Le Balcon

Samuel Beckett wrote his radio play Words and Music in November 1961, but the next year, shortly after it was broadcast by the BBC, he withdrew it. Until the 1980s, dissatisfied with his own work, Beckett withheld the text. Then he befriended the American composer Morton Feldman, whom he got to know first through a memorable encounter at the Schiller Theatre in Berlin, and above all through their collaboration on the opera Neither. In 1977, Beckett asked Feldman to write music for Words and Music. For Feldman it was 'to some extent a labour of love, which I happily undertook', and so Words and Music was first performed in 1987, the year Feldman died, at the American Beckett Festival of Radio Plays.

Together with two narrators and the Orchestra Academy of the Staatskapelle Berlin, Maxime Pascal develops a form of live radio play that rediscovers Beckett’s and Feldman’s understanding of the theatricality of music, language and space.

Program