Joyce Music – Berio: Outis
- At January 18, 2023
- By Great Quail
- In Joyce
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The vast, idiosyncratic network of puns that Joyce weaves demonstrates with gigantic cheerfulness that every man, culturally, is an island: but that precisely this gives us cause for endless curiosity about each other. That lesson has not been lost on Berio. The wanderings of his Outis are no longer geographical, but through the unknown seas of other people’s minds. Lest that voyage should seem daunting, music is there to move us onward through it—just as the Joycean “voice” is there to encourage us through the jungle of puns in “Finnegans Wake.”
—David Osmond-Smith, “Here Comes Nobody: A Dramaturgical Exploration of Luciano Berio’s Outis”
Outis
(1996)
A scenic work for 13 soloists, recitation, mime, choir, orchestra, and electronics.
[Watch here]
Luciano Berio’s first opera since Un re in ascolto in 1984, Outis premièred on 2 October 1996 at La Scala in Milan. The libretto was written by Dario Del Corno, a Milanese scholar of Greek literature and theater. Like most of Berio’s vocal works after Passaggio, the libretto features numerous literary quotations and allusions. The subject is Odysseus—“Outis” is Greek for “nobody,” the name Odysseus famously offered to the cyclops Polyphemus. (It must be said that Berio declined calling Outis an “opera,” referring to it as an azione musicale, or “musical action.” Having said that, it’s an opera.)
Overview
Lacking a traditional plot or narrative, Outis unfolds in five cycles, each a different iteration of the Odysseus myth drawing from the same stock of characters: Outis the wanderer; his faithful wife Emily, who represents a modern Penelope; his loyal son Steve, who represents Telemachus; his bastard son Isaac, who corresponds to Telegonus; and his youngest son, the innocent Rudy. This somewhat dysfunctional family is surrounded by an enigmatic cast of secondary characters: the beautiful young Marina, who represents Homer’s Nausicaa and may also symbolize the call of the sea; the twin temptresses Olga and Samantha, who correspond to Calypso and Circe, the latter of whom gave birth to Isaac; the Mephistophelian Director, a darker shadow of the same figure from Un re in ascolto; Guglielmo and Ada, a storyteller and dresser; and a mysterious Prompter, who acts as an increasingly frustrated meta-chorus.
Homer is Berio’s main touchstone, but Outis includes elements from other literary adaptations of the Odysseus myth, including Bertolt Brecht’s poem “Heimkehr des Odysseus,” Umberto Sabe’s poem “Ulisse,” and of course, James Joyce’s Ulysses. (As Berio’s biographer David Osmond-Smith has observed, musical adaptations appear off-limits. Berio’s score refrains quoting from Monteverdi or Dallapiccola—or Cream, for that matter!)
After Homer, Berio borrows characters most generously from Joyce. “Steve” is loosely derived from Stephen Dedalus, a Telemachus in search of a father. Emily is both Penelope and Molly Bloom, and during the erotically-charged second cycle, her lines from Auden are greeted with a quotation from Molly’s soliloquy. However, the most Joycean character in Outis is the one without a Homeric parallel—Rudy, the living double of Bloom’s dead son. Berio has been attracted to the idea of including Rudy in a work since the early 1960s, when Bloom and Rudy were the subjects of a tentative musical project called Duo, which later became the ill-fated Traces.
There are other Joycean references in Outis, but these are more tenuous: Marina has echoes of Gertie McDowell, and a blind man tapping his way through a brothel evokes the blind piano tuner who wanders in and out of Ulysses, finally shaking Bloom’s hand in Nighttown. Indeed, there’s something quite Circe-like about the entire opera, with its recurring characters and nightmare scenarios.
The Homeric framework of Outis supports a canvas upon with Berio and Del Corno explore themes of ancient and contemporary life. The complications of fidelity, the perils of nostalgia, the fear of oblivion, the horrors of inhumanity, and the Romantic longing to return to some prelapsarian state of innocence—these complicated ideas are expressed through quotations adapted from literary sources including W.H. Auden’s The Age of Anxiety, Samuel Beckett’s Play, Herman Melville’s “The Swamp Angel,” and Sylvia Plath’s “The Applicant.” However, it’s Paul Celan who emerges as the loudest voice in the libretto, his jigsaw-puzzle German shattered into fragments as the characters attempt to express what ultimately cannot be spoken.
The Action
Each cycle begins the same way: Outis appears on stage in silhouette. He is then murdered—apparently unknowingly, as per Odysseus and Telegonus—by his son Isaac. This act of violence splits the silhouette into two figures: one Outis falls dead to the ground, while the other remains standing. As Isaac retreats, a spotlight reveals the standing Outis appropriately dressed for the coming scenario: a simple fisherman, a businessman, a colonel, a sea captain, etc. Whether this Outis is the “real” Outis or a wandering shade remains ambiguous.
Each cycle exposes Outis to a carnivalesque spectacle of human folly. These episodes are not to be interpreted as literal narratives—this is the realm of the symbolic, each cycle an allegorical phantasmagoria of characters, images, and events. As mentioned above, the “Circe” episode of Ulysses is an appropriate analogy, while David Osmond-Smith compares Outis to the oneiric face-dances of Finnegans Wake. These surreal episodes are populated by loose Homeric counterparts: prostitutes as sirens, consumers as lotus eaters, child soldiers as Greek heroes, etc. Outis wanders through each cycle, more a passive observer than a participant—more “Nobody” than “Odysseus.” Now and then he encounters members of his family, and occasionally he’s tempted by lovers and partisans, but he seems unable to make meaningful connections. In the end he simply continues his journey, the stage fading to black in preparation for his next death.
Primo Ciclo
The first cycle begins with Steve calling for his lost father above the rolling waves. The scene quickly shifts to an auction house, were a sinister auctioneer converts childhood myths into marketable commodities: “Cenerentola…Rapunzel…Superman…Biancaneve…la Sirenetta…Capitan Nemo…” Rudy arrives on stage, described in quotations from Joyce. Eventually the auctioneer swells into a float-sized balloon. A Lestrygonian giant grown fat from cannibalizing the human spirit, he looms over the prancing circus of Snow Whites and Cinderellas. Outis tries to rescue Rudy, but only manages to seize Rudy’s “ivory wand.” He uses this to puncture the auctioneer, deflating this conflation of gluttonous giant and myopic cyclops. (In the Milanese première, the libretto’s instructions are ignored and Rudy punctures the giant.)
The Auctioneer inflates to giant-size. (La Scala)
As the crowd shuffles offstage, Emily appeals to Outis by wearing her wedding dress. She reminds him of their marriage, quoting the vows from Auden’s Age of Anxiety—“If you blush, I’ll build breakwaters…” Immune to her nostalgic cri de coer, Outis continues his wandering.
Secondo Ciclo
The second cycle opens in a stock exchange trading shares of the golden calf, but soon transforms into a red-light district, complete with leering prostitutes cavorting behind glass. It’s an erotically-charged episode, with lyrics culled from Catullus, Auden, and Joyce. Olga and Samantha portray vixens, Marina voices the call of the sea, and Emily sings an aria adapted from Auden’s “Horae Canonicae: Prime.” Apparently moved by her plaintive offering, Outis responds with Joyce: “Yes—oh yes. You will Yes.” Despite this affirmation—albeit switched from first- to second-person—Outis remains curiously idle. The cycle ends when the fantastic cabaret vanishes between Emily’s open legs.
Graham Vick’s gonna be Graham Vick! Samantha in Saran-Wrap, à la Marabel Morgan, while the Swingle Singers croon in the background. (La Scala)
Terzo Ciclo
The third cycle is largely composed of quotations from Paul Celan. It begins in a forest, with Outis and Steve again failing to connect. Suddenly a “grotesque, labyrinthine, dreamlike” supermarket appears. Dazed shoppers hunt for deals among the arboreal aisles, hunter-gatherers numbed into submission as consumers. Only Steve appears free to act, reading from a book while the lotus-eaters shuffle mindlessly around him. Above their heads, amidst images of war and suffering, an amplified octet offers an otherworldly lament—“Niemand knetet uns wieder aus Erde und Lehm, niemand bespricht unsern Staub.” (“No one will knead us from earth and clay again, no one will speak our dust.”) With dreamlike slowness, the supermarket transforms into a concentration camp—the consumers have become commodities. Celan continues to drive the libretto as Outis attempts to make sense from senselessness, unable to comprehend how “Niemand” can become so many lost names.
Quarto Ciclo
After an intermission, the fourth cycle opens with “Solo. Venuto dal mare,” Marina’s aria of solitude and loss. One of the most beautiful songs in the opera, it’s accompanied by a solo violin accented by a clarinet. Marina leaves the stage, and the Prompter explains that Outis has been torn away from home by war. Outis is addressed by three women: Samantha, who reminds him of the infidelity that bore Isaac; Olga, who repeats her Catullian seduction; and Emily, who offers a vision of domestic comfort. Outis remains indifferent to all three.
Suddenly we’re in a playground filled with children. The sinister Director rolls a Trojan Horse onstage. He opens it to reveal a cache of guns, which he gleefully hands to children for “war games,” urging them to play at Greeks and Trojans. Only Rudy seems immune, sitting at the feet of Guglielmo, who reads from a book. The presence of Guglielmo as storyteller—his countertenor rising above the chaos—suggests that literature and art may provide an alternative to conflict. Despite the Director’s best efforts to condition the next generation for slaughter, the children lose interest and gravitate to Guglielmo and Rudy. Meanwhile, adults begin filtering on stage: laundresses, nurses, wounded veterans, and refugees.
This leads to one of the most “Berioesque” moments in the opera. A trio of clowns appear, equipped with trombone, accordion, and miniature violin. The clowns touch off a musical interlude, a traditional folk tune played above the sonic landscape of the orchestra. Eventually the scene decays into a parody of postwar aftermath, children and adults gathered in a nightmare pavane while Outis declares his intentions to carry on alone. The cycle ends strangely, the war-torn characters dancing merrily to music that’s undanceably bleak.
The trio of clowns is approached by Ada the dresser. (La Scala)
Quinto Ciclo
The fifth cycle begins on a luxury liner—possibly the Titanic, à la Opera?—crowded with lounging patrons. A storm disrupts their leisure, the Director forcing the chorus to play the part of wind and waves. Outis is castaway on a beach, his unconscious body watched over by Marina. Her final appearance onstage, she sings “O tu che sei sì triste.” The most lyrical aria in the opera, its moments of birdlike fluttering recall Berio’s writing for Cathy Berberian.
After Steve helps his father to his feet, Outis and Emily come face to face, formally dressed as concert singers standing before opposed pianos. Outis and Emily are each paired with a double, wearing the same costumes, but positioned behind the pianos. As they sing their back-and-forth duet, a tale of marital hopes and regrets, their doppelgängers add darker shadings to their recollections. The pianists remain entirely neutral, as if we’re watching a concert performance; the orchestra has fallen silent. The music here is some of the thorniest in the opera—this is the Berio of Darmstadt, the pianos exchanging scampering, pointillist runs mined with discordant clusters. As the estranged couple nears the conclusion of their duet, the orchestra quietly returns, a yearning elegy rising from the strings. The doubles fade into the background, leaving Outis to brusquely accuse his wife: “Non mi hai mai conosciuto”—“You never knew me.” Emily responds softly, plaintively to her stony partner: “Le tue mani contavano le promesse. Non ti ho conosciuto mai,” or “Your hands counted the promises. I’ve never met you.” As she walks away, the spotlight reveals Outis, his hand uplifted as he readies a dramatic reply. Suddenly the stage goes dark. The opera is over.
Alan Opie before the plug is pulled. (La Scala)
The Music
The glorious task of opera is to create a world where music, words, images, and action come together to form something greater than the sum of its parts. This is true for all operas; but in certain works these elements feel more intertwined and interdependent than others. While operas like Don Giovanni, La Traviata, and Tosca are certainly magical, they make “sense” in a way that other operas do not. One could unravel them into theatrical plots, concert arias, even films without losing the essence of the whole. This becomes more difficult for operas such as Parsifal, Pelléas et Mélisande, Moses und Aron, and Einstein on the Beach, to name a few. There’s a kind of madness to such operas, so obsessive in the creation of their integrated worlds they border on hallucination. Albeit only two hours long, Outis shares this intensity. It’s one of Berio’s most consistent and profound works, a seamless fusion of sound, language, and vision. Outis feels deep, like the winedark sea that permeates its libretto.
There are many ways that Berio establishes this unique sound-world. Most superficially, unlike many of his earlier operas, Outis refrains from musical pastiche and sudden stylistic changes. When Outis wishes to foreground an “alien” musical element, it draws attention to its artificiality by literally placing it on stage—the clownish trio that punctuates the third cycle, or the Boulez-like piano duet near the conclusion. This allows the musical texture of the orchestra to remain consistent.
On a deeper level, Berio creates a sense of internal coherence through the clever manipulation of orchestral timbre. Outis is acutely aware of “sound color” at all times, combining and re-combining instrumental groups to create musical shades, often moving imperceptibly from one color to the next. The effect is not unlike staring into an ocean and watching the colors shift in response to passing clouds and submarine currents. This almost painterly sense of depth is partly established by linking pitch to timbre—changes in one are often accompanied by changes in the other, a synthesis of words and music that takes the place of traditional melody. Outis also features many examples of Berio’s playful approach to harmony and counterpoint, particularly in response to the vocal lines. These complicated relationships are aptly described by David Osmond-Smith in his essay on Outis, “Here Comes Nobody”:
Striking as such individual vocal lines are, it is the extraordinarily rich harmonic discourse achieved by a counterpoint in which each line may be clouded by echoes and heterophonies that gives Outis its particular aural character… the clear outlines of dialogue move in and out of aural focus through the sonic equivalent of chiaroscuro.
This is not to say that Outis has no bright points. Highlights frequently emerge from the rolling gloom like the play of sunlight on waves—cascading ripples of brass, a solo violin, a virtuoso tuba, a continuo played on accordion. Outis is also fond of gathering instruments into quartets, such as saxophones and flutes. But these moments are always transitory, soon to be re-absorbed into the pelagic churn of the score.
Outis is also one of Berio’s most beautiful works—beautiful, but not necessarily pretty. The salacious trilling of the “flower maidens” Samantha and Olga, the unbearable tension of the sustained strings that close the second cycle, the discordant pianos of the finale; these moments earn their beauty through a powerful feeling of rightness, almost inevitability. The opera’s most lyrical moments are given to the characters Marina and Emily, with Marina’s longing arias foreshadowing Berio’s completion of Turandot five years later. (Is it only coincidence that Marina sings a lyric containing, “nessuno dorme?”) But make no mistake, Berio is not Puccini! Outis may be lush, but it’s still atonal, unlikely to please the bluehairs who skip Lulu for their twelfth performance of Madame Butterfly.
Outis also features many of Berio’s distinctive tropes, from “meta-musical” interruptions to flourishes of instrumental and vocal virtuosity. One returning favorite is the amplified vocal octet, introduced in Sinfonia and last seen in A-Ronne. In Outis, these eight vocalisti are situated between the chorus and the singers, a floating Greek chorus that offers a position of ironic detachment from the action on stage. Berio saves some of his most ingenious vocal writing for their appearances, their eight amplified voices playing against the larger chorus or individual singers. For instance, in the second act they’re inserted as a sardonic pop group—“The Swingle Singers Sing Sylvia Plath!”—mediating the transformation from stock market to brothel. In the third cycle, they hover above the dismal supermarket, impeccably-dressed angels heralding the misery to come.
Other similarities to previous works are more gestural, and speak to Berio’s fondness for postmodern idiom. The Director, for instance, seems to be the same character from Un re in ascolto, and along with the Prompter and Ada the dresser, suggests that Outis is aware of itself as a theatrical endeavor. This is confirmed by the final duet, which adopts the doubling technique from Opera, along with the “premature” ending of Un re in ascolto that concludes the performance just as the “performance” is about to begin.
Outis shares many of Berio’s characteristic thematic considerations as well. Most of the fourth cycle can be seen as an extension of the questions asked by Sinfonia, Coro, La vera storia, and others: what use is art—or artists—in a world consumed by poverty and warfare? Certainly Outis continues Berio’s longstanding critiques of capitalism, consumerism, fascism, and Romantic ideation. This last is particularly relevant to Outis, which rejects the “happy ending” of Joyce’s Ulysses, depicting instead an exhausted marriage where communication seems impossible and infidelity has born a murderous child. It’s notable that Berio’s Ulysses forces Molly’s “yes” prematurely into the mouth of his Penelope; Emily’s last words are “I’ve never met you.” To which Outis is denied a reply by his very creator: the rest is silence.
Berio checking the ponies.
Excerpts from “Here Comes Nobody”
By David Osmond-Smith
“Here Comes Nobody: A Dramaturgical Exploration of Luciano Berio’s Outis”
Cambridge Opera Journal, July 2000, Vol. 12, No. 2, pp. 163-178.
…it was . . . a pleasant turn of the populace which gave him as sense of those normative letters the nickname Here Comes Everybody. An imposing everybody he always indeed looked, constantly the same as and equal to himself and magnificently well worthy of any and all such universalization, every time he continually surveyed . . . the truly catholic assemblage gathered together in that king’s treat house of satin alustrelike above floats and footlights . . . unanimously to clapplaud . . . the problem passion play of the millentury, running strong since creation…
—James Joyce, “Finnegans Wake”
With Outis (1995-6), Luciano Berio achieved a distinctive response to questions that have haunted musical theatre from Monteverdi to the present. The questions arise because musical theatre is one of a number of artistic media rooted in the retelling of seminal stories. A culture needs such stories to define a common understanding of what each individual may expect to encounter in others—and, more disconcertingly, within him- or her-self. Their power derives from the fact that, however striking the social and technological innovations that surround us, we do not easily escape repeating the life-shapes of our forebears. (And if, like Berio’s much-loved James Joyce, we are drawn to the cyclic vision of cultural history advanced by Vico, the same applies as much on the epochal scale as within the individual life.) This working-over of seminal stories has taken on two contrasting forms within Western culture. On the one hand, epic and novelistic narration has tended to engage the imagination by an abundance of circumstantial detail—a process richly abetted by the visual arts, and particularly painting. On the other, ritualistic re-enactment has tended to pare narrative down to essentials, using musical organization (in its broadest sense) as the means to focus upon a given situation or affect at sufficient length to allow the fullest reverberation within our individual or collective memories. (Such indeed would seem to be the case when Mr H. C. Earwicker, as narrated by Joyce in the epigraph to this essay, attends the opera, or ‘king’s treat house’.)
Narrative is therefore work done prior to bringing into play the singularly powerful forces of musical dramaturgy. A degree of familiarity with the narrative sequence that provides its point of departure is presupposed by much musical theatre: the epic sequences that underpin both Attic tragedy and the speculative attempts to recreate it that underpin much of the history of opera from its origins to the present; Ariosto and Tasso’s epics of Christianity defended that fed so much 17th and 18th century opera; ancient (and subsequently modern) history treated as epic for the same purpose; or the ‘biblical tragedy’ of Handel’s oratorios. In all of these instances, narrative is a ‘pre-text’: that which is established prior to, and often provides legitimation for the disturbing, and confrontational powers of musical drama. (One may sympathize with the dilemma of a Richard Wagner who, eager to unleash those powers, was obliged to let Siegfrieds Tod proliferate into the Ring, precisely because Teutonic mythology was ‘already known’ only to a rather restricted range of mid-nineteenth-century literary savants.)
But the nineteenth century also saw the triumph of a genre that profoundly challenged the praxis of musical theatre: the novel. Here the emphasis was upon the beguiling idiosyncrasies of individual ‘characters’, and the unexpected twists and turns of a ‘plot’ generated by their interaction. It was an obsession to which the opera house had to respond: vivid ‘characters’—Rigoletto, Turandot, Carmen, Golaud, Wozzeck, Boris Godunov, seductive to audiences because they depended upon a few striking, and usually immutable traits—were presented as caught up within a network of narrative consequences, dynamized by ‘melodramatic’ coups de theatre. Their gratifyingly clear-cut psychological architecture offered fantasies of escape from the fluid intermittencies of subjective life. The temptation to become a ‘character’ oneself was never far from the nineteenth-century mind: and the opera composer, intent upon pleasing his patrons, remained deaf to the ironic warnings of a Pushkin or a Flaubert as to where such appetites might lead.
Reaction was not long in coming. Tenuous narrative consequence became the hallmark of early twentieth-century opera (Malipiero, early Hindemith, the Schoenberg of Die glückliche Hand, or the Shostakovich of The Nose). The gratifications of ‘character’ were decimated by Brecht and Weill, or outrageously inflated, tongue in cheek, by the Hollywood epic. It became obvious to the modernist tradition that musical theatre could play games with story-telling with an assurance that prose theatre could not easily emulate, because it was able to contain a set of narrative fragments within its own, musically generated dramaturgical time (Pelléas and Lulu, both based upon spoken theatre works, are classic examples of how such fragments achieve their full potential when integrated within a powerful, over-arching musical structure.)
All of Luciano Berio’s musical theatre, whether performed in the opera house or the concert hall, is rooted in this tradition. But it has reached its most radical maturity only gradually. In part this is hardly surprising, for he had to synthesize two powerful, but seemingly contradictory tendencies: on the one hand, the ‘stripped-down’ narrative native to music theatre, and brilliantly reinvented by Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex, on the other, the disturbing, echoing complexity of modernist novel and poetry, which threw nineteenth-century narrative traditions into disarray from the opposite corner. With the registering by Proust and Musil of the subjective non-linearity of what, chronometer in hand, would appear to the onlooker as a progress ‘through’ time, Berio has had little to do. But he has been consistently haunted by the vision, propounded poetically by Sanguineti in the footsteps of Eliot and Pound, but above all by the two labyrinthine masterpieces of Joyce’s maturity, of an echoing semiological regression. Here, every ‘signified’ is itself a ‘signifier’, pointing to further signifieds—a process whose dynamic abundance invests the lived present with meaning and substance by turning the arrow of time into a looping meander (a Viconian diagram redrawn by Paul Klee). Within that perspective, the wanderings around Dublin of Leopold Bloom are those of Ulysses around the eastern Mediterranean, and the vicissitudes of Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker and those of all narrated history are co-present through the manic compression of the Joycean pun. Of the innumerable Joycean elaborations upon H. C. Earwicker’s initials that pepper Finnegans Wake, one might well be proposed as a superscript to Outis: ‘Hush! Caution! Echoland!’ (Or perhaps ‘Ecoland’ in this instance, in honour of the man who opened up this territory for Berio.)
Popular as Un re in ascolto has proved, it is entirely typical of Berio that he should refuse to capitalize upon a successful formula. Instead, in Outis (1995-6) he returned, with blazing conviction, to his vision of a musical theatre beyond narrative. Although there is still vestigially a central figure in Outis, the work might plausibly lay claim to being a first example of that ‘other theatre’ which Prospero persistently strives to realize in Un re in ascolto. Certainly, it and the subsequent Cronaca del luogo (1998-9) are the most radical embodiment yet of a vision of musical theatre that Berio has nurtured into growth ever since Passaggio. It presents a theatre without even a skeletal narrative: a carefully constructed flow of theatrical images held together by the score (and for those who possess it, by a knowledge of images from the Odyssey), but juxtaposed so as to allow potential interconnections to proliferate. The dramaturgical scaffolding that underpins this flow of imagery owes much to Berio’s enduring fascination with the work of the Russian ethnologist, Vladimir Propp, and in particular to his pioneering exercise in structural analysis, Morphology of the Folk Tale (1928). But as with his treatment of material from Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Le cru et le cuit in Sinfonia, Berio’s celebration of structuralist origins makes no attempt to replicate Propp’s analytical adventures amongst the isomorphic structures underpinning differing narratives. Instead, he takes a chain of paradigmatic situations—each of them the sort of generic terminus at which one of Propp’s analyses might have arrived—and employs this as the generator of five dramaturgical and musical cycles. The situations are as follows: (a) the killing of Outis by his son, (b) danger, conflict, or persecution, (c) resolution or removal of (b), (d) a virtual return, (e) a journey.
[…]
In introducing Outis, Berio expressed the hope that ‘the cohabitation of differing elements and musical perspectives may help to arouse the creativity of those who listen and watch, and prompt them to imagine even those things which no-one says or sings’. It is his most subtle theatrical tribute yet to the labyrinth of images and associations into which Joyce hoped to lead his readers through the multi-layered puns of Finnegans Wake. In the theatre, embraced by music, Joyce’s manic textual compression can relax into a broadly paced kaleidoscope of images, encouraging the innocent spectator to venture into the maze that lies beyond the empathetic observation of an individual character’s fate.
That encouragement implies a precise, and long-meditated scrutiny of the social functions of opera in a democratic context. The ‘pre-texts’ characteristic of opera in previous centuries functioned as gate-keepers to the cultural elite: if you knew the stories (or empathized with their underlying concerns) you ‘belonged’. But in Outis the ‘pre-text’ is that which you are not obliged to know. It adopts Joyce’s strategy in Ulysses: the title tells you where to go should you wish to activate the echoing associations of a ‘mythe de référence’. But it is entirely possible to derive rich rewards from either work without doing so—the more so in Outis because no large-scale parallel of narrative structure between the work and its underlying myth. So here one does not have the problems of exclusivity created for readers of Joyce’s novel by knowing scholarly allusions to ‘the Sirens chapter’ or ‘the Laestrigonians’. There is nevertheless a substantial problem of presentation for Outis: not so much in terms of what to put on stage, but rather of what to put in the programme book. Turning to the multi-lingual textual montage as it is set out there, we find major sources acknowledged by an array of footnotes (though the many other more fleeting allusions are left to trigger response as and where they may). Are we therefore to conclude that our presence in the theatre is intended as a vivid, central link within a more extensive chain of study and reflection? That scholarly option—the lengthy cohabitation with a complex work that seems to be demanded by many of the major monuments of modernism, such as Joyce’s Ulysses—is of course open to us. But despite appearances, one would be foolish to imagine that it is central to the theatrical experience for which Berio strives—that we all ‘ought’, in other words, to recognize the allusions. On the contrary here, as in so many of Berio’s previous large-scale works from Passaggio on, we are brought together to confront the ineluctable idiosyncrasy of our responses, the contingency of our past cultural encounters, our solidarity in solitude.
When John Donne wrote that ‘no man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main’; he envisaged a social world locked together by common texts, and aspiring to a consensus about what it is to be human. By their insistent return to central themes of mutual responsibility, Berio’s major works look to the same ideal—yet acknowledge that it appears to be placed in increasing question by the maze of competing texts and images that invite us to build our identities through them. The kaleidoscopic flow of references with which he is content to work—musical in the third movement of Sinfonia, stylistic in the Sequenzas for violin and bassoon, literary in the libretti for Un re in ascolto and Outis—serve primarily to remind us how limiting a reaction the mere ‘recognition’ of sources is. The echoing power of chains of association in our mind is lessened by the naming of a dominant identity. It allows the mind to close upon a moment of scholastic self-satisfaction where it should remain open to the echoes. It was to prevent that closure that Joyce, in Finnegans Wake, created a torrent of superimposed allusions whose power is only unleashed when one closes the scholarly commentaries and, borne along by the vigorous rhythms of spoken Anglo-Irish, allows them to resonate, half-recognized. Only then does the genuinely Dionysiac potential of the work unfold itself. Mr Earwicker, as landlord of the pub in the Dublin suburb of Chapelizod, is a purveyor of inebriation, of ‘ek-stasis’—being beyond (one)self—by the most traditional of means; the ‘echoland’ into which Joyce projects him achieves that same inebriate non-self by resolutely refusing closure into novelistic, or operatic ‘character’, and linear narrative.
The vast, idiosyncratic network of puns that Joyce weaves demonstrates with gigantic cheerfulness that every man, culturally, is an island: but that precisely this gives us cause for endless curiosity about each other. That lesson has not been lost on Berio. The wanderings of his Outis are no longer geographical, but through the unknown seas of other people’s minds. Lest that voyage should seem daunting, music is there to move us onward through it—just as the Joycean ‘voice’ is there to encourage us through the jungle of puns in Finnegans Wake. And like Joyce, Berio has here chosen to step beyond a ‘characterful’ recreation of the resourceful Homeric survivor such as was given contemporary voice in Ulysses. Instead, his Outis seems to offer an unnervingly sober reincarnation—his talent for laughter in the dark temporarily suppressed—of Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker/Haveth Childers Everywhere/Here Comes Everybody.
Review of Outis
By Bernard Holland
“A Hero Who Defies Mortality And Logic”
New York Times, 10 October 1996
Outis, Luciano Berio’s extravagant new stage piece, is heavy thinking for the ear and the eye. Is there a real me underneath my clothes, it seems to ask, or am I redefined daily by the color of my shirt or my choice of shoes? Is my life a story—with a beginning, an end and consequences in between—or does it dangle in space and time, a collision of events?
Outis, which had its second performance at La Scala on Monday night, is the philosophy of Descartes as Fellini might have filmed it, an illustrated edition of Kant with pictures by Dali or Chagall.
Outis means nobody. It is Odysseus’s answer to the Cyclops Polyphemus, who has asked, “What is your name?” Outis is also the hero of Mr. Berio’s opera, although his slippery identity attaches itself to just about every time period, venue and culture imaginable. Mr. Berio expresses a taste for the poet Paul Celan, and Celan has written: ‘‘A nothing/we were, are, shall/remain, flowering/the nothing-, the/no one’s rose.’’ Just as Homer’s hero avoids being eaten by a hungry adversary, a modern protagonist evades the murderous grasp of logic.
Outis makes hamburger of the sequential event. Our hero is killed at the beginning of each of five scenes, but whether strangled, stomped, shot or stabbed, he gets up and goes about his business. The fatal blows, it would seem, are aimed as much at our watches as anything else. The composer’s explanatory essays, a version of the operatic overture, identify the elements of danger, conflict, journey and return—all of which pretty much sum up “The Odyssey.” They are reordered in every scene, put in different places and given new clothes to wear.
Hectic carnival alternates with colorless simplicity, in particular a rotating monolithic wall against which characters lean as they sing. Elsewhere, an auctioneer inflates himself into a giant balloon. Dangling television screens report from the stock market or leer at us with one blinking, shifting eye. We visit a supermarket checkout counter. A dubious surgeon, saw in hand, removes a leg. A cruise ship, all in white, rocks in a storm; its passengers engage in fistfights.
The brothel scene steams with bare skin, gyrating pudenda and simulated (I think) copulation. Respectable-looking Milanese took it all pretty well, although a lot of the fashionable boxes were prominently empty after intermission. Mr. Berio went to school in this tough, elegant, fast-moving city, and Outis is the centerpiece of a three-week Berio festival. A brief strike at La Scala threatened all these performances, but in the main, Milan seemed happy to honor a distinguished alumnus.
Mr. Berio dislikes the term opera for this piece, but its music is, if anything, operatic, with layers of colorful, sometimes amplified sheets of sound that pick up the human voice and carry it along on a broad, sweeping legato. The texts, by Dario Del Corno, go from Italian to German to English, and they are confidently sung by principals like Alan Opie (Outis), Tatiana Poluektova (Emily), Luca Canonici (Steve) and Luisa Castellani (Ada).
The instrumental music, despite a few wavering trumpet parts, was splendidly played by Centro Tempo Reale, conducted by David Robertson. Graham Vick and Timothy O’Brien have created the stage pictures and movement, and in the process let their imaginations run attractively wild.
Outis on the other hand, leaves us with a puzzle or two. First of all, the stage events are not freestanding. An onlooker plucked unsuspecting off the streets would be dazzled by the parade of sights and sounds, but I doubt that even the most intelligent could intuit an iota of Mr. Berio’s ontological sermon. His music has a way of talking to listeners, making its explanations as indispensable as meter or orchestration.
Second, Mr. Berio’s celebration of randomness is subverted by the fact that it is randomness of his own making. Thus, the seeming chaos of Outis turns out to be as carefully organized and as subject to laws of time and space (new laws passed by Mr. Berio himself) as those governing any ordinary, identifiable man engaged in the story of his life. The creation of this opera, in other words, contradicts its premises. Outis makes sense of nonsense, and that won’t do at all.
Texts
There are three specifics sections of Outis where the libretto quotes directly from James Joyce’s Ulysses. The first two involve Rudy, and occur in the first cycle:
OUTIS: PRIMO CICLO
Appare Emily che avanza verso il proscenio tenendo per mano Rudy, un bambino sugli undici anni. Ada, sempre seguendo le indicazioni di Guglielmo, gli mette scarpine di cristallo e un piccolo casco di bronzo. Nella mano sinistra Rudy tiene una bacchetta d’avorio con un nastro violetto. Nella mano destra regge un libro che legge mutamente, baciandone le pagine. Un agnellino bianco gli fa capolino da una tasca.
Translation: Emily appears walking downstage holding Rudy, a boy of about eleven, by the hand. Ada, still following Guglielmo’s instructions, puts him in crystal shoes and a small bronze helmet. In his left hand, Rudy holds an ivory rod with a violet ribbon. In his right hand, he holds a book which he reads silently, kissing the pages. A little white lamb peeks out of his pocket.
This is drawn from the final lines of the “Circe” episode:
RUDY
(Gazes, unseeing, into Bloom’s eyes and goes on reading, kissing, smiling. He has a delicate mauve face. On his suit he has diamond and ruby buttons. In his free left hand he holds a slim ivory cane with a violet bowknot. A white lambkin peeps out of his waistcoat pocket.)
Later in the first cycle:
GUGLIELMO
Rudy
Faccia di nano,
violetto, grinzosa,
nella casetta bianca. Piccolo.
Povero.
Bambino.
Non significava più nulla.
Translation:
Rudy
dwarf face,
purple, wrinkled,
in the white box. Small.
Beggar.
Baby.
It no longer meant anything.
This is drawn from the “Hades” episode of Ulysses, when a child’s coffin prompts Bloom to remember Rudy:
White horses with white frontlet plumes came round the Rotunda corner, galloping. A tiny coffin flashed by. In a hurry to bury. A mourning coach. Unmarried. Black for the married. Piebald for bachelors. Dun for a nun.
—Sad, Martin Cunningham said. A child.
A dwarf’s face, mauve and wrinkled like little Rudy’s was. Dwarf’s body, weak as putty, in a whitelined deal box. Burial friendly society pays. Penny a week for a sod of turf. Our. Little. Beggar. Baby. Meant nothing. Mistake of nature. If it’s healthy it’s from the mother. If not from the man. Better luck next time.
The third Ulysses quotation closes the second cycle. Near the end, Emily sings a rearranged fragment of Auden, translated into Italian:
OUTIS: SECONDO CICLO
EMILY
Assieme spontanee senza suono subito come al sorriso dell’alba si schiudono dall’assenza le porte ospitali del corpo come la terra senza storia senza nome.
Translation: Spontaneous together without sound immediately like the smile of dawn the hospitable doors of the body open from absence like the earth without history without name
The lines are adapted from “Horae Canonicae: Prime” by W.H. Auden:
Simultaneously, as soundlessly,
Spontaneously, suddenly
As, at the vaunt of the dawn, the kind
Gates of the body fly open
To its world beyond, the gates of the mind,
The horn gate and the ivory gate
Swing to, swing shut, instantaneously
Quell the nocturnal rummage
Of its rebellious fronde, ill-favored,
Ill-natured and second-rate,
Disenfranchised, widowed and orphaned
By an historical mistake:
Recalled from the shades to be a seeing being,
From absence to be on display,
Without a name or history I wake
Between my body and the day.
To this, her husband responds with a paraphrase of Molly Bloom’s famous words:
OUTIS
Yes –
oh yes.
You will Yes.
Recordings
There are no commercial recordings of Outis, a situation Osmond-Smith succinctly called “disgraceful.” Fortunately, RAI recorded the Milanese première for Italian television, and this version may be obtained online.
Video
Outis
Conductor: David Robertson
Musicians: Orchestra del Teatro alla Scala
The full recording of Outis is available to view at OperaOnVideo.com. A small donation permits you to download the MP4 file itself.
Audio
Outis Part 1 & Part 2
Conductor: David Robertson
Musicians: Orchestra del Teatro alla Scala
The audio-only portion of the broadcast has been uploaded to YouTube. The sound quality is not ideal, but significantly better than nothing at all!
Additional Information
Outis Libretto
A PDF of the opera’s libretto is available from Di cosi un po’.
Création Française d’Outis de Luciano Berio au Théâtre du Châtelet
In 1999, Outis was performed in Paris at the Théâtre du Châtelet. The production was designed by Yannis Kokkos and conducted by David Robertson. This is a 3-minute feature on Outis for French television, and contains some rare footage of the production. [French]
“Live Electronics in Berio’s Music”
By Francesco Giomi, Damiano Meacci and Kilian Schwoon; from MIT’s Computer Music Journal, vol. 27, No. 2 (Summer, 2003), pp. 30-46. This paper features a small section on Outis. It’s also available on JSTOR.
Tempo Reale Outis Page
This page at Centro Tempo Reale details the electronic realizations in Outis. The text is largely adapted from an Italian translation of the CMJ paper linked above. [Italian]
The Show That Didn’t Go On
Heather Cairncross, one of the Swingle Singers, explains how the troubled La Scala première of Outis was nearly canceled. Her charming story offers a humorous peek behind the scenes of a modern opera production—“Right from the outset, things seemed very Italian.”
Luciano Berio: Other Joyce-Related Works
Luciano Berio Main Page
Return to the Brazen Head’s Luciano Berio profile.
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.
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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