fuller sound; the dampers were raised by pedals rather than knee levers, and a shift pedal allowed the una corda effect, whereby the hammers could be shifted to strike one, two, or all three strings. Only once does Haydn suggest use of the damper pedal, indicating “open pedal” for two of his boldest and most intriguing passages, from the opening movement of the C Major Sonata, Hob. xvi: 50’ (Wheelock 2002: 96). I take the dates of Haydn's London visits from Kennedy (1994 [1985]: 394).

¹⁴ For example, Beethoven wrote, at the beginning of the ‘Waldstein’ Sonata in C, Op. 53 (1804): ‘Nb. where ped. is written, all the dampers from the bass to the treble should be raised. O means that they should be allowed to fall back again’ (Rowland 1993: 47). In dating these sonatas I follow Kennedy (1994 [1985]: 74).

¹⁵ ‘Back we go to Beethoven and his Moonlight Sonata – and his original manuscript which shows the sustaining pedal held hard down for the entire first movement. Pianists follow no strict rule in pedaling the sustaining pedal. The effects which individual pianists seek to obtain are produced with an interaction between the use of this pedal and the natural decay time of individual notes struck with varying degrees of force’ (Ord-Hume 1984: 264).

¹⁶ ‘The repeated “a” in the third movement of the Sonata [in Ab] Op. 110 [1821] is a device employed partly in an attempt to overcome the lack of sustaining power’ (Grover 1976: 100). Note that ‘partly’.

¹⁷ Karl Czerny (1791–1857), ‘Erinnerungen aus meinem Leben’ [1842] (Rowland 1993: 181 n56).

¹⁸ Karl Czerny, Supplement (oder vierter Theil) zur grossen Pianoforte Schule [1847] (Rowland 1993: 182 n10).

¹⁹ Theodor Kullak (1818–1882), German pianist, teacher and composer (Kennedy 1994 [1985]: 486).

²⁰ William Shakespeare (1564–1616), Hamlet (1600), II.ii.300–4. I derive the dates of Shakespeare plays from a combination of the Arden, Oxford and Riverside editions, details of which are given below, however, the edition from which I quote is the Oxford.

²¹ Thomas Mace, Musick's Monument (1676) (quoted in Rowland 1993: 14 and 179 n2).

²² ‘The red plague rid you | For learning me your language!’ (The Tempest, I.ii.366–7).

²³ Beckett's own alternative phrase for ‘the mess’, as used in his 1961 interview with Tom F. Driver (see Fletcher 2003: 65–6). The phrase alludes to a famous passage in The Principles of Psychology (1890) by William James (1842–1910), where he describes the ‘great, blooming buzzing confusion’ of non-/unindividuated existence. As Steven Connor notes, its ‘reference to sound is involuntarily intensified by the many readers who render it as “booming, buzzing confusion”’ (1997).

²⁴ 31 July [1979] ‘A. [Avigdor Arikha] put on Hans Hotter singing Der Leiermann, S. [Samuel Beckett] preferred Fischer-Dieskau, “at the end there's a real cry, he cries out”. We put on Fischer-Dieskau to compare. At the end, the cry, a shudder. S. looked at me, there it was. Nodded. Too moved to talk…. Gerald Moore's art.’ (Atik 2001: 102).

²⁵ Though I do not know which edition Beckett used, volume 2 of the Peters edition of Schubert contains the songs ‘Gretchen am Spinnrade’, ‘Des Mädchens Klage’, ‘Liebe schwärmt’, ‘An die Nachtigall’, ‘Die junge Nonne’, ‘Lied der Mignon’, and ‘Der Tod und das Mädchen’ (‘Death and the Maiden’). See <http://www.editionpeters.com>.

²⁶ Beethoven died on 26 March 1827, his funeral taking place 29 March; Schubert died on 19 November 1828 and was buried, according to his request, beside Beethoven in Währing cemetery. (The couple have since been reinterred in Vienna's Zentralfriedhof.)

²⁷ Friedrich Wieck, Clavier und Gesang (1853, Eng. trans. 1872) (Rowland 1993: 183 n7).

²⁹ Letter of 25 December 1873; also quoted in Rowland 1993: 125 (184 n45). Fay began studying with Deppe in November or December 1873 (Fay 1965 [1880]: 283), and wrote on 11 December 1873 that Deppe's initial reaction was to tell her that ‘I did not know how to use the pedal’ (287). Of course, Deppe's description of the pedal as the ‘lungs of the piano’ can point us in the opposite direction, where the pedal, as on a bicycle, is connected with bodily exertion. One thinks, inevitably, of Belacqua, and of Mr Connery's portrait in Erskine's room of the ‘gentleman seated at piano’: His right foot, assisted from above by its fellow, depresses with force the sustaining pedal […] The bust was bowed over the keyboard and the face, turned slightly towards the spectator, wore expression of man about to be delivered, after many days, of particularly hard stool, that is to say the brow was furrowed, the eyes tight closed, the nostrils dilated, the lips parted and the jaw fallen, as pretty a synthesis as one could wish of anguish, concentration, strain, transport and selfabandon, illustrating extraordinary effect produced on musical nature by faint cacophony of remote harmonics stealing over dying accord (Beckett 1976 [1945]: 251). But that is another story.

²⁸ Ludwig Deppe (1828–1890), pianist and conductor.

³⁰ Though I do not know whether Beckett knew of Jankélévitch's musical writings, he might have encountered him in another context: Jankélévitch's previous book, part of the series ‘Les Grands Penseurs’, was Henri Bergson (1959, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France), in whom Beckett had had a deep interest as a young man.

³² Edgard Varèse (1883–1965), French-born composer and conductor (Kennedy 1994 [1985]: 914).

³³ Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971), Russianborn composer who came to prominence as part of the Ballets Russes in Paris in 1910 (Kennedy 1994 [1985]: 853).

³¹ Federico Mompou (1893–1987), Spanish pianist and composer who lived and worked in Paris between 1921 and 1941 (Kennedy 1994 [1985]: 586).

³⁶ Letter of 16 October 1972. Beckett is also reported to have said to Jessica Tandy, who played Mouth in the production at New York's Lincoln Center, ‘I am not unduly concerned with intelligibility. I hope the piece may work on the nerves of the audience, not its intellect’ (Gontarski 1985: 19 or Brater 1989: 110).

³⁴ Though Abbate is the translator of both Nattiez and Jankélévitch, her rendering of the phrase is slightly different in the latter: ‘“Expression,” says Stravinsky, “has never been an immanent property of music.”’ (Jankélévitch 2003 [1961]: 30.)

³⁵ Originally in Nouvelles Littéraires (16 February 1961); trans. Christopher Waters. Also quoted in Keller (2002: 2) and Uhlmann (2006: 84).