By Trish McTighe<\/p>\n
It is with great sadness that we have learned that this year\u2019s Happy Days Beckett Festival has been cancelled. I hope that the situation will be rectified in time for next year and that the Paris wing of the festival, which premi\u00e8red this year, will also continue. The following is a short piece on the musical highlights of the Commencez! Paris Beckett \u201816 <\/strong>events. <\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n One of the delights of the Beckett festivities that Sean Doran brings to life is the way in which they allow us to hear the music that Beckett loved and experience the extent to which this music permeated his work. This is the case with the Festival in its Enniskillen manifestations and it is no less the case with the recent Paris incarnation of the event. While the extensive Commencez! Paris Beckett<\/em> programme balanced live performance and visual art with musical performance, I happened to experience several events of the latter variety. I was in Paris from the 22nd<\/sup> of April to the 25th<\/sup> and was privileged to represent the Staging Beckett project team of the University of Reading at the reception at the British Ambassador\u2019s residence. I was fortunate also to attend Ian Bostridge\u2019s performance of Schubert\u2019s Winterreise<\/em> in the American Cathedral. The latter piece is so clearly linked to Beckett – it was a favourite of the author\u2019s – but both events managed to reach toward the Beckettian sublime. I have seen this emerge at the Enniskillen Festival and I am delighted to have seen it flourish in Paris as well. It is, in short, a sense of stillness, a moment of quietness in the midst of busy lives, and a bustling city. It is a sense of quietness, or better still quietude, that reflects what the author himself sought through music and through art.<\/p>\n Hearing Bostridge sing reminded me of the extent to which Schubert\u2019s music resonates and remains within Beckett\u2019s work – the sparseness, the musical precision and the unflinching gaze through the veil into the quick of mortality. If the festival in Paris achieved anything, it was this exact thing: a moment of quietness which allowed gathered audiences to cut a glimpse through to the quick of existence, the irreducibility of the mortal body and its inevitable end – searing honesty couple with aesthetic beauty. Bostridge\u2019s skill is such that he captures and communicates all this in his voice.<\/p>\n The evening at the Ambassador\u2019s, though perhaps less sombre in tone, musically speaking, was no less affecting. Music from two stunning sopranos, followed by a reading of Beckett\u2019s short piece \u2018One Evening\u2019 and an extract from Eliot\u2019s Wasteland<\/em>. The Beckett piece was a treat for those less familiar with it, and brought a shard of something a little less pure perhaps – the piece describes the discovery of a corpse in a field – into the sumptuous surroundings of the magnificent residence on Rue de Fauborg, a shadow into the warm chandelier-glow of the Ambassador\u2019s salon. Again, a reminder of the truths of being amidst the splendour; \u2018all the light and dark and famine and feasting\u2019 as Beckett\u2019s Krapp might put it.<\/p>\n It is my hope that events like these will continue. Not only for the sake of the aesthetic value that I highlight here but also for the rich network of cultural labourers, visual artists, actors, directors, musicians, as well as those engaged in producing, funding and so on – the engines of culture in other words – that the Festival managed to bring together. We know that the author would have fled to the hills rather than attend anything conspicuously in his honour. Yet we might surmise that he would have been quietly pleased to know that others shared in the appreciation of beautiful music. And art. And performance. And in his adopted home no less. I will be looking forward to next year\u2019s events with eagerness.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"