Beethoven's Haunting of Beckett's 'Ghost Trio'

Laws, Catherine (2003) Beethoven's Haunting of Beckett's 'Ghost Trio'. In: Drawing on Beckett: Portraits, Performances, and Cultural Contexts. Assaph, Tel Aviv, Israel, pp. 197-214. ISBN 9659062508

Abstract / Summary

Part of Laws’s Beckett-related research is concerned with the significance of music in his work. This essay focuses on a late television play, examining the complex role of music in the interrogation of the relationship between the body, the imagination and subjectivity. Beckett deconstructs Beethoven as a symbol of Romantic creativity and authority, and subtly edits and re-structures Beethoven’s ‘Ghost’ Trio to scrutinise the relationship between watching and listening, interior and exterior, past and present, selfhood and otherness. Beckett’s television plays are somewhat neglected and, specifically his use of music and its significance for questions of form and meaning in late twentieth-century arts practices, have barely been explored. This project developed from Laws’s previous publications on music in Beckett’s earlier work. It is part of her long-term study of the extent to which Beckett’s attitude towards language and literature (and his testing of their limits) was formed in relation to his knowledge and understanding of music and musical philosophy, and the ways in which his use of music as a comparative model relates to and differs from the idealisation of music commonly apparent in Modernist literature.

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