Stirring Beckett

If Mark Rothko’s paintings represent a visual approach to the condition of music, then Samuel Beckett’s poems, plays and prose are the literary equivalent. Not just the music of words: a music suggested by the words, beyond them yet intrinsic to their sounds and rhythms. Stirrings Still was Beckett’s last piece of prose: nine pages, about 2,500 words, written between 1983 and 1987, which means it was finished two years before his death. And that’s what it seems to evoke: a man quietly contemplating his own mortality, time and loss and things undone, summoning flawed memories. As it opens, he sits at a table, watching himself “rise and go”. Paul Griffiths reads Stirrings Still on a new album of that title, the words divided into 18 sections separated by music for string quartet written by the American composer Trevor Bača. Griffiths, whom I knew when he was the chief classical music critic for The Times in London throughout the 1980s, is a much decorated author (including three…