Unquiet heart and brain

Musical Times, Autumn 2003 by Whittall, Arnold

Luciano Berio: in memoriam

ARNOLD WHITTALL assesses the texturally complex, hugely imaginative legacy of the modern Italian master, who died in May

BACK IN 1994 a series of Berio concerts in London inspired a penetrating assessment of his work in the August issue of this journal. Susan Bradshaw's mixed feelings are clear from her early comment on this 'challenging' music's 'hugely imaginative if sometimes confusing textural complexity': and she links that confusion with a certain 'unconcern for the communication of structural logic', as well as with 'a lack of proportional definition that on occasion seems both perverse and unnecessarily distracting - prompting the listener to ask whether it is he or the composer who has temporarily lost the thread that had appeared to be guiding both of them through the labyrinth of undeniably beguiling sounds'. This is music 'which is as heartening to the spirit as it may now and then be baffling to the ear'. In the end, however, Bradshaw takes a positive view of Berio's modernist strategies: in the opera La vera storia (1977-81) he 'succeeds in bringing together the best of his multi-layered musical imaginings to forge a succession of real contrasts'. And she also connects Berio's 'quite extraordinary ability to convey powerful emotions' to a formal characteristic: the Notturno for string quartet (1993) 'enthralls even as it refuses to provide an outcome or to reach conclusions'.1

In The Musical Times for February 1993 David Osmond-Smith also made a special feature of Berio's 'polemic against the compulsion to complete' in Rendering (1988-90), the large-scale orchestral work built around Schubert's fragmentary sketches for a D major symphony. Osmond-Smith points out that Berio 'does not attempt to mitigate the tentative, exploratory nature of the sketches as they emerge from, and resolve back into his "rendering"', and notes that 'in calculated opposition to those musicologists who propose to "complete" unfinished works by an exercise in pastiche, Berio underlines the fragmentary nature of his materials'.2 Berio was perfectly willing to provide transcriptions - and, in the case of Turandot, completion - of existing works: activities which illustrate the apparently benign pluralism of his aesthetic convictions, and which are regarded by Osmond-Smith as 'continuing testimony to Berio's refusal to be bound by the polarized roles of contemporary musical life'.3 But such exercises were quite distinct from the kind of form-building found in Rendering: this comes across as a further development of the interactive oppositions between relative simplicity and density, continuity and discontinuity, which help to make earlier large-scale scores like Sinfonia (1968-69) and Com (1975-76), as well as the various stage works, so powerful.

Berio's vision of music as a 'social act'4 has not pleased everyone. Speaking in 1989 of Sequenza III for female voice (1965-66), Brian Ferneyhough observed that 'there is an ever-present danger of these compositional operations tipping over into concatenations of semantically explicit images'.5 One can see why Ferneyhough-the-composer might take fright at such explicitness. But in Berio it is an element that generally functions within a complex dialectic. With reference to the tape piece Visage (1960-61), Richard Causton has commented that 'the invocation of, on the one hand, electronic sounds which carry no specific connotations, and, on the other, the most meaningful sound of all - the human voice - makes possible the establishment and dissolution of innumerable different interrelationships, and allows Berio freely to exploit the potential for referential ambiguity inherent in the electro-acoustic medium'. Causton concludes that 'the extreme and carefully calculated tension between the great accuracy of semantic specificity and the total lack of semantic specificity forces the mind of the listener into creative activity'6 - an interpretation which fits well with Berio's own declaration from 1968 that educating people 'to find, even to invent relations among things, may be the most important role of music in our society'.7

Behind such thinking lies a view of music as something which 'can express, comment upon, even straightforwardly describe what is on stage, but [...] can also estrange itself, remain indifferent, enter into conflict'.8 And it follows that what Osmond-Smith terms 'the central humanistic thrust of Berio's theatre' does not require that 'central narrative core' of traditional opera. Instead, we find 'a more allusive and multi-layered conception'9 - a conception explored in Berio's three major stage works of the years between 1977 and 1996, La vera storia, Un re in ascolto, Outis, and their successor Cronaca del luogo (1999).10 Osmond-Smith has consistently drawn attention to that sense of 'a lost utopia' than accompanies Berio's 'humanistic values'.11 In consequence, not only do such invocations of popular music as occur in La vera storia turn 'infinitely melancholic',11 but the tendency of modernistic pluralism to acquire overtones of pessimism and disorientation extends to other works - Rendering, for example, where Berio 'has used restoration not as a means of attaining historical fidelity but rather as a creative act, one that evokes loss and disintegration. Once orchestrated, [Schubert's] drafts are manipulated and splintered even more so as to bring out the incompleteness and decay of the [D major] symphony. In this way, the sketches have been restored - restored to the fragmentary state of the ast, not the artifical reconstructions of the present'.12