No More Music? 
Beckett, Adorno and Culture after Auschwitz

Author: Benjamin Waterer
Affiliation: Lady Margaret Hall, University of Oxford

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Abstract:

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The works of Samuel Beckett often feature authorial instructions to play Romantic music in them: a trio of Beethoven’s, Schubert’s Lieder and a Chopin waltz. Though much has been made of his love for Romantic music in his personal life, musical analysis of his works often revolves around American modernism and serialism, typically neglecting these Romantic influences. The importance of Romantic music in his works is an underappreciated topic, and one that has huge implications for Beckett’s attempts to create a new type of culture after the Holocaust. This culture puts Beckett at odds with his friend and admirer, Theodor Adorno, who likewise saw the world as needing a new form of culture after Auschwitz, but who went about it in an entirely different way to Beckett. I argue that Beckett’s use of Romantic music is a key way in which he creates a new, more optimistic post-Holocaust cultural identity in his works, one that differs completely to Adorno’s more pessimistic, absolutist theory. 

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Keywords: Beckett, Adorno, music, the Holocaust, Romanticism ​

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ISSN 3069-8200