Joyce Music: Luciano Berio

Whereas our composer, a creative artist who is eternally a “young man,” intent upon giving form to “the uncreated conscience of his race,” is like a navigator passing through the boundaries of his own history to explore unknown archipelagos, and to land on mysterious islands which he thinks he is the first to discover, and which he describes to others in sound.
—Luciano Berio, 1980, quoting from Joyce

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Luciano Berio
(1925-2003)

Luciano Berio was one of Italy’s most ingenious—and adventurous—composers. He employed a myriad of idioms and techniques during his long and prolific career, often combining apparently antithetical approaches to create fascinating new hybrids. Frequently called an “omnivore” by contemporary critics, Berio absorbed everything he came across: baroque counterpoint, classical forms, opera, serialism, aleatory music, folk music, pop music, jazz, musical theater; all were deconstructed, rearranged, and hybridized into his own unique language. (It’s this “omnivorous” creativity that has often invited comparisons between Berio and Joyce.) Of the same generation as Stockhausen, Boulez, and Cage, Berio was a pioneer in mid-century electronic music, from magnetic tape manipulations to the sophisticated use of computers. Many of his compositions employ dynamic spatial arrangements, whether placing the musicians in clusters, distributing the chorus through the audience, or rotating a soloist around the orchestra.

Berio was a restless experimenter. Often remarking the “best possible commentary on a symphony is another symphony,” he would frequently incorporate another composer’s music into his own, transforming the borrowed works into bold new shapes through the act of “analytical transcription.” He approached his own work much the same way, continually revisiting old pieces and subjecting them to fresh permutations. Berio viewed concerts as musical laboratories, and was rigorously attuned to the success or failure of his ideas—few composers have “withdrawn” works as often as Berio, many of which later reappeared in different forms. Considering himself more a “musician” than a “composer,” Berio held his performers to the same high standards he applied to himself, and was cheerfully devoted to musical virtuosity. Some of Berio’s most famous works are the Sequenzas, fourteen solos (and alternates) for different instruments written over the course of his career, each exploring the full gamut of the instrument’s capabilities. Perhaps the most famous of these is Sequenza III for woman’s voice, a dramatic display of vocal fireworks written for his first wife, the peerless mezzo Cathy Berberian.

The human voice was central to Berio’s work, and his appreciation of literature, linguistics, and semiotics was virtually unparalleled among twentieth-century composers. Samuel Beckett and Berthold Brecht were important influences on his stage works, and his lectures invoked figures like Jorge Luis Borges, Stéphane Mallarmé, and Robert Musil. Berio was close friends with Edoardo Sanguineti and Italo Calvino, both of whom supplied text for his operas. But Berio’s most enduring literary friendship was with Umberto Eco, the Italian writer and philosopher who introduced the composer to Joyce’s Ulysses, a work which would inspire several of Berio’s compositions.

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Joyce-Related Works

Chamber Music (1953)
Three songs adapted from Joyce’s poetry.

Thema (Omaggio a Joyce) (1958)
An electronic transformation of the opening text from the “Sirens” episode of Ulysses read by Cathy Berberian.

Epifanie (1961/65)
A variable sequence of orchestral and vocal pieces, including texts from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses.

Traces (1964)
Only given one performance and withdrawn, this “ghost opera” about racism was partially inspired by the “Circe” episode of Ulysses.

Sinfonia (1968/69)
This tour de force of music, voice, and sound incorporates text from Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable. While it has no overt Joycean references, Sinfonia is frequently compared to Ulysses and Finnegans Wake.

A-Ronne (1974/75)
A “documentary” on a poem by Edoardo Sanguineti, this piece of vocal virtuosity contains a reference to Finnegans Wake.

Outis (1996)
Berio’s opera about the transformations of Odysseus includes material borrowed from Joyce’s Ulysses.

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Luciano Berio (Photo by Jack Robinson)

Biography

Youth
Luciano Berio was born in 1925 in the port town of Oneglia on the Ligurian coast. His grandfather Adolfo Berio was a professional organist and composer of polkas, marches, and waltzes. His father Ernesto Berio was also an organist, and played piano for silent films before enrolling in the Milan Conservatory and composing more “expressive” pieces for piano and voice. Berio’s father was a music teacher, and their home often rang with the voices of his students. By the time Berio was 8 years old, he was a talented enough pianist to hold his own with the adults, and sometimes filled in for his father at the church organ on Sundays.

Berio entered childhood at a time when Benito Mussolini was firmly in power, and like many Italians of his generation, he enrolled in fascist youth groups as a boy. (Mussolini had actually lived in Oneglia for a spell, where he worked as a schoolteacher in 1908 and ran the socialist newspaper, La Lima.) As might be expected, Berio’s childhood notebooks reveal a young boy’s fascination with the military, particularly the navy. Growing up in a port town, young Berio entertained notions of becoming a sailor; perhaps even commanding his own boat like the hero Odysseus. Despite these childhood tendencies to romanticize martial life, as Berio entered adolescence he found himself becoming disillusioned with fascism, embarrassed by his father’s embrace of Il Duce—Ernesto Berio had even dedicated a three-part symphonic poem to “the descendent of Augustus.” (As Berio later remarked in an interview, “May God forgive him!”)

Adolescence
Oneglia hosted few musical concerts, so the family radio was Berio’s primary source of hearing symphonies and operas. This connection to the outside world was very important to Berio, who had something of an epiphany when he first heard Puccini on his transistor radio:

In fact, it was a lunchtime broadcast of La Bohème that was responsible for a very embarrassing moment. I was about thirteen at the time, and I suddenly found my eyes filling with tears. So, to hide them, I dropped a spoon on the floor… I was taken unawares by the emotional weight of the fourth act, and at that age I didn’t know how to confront a phenomenon that was essentially physiological.

Although Berio would later rationalize his response by praising the way Puccini “introduced the rhythm and the psychological mobility of everyday life into the musical theater,” this early “physiological” reaction was a potent reminder of the power of music. It was a power that Berio would explore, celebrate, and interrogate across his entire musical career, continually asking questions about the role of music—and by extension, the arts—in a corrupt and fallen society.

Aside from his father’s piano and the family radio, literature was a critical influence on Berio’s artistic development. His first formal composition was Pastorale, a piano piece inspired by the Jean-Christophe novels of Nobel laureate Romain Rolland. Later, he became fascinated with the realist drama of Henryk Ibsen. In fact, a youthful Berio even wrote an Ibsen-inspired play, much like the young James Joyce had done a generation earlier! German poet Rainer Maria Rilke was another early influence, and Rilke’s poem “Verkündigung” (“Annunciation”) provided the text for Berio’s first vocal composition, L’Annunciazione, an unfinished cantata for soprano and orchestra.

As Italy fractured into civil war, Liguria remained firmly under the sway of Mussolini’s Republic of Salò. In 1944, at the age of 19, Berio was drafted into the Italian army. He briefly entertained the idea of running away to join the partisans, but wanted to avoid bringing shame upon his family, or worse, triggering repercussions against his father. On his first day reporting to the barracks at San Remo, a loaded gun exploded in Berio’s hand. He was hospitalized for three months. After a protracted battle with septicemia, Berio forged his discharge papers and recuperated with the partisans in Como. Berio’s contempt for fascism would only deepen with time, and many of his most profound stage works and operas reveal a deep revulsion for mindless authority.

Milan Conservatory
Berio’s injury precluded a career as a professional pianist, so he turned increasingly toward composition. After the war he followed his father’s footsteps to the Milan Conservatory, where he studied with Giulio Cesare Paribeni, an expert in counter-point; and Giorgio Federico Ghedini, a composer fascinated by Renaissance and Baroque music. (He was also a fan of Melville, turning Billy Budd into an opera two years before Benjamin Britten.)

Berio’s education in Milan introduced the young Ligurian to a whole new world. As Berio later remarked in interviews, he felt his entire generation had been aesthetically “starved” by fascism and the war, and he was eager to make up for lost time. In Milan Berio was exposed to the Second Viennese School, and in 1946 he saw a performance of Arnold Schönberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, an experience which left him “baffled” but curious. He began to study the scores of Schönberg, Berg, and Webern, and found himself becoming fascinated by composers such as Bartók, Hindemith, and Stravinsky.

Berio’s years at the Conservatory did more than widen his musical horizons; it introduced him to his first love, the American mezzo-soprano Cathy Berberian. Studying in Milan on a scholarship, Berberian fell in love with Berio when he worked as her pianist. Despite being as-yet unfamiliar with each other’s native languages, they married a few months after first meeting in 1950. It was also the beginning of a fruitful creative partnership, one that would continue long after their divorce fourteen years later.

Cathy Berberian

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The “Roaring Fifties”
In 1952 Berio was awarded a scholarship from the Koussevitzky Foundation to study with Luigi Dallapiccola for eight weeks at Tanglewood. At that time Italy’s most progressive contemporary composer, Dallapiccola instructed Berio in formal methods of serial composition. (Though Berio claims he learned more from studying Dallapiccola’s scores than from the man himself, whose teaching skills he found lacking.)

During this visit to the States, Berio attended a concert at MoMA in New York, where he was first exposed to electronic music: two tape pieces by Otto Luening and Vladimir Ussachevsky, including Sonic Contours. Although he considered the pieces “rudimentary,” Berio was fascinated by the technology. Returning to Milan with a “warm letter of introduction” from Dallapiccola, Berio landed a position at Radio Audizioni Italiane (RAI). There he began composing scores for Italian radio and TV. He also began experimenting with electronic music, producing Mimusique No. 1, a tape manipulation of a gunshot—a sound quite familiar from his experience at San Remo!

At RAI Berio made two lifelong friends who’d profoundly impact his work—the Venetian composer Bruno Maderna, and the Piedmontese writer Umberto Eco.

Bruno Maderna and Umberto Eco

Bruno Maderna & Darmstadt
Born in 1920 in Venice, Bruno Maderna studied music at the Conservatorio di Musica Santa Cecilia in Rome before spending the war with the partisans. An accomplished violinist and conductor, Maderna became enamored of the Second Viennese School after studying with the conductor Hermann Scherchen. Having attended the influential Ferienkurse für Internationale Neue Musik in Darmstadt, Maderna convinced Berio to further his musical education studying dodecaphony and electronic music with the likes of Luigi Nono, Karlheinz Stockhausen, György Ligeti, and Pierre Boulez.

Berio attended the Darmstadt Summer Courses from 1954-1959. While the influence of the Darmstadt School was instrumental on Berio’s maturing style, Berio developed a reputation as an iconoclast among iconoclasts, and quietly rejected the totalitarian aesthetics of Darmstadt’s most rigid composers. Berio’s serial works evolved according to their own idiosyncratic systems, and he was always willing to break the rules when intuition suggested a more interesting solution. Indeed, Berio referred to many of his early pieces as “exorcisms,” partially written to absorb, transform, and purge a musical influence. Many of these “exorcisms” displayed Berio’s ironic sense of humor; for instance, his Joyce setting “Monotone” strips Dallapiccola’s celebrated canon technique to its bare minimum, while his Webern-influenced Nones somewhat mischievously employs a 13-note tone row.

In 1955 Berio and Maderna founded and directed the Studio di Fonologia Musicale di Radio Milano, a center for electronic music (barely) funded by RAI. Working in an almost “telepathic” partnership, the pair composed tirelessly for Italian radio, constantly trying new approaches and refining their skills. Soon Berio and Maderna’s Milan was being mentioned in the same breath as Stockhausen’s Cologne and Boulez’ Paris, a center for musical experimentation that attracted visiting composers such as Henri Pousseur and John Cage. Both were frequent dinner guests of the Berios, and John Cage took the opportunity to write Aria for Cathy Berberian. (While Berio appreciated some of Cage’s ideas, he never warmed up to the American’s more whimsical devices, such as “preparing” a piano or relying purely on chance. The first Berio considered equivalent to “drawing a moustache on the Mona Lisa,” the second he likened to musical “fascism.”) In 1956 Berio and Maderna founded Incontri Musicale, a contemporary music series backed by a journal of the same name.

Studio di Fonologia Musicale

Umberto Eco & The Open Work
Also working at the RAI studios in the 1950s was Umberto Eco, who had just graduated from the University of Turin with a degree in philosophy, and had been hired by RAI to produce cultural programming. In 1955, Eco introduced Berio to the complexities of James Joyce’s Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. Eco in turn became fascinated with Berio’s compositions, particularly Sequenza I for flute, which he considered an example of an opera aperta, or “open work.” Berio and Stockhausen are both mentioned in Eco’s first major book—called Opera Aperta—and Eco’s postmodern notions of the “unfinished” text continued to inform Berio’s poetics throughout his career. In fact, one of the more celebrated pieces to come out of Studio di Fonologia during the “roaring fifties” was a collaboration between Luciano Berio, Umberto Eco, and Cathy Berberian: Thema (Ommagio a Joyce), a tape manipulation of Berberian reading from the “Sirens” episode of Ulysses.

In 1959 the Venice Biennale commissioned a theatrical piece from Berio. The result was Allez Hop, a “mime-ballet” for orchestra, percussion, electric guitar, a mezzo-soprano soloist, and eight mimes. The scenario was provided by Italian fabulist Italo Calvino, and involved a flea circus gone haywire. Although Allez Hop failed to register as a success, it was the first of three major collaborations between the fellow Ligurians.

The American Years
Becoming disillusioned with purely electronic music, Berio resigned his position at the Studio di Fonologia to focus on expanding his career in the United States and the UK. In 1960 he accepted a position as composer-in-residence at Tanglewood. The main product of this relationship was Circles, a setting of ee cummings for percussion and soprano. This was followed by two summers at Dartington Hall in South Devon. In the spring of 1962 Berio took over from Darius Milhaud at Mills College in California.

At Mills, Berio had two students who would later become quite celebrated for their own contributions to music. The first was Steve Reich, who credits Berio as being influential on his own tape compositions, particularly It’s Gonna Rain (1963). The second was Phil Lesh, the future bassist for the Grateful Dead, who participated in Berio’s staging of John Cage’s Winter Music. But more importantly for Berio, at Mills he met a Japanese-American psychology student named Susan Oyama, his future second wife.

In 1962 Berio composed his first “opera,” Passaggio, a “mass on stage” inspired by Brecht, Beckett, and Genet. (From this point on, the scare-quotes around “opera” will be dropped. Berio resisted calling his stage works operas, but it’s a useful term to describe a staged, quasi-narrative performance involving singers, a chorus, and an orchestra, so there you have it.) Using text written by Edoardo Sanguineti and loosely inspired by Kafka’s letters and the prison diaries of Rosa Luxemburg, Passaggio features a female protagonist known only as “She.” Over the course of the opera, She—a virtuoso soprano—moves across the stage to various “stations,” each scene describing an ordeal of arrest, interrogation, imprisonment, and release. Meanwhile, a second “chorus” dispersed through the audience shouts in various languages, some offering encouragement, some praising the authorities, and others objectifying the woman with jeering catcalls. Intended to vocalize the bourgeois audience’s inner thoughts, the chorus is also instructed to mimic—and thereby to mock—any real-life hecklers. The conclusion of Passaggio arrives when She turns to the audience and issues a command borrowed from Genet: “go away!”

Edoardo Sanguineti

Received somewhat stiffly by the Milanese audience at its première, Passaggio clearly signaled Berio’s anti-fascist politics, and suggested the disposition of many works to come—most notably La vera storia, a collaboration with Italo Calvino set in a police state.

In 1963 Darius Milhaud departed Mills for a sabbatical in Paris, and Berio was invited to assume his classes for the full academic year. Berio and Berberian were divorced, and Berio began living with Oyama. (The divorce was amicable, and the two maintained a close working relationship.) In 1964 Berio wrote his first Chemins piece—a series of elaborate orchestral extensions of his Sequenzas. Chemins I was based on Sequenza II for harp, itself composed to redeem the harp from “the rather limited vision of…half-naked girls with long, blond hair, who confine themselves to drawing seductive glissandi from it.”

Berio followed Oyama to Harvard, and in 1965 he accepted a position at Juilliard, where he founded the Juilliard Ensemble, a group dedicated to new music. In 1966 Berio and Oyama were married and settled in Hoboken, New Jersey. That same year Berio gave a lecture at the Italian Cultural Institute in New York. One of the attendees was Paul McCartney, who along with John Lennon had become interested in the musical avant-garde, particularly the works of Stockhausen. Berio and the Beatle talked briefly in the hallway after the lecture. A year later Berio wrote Beatles Songs for Cathy Berberian, curiously baroque arrangements of “Michelle,” “Ticket to Ride,” and “Yesterday.”

Paul McCartney, Barry Miles, and Luciano Berio, 1966

Although Berio remained at Juilliard for six years, he spent much of his time traveling across the United States and Europe promoting and conducting his works. In 1968 Berio was conducting a revised version of Allez Hop in Rome when he and his director were assaulted outside the Teatro dell’opera:

We were attacked by a gang of fascists who were going past the Opera singing “per vincere ci vogliono i leoni di Mussolini” (“to win you need the lions of Mussolini”.) I suppose we asked for it, because we were making fun of them like a couple of students. Mario came out of it with a broken finger, and I with a cracked vertebra. The police watched imperturbably, with arms folded, as the “massacre” went on.

Recognizing the “fairly explicit link between the neo-fascists and the prosperous, right-wing bourgeoisie who frequented the Opera,” Berio extracted artistic revenge on the citizens of Rome, unwillingly enrolling them in the performance itself:

I had added a final piece…during which the mimes came down from the stage and, adopting the attitudes of the then current “flower generation,” circulated around the stalls painting the heads of distinguished elderly gentlemen and the décolletés of the more showy matrons. All hell broke loose, of course.

Berio was to fare better that year when he premièred Sinfonia in New York City. Dedicated to Leonard Bernstein, this postmodern masterpiece remains Berio’s most successful and enduring work. Loosely structured around texts by Claude Lévi-Strauss and Samuel Beckett, Sinfonia contains a haunting elegy to Martin Luther King, extended quotations from Beckett’s The Unnamable, and a wildly inventive deconstruction of Mahler’s scherzo from the “Resurrection” Symphony. The spoken-word sections of Sinfonia reflected Berio’s ongoing dialectic between music and politics, quoting from graffiti scrawled during the May ’68 Sorbonne riots and offering this self-aware Beckettian monologue:

And when they ask, why all this, it is not easy to find an answer… when we find ourselves, face to face, now, here, and they remind us all this can’t stop the wars, can’t make the old younger or lower the price of bread—say it again, louder!—it can’t stop the wars, can’t make the old younger or lower the price of bread, can’t erase solitude or dull the tread outside the door, we can only nod, yes, it’s true, but no need to remind, to point, for it is all with us, always, except, perhaps at certain moments, here among these rows of balconies, in a crowd or out of it, perhaps waiting to enter, watching. And tomorrow we’ll read that [mentions composer and title of a work included in the same program] made tulips grow in my garden and altered the flow of the ocean currents. We must believe it’s true. There must be something else. Otherwise it would be quite hopeless. But it is quite hopeless. Unquestioning. But it can’t go on. It, say it, not knowing what. It’s getting late. Where now? When now? I have a present for you. Keep going, page after page. Keep going, going on, call that going, call that on.

True to form, Berio would later add a fifth movement to Sinfonia that recapitulates and deconstructs the first four movements.

Berio at work

Return to Europe
In 1972 Berio and Oyama divorced, and the composer returned to Europe. Weary of “spending his life in hotels,” Berio purchased a Tuscan farmhouse in Radicondoli, cultivating the surrounding estate with vineyards and establishing a “library” of fine wines. In 1973, Berio’s friend Bruno Maderna died of lung cancer in Darmstadt. He was memorialized by Pierre Boulez in the moving Rituel in memoriam Bruno Maderna. A year later, Boulez asked Berio to direct the electro-acoustic division of IRCAM, the electronic music center Boulez was founding in Paris. At IRCAM, Berio was instrumental in the development of the 4X, a sophisticated musical computer that could handle multiple transformations in real time. (Perhaps the most famous piece utilizing the 4X is Boulez’ Répons, another work partially inspired by James Joyce.) Although Berio remained in demand across Europe and the U.S., he spent much of his time divided between Tuscany and Paris.

The mid-70s were a turbulent time in Italy, which was wracked by a series of bombings, assassinations, and riots known as Anni di piombo, or “The Years of Lead.” Partly in response to this unrest, Berio composed a piece generally regarded as his second masterpiece: Coro, a work for 40 singers and 40 musicians divided into matched pairs. Musically inspired by Banda Linda heterophony, the heart of Coro’s libretto is a poem by Pablo Neruda, “Explico algunas cosas” (“I Explain Some Things”). Neruda’s poem is spliced with dozens of passages from other works, mostly folk music drawn from cultures ranging from Native American to Persian, and sung in five different languages. A stirring and sometimes harrowing piece, Coro addresses the same concerns Berio voiced in Passaggio and Sinfonia—what role does art have in the face of oppression and violence? The piece concludes with a full reading of Neruda’s final stanza, up until now fragmented and interwoven through the other texts:

Preguntareis por qué esta poesia
No los habla de sueño, de las hojas:
De los grandes volcanes del pais natal?
Venid a ver la sangre por las calles

You will ask why this poem
Says nothing of dreaming, or of leaves;
Or of the native land’s great volcanoes?
Come and see the blood in the streets.

Real Time
In 1977 Berio married his third wife, the Israeli musicologist Talia Pecker. Three years later he resigned his position at IRCAM. He turned his attention to establishing a new musical center in Italy, once that would combine musicians and computer experts to realize complex musical ideas during “real time” performances.

On 5 March 1983, Cathy Berberian—legally blind and in poor health—called Berio to discuss her upcoming performance on RAI. She died of a heart attack the next day, aged 57. A year later Berio wrote Requies in her memory.

In 1987 the Centro Tempo Reale opened its doors in Florence—Berio’s Italian response to Boulez’s IRCAM. The keystone of the center’s technological innovations was the Tempo Reale Audiomatica Interactive Location System, or TRAILS. Consisting of specialized computers, software, and speakers, TRAILS could analyze a performance space and create sound profiles for individual compositions, reading the score to assign optimal acoustics for over twenty-four separate “sound events” moving across eight different “trajectories.” Berio’s first major work using TRAILS was Ofanim, a complex piece for orchestra, two children’s choruses, and a female singer who begins in a crouch and slowly stands during the performance. Taking Ezekiel’s Biblical wheel as its inspiration, the apocalyptic piece uses TRAILS to create “illusionary spaces” beyond the horizon of the speakers.

Unfortunately, Ofanim has never been commercially recorded. Like so many of Berio’s quasi-operas and theatrical collaborations with Italo Calvino, his most ambitious works feature complex spatial arrangements, dramatic theatrical gestures, and audience participation; none of which translates well to a commercial recording. This situation would continue throughout the remainder of his career, and to this day there are few available recordings of Berio’s major operas on CD, DVD, or Blu-ray.

In 1993 Berio was appointed to the Charles Eliot Norton Professorship of Poetry at Harvard, becoming Harvard’s Distinguished Composer in residence from 1993-1994. (The chair was held by Umberto Eco the previous academic season; it’s also been held by Jorge Luis Borges, John Cage, Leonard Bernstein, and Italo Calvino, who died before giving his lectures.) The prestigious position carries the expectation of six lectures, usually collected and published as a separate book—Borges’ This Craft of Verse and Eco’s Six Walks in the Fictional Woods are examples. Offering a summation of Berio’s musical philosophy and poetics, the lectures were published in 2006 as Remembering the Future. The book’s paradoxical title was drawn from the libretto of Un re in ascolto, Berio and Calvino’s 1984 opera about an impossibly demanding theater director named, what else, Prospero.

Frequent Berio collaborator Italo Calvino

Nessun Dorma
In 1995 Luciano Berio turned 70, an event that was celebrated with numerous concerts around the world. Although he spent more time at his estate in Radicondoli, his trademark cigar in one hand and a bottle of wine in the other, Berio had no intentions of slowing down, composing three more Sequenzas and two large-scale theatrical pieces.

In 1996 La Scala premiered his opera Outis, or “Nobody.” A postmodern take on Homer’s Odyssey, Outis features five incarnations of Ulysses throughout the ages, each murdered by his son before embarking on a series of bizarre post-mortem adventures. The libretto was written by the Greek scholar Dario Del Corno, but incorporates quotations from many other sources, including James Joyce’s Ulysses. This was followed in 1999 by Cronaca del Luogo, a complex opera with a libretto by his wife, Talia Pecker Berio.

In 2000 Berio assumed the presidency of the centuries-old Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome, where he helped establish the Auditorium Parco della Musica.

In 2001, the Festival de Musica de Gran Canaria commissioned Berio to compose a new ending for Puccini’s famously-unfinished final opera, Turandot. Having already composed Rendering, an idiosyncratic “restoration” of Schubert’s Tenth Symphony, Berio approached the task with a surprising amount of reverence—but not for the “traditional” Franco Alfano ending Turandot has possessed for decades; rather, reverence for the Puccini that Berio first heard as a boy on his transistor radio. The Puccini who understood the subtleties of time, the Puccini who continued to evolve from one opera to the next, the Puccini who had expressed admiration for Debussy, Stravinsky, and even Schönberg. Berio made the decision to evolve the ending from Puccini’s developing language, eschewing Alfano’s derivative and retrogressive gestures for a more subtle, modernist approach. Also tossed aside was Turandot’s miraculous redemption—Berio’s ending is more subtle, more ambiguous. One could almost wonder if the lush melodies of Puccini’s opera had not, in fact, ended the war, lowered the price of bread, or truly redeemed the monstrous princess through the power of love.

A few pieces followed Turandot—including a final Sequenza—but a spinal injury triggered a decline in Berio’s health, followed by an unpublicized battle with cancer. The family maintained Berio’s privacy right up to his death, which occurred in a Roman hospital on 27 May 2003. Luciano Berio was buried in the local cemetery at Radicondoli.

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Additional Information

Wikipedia Berio Page
Wikipedia’s page on Luciano Berio contains a few errors and suffers from a lack of organization, but is generally informative.

Centro Studi Luciano Berio
The Centro Studi Luciano Berio was founded by Talia Pecker Berio, and is dedicated to celebrating his life and works. Their homepage serves as a comprehensive Berio site.

Luciano Berio: A Contemporary Maestro
Filmed in 1999-2000, this Israeli documentary by Reuven Hecker shows Berio at work, and prominently features Umberto Eco.

“Luciano Berio’s Postmodern Paths”
A 48-minute long YouTube video by famed Morton Feldman cosplayer, the Classical Nerd. An excellent overview of Berio as a “postmodern” composer, this video also explains why Berio’s compositions are considered “open works.” Highly recommended.

Interview with Bruce Duffie
On 4 January 1993, Bruce Duffie interviewed Berio for WNIB in Chicago.

“Luciano Berio Is Dead at 77: A Composer of Mind and Heart”
New York Times, 28 May 2003. Berio’s Times obituary was written by musicologist and librettist Paul Griffiths.

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Sources & Notes

Much of the information from this biographical sketch was compiled from David Osmond-Smith’s numerous works about Berio, along with Berio’s own interviews and lectures: a complete bibliography is provided below. (This bibliography may stand for all the associated Berio/Joyce pages on the Brazen Head.) However, these sources contain a few inconsistencies. Most importantly for this site is when Berio first encountered the works of James Joyce. According to a 1981 interview with Bálint András Varga, Berio claims it was Umberto Eco who first introduced him to Joyce; but in Hecker’s 2000 documentary on Berio, Eco himself places the year of their meeting as 1955. Seeing that Berio composed Chamber Music in 1953, he must have known about Joyce’s poetry before meeting Eco. Other online sources claim Luigi Dallapiccola introduced Berio to Joyce’s writing at Tanglewood, but there’s nothing in official records to back this up. (However, in Two Interviews Berio mentions that Dallapiccola “often liked to refer” to Joyce, particular his “associative epiphanies.”) Some sources claim Berio actually met Joyce himself, surely a misunderstanding of the word “introduced!” (Unless the aging Joyce left Paris to hang out in Oneglia with a five-year old.) It seems most likely that Berio first read Joyce in translation at the Milan Conservatory during the same intellectual awakening that brought him Brecht and Beckett, and later discovered his works in English at Tanglewood. However, given Berio’s adolescent passion for Rolland and Ibsen, it might have been earlier. Still, what is clear is that Umberto Eco introduced Berio to Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, or at least gave him a “proper” introduction to these difficult works.

Another inconsistency that keeps popping up is how long Berio studied with Dallapiccola at Tanglewood—four weeks? Six? Eight? I opted for eight weeks, because that’s what Berio himself claimed in a later interview. And finally, the exact cause of Berio’s death has remained private, but some articles have mentioned a spinal injury followed by cancer, so that’s what I wrote. Any other inconsistencies or mistakes are my own!

Bibliography

Berio, Luciano. Two Interviews. (with Rossana Dalmonte and Bálint András Varga. David Osmond-Smith, ed.) Marion Boyars Publishers, 1985.

—. Remembering the Future. Harvard University Press, 2006.

—. “Poesia e musica—un’esperienza.” Incontri Musicali No. 3, 1959. (Read in French translation: “Poésie et musique—une expérience.” Revue Contrechamps No. 1, 1983.)

Boulez, Pierre. Orientations. Harvard University Press, 1986.

De Benedictis, Angela Ida. “From Esposizione to Laborintus II: Transitions and Mutations of ‘A Desire for Theatre.’” Le théâtre musical de Luciano Berio Vol. 1, 2016, pp. 177-246.

Eco, Umberto. The Open Work. Harvard University Press, 1989.

Feuillerac, Martin. “Multiple Layers of Meaning(s) in Luciano Berio’s A-Ronne.” Dzielo musyczne znak, 2012.

Goldbach, Felix Constantin and Ilia Bilbie Georgescu.“Berio’s Interpretation and Integration of Beckett’s The Unnamable in Sinfonia.” International Journal of Mathematical Models and Methods In Applied Sciences, Issue 5, Volume 5, 2011.

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Horvath, Nina. “The ‘Theatre of the Ear’: Analyzing Berio’s Musical Documentary A-Ronne.” Musicological Explorations, Vol. 10, 2009.

Jurkowski, Nicholas. “Berio’s Early Use of Serial Techniques: An Analysis of Chamber Music.” Masters Thesis, Bowling Green, 2009.

Knowles, Sebastian D.G., ed. Bronze by Gold: The Music of Joyce. Garland Publishing, Inc, 1999.

Kuo, Tiffany. “An Americanization of Berio: Tracing American Influences in Luciano Berio’s Traces.” Mitteilungen der Paul Sacher Stiftung, Nr. 22, April 2009.

Meehan, Kate, “Not Just a Pretty Voice: Cathy Berberian as Collaborator, Composer and Creator.” Doctoral Dissertation, Washington University in St. Louis, 2002.

Muller, Theo & Luciano Berio. “Music Is Not a Solitary Act: Conversation with Luciano Berio.” Tempo, Jan. 1997, New Series, No. 199, pp. 16-20.

Osmond-Smith, David. “From Myth to Music: Lévi-Strauss’s Mythologiques and Berio’s Sinfonia.” The Musical Quarterly, 1981, Vol. 67, No. 1, pp. 230-260.

—. Playing On Words: A Guide to Luciano Berio’s “Sinfonia”. Routledge, 1985.

—. Oxford Studies of Composers: Berio. Oxford University Press, 1991.

—. “Here Comes Nobody: A Dramaturgical Exploration of Luciano Berio’s Outis.” Cambridge Opera Journal, Jul. 2000, Vol. 12, No. 2, pp. 163-178.

—. “Voicing the Labyrinth: the Collaborations of Edoardo Sanguineti and Luciano Berio.” Twentieth-Century Music, 2012, 9(1-2), pp. 63-78.

—. Two Fragments of “The Music of Luciano Berio.” Cambridge University Press, 2013.

Ross, Alex. The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century. HarperCollins, 2009.

Scheffer, Frank. Voyage to Cythera. Television documentary. Allegri Film. 1999.

Varga, András Bálint. From Boulanger to Stockhausen: Interviews and a Memoir. University of Rochester Press, 2013.

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Author: Allen B. Ruch
Last Modified: 16 June 2024
Joyce Music Page: Bronze by Gold
Main Joyce Page: The Brazen Head
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