Come and go / Va et vient / Kommen und Gehen

Beckett’s text consisting of 124 words was written in English in 1965 and translated by the author into French a year later. The work lasts barely four minutes on stage. Three women of unspecified age sit together and converse in language reduced to an absolute minimum: memories of experiences of love and childhood from long ago are touched on without actually being discussed. The intrinsic characteristics of Beckett’s dramaticules are pauses, silences between words and economical action. The women leave the stage one after another, re-enter and sit down again – at the end, the order of seating has changed in comparison to the original set-up, but the silence remains untouched by the action, bringing an oppressive atmosphere to the scene.
Heinz Holliger analyses the three different language versions of the work, simultaneously tripling the text volume by assigning the German, English and French versions to three different singers and instrumental groups. Holliger retains Beckett’s scenic structure, but achieves intense multiplication through this intensive tripling. The laconic text gains an additional characteristic through the utilisation of the three languages, becoming a polyglot speech melody. The three instrumental groups assigned to each of the three singers (three flutes, three violas and three clarinets) reinforce the element of intangibility and indeterminacy in a downwards transformation during the progress of the work, in the wind instruments from the treble range to the lowest registers and in the violas a tonal modulation achieved through scordatura. Parallel to this alteration in the instrumental registers, the speech style of the singers also becomes transformed: in the second act, the vowels are increasingly swallowed and in the third, the text is progressively augmented with pauses and words are replaced by noises and song through pantomime until ultimately silence extinguishes the music almost like an invisible carpet.