John Beckett. This score, evidently considered less than satisfactory by all
concerned, was withdrawn shortly after the premiere. In the early seven-
ties, Beckett scholar Katharine Worth produced a new version of Words and
Music for the University of London Audio-Visual Centre, with music by
Humphrey Searle. But this production, described at some length by Worth
in an essay called “Words and Music Perhaps,”^20 was recorded for archival
purposes only, and it was not until 1985, when Everett Frost undertook the
production of The Beckett Festival of Radio Plays (see note 7), that the Beckett
collaboration with Morton Feldman took place.
Feldman and Beckett had ¤rst met in 1976 in Berlin, where the latter was
directing a stage version of The Lost Ones. They discovered that they shared
a mutual hatred of opera. Beckett further told Feldman, “I don’t like my
words being set to music,” to which Feldman replied, “I’m in complete agree-
ment. In fact it’s very seldom that I’ve used words. I’ve written a lot of pieces
with voice, and they’re wordless.” Encouraged by these remarks, a few weeks
later Beckett sent Feldman a card bearing a handwritten text (not quite a
poem) called “Neither,” which began with the words “to and fro in shadow
/ from inner to outer shadow / from impenetrable self to impenetrable un-
self / by way of neither.” These short phrases became the germ of Feldman’s
1977 “anti-opera” Neither, the composer’s ¤rst work to consist entirely of the
repetition and mutation of tonal forms. The composer thus became the logi-
cal choice to be Beckett’s collaborator on Words and Music; indeed it was
Beckett who recommended him to Frost. The radio piece was followed by a
long composition called For Samuel Beckett (1986), which was Feldman’s last
work; he died a year later, before he had the opportunity to take on Beckett’s
other “musical” radio play, Cascando, as the two had planned.^21
The relation of spoken word to music in Words and Music and Cascando
has received curiously little critical discussion. Jonathan Kalb observes:
Words and Music... presents a special problem.... Its action consists
of a relatively conventional dialogic exchange, but the dialogue is miss-
ing half its lines—lines that the play implies should match, sentence
for sentence, in musical terms, the speci¤city and subtlety of Beckett’s
language.
It is hardly surprising that neither his cousin nor subsequent com-
posers have been up to the task. In one case (John Beckett’s score) the
music proved unable to communicate ideas speci¤c enough to qualify
as rational lines, much less repartee, and in another (Morton Feld-
man’s score for Frost’s 1988 production) the composer came to feel con-
strained by the text’s requirements.... Unless Music convinces us that120 Chapter 6