Le Balcon

In the empty space of the theater, an imaginary castle, Words - a man - and Music - an orchestra - coexist.
At the center, Croak attempts to orchestrate reconciliation. Beyond the fable, these are the three faces of a single character in search of the truth.
With humor and poetry, Beckett draws a fascinating portrait of the artist in the process of creating.

In 1961, Samuel Beckett wrote Words and Music, a radio play with numerous didascalies concerning one of the characters, named “Musique”, and asked his cousin John S. Beckett to write the “voice”. Unhappy with the work, Beckett had it scrapped after the first broadcast.

Twenty years later, after his first collaboration on the opera Neither (1976-77), Beckett asked Morton Feldman to write a new score for this singular text. It is this version that is the benchmark today. Since 2013, Le Balcon has regularly performed Words and Music by Feldman and Beckett, first at the Théâtre de l'Athénée in 2013 and then, more recently, at Berlin's Staatsoper Unter den Linden.

Composer and co-founder of Le Balcon, Pedro García Velásquez then proposed his own version, directed by Jacques Osinski.

The official album of this García Velásquez / Osinski version, which won the Prix du Syndicat de la Critique for best composition.