‘Je n’ai pas envie de chanter ce soir’: A Re-examination of Samuel Beckett’s Opera Collaboration Krapp, ou La Dernière bande

Abstract

This article re-examines Krapp, ou La Dernière bande (1961), an opera adaptation of Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape (1958), which was a collaboration between the playwright and the Romanian composer Marcel Mihalovici. Beckett’s changes to the libretto give new insights into the writer’s developing concerns around form and his aesthetic of failure. In the programme for the Bielefeld production of the opera in 1961, Beckett supplied a sentence from the German translation of his Texts for Nothing, although inverting its first two clauses. His inclusion of this line in the programme affords us greater insight into Beckett’s ever evolving conception of the play. Shane O’Neill’s doctoral research on Samuel Beckett’s self-translated drama is funded by the Irish Research Council. He teaches at Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick, and has published essays in Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui and the edited volume Samuel Beckett and Translation (Edinburgh University Press, 2021).