Kin Beneath The Skin?

You'd never so much as even suspect it, we'd guess, but Samuel Beckett and Richard Wagner really were, in some respects at least, aesthetic kin beneath the skin. Or so playwright, Guardian theater columnist, and blogger George Hunka of Superfluities Redux posits.

On the face of it, there couldn't be two more different theatre artists than Richard Wagner and Samuel Beckett – the first the egomaniacal, nineteenth-century composer and theorist who had giants and gods banging about the stage in forests and faux-Olympias like Valhalla to thundering orchestral music in five-hour-long operas; the second the spare, self-effacing master of essences who, towards the end of his career, turned out plays – often quiet, approaching silence – that rarely exceeded twenty minutes.

Beckett himself cared very little for Wagner.... But the production of Tristan und Isolde by Dieter Dorn which was recently restaged at New York's Metropolitan Opera with Deborah Voigt and Ben Heppner suggests there may be more to the comparison than meets the eye. After the Ring cycle of operas and Die Meistersinger, this opera and Parsifal expressed essences of suffering, desire and renunciation – the same essences that provided the matter for Beckett's own last plays. And, apart from the extraordinary opportunities and challenges that these works provide for their performers ... there's just as much, if not more, to say about the theatre practice that these works represent.

Wagner was always a man of the theatre first. "Everything he did was determined by his need to create theatre," said the editors of an anthology of Wagner's prose work, and by the time Bayreuth was built, Wagner, like Beckett, found it necessary to direct his own music-dramas. But there was more. Both Beckett and Wagner recognized Arthur Schopenhauer's contribution to aesthetic philosophy and exemplified this same philosophy in their stage work.

Mr. Hunka has lots more to say on this, and while we're not familiar with Beckett's full oeuvre, we are familiar with Godot, and although we confess we never saw any parallels between that extraordinary play and Tristan, a work with which we're intimately familiar, Mr. Hunka has persuaded us that, in some respects at least, they do indeed exist.

We suggest you read this excellent piece and judge for yourselves.