“The Passions of the Mind in Samuel Beckett’s 'Words and Music'”

The article examines Samuel Beckett’s radio piece Words and Music as an allegory of the relationship between verbal and musical language in art, with a privileged focus on radio drama. In accordance with Arnheim’s idea that in the acoustic medium words regain a phonosymbolic musicality that brings them closer to poetry, the writer shows how even a brief respite between Words and Music – the two conflicting protagonists of the work – can produce a more powerfully evocative kind of language. By silencing, even if only momentarily, reason, meaning and narrative impulse, this new, more lyrical form of expression – words as music, in the style of Schönberg’s Sprechgesang – can prove more capable of resonating the depths of the self and conveying pure emotion. In light of this, based on a reading of emotions as ‘passions of the mind’ that stir the writer – a reading that seems to echo a famous treatise from the early 17th century – the article also interprets Words and Music as a meditation on emotional memory as creative stimulus and writing material. In fact, it highlights the presence of a residual autobiographical vein rooted in personal experiences and emotions that must be sublimated into aesthetic language: a process shown self-reflectively by the author as it unfolds, aimed at ensuring, as Mahler wrote, that ‘a burning pain crystallises’.