(Matthew Ingate’s article appeared 12/31 on Far Out; Photo Getty Images.)
Like his contemporary writer Ernest Hemingway and then later Cormac McCarthy to come, the Irish novelist and playwright Samuel Beckett was an economical practitioner and a man who firmly believed in the maxim that less is more. Again, like those writers, his works can be staggeringly bleak, and they address existential issues and explore the human condition. More so than with Hemingway or McCarthy, though, Beckett’s work is shot through with absurdity, black humour and tragic comedy.
Beckett was such a staunch absurdist and minimalist that his most famous character, the titular entity from his 1953 play Waiting for Godot, never even makes an appearance on stage or on the page.
His early writings included essays on James Joyce, who he had crossed paths with in the late 1920s while working as an English Lecturer at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, and Marcel Proust. His later works were more informed by playwrights, poets and philosophers like Dante Allegro, Rene Descartes and Arnold Geulincx, though his earliest published piece of work was actually a music review, To a Toy Symphony (Haydn), written in the early 1920s under the pen name John Peel.
Like fellow Nobel Laureate Albert Camus, Beckett’s existential writing could be shockingly sparse and yet absurd in both its mundanity and profundity. Camus won the Literature Laureate in 1957, though he tried to refuse the honour, while Beckett was celebrated for his achievements in 1969.
And while he was inspired by Joyce, Dante, Descartes and other literary luminaries, he was also inspired by a deep and abiding love of music, chiefly classical.
As well as a playwright and novelist, Beckett was also a prolific letter writer, as the various collections of his missives that have been posthumously published attest. He would often praise or critique the classical performances that he had witnessed.
Though at first he wasn’t sold on certain selections from one of history’s most famous, and his otherwise most favoured, composers, writing that “I feel that Beethoven’s Quartets are a waste of time”, because “he needed a piano or an orchestra”, although he was eventually won round when witnessing the Busch Quartet play Beethoven’s Quartet Opus 130, of which he wrote that “although it is only his penultimate quartet it has as its finale the last composition we have from his hand, an incomparably beautiful Allegro. But it is the Cavatina that immediately precedes that Allegro that made the greatest impression on me. A movement which in calm finality and intensity goes beyond anything I have ever heard by the venerable Ludwig”.
