Beckett Program II

Hamm, Words and Music, Ohio Impromptu

Music by William Osborne

As with our other Beckett Program, this one too can be interpreted in its relation to Dante.   Hamm is vivid example the intellectual pride that Dante saw as heresy and violence against God.  A blind cripple – he suffers a buried soul like Winnie, and violently expresses his contempt for all the hell surrounding him with the words, “Clear away this muck!  Chuck it into the sea!”  In Canto XIII, the forest of suicides, Pier delle Vigne demonstrates the exact and legal-sounding language of a careful, methodical lawyer whose sense of logic and justice was so trampled upon that he could no longer bear it.   Hamm’s world view is similar, but he maintains his dignity by refusing to end the game of life.

Listen to Hamm performed by William Bouton in 1983.

With his little known radio play, Words and  Music, Beckett concentrates on the expression of doubt and hopelessness that characterizes the inferno.  It is a world in which human relations are burdened because each soul is so completely trapped in its own identity.  An old man, forced by two muses, Words and Music, to remember a woman he once knew, realizes that he has never had genuine contact with another human being.   The work, seen here in an experimental staged version, was recorded by the Bavarian State Radio in 1985.

Listen to the opening of Words and Music

Ohio Impromptu

Two old men sit at a table.  One reads, the other listens.  The listener occasionally knocks on the table when he wants a passage repeated.  The story read is of ghostly mirror images, and of the way the waters of a river re-converge after being separated by an island.  

Listen to Ohio Impromtu