Get it by heart in the end and lean back.'įor many Irish families music making was akin to drawing breath: it was in the blood. my nose so close to the score that the keyboard feels behind my back. bought a little German piano (a Schimmel) in the country and take it out on Haydn and Schubert. The intensity of his absorption was almost ferocious.' In the late 1960s, when his sight was beginning to fail, Beckett wrote a humorous description of himself: '. His cousin Morris Sinclair recalled evenings accompanying Beckett on the violin and remembered 'well with what conviction and elan he would play the last movement of Beethoven's Pathétique. Music was always going to win out for a schoolboy sent to lessons with two German spinsters in a place called Stillorgan where the young Beckett grafted at the piano, and word had it that his style of playing was 'intense'. But it led him to the creation of two highly innovative radio plays where music itself became a central character: as well as Words and Music there was Cascando his composer cousin John Beckett writing the original music for the former, and Mihalovici for the latter. Re-engaging with his own words at the behest of music was a struggle.

Both were labouring over Mihalovici's operatic version of Beckett's play Krapp's Last Tape, for which Beckett had agreed to write the libretto. The writer uttered his three-word resignation when composing his radio play Words and Music, itself probably triggered by an occasion at the piano with his Romanian composer friend Marcel Mihalovici. But those who knew Samuel Beckett also knew that his was a life embedded in music, both making and listening to it, usually in the company of friends. 'M usic always wins' may be an unexpected statement to come from a Nobel prizewinner for literature.

The Chords of Memory by David Beckett