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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 January 2025
Luciano Berio's name appears once in the 1,134-page Oxford Handbook of Western Music and Philosophy (2021), yet his poetics sits among the most profound and expansive of the twentieth century. By the mid-1960s Berio was writing lucidly about tensions between synchronic and diachronic meaning. Such works as Sinfonia, the Sequenze and the electroacoustic output are radical applications of these ideas, yet they have been claimed by the proponents of the very structures they challenge and their meanings effectively reduced, notwithstanding Berio's insistence and clarity across his substantial writings. This article characterises Berio's work according to his poetics, demonstrating the ways in which Sinfonia actively stages the mechanisms of musical meaning, before situating Berio's writing in a context of contemporary theories of meaning. Particular comparison is made to the work of Harold Bloom, whose words transformed poetic discourse in the 1970s.
1 Originally published as Beckett, Samuel, L'innommable (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1953)Google Scholar; later translated by Beckett and published as The Unnamable (New York: Grove Press, 1958).
2 Such futility is also pertinent to the principal musical influence of the movement: Mahler's Scherzo is indirectly related to a tale in which Anthony of Padua preaches to a crowd of fish, only for them to return to their habits unchanged. Mahler set this tale to music in the song ‘Des Antonius von Padua Fischpredigt’, taking his text from Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano's collection of folk poems and songs, Des Knaben Wunderhorn: Alte deutsche Lieder (Heidelberg: 1805–1808). The song is a simpler version of the Scherzo, both of them completed in the summer of 1893. David Osmond-Smith goes into more detail in Playing on Words: A Guide to Luciano Berio's Sinfonia (London: Royal Musical Association, 1985), pp. 40–43; a broader context to Mahler's work with the tale is provided in Mitchell, Donald, The Wunderhorn Years (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1975)Google Scholar.
3 Berio had considered as an alternative Beethoven's op. 131, the C♯ minor quartet. In Luciano Berio, Rossana Dalmonte and Bálint András Varga, Luciano Berio: Two Interviews, tr. David Osmond-Smith (ed.) (New York and London: Marion Boyars Publishers, 1985), pp. 107–108, he described ‘“harmonically exploding” the last three movements of Beethoven's Quartet in C# minor, Op.131 – though without quotations, and with “little flags” composed by me instead. The vocal parts would have had a more instrumental character and the text would naturally have been quite different… Translating Beethoven's Op.131 into orchestral terms would have been a very risky operation and, in view of the task in hand, not an entirely justified one.’
4 Berio describes ‘a river flowing through a constantly changing landscape, sometimes going underground and emerging in another altogether different place’. Luciano Berio, ‘Sinfonia: author's note’, Centro Studi: Luciano Berio, www.lucianoberio.org/sinfonia-authors-note?1683069894=1 (accessed 15 September 2022).
5 On various occasions Berio even orientates Beckett's text so that it appears to refer to the structure of the Scherzo: ‘Yes, I feel the moment has come for us to look back, if we can, and take our bearings, if we are to go on’ sounds over the start of Trio I (E11 in the score).
6 Osmond-Smith, ‘An Inventory of Interrelations’, Playing on Words, pp. 57–71.
7 Berio, Dalmonte and Varga, Interviews, p. 106.
8 Ibid., p. 107.
9 There is a parallel here to Berio's incorporation of Claude Lévi-Strauss, Le Cru et le Cuit (Paris: Plon, 1964) into the first movement of Sinfonia (Osmond-Smith, Playing on Words, pp. 8–15). Of course, in the third movement, Berio employs such transformational relations within a wider philosophy of history.
10 Luciano Berio, Remembering the Future (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), p. 11. This is essentially Berio's poetics, the publication of the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures and his most important writing.
11 Berio, ‘Sinfonia: author's note’.
12 Berio, Dalmonte and Varga, Interviews, p. 167.
13 Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, 2nd edn (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. xi; first published Oxford University Press, 1973.
14 Luciano Berio, ‘Du geste et de Piazza Carità’, La Musique et ses problèmes contemporains (Paris: Cahiers Renaud-Barrault, 1963), pp. 157–62. The article is also available in Italian in Sequenze per Luciano Berio, ed. Enzo Restagno (Milan: Ricordi, 2000), pp. 275–77, and in Luciano Berio, Scritti sulla musica, ed. Angela Ida De Benedictis (Turin: Giulio Einaudi, 2013), pp. 30–36, which includes an edited version from 2000, pp. 472–74. The latter is the best collection of Berio's writings.
15 Berio, Remembering, pp. 3–4. Berio's reference is to Bloom's Kabbalah and Criticism (New York: The Seabury Press, 1975), p. 96.
16 Harold Bloom, A Map of Misreading, 2nd edn (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 32; first published Oxford University Press, 1975. A Map of Misreading was intended as an antithetical completion of The Anxiety of Influence (p. xiii).
17 Bloom, Anxiety, p. 120.
18 Berio, Remembering, p. 31. ‘In reality this need is so pervasive and permanent that we are tempted to say that the history of music is a history of translations.’ This second chapter/lecture is entitled ‘Translating Music’.
19 Susanna Pasticci touches on Berio's approach to translation in ‘“In the Meantime, We’ll Keep Translating”: The Strength of the Ethical Dimension in the Creative Thought of Luciano Berio’, in Nuove Prospettive, ed. Angela Ida De Benedictis (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 2012), pp. 459–75. Nuove Prospettive is recommended reading, a collection of papers presented at a conference on Berio in Siena, 2008.
20 Bloom, Misreading, p. 85.
21 Berio, Remembering, p. 78. The third chapter is titled ‘Forgetting Music’.
22 Bloom, Misreading, p. 32.
23 Bloom, Anxiety, p. 120.
24 Berio, Dalmonte and Varga, Interviews, p. 53.
25 Berio, ‘Du geste et de Piazza Carità’, translation my own, p. 41.
26 ‘Pour être créateur, le geste doit pouvoir détruire quelque chose.’ Berio, ‘Du geste et de Piazza Carità’, p. 162.
27 Bloom, Kabbalah, p. 122.
28 Ibid., p. 88.
29 Berio, Remembering, p. 50.
30 Ibid., p. 46.
31 David Osmond-Smith, Berio (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 64.
32 Berio, Remembering, p. 70.
33 Berio describes in detail how Sequenza III functions in Remembering, pp. 68–71. Osmond-Smith describes Berio's use of text in detail in Berio, pp. 64–66.
34 Berio, Remembering, p. 70.
35 As Berio writes in ‘Sequenza III: author's note’, Centro Studi: Luciano Berio, www.lucianoberio.org/sequenza-iii-authors-note?1487325698=1 (accessed 15 September 2022), ‘Sequenza III can also be considered as a dramatic essay whose story, so to speak, is the relationship between the soloist and her own voice’.
36 In this context, it would be remiss not to mention Gesti (gestures), written the year after Sequenza III, for the recorder player Frans Brüggen. It is appropriate that at this stage of experimentation with gesture, the next step would be recorder, the instrument closest to the voice. Brüggen thought of it as a small Sequenza. Frans Brüggen, ‘Berio's “Gesti”’, Recorder and Music Magazine, November (1966).
37 Luciano Berio, ‘Sequenza VIII: author's note’, Centro Studi: Luciano Berio, www.lucianoberio.org/sequenza-viii-authors-note?177677955=1 (accessed 15 September 2022).
38 Luciano Berio, ‘Sequenza II: author’s note’, Centro Studi: Luciano Berio, www.lucianoberio.org/sequenza-ii-authors-note?131775360=1 (accessed 15 September 2022).
39 Berio, Dalmonte and Varga, Interviews, pp. 37–38.
40 Luciano Berio, ‘Duetti per due violini: author's note’, Centro Studi: Luciano Berio, www.lucianoberio.org/duetti-per-due-violini-authors-note?237685848=1 (accessed 15 September 2022).
41 Berio, Dalmonte and Varga, Interviews, p. 90.
42 Luciano Berio, ‘Chemins IIb: author's note’, Centro Studi: Luciano Berio, www.lucianoberio.org/chemins-iib-authors-note (accessed 15 September 2022).
43 Berio, Remembering, p. 45.
44 Richard Causton, ‘Berio's Visage and the Theatre of Electroacoustic Music’, Tempo, no. 194 (October 1995), p. 20.
45 Berio, Interviews, p. 148: ‘it is not my intention to preserve the authenticity of a folk song. My transcriptions are analyses.’
46 Berio, Remembering, p. 12.
47 The most comprehensive summary of Berio's works is Osmond-Smith, Berio.
48 Berio summarises a number of works in Interviews; for instance, ‘Différences was the first attempt to develop a relationship in depth between an instrumental group and the possibilities of electro-acoustics; with Chemins V, on the other hand, I want to make the performance of a clarinet solo interact with the programmed functions of a digital filter’, p. 126.
49 Luciano Berio, ‘Remarks to the Kind Lady of Baltimore’, Electronic Music Review, 1, no. 1 (1967), p. 58.
50 Edoardo Sanguineti, ‘Poesia informale?’, I Novisimmi: Poesie per gli anni ’60, ed. Alfredo Giuliani (Milan: Rusconi and Paolazzi, 1961), pp. 171–72; first published in Il Verri (1961): ‘gettare se stessi, subito, e a testa prima, nel labirinto del formalismo e dell’irrazionalismo, nella Palus Putredinis, precisamente, dell’anarchismo e dell’alienazione, con la speranza, che mi ostino a non ritenere illusoria di uscirne poi veramente, attraversato il tutto, con le mani sporche, ma con il fango, anche, lasciato davvero alle spalle’. See also Osmond-Smith, Berio, pp. 70–73, and David Osmond-Smith, ‘Voicing the Labyrinth: The Collaborations of Edoardo Sanguineti and Luciano Berio’, Twentieth-Century Music, 9, nos 1–2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, March 2012), pp. 63–78.
51 See, for example, Berio, Interviews, p. 66, or Berio, ‘Du geste et de Piazza Carità’, p. 162, where it is described as a necessary condition of gesture's creativity. Sanguineti's ‘lasciato davvero alle spalle’ is a play on ‘lasciato alle spalle il passato’, which more colloquially means ‘leave the past behind’.
52 Luciano Berio, ‘The Composer on His Work: Meditation on a Twelve-Tone Horse’, Christian Science Monitor, 15 July (1968).
53 Berio, Dalmonte and Varga, Interviews, pp. 17–18.
54 Ibid., p. 23.
55 Ibid., p. 31.
56 Bloom, Kabbalah, p. 103.
57 Berio, Remembering, p. 11.
58 Cook, Nicholas, ‘Theorizing Musical Meaning’, Music Theory Spectrum, 2, no. 2 (2001), p. 192Google Scholar.
59 Berio, ‘Remarks to the Kind Lady of Baltimore’, p. 59.
60 Norris, Christopher, ‘Continental Philosophy of Music’, The Oxford Handbook of Western Music and Philosophy eds. Tomás McAuley, Nanette Nielsen, Jerrold Levinson and Ariana Phillips-Hutton (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021), pp. 108–109Google Scholar.
61 Berio, Remembering, p. 125.
62 Bloom, Kabbalah, p. 109.