Winnie

       (from Samuel Beckett’s “Happy Days”)

Dante is a key to Beckett.  Winnie embodies the forceful image of Canto X in which those who rebel against God are punished.  Here are two Epicurians, Farinata and Calvacante, who believe that the highest good is temporal happiness achieved through a virtuous life.  They both stand in their graves, Farinata buried to the waist, merrily ignoring the desperate condition of Calvacante, who has only his head remaining above the surface.  Winnie’s dilemma is similar and we admire her, just as Dante admired the self-sufficiency of Farinata, who maintains his dignity and expresses contempt for all this hell.

We also explore the deeply ironic humor of Beckett’s text.  As the Süddeutsche Zeitung observed, “Abbie Conant, otherwise solo trombonist of the Munich Philharmonic, embodies a wrecklessly funny Winnie.   The way she rummages in her shopping bag, deciphers the print on her tooth brush, continually quotes the ‘wonderful’ and ‘immortal’ classics, and always two centimeters this side of hysteria—this one should really see and hear, and in English, one discovers the clown in Samuel Beckett.”

“Reason says put it down, Winnie, it is not helping you, put the thing down and get on with something else.  I cannot.  I cannot move.  No, something must happen, in the world, take place, something change, I cannot, if I am to move again.   Willie.  Help. For pity’s sake. No?  You can’t?”

For eight sample pages from the score of Winnie click here.  They are for Legal size paper but can be scaled down to Letter or A4 paper when printing.  The score does not look good on screen, but prints beautifully.

Beckett has said that silence flows between the words of his works like water into a sinking ship.  In this silence one hears the music of a will to life.  This will  enables the residents of Dante’s Inferno and the characters of Beckett to portray a stark contrast between the indignity of hell and dignity of humans under torture—even if ironically. 

Beckett was a great fan of Buster Keaton-- our model for Act Without Words I.   Beckett’s text contains no spoken passages, only pantomime for which we have created a precise and continuous musical accompaniment.   The story is of a modern day Tantalus.  Via an elaborate stage work of pullies and invisible black string, objects descend from the heavens that never fulfill.  At the end even a trombone comes down…