Two Fragments of 'The Music of

twentieth-century music 9/1–2, 39–62 8 Cambridge University Press, 2013
doi:10.1017/S1478572212000199
Two Fragments of ‘The Music of Luciano Berio’
DAVID OSMOND-SMITH
WITH AN INTRODUCTORY NOTE BY TALIA PECKER BERIO
Abstract
At the time of his death in 2007 David Osmond-Smith had begun work on his second book on Luciano Berio.
Planned as a more substantial volume than the earlier one (Oxford University Press, 1991), it aimed to combine
what he termed ‘creative biography’ with a multidimensional view of the composer’s output, seen through the
lens of such categories as text and commentary, density and harmony, voice, and theatre. Published here is
the only written-up chapter, covering the early part of the composer’s life (1925–53), followed by the outline of
the projected book. Preceding these fragments is an introductory note by Talia Pecker Berio. (CW)
Introductory note
What follows is an introduction to the only two segments that have come down to us of
David Osmond-Smith’s major book on Luciano Berio, a project truncated by the sudden
and premature death of the author in 2007.1 They consist of a detailed outline proposal
and a through-written draft of a first chapter, covering the period from the composer’s
birth in 1925 to 1953.
The biography of an artist is an audacious enterprise, doubly so if its subject is alive
(or, as in this case, had passed away only recently at the time of the biography’s drafting).
Osmond-Smith’s first, eponymous book on Berio, issued by Oxford University Press in
1991, was the second attempt at a comprehensive study of the composer’s output to that
date,2 and the first to follow a loosely yet essentially chronological timeline, with concise
information on the most relevant biographical elements and events in Berio’s life.3 No other
scholar could have obtained a more balanced result then, or equalled David’s all-embracing
and insightful knowledge of Berio’s music when he set out to outline what he called ‘the big
book’:4 ‘an extended study of Luciano Berio’s compositions’ within a frame that would ‘seek
to place Berio’s musical development in a substantially richer social and cultural context
than was possible in my short OUP book of a decade ago’ (see below, 55).
1 I wish to thank Björn Heile, David Osmond-Smith literary executor, for letting me have a copy of the material relating
to Luciano Berio that was found in David’s archives.
2 The previous study was Ivanka Stoianova’s 1985 study Luciano Berio: chemins en musique.
3 See also Osmond-Smith, ‘Berio’, New Grove.
4 Email to Talia Pecker Berio, 8 September 2005.
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40 Osmond-Smith Two Fragments of ‘The Music of Luciano Berio’
The outline contains a solid and articulate plan for an interpretative study, which, had it
materialized, would have been an important contribution to Berio scholarship. The rather
complex architecture and content-projection of the outline reflect the originality of David’s
intellectual and analytical approach. His mastery of the composer’s output enabled him to
convey the essence of his ideas in the concise thematic paragraphs that comprise the second
part of the outline, offering a large yet specific set of features for an outstanding musical
portrait. But Osmond-Smith was aiming for something broader than just an essay in analysis
and interpretation. He conceived the book as a ‘creative biography’:5 ‘an account of bio-
graphical elements impinging upon Berio’s creative development, rather than a full, personal
biography’ (see below, 46).
The introductory part of the outline testifies to David’s awareness of the complexity of his
task. His decision to distinguish between the biographical section of the book (chapters 1–4)
and the survey of the music’s evolution according to a number of ‘major creative obsessions’
(chapters 5–11 – see below, 56) is motivated by his conviction that ‘Berio evolved at an
early point [. . .] a range of compositional techniques that [. . .] were then used time and
again’, so that ‘a chronologically-ordered work-by-work survey’ would not have made
much sense (see below, 55). The paragraphs outlining the four biographical chapters reveal
David’s dilemma. Their layout does not correspond to the one proposed at the beginning
of the outline (see below, 55, n. 2): they are shorter and sketchier than the thematic para-
graphs, and, with the exception of the one related to the first chapter, they do not contain
any biographical data that was not known from previous surveys of Berio’s life and career.
The planning and realization of this part of the book would no doubt have undergone
substantial modifications in order to have it stand up to the author’s ambition to achieve a
balanced and musically significant biographical account.
The rest of this note will concern the first and only written-up chapter.6 Its scope and
undeniable interest for those wishing to enhance their knowledge of the early years of
Berio’s life and career should be recognized: but so too should its limitations in the form
in which it survives. Firstly, the text comes down to us as a draft that the author himself
evidently considered to be incomplete and in need of further research and editing.7 Secondly,
beyond that, a lot more would need to be said in order to achieve a balanced and authoritative
account of the first crucial stage of the composer’s personal and creative evolution.
5 See below, 55. This intriguing term could be read as a typical Osmond-Smith play on words: it invites us to
approach this part of the book as a biography of Berio’s creative development, but at the same time it could be taken
to represent the author’s claim for his own interpretative freedom.
6 A folder named ‘Ch 2’ in David’s archives contains two one-page files: an annotated timeline for the years 1953–61
and a list of selected Strehler productions at the Piccolo Teatro and La Scala, with the heading ‘Milanese awareness
of juxtaposed riches and poverty’ at the top of the page.
7 Oral communication to Talia Pecker Berio. The occasional occurrence in square brackets of the word ‘check’, as well
as the frequently incomplete footnotes, with ‘cf.’ and ‘see’ followed by an ellipsis, are evident indicators of the pro-
visional state of the text.
Osmond-Smith Two Fragments of ‘The Music of Luciano Berio’ 41 |
The idea of a ‘creative biography’ implies a selection, and any such selection relies first
and foremost on the biographer’s sources. This is an aspect of the project on which we
lack sufficient information. No draft of a comprehensive bibliography for the projected
book has been found among David’s papers. A digital file named ‘search out’ lists anglo-
phone sources from which Osmond-Smith clearly sought to augment his references to the
history and politics of modern Italy.8 The footnotes to the draft of the chapter itself explicitly
acknowledge Nicholas Doumanis and Tracy H. Koon.9 A further file, named ‘Balilla e
Imperia’, contains a miscellany of texts on the fascist youth movement and Berio’s home
town of Imperia (Oneglia), some from internet sites whose validity is questionable. The
rest of the chapter is mostly oral history, much of which was transmitted to David by Berio
himself in countless conversations held over some thirty years of close friendship and
collaboration. It is quite likely that in a later stage of his work the author would have added
a general note, similar to the one he included in the Preface to his previous Berio book.10
Moreover, much information, both from the rich sources of oral history that were available
to Osmond-Smith and from extant documentation, is missing from the chapter. Osmond-
Smith’s research into and around Berio’s childhood and adolescence was evidently condi-
tioned by his desire to shed light on the ‘obscure’ side of that part of the composer’s life:
namely the fact that, as the son of a pro-fascist father, and in adherence with common prac-
tice under the compulsory law of the régime, he was enrolled in at least two stages of the
fascist youth movement (see below, 46, n. *; 48, n. †). As David had assumed, Berio did
not discuss this aspect of his youth with the members of his family who did not live with
him through that tumultuous period in Italy’s history. This did not prevent those family
members who have survived him from sensing his embarrassment; nonetheless the oppor-
tunity offered by this Journal to render public David’s contribution is to be welcomed, in
the hope that it will make possible its integration into future, more complete reconstruc-
tions of Berio’s early biography.11 The chapter’s incompleteness concerns more than just
its materially unfinished state: David’s interest in revealing heretofore unknown elements
of those years, and his search for sources that would support it, seem to have diverted his
attention from other aspects of Berio’s youth. The result is a biographical account that is
manifestly partial and lacking the balance one would expect to find in a chapter intended
to set the tone of a ‘creative biography’.
8 Berezin, Making the Fascist Self and ‘Political Belonging’; De Grazia, The Culture of Consent; Forgacs, Italian Culture
in the Industrial Era; and Ginsborg, A History of Contemporary Italy.
9 See Osmond-Smith’s notes 6, 7, 11, and 19 to Chapter 1.
10 See Osmond-Smith’s preface to his 1991 Berio book, where he accounts for Berio’s contribution ‘with time and
information’. No transcripts or recordings are cited or known to have survived. The primary published source for
Berio’s biographical recollections (Berio, Intervista sulla musica) is listed in the bibliography, though the interviewer’s
name (Rossana Dalmonte) is omitted (Osmond-Smith, Berio, 151).
11 The decision to consent to the publication of this material involved Berio’s five children – Cristina, Marina, Stefano,
Daniel, and Jonathan. I thank them for the conversations that have led to it.
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There is no need to ignore or diminish the effect of education, official culture, and political
propaganda on the creative development of a person who grew up in fascist Italy in order to
acknowledge the equal weight and relevance of other factors in his or her childhood and
youth. Beyond his reticence about his own contact with the fascist régime, Berio was any-
thing but ‘silent [. . .] about the experiences of his youth’ (see below, 46). He did share with
family and friends many reminiscences and lively anecdotes of his early life, the spirit of
which is recorded in diary pages, letters, drawings, and photographs. A glimpse at the
colourful and adventurous world of Berio’s youth is offered by the well-known ‘Grock con-
nection’ of Sequenza V – an evident case of creativity ‘impinged upon’ by an autobiographical
element.12 Luciano Berio’s mother, Ada Dal Fiume (1904–89), and his sister Miriana (1922–
2004) both recalled a highly imaginative, sometimes naughty boy, whose acceptance of rules
and discipline were combined with a natural inclination to disobedience and independence
of thought and conduct. Love of nature, company, outdoor explorations, and practical jokes
coincided in the young Berio with a strong desire for withdrawal, lonesome fantasy and
silence – and, above all, music. These and other dualities of his character had a deep and
tangible bearing on his future poetics and work. The ways in which such undercurrents
took shape suggest something far more complex than the straightforward cause-and-effect
relationship suggested by Osmond-Smith between Berio’s lifetime attraction to folksong
and the fascist régime’s cult of popular culture (see below, 51 and 61), or between the com-
poser’s feeling at home at the Milan RAI and his earlier exposure to the radio programmes
of the fascist EIAR (see below, 54). These experiences in and of themselves form an integral
part of the composer’s early biography, and still await a thorough exploration.
Osmond-Smith’s account of the cultural context of postwar Milan in the second part of
the chapter, dedicated to Berio’s years in the conservatory (1945–51) and to his first con-
tacts with the RAI (1953), is, as it stands in this draft, concise and efficient, though some-
what out of balance in comparison with the amount of historical-political argumentation
that animate the first part of the chapter. This account of Berio’s higher musical training,
while it has hardly any new objective data (and contains a number of inaccuracies concern-
ing the composer’s earliest unpublished works13), makes insightful observations on the
importance of the practice of rigorous counterpoint for the composer’s future capacity of
‘englobing concurrent musical processes, and organizing their simultaneous development’
(see below, 51) and on the lasting benefit of Ghedini’s teaching for his conception of instru-
mental colour and orchestration (52).
12 See below, 46: ‘A book such as this offers only an account of biographical elements impinging upon Berio’s
creative development [. . .]’. For the composer’s note on the trombone Sequenza, see Luciano Berio’s official website
<http://www.lucianoberio.org/node/1466?771092909=1>.
13 See below, 50, nn. ‡ and §, and 52, n. ¶. Certain errors of dates and titles are carried over from the work lists in
Osmond-Smith, Berio (123–4) and his entry on the composer in the New Grove (see note 3 above). For a complete
survey of Berio’s early unpublished output, see Mosch (ed.), Sammlung Luciano Berio: Musikmanuskripte, 48–58.
Berio scholarship, of which David Osmond-Smith was an influential voice, has progressed
considerably in the years following the composer’s death in spring 2003. Late works such as
the Sonata for piano (2001), the cello Sequenza XIV (2002), and Stanze (2003) became
known to the musical world, providing new perspectives on older works of the same genre;
compositions with live electronics, such as Ofanı̀m (last version, 1997), Cronaca del Luogo
(1998–9), and Altra voce (1999), have shed new light on Berio’s lifetime engagement with
the electronic studio and with the dramaturgy of sound. Berio’s six Norton Lectures
(1993–4) were published in 2006,14 and a complete edition of his writings is forthcoming
in 2013.15 The years 2008 and 2010 saw a substantial increase in the manuscript collection
held at the Paul Sacher Stiftung, Basel: this, together with the gradual reorganization of the
unpublished notes and texts in this collection, has furthered research work in the period
following David’s passing. He himself was due to join the board of the then nascent Centro
Studi Luciano Berio,16 as well as the Scientific Committee of the first major symposium ever
devoted to the composer, which was held in Siena on 28–31 October 2008. The sympo-
sium’s proceedings, recently published in Italy,17 bear witness to David’s fundamental con-
tribution to research on Berio’s music in their frequent references to the scholar’s writings.
At the same time this collection of essays marks a turning point in the study of the com-
poser’s poetics and compositional techniques, as it covers a wide spectrum of his output
and a considerable number of its specific aspects, including particular works hitherto un-
explored. There is no doubt that David would have participated actively in the lively debate
generated by the symposium and its proceedings, and that he would have integrated the
findings of the new scholarship into his projected book. With all their merits and flaws,
the two surviving segments of the book thus stand out as a token of their author’s ongoing
devotion to Berio’s music, and of his unfulfilled intention to encompass and investigate its
many facets within an unconventional biographical framework.
14 Luciano Berio, Remembering the Future (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2006).
15 The book, edited by Angela Ida De Benedictis, will be published in 2013 by Einaudi as the second of a three-volume
series of Berio’s writings and interviews under the direction of Talia Pecker Berio. The first volume, Un ricordo al
futuro: lezioni americane, is the Italian version of the Norton Lectures Remembering the Future.
16 The Center was officially founded on 24 October 2009 <www.lucianoberio.org>.
17 De Benedictis (ed.), Luciano Berio: nuove prospettive / New Perspectives.
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The following texts have been left essentially intact, apart from corrections of typographical or
spelling errors, punctuation, number and date forms, and orthography. Amplifications of source
citations, supplementary bibliographical references, and changes to the original phraseology in
the interests of clarity have been made by Charles Wilson (CW), with the assistance of Ben Earle
(BE). All these are indicated using square brackets. The original footnote numbers have been
kept; additional footnotes are marked by symbols. Talia Pecker Berio (TPB) has kindly provided
some factual corrections.
Chapter 1
Luciano Berio was born on 24 October 1925 in Oneglia, a small, hard-working commercial
port on the Ligurian coast. Situated on the western cusp of the Gulf of Genoa halfway between
Genoa and the French border,1 the town’s modest prosperity depended upon trade in the
olive oil of the region, and upon the thriving local pasta manufacturers, Pasta Agnesi. The
town council (among whose members had been several [representatives] of the Berio clan)
had long dreamt of augmenting the port’s economic potential by encouraging construction
of a railway line north through the mountains into Piedmont.2 But such entrepreneurial
ambitions were repeatedly frustrated, and Oneglia retained its modest size. Other attempts
at expansion were more successful. A little further westward round the bay, but too close for
commercial comfort, lay Porto Maurizio. In 1919 this relatively elegant resort town acceded
somewhat warily to economic logic, and entered negotiations to form a single port authority
alongside its more hard-nosed neighbour. Mussolini, who knew the area and its aspirations
well, since he had worked in Oneglia as a primary school teacher in 1908 and had edited the
local socialist newspaper, La Lima, gave his blessing to the union in 1923, a year after he had
assumed governmental power. The combined towns were renamed Imperia (after the river
Impero that flows into the sea between the two towns). Nevertheless, Berio always referred
to his native town as Oneglia.
The Berio clan had made its presence felt in and around Oneglia for many generations.3
1 Such border territory had a predictably chequered history of political allegiance. Originally a fiedom of the Doria
family, Oneglia lay for many years within the sphere of influence of the intensely mercantile, seafaring Republic
of Genoa. It was absorbed into the French Empire under Napoleon, and was until 1860 part of the Kingdom of
Sardinia, subject to the French-speaking House of Savoy, the diffident magnet around which a united Italy then
coalesced. No Ligurian with a sense of history would treat national identity as a straightforward matter, not even
[such] champions of Italian unification as the Genoese Mazzini, or Garibaldi from (then Ligurian) Nice.
2 [This] aspiration [was] prompted by Cavour’s determined investment during the 1850s, as prime minister of the
post-Napoleonic Kingdom of Sardinia (Piedmont, Liguria, and Sardinia), in shipping and railways as mainsprings
for the economic modernization of the Savoyard territories.
3 Berio is not a common Italian family name. A local historian, [G]. M. Pira, recorded [in] the [first half of the] nine-
teenth century a story of the family’s origins, [which was] treated by Luciano Berio with sceptical amusement. It
would seem that a Turkish bey (from whence the name ‘Berio’) had aroused the jealousy of the Sultan through his
military prowess and amassed riches. (Pira surmises that the Sultan in question is Bajazet I, and that therefore this
episode took place in the mid-fifteenth century.) Invited to commit suicide by self-strangulation, he instead flouted
court convention and fled – first to England, then to France, and finally across the border into Liguria. [Th]ere, near
Although men of business and the law primarily,4 they had shown a propensity for music
over a number of generations. The first of whom direct evidence is preserved was the
‘dilettante’ Angelo Filippo Berio, two of whose compositions (a Tantum Ergo for solo bass
and instruments of 1827, and a Benedictus Dominus of 1831) are still preserved by the
family. However, the adoption of music as a profession, rather than as a cultivated pastime,
fell to Luciano Berio’s formidable grandfather, the organist and composer Adolfo Berio
(1847–1941). The victor of many Ligurian improvisation competitions, he began to publish
during the 1870s not only organ music but also well-turned recreational music: parlour
songs, waltzes, marches, not to speak of polkas and mazurkas. His grandson took pride in
Adolfo’s capacity to write a good tune, and sought to emulate him when the need arose.
Adolfo Berio had his son Ernesto (1883–1966) playing in light orchestras from an early age,
and sent him [first] to the Milan Conservatory and then to Parma to study with Pizzetti.
As befitted the beneficiary of such schooling, Ernesto Berio preferred to turn his hand to
more sophisticated projects. He produced settings of Carducci and Heine, as well as a good
deal of church music. But swayed like many of his generation by the fascist régime’s aspira-
tions to national regeneration, he reacted eagerly to its encouragement of living Italian
composers. Responding to a competition set up by MinCulPop5 as part of the régime’s
celebrations, in 1937–8, of the bimillenario augusteo (the two thousandth anniversary of
the birth of Augustus),6 Ernesto Berio wrote a tripartite symphonic poem whose pro-
gramme chronicled: first the glory of the Roman empire under Augustus; secondly the
dark ages when the Roman eagles flew away to take refuge in the Alps (even if the latter-
day exploits of that headstrong embodiment of Ligurian boldness, Garibaldi, intimated
that the spirit of Augustus was not entirely eclipsed); and finally the glorious present when
the Imperial eagles returned to Rome under the aegis of the ‘stirpe d’Augusto’ (descendant
of Augustus) Mussolini, to whom the work was dedicated. Sadly, this combination of ingen-
uous flattery and solid musical workmanship, typical of many such produced in the thirties,
did not win the prize.
Although Ernesto Berio saw to it that his son received a thorough grounding in music,
his enthusiasm for the fascist national regenerative project naturally induced him to enrol
Luciano Berio in the various stages of the fascist youth movement, the Opera Nazionale
Balilla [(ONB)]. In this, Luciano Berio was no different from approximately three quarters
Oneglia, he was sheltered by a peasant, whose attractive daughter he subsequently married, having first embraced
Christianity. Pira concludes that ‘this unhappy man died when he was 92 years old, leaving nine male children.
One may properly call him unhappy because in the final days of his life he returned to the Muslim faith.’ [Pira,
Storia della città e principato di Oneglia, vol. 1, pp. 239–41 (240). (CW)]
4 [T]he more ambitious [of these family members] had moved to Rome. It is this branch of the Berio clan that
furnished Mussolini with his senator, Adolfo Berio – not to be confused with Luciano Berio’s organist grandfather
of the same name.
5 The fascist ministry of popular culture [Ministero della Cultura Popolare].
6 [The] principal manifestation [of these bimillennial celebrations] was an inspirational ‘Mostra augusteo della
romanità’ (Augustean exhibition of the Roman character), which sought to underline putative parallels between
the glories of the Roman empire, and the achievements of the fascist revolution. See Doumanis, Inventing the Nation:
Italy, 151.
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of his Ligurian peers.7 Granted the ever more stringently ideological turn of Italian school-
ing during the 1930s, boosted by the output of Italian radio, Berio thus found himself one
of a generation whose world-view was torn asunder by the experience of civil war in their
late teens, and who thus had to build themselves ex novo from 1945 on. Berio never dis-
cussed this aspect of his childhood (not even with members of his family) but photographic
evidence in the possession of his daughter Cristina confirms his membership of the Balilla
by 1937 (he would have been entitled to membership since 1933) and, later, of the Giovani
Fascisti under the auspices of the Repubblica di Salò.8 Verbal evidence from his first wife,
Cathy Berberian, would suggest that he was enrolled in the youngest section, the Figli della
Lupa (4–8 years old); and (granted the Starace law of 1939 making membership of the
youth movement compulsory) it is highly probable that he was enrolled in the intermediate
bridge between the Balilla (8–14 years old) and the Giovani Fascisti (18 years old and
upwards), the Avanguardisti (14–18 years old), though no photographic evidence to con-
firm this has yet come to light.*
A book such as this offers only an account of biographical elements impinging upon Berio’s
creative development, rather than a full, personal biography. So it might seem appropriate
to emulate the composer himself, and dismiss as a tragicomic waste of time Berio’s youthful
exposure to fascist ideological preoccupations, both at school and through his activities in
the ONB. [As with] so many of his Italian contemporaries, the child was not father to the
man, and his developed creative personality was synthesized from the explosive inrush of
new experiences in the fifteen or so years following 1945. But it is [sic] worth noting, not
just as the negative backdrop to those seminal years, but because the fascist attempt to raise
up a generation of youths whose world-view was qualitatively different from previous
generations left certain traces (much transformed, because refracted through a liberal,
humanistic glass) in Berio’s later preoccupations. These will be noted as we come upon
them.
Silent as Berio may have remained about the experiences of his youth, it may be reasonably
assumed that Oneglia offered him little or nothing of the discrete ‘counter-culture’ that
older generations in major urban centres such as Turin or Milan kept up unopposed
throughout the fascist ventennio. That he was no mere sponge for fascist orthodoxy may
be inferred from some of his reading. Ibsen, whose plays were banned from the school
curriculum,9 he nonetheless read. Likewise Brecht, whose anti-bourgeois barbs might
7 Enrolment was voluntary until 1939, but in practice differed widely by region. The most widespread support was to
be found among middle class families in Piedmont, Lombardy, and Liguria. Cf. Koon[, Believe, Obey, Fight – see
especially Tables 6-10 and 6-11, pp. 180–83. (BE/CW)]
8 Membership of the different stages was determined strictly according to age. [See Koon, Believe, Obey, Fight, 94.
(BE/CW)]
* The only photographic evidence found in Osmond-Smith’s archives is a copy of the young Luciano’s membership
card of the Società Nazionale Dante Allighieri, dated 1937. This confirms his membership of the Balilla only, not of
the subsequent stages (Avanguardisti and Giovani Fascisti). Cristina Berio has confirmed that this is the only photo-
graph she shared with Osmond-Smith. (TPB)
9 [Note missing. Berio recalls reading Ibsen in Intervista sulla musica, 46–7 (Two Interviews, 47). (CW)]
have been relished by the fascist cultural élite10 but who was certainly not going to make his
way onto the list of ‘approved authors’. But for much of provincial Italy it was in fact the
ONB, and above all the Giovani Fascisti, that provided a (highly selective) introduction to
cultural challenge. Much of the most striking Italian modernist architecture of the thirties
was erected to house the sporting and cultural activities of the ONB, and the mix of children
who pursued such activities within them transcended class barriers in a way that would have
been unthinkable in pre-fascist, liberal Italy. Excursions and summer camps likewise
opened provincial eyes to a wider world. That all this was conducted under the aegis of a
grotesque cult of the ‘Duce’, and an absurdly chauvinistic nationalism, may have been
enough to constrain many former participants to embarrassed silence. But it should not be
assumed that such experiences were unrelievedly counter-productive.
On the other hand, Berio’s musical education was purely domestic, and very thorough.
Between grandfather and father, he was brought up in a professional household that took
a marked pride in musical craftsmanship and placed a strong emphasis upon practical music-
making. Ernesto gave lessons to local singers, and the better local instrumentalists gathered
at the Berio household to play chamber music, in which, once the eight- or nine-year-old
Luciano’s piano playing had reached a sufficient standard, he was encouraged to join. The
Berios were musicians who expected to serve the local community. Both Adolfo and
Ernesto presided at the organ in church on Sundays, and Ernesto sallied forth to the local
cinema to play between films.11 Only once, and briefly, did his son doubt his vocation to
continue in the family profession. At about age eleven, the sights and sounds of the bustling
port in which he had grown up persuaded Luciano Berio that he wanted to become captain
of his own ship. That dream soon faded; the obsession with the sea did not. Fifty years later,
after a career that found little room for easy musical pictorialism, he could, for the final part
of Outis, conjure up a sea picture of uncanny immediacy. A competing phantasy, though
one with as yet little greater likelihood of realization, was prompted by a reading of Romain
Rolland’s novel about an imaginary composer, Jean Christophe. In response, the young
Luciano tried his hand at composition with a Pastorale for piano (1936) and subsequently
with a Toccata for piano duet (1939). But at this stage, this was merely one of the many
activities at which any aspiring musician might try his hand. And even though it transpires,
from a diary now in the possession of his daughter, that he was left wondering how one
might acquire the technical competence necessary to make of composition a vocation, the
strongly practical tenor of his formation encouraged him primarily to dream of a career as a
concert pianist. No doubt it was that aspiration, as much as any nascent wish to develop
skills as a composer, that caused him pangs of envy when, [having] travel[ed] along the coast
10 [Reference missing. Ruth Ben-Ghiat (Fascist Modernities) is one author who addresses the anti-bourgeois tendencies
in fascism. (BE)]
11 An activity of well-nigh equal importance during the 1930s, due to the provision by the OND (Opera Nazionale
Dopolavoro) of subsidized cinema tickets – thus creating a mass audience for cinema unprecedented in Italy ([see]
Doumanis, [Inventing the Nation,] 145). Since much of the material presented to the cinema public was ideologically
inspired documentary (c.f. [reference missing]), the cinema organist played a role within the Fascist corporate state
not dissimilar to that traditionally assumed by the organist within the Christian church.
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to attend his first orchestral concert in San Remo around the age of fifteen, he witnessed a
performance of a Rapsodia for saxophone and orchestra by Gino Marinuzzi jr, the scion of
another musical dynasty, with the young maestro performing his own obbligato part at the
piano.12
The entry of Italy into the Second World War in 1940 drew even tighter the horizons of
the provincial musical world in which Berio passed his youth. Liguria was quickly brought
to a rude awakening – after endless official encomiums of the salutary effects of war and the
heavily edited newsreels of belligerent foreign excursions into Ethiopia, Spain, and Albania –
as to its genuine consequences. Soon after Mussolini declared hostilities, the British fleet
sailed into the Gulf of Genoa, and subjected Genoa to devastating bombardment on
account of its extensive port facilities and rapidly developing steel-works. (The thwarted
ambitions of Oneglia’s city fathers at least spared the Berios’ home town any similar fate.)
Liguria likewise became an invasion route for the Italian army’s ill-judged attempt at annexa-
tion of the south-east corner of France. [Hence,] although it is well-nigh certain that a
fourteen-year-old Luciano Berio would have taken his next (and by now obligatory) step
towards ‘Fascist perfection’ by joining the Avanguardisti in 1939, the pre-military indoctri-
nation to which he was thereby subject was inevitably undercut by an ever more widely
diffused awareness of the country’s disastrous military record between 1940 and 1943. Like
most other provincial families not yet directly involved in the conflict, the Berios would
seem to have kept their heads down and concentrated on their professional concerns. But,
inevitably, the young Luciano’s musical explorations were almost entirely confined to the
home. EIAR, the national radio, underlined the country’s musical patrimony by broad-
casting Italian opera of the generations up to Puccini and Mascagni. Ernesto’s chamber music
evenings, less emphatically nationalistic, took in a fair swathe of the nineteenth-century
repertoire.
If the photographic evidence is correctly interpreted, [the] then Avanguardista Berio took
the final step up the ladder of the Fascist youth movement in late 1943.† There could not
have been a more disastrous time to do so, for Liguria was fast succumbing to the disastrous
civil war that tore northern Italy apart between 1943 and 1945. After the fall of Mussolini in
1943, German forces occupied northern Italy, and having rescued Mussolini by a spectacular
raid upon his place of confinement in the Abruzzi, installed him as puppet head of the
Fascist Social Republic, whose headquarters were at Salò on Lake Garda, and whose writ
ran throughout northern Italy. The immediate consequence was a polarization of the youth
of Liguria. Some enrolled voluntarily in the Republican forces, deeming the true ‘invaders’
to be the Anglo-American forces fighting their way northwards up the peninsula. Others
instead took to the mountains lying behind the coastal plain, whence they organized guerilla
raids on the German and Republican forces. Brutalities multiplied on both sides.13 Those
12 An entirely typical manifestation of the régime’s determination to encourage youthful cultural enterprise.
† Osmond-Smith contradicts his earlier statement about photographic evidence here. In writing ‘then Avanguardista’
he makes an assumption based on the 1937 photograph, which, as noted above, confirms Berio’s membership in the
Balilla. There is no photographic evidence to support later membership of the Avanguardisti.
13 They are commemorated with asperity to this day, as will become evident to any Italian speaker who enters ‘Imperia’
and ‘fascismo’ into their search engine.
amongst the partisans who were captured were sometimes executed and, more often,
deported to German concentration camps. The Republican authorities responded by impos-
ing mass conscription, and in 1944 Berio was called up to join the Republican army. The
19-year-old was torn as to how to respond. Acquaintances of his had already taken to the
hills to enlist with the partisans, and he was half-tempted to follow their example. But his
father, having gained the benevolent approbation of the fascist authorities, could not now
be seen to fail in his most elementary duty, that of ensuring that his son presented himself
for military training, without risking reprisals. Unwillingly, Berio therefore presented him-
self at the barracks in San Remo. The situation there was chaotic: on the first day, without
any previous instruction, he was handed a loaded gun. He tried to work out for himself how
to operate it. It blew up, severely injuring his right hand. He was forced to spend the next
three months in a military hospital. His wounds became infected, but as the civil war
proved ever more disruptive, there was no longer any available medication to treat them.
When at long last his injuries began to heal of their own accord, he took advantage of
spiralling chaos as Allied troops advanced ever nearer up the peninsula and successfully
faked his discharge. It would have been imprudent to return to Oneglia lest his fraud was
discovered, so he fled northwards first to Milan and thence to Como, in hope of at last join-
ing up with his sister, who was providing support to one of the partisan groups.
But by now the German forces had decided to withdraw from Italy altogether, and with
the props thus removed from under the Repubblica di Salò, and Mussolini captured and
shot, the civil war in northern Italy was drawing to a ragged close. Berio accordingly returned
to Milan in the autumn of 1945, where, following in his father’s footsteps, he enrolled in the
Conservatory. In deference to his father’s wishes (and to family tradition) he also enrolled
in the faculty of law at Milan University, although his legal studies were to be laid aside
within a year. Milan had suffered terribly under allied bombardment, but was resolute in
its attempts to restore its civic and cultural pride. In his reminiscences of Milan as it was
in that year, the critic Roberto Leydi takes pains to undermine the easy cliché that would
depict 1945 as the year in which ‘cultural vitality [. . .] exploded [. . .] magically and inexpli-
cably [. . .] out of nothing’.14 For a young man like Berio, emerging from war-torn Liguria,
it may well have seemed that his fifteen Milanese years were marked by a sudden and over-
whelming access to the riches of the modernist tradition, of which a provincial childhood
had denied him any previous knowledge.15 But the renaissance of Milanese cultural life
among the post-war ruins was, as Leydi properly emphasizes, the fruit of a singular civic
resilience. Profiting from the relatively benign attitude to artistic radicalism maintained by
certain members of the fascist régime,16 pre-war Milan had successfully kept alive an aware-
ness of wider artistic horizons. Although the Second Viennese School was not welcomed
14 Roberto Leydi, [quoted in] Nuova Musica alla radio, 216.

15 Cf. Interviews. . . [This might refer to Berio, Intervista sulla musica, 68–9; Two Interviews, 63–4. (BE)]
16 Notably the Minister of Education, [Giuseppe] Bottai and the veteran futurist Marinetti. Indeed, Mussolini himself
took pains to emphasize the distance between Fascist modernism and the aesthetic conservatism of the Third Reich.
Cf. [reference missing. In his article on Petrassi earlier in this issue Osmond-Smith quotes Yvonne de Begnac’s
testimony regarding Mussolini’s mockery of the Nazis’ concept of ‘degenerate art’ and their rejection of futurism
(see above, ‘Masculine Semiotics’, 34–6 and nn. 28–30). (CW)]
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into the major cultural institutions, the Milanese had been able to listen to small-scale
works by Schoenberg and Webern at the Milione gallery [check]. And Ferdinando Ballo,
one of the instigators of the Milione concerts, had also promoted the writings of Joyce and
Brecht through his small publishing house. Now that post-war Milanese cultural life was
reasserting itself, Ballo once again placed himself at the helm, founding in late 1945 a new
orchestra to play unfamiliar repertoire (notably [that of ] the seventeenth and twentieth
centuries) at his Pomeriggi Musicali concerts. Cheap tickets for students encouraged them
to explore the music of Bartók, Hindemith, Milhaud, and Schoenberg, often for the first
time. The impact of such sudden exposure upon the young Berio was profound. Nor was
this influx of new experiences merely musical. From 1947 another pioneering institution
of post-war Milan, the Piccolo Teatro, erupted into provocative life under the direction of
Paolo Grassi and Giorgio Strehler, taking over the Cinema Broletto that had been employed
during the final months of civil war by the republican Muti regiment as a centre for the
interrogation and torture of captured partisans.17 Strehler’s championing of Brecht at the
Piccolo Teatro a decade later was to make an enduring mark upon Berio’s conception of
musical theatre. But during Berio’s student years the Piccolo’s repertoire was more tradi-
tional: Shakespeare, Goldoni, Ibsen, and an international range of twentieth-century play-
wrights.18 Furthermore, a strong emphasis was put, as with the Pomeriggi Musicali, upon
attracting a new audience of students, schoolchildren, and workers. Naturally, the sheer
availability of such a rich variety of theatrical experience could not fail to make its mark
on a provincial youth, eager to explore wider horizons.
The Milan Conservatory prided itself on offering a ten-year course that covered the full
range of components necessary to create a ‘rounded’ musician. Because of the thorough
grounding that he had received at home from father and grandfather, Berio was able to
take the fourth-year exam as soon as he enrolled, and thus to proceed directly into the fifth
year of the course. Although when he resumed his studies Berio still hoped that his injured
hand would heal sufficiently to allow him to develop his skills as a concert pianist, it soon
became dispiritingly obvious that this was not going to prove possible. Consequently, he
found increasing fulfilment in the technical studies that would lead him through, three
years later, to Ghedini’s composition class.
As has already been underlined, there was little in Berio’s youth that suggested the likeli-
hood of his graduating from a composition class. The handful of pieces that he had written
prior to enrolling in the fifth year of the Milan Conservatory strongly reflected his family’s
musical concerns. Even after he had started his studies in Milan, the flow of compositions
prior to his entry into Ghedini’s class was modest, but again resonated strongly both with
his provincial background and with some of his future concerns. A choral O bone Jesu
(1946) simply echoed his family’s tradition as local church organists.‡ But in 1946 he also
17 Hirst, Giorgio Strehler, 5–6.

18 See Hirst, [Strehler,] 125–6.
‡ There is no documentary evidence for the existence of this work. Osmond-Smith’s previous references to it do not
cite a source (see Osmond-Smith, Berio, 123; ‘Berio’, New Grove, 357). (TPB)
came upon an anthology of folk-song texts, and set three of them in what seemed to him a
melodically appropriate style. Two of these eventually came to form part of one of his most
popular works from the sixties: Folk Songs (1964). But it is not simply as a harbinger of the
fascination with folk song that runs thread-like through Berio’s output that the Tre canzoni
popolari § merit a moment’s consideration. The fascist régime had been strongly aware that
one crucial way of encouraging identification with the corporate state was by fostering
popular culture. Dismissive as were forerunners of fascist culture, such as [Giovanni] Papini,
of the ‘picture-postcard’ Italy created by the wistful imaginings of northern European tourists,
the fascist cultural hierarchy took the view that where a traditional popular culture had
already been undermined by the modern world, it was salutary to invent it – not as a tourist-
trap, but rather as a means of fostering pride in ‘italianità’ and of underlining to the pre-
dominantly bourgeois, northern Italian supporters of the régime the importance of its
agricultural exploits: the ‘battaglia del grano’, or the reclamation for cultivation of the Pontine
marshes.19 Although Berio was to express virulent disdain for the cultural products of the
fascist ventennio, and in due course to find telling musical means to mark the distance
between modern urban life and evocations of rural musical culture, there is a measure of
continuity between the folk confections dear to the régime under which he had grown up
and Berio’s abiding fascination with inventing simulacra of folk idioms.
Looking back on his Milanese studies in later years, Berio repeatedly underlined his debt
to the (relatively unfrequented) counterpoint class taught by the vice-director of the Con-
servatory, Giulio Cesare Paribeni. This is not merely the retrospective gratitude of a student
for a fine teacher (Paribeni had been holding these classes for thirty years, and was one of
the most respected teachers of the elements of musical technique in the country). At first
glance, the demands of ‘classical’ counterpoint might seem remote from the post-war neo-
modernist generation among whom Berio was soon to make his mark – as indeed from the
interests of the younger generation in general, if one is to judge from the paucity of fellow-
students attending classes. Yet it was a discipline that habituated Berio’s mind to englobing
concurrent musical processes and organizing their simultaneous development. It was the
exhilarations of negotiating perceptual complexity that were to give to post-war neo-
modernism its militant edge – its explicitly assumed stance against the empty bustle of
neo-classicism, and the deliberately circumscribed technical means that permitted commer-
cial music to persuade people that they belonged together if they consumed the same things.
Music’s cardinal role in the passage from ideological totalitarianism to its consumerist
equivalent established a ferociously vivid sense of aesthetic polarities in the minds of Berio’s
generation, and to a greater degree than many of his peers, Berio was to feel confidence
in negotiating between those polarities. A well-honed contrapuntal sensibility was by no
means the only technical marker of a modernist musical aesthetic (as we shall in due course
§ The correct title of these songs for voice and piano is Tre canzoni siciliane (1946–7, unpubd). The same mistake
occurs in Osmond-Smith, Berio, 123, and ‘Berio’, New Grove, 357. (TPB)
19 For the innovatory activities of the OND, when directed by Enrico Beretta, in ‘reviving’ folk festivals during the early
1930s, see Doumanis, [Inventing the Nation,] 145. For the willingness of the authorities to invent where tradition
was lacking, see [reference missing].
|
see, a technical understanding of how one might master radically diverse experiences of
subjective time was equally pivotal, and equally polarizing vis-à-vis popular culture), but
it did allow a young musician such as Berio a generous but technically grounded sense of
the ever-widening gap between the aesthetic of the concert hall and that of the assertively
omnipresent mass media.
In 1948 Berio proceeded to the composition class of Giorgio Ghedini, with whom he was
to study until he received his diploma in 1951. It was a felicitous moment at which to cross
Ghedini’s path. Stravinsky had been a major focus for admiration20 and emulation among
musical modernists during the fascist ventennio. The 1930s had seen a marked reactivation
of appreciation for Italy’s Baroque tradition, and Stravinsky’s demonstration of how the
contemporary world might redeploy Baroque instrumental gesture provided the genera-
tion of Casella and Ghedini with a piquant example. But the generic sub-Stravinskian neo-
baroque of fascist modernism received a markedly individual inflection at Ghedini’s hands.
He suffused it with the austerity of Pizzetti and, seminally for Berio, with the ultra-fastidious
study of the potentialities of instrumental timbre of Ravel. From these [Ghedini] created in
the earlier 1940s a distinctive sound-world whose gelid reserve and, in the case of his operatic
masterpiece Le baccanti (1941–4), unblinking dissonance marked a calculated distance from
the eager-to-please splashes of orchestral colour dear to many of his compatriots. Under his
tutelage Berio began an avid study of the master technicians of the early twentieth-century
orchestra: Ravel, Debussy, Mahler, Prokofiev. This was a brave new world. Prior to his
arrival in Milan Berio had attended only the one orchestral concert at San Remo mentioned
above. But now, absorbed attendance at the Pomeriggi Musicali concerts and relentless
attention to details of instrumental technique on the part of Ghedini were to establish the
foundations of an enduring relationship with the full symphony orchestra that few other
post-war modernists could match. Unsurprisingly, the first extended compositions that
Berio produced in his class – a Concertino for clarinet (Berio’s own ‘second instrument’ at
the Conservatory), violin, celesta, harp, and strings (1949),¶ and particularly a Magnificat
for two sopranos, chorus, two pianos, wind, and percussion (1949) – showed just how
profoundly Ghedini’s students were encouraged to immerse themselves in the Stravinskian
example. This process of learning by a concentrated period of imitation Berio subsequently
referred to as his ‘exorcisms’. The Stravinskian exorcism, which hardly lasted beyond 1949,
was not his last.
Unlike instrumental students at the Conservatory, Ghedini’s composition students had
few chances to earn money through the skills that they were labouring to acquire. Accord-
ingly, Berio supported himself by a wide swathe of practical activities. He often acted as
accompanist to vocal classes at the Conservatory. Having attended Giulini’s conducting
20 An admiration shared by Il Duce himself – and reciprocated by Stravinsky. [See, for instance, Vera Stravinsky and
Craft, Stravinsky in Pictures and Documents, 551–2, and Sachs, Music in Fascist Italy, 167–9. Also Osmond-Smith,
‘Masculine Semiotics’, this issue, 30–31. (CW)]
¶ The title Concertino refers to Berio’s revision, dated 1970, of an early, unpublished work completed in 1951 for the
same instrumental ensemble, with the title Piccolo concerto. No document has been found among Berio’s manu-
scripts to support the assumption that the piece was written in 1949. (TPB)
classes there, he also took on occasional engagements as assistant conductor in provincial

opera houses. But it was his work as a jobbing accompanist that precipitated the next crucial
encounter of the early fifties. Cathy Berberian had come to Milan in 1949 [check]†† to pursue
further vocal studies with Georgina del Vigo. These were proving sufficiently fruitful that, in
1950, she applied for a Fulbright scholarship to continue her studies in Milan. She needed
an accompanist for the recordings demanded in support of her application, and Berio was
recommended to her. The attraction between these two vivid personalities, voraciously
exploring everything that post-war Milan had to offer, was immediate and enduring. Within
a few months they were married.
Profound as was the impact of Ghedini’s teaching, he lacked one thing that young Italians
emerging from the enclave of fascist cultural life coveted: international acclaim. As the
culture and ideology of the ventennio was consigned to a strenuously maintained oblivion,
they looked for an internationally acknowledged incarnation of forward-looking and ‘ideo-
logically correct’ musicianship. They thought to find it in the work of Luigi Dallapiccola.
Not only had Dallapiccola during the war years created his own distinctive rapport with
the music of the Second Viennese School – a lyrical serialism whose international impact
was far greater than [that of ] the work of other Italian serial pioneers such as Camillo Togni
or Riccardo Malipiero – but he had also accomplished a potent reversal of his public image.
Having risen to prominence as one of the major talents of fascist musical modernism, he
had (like many of his compatriots) found himself alienated by the régime’s rapprochement
with Hitler, and had led a fraught existence seeking to protect his Jewish wife, Laura, when
German forces occupied Florence. His one-act opera Il prigioniero was the first Italian work
of the post-war years to create a profound international impact. No sooner had Berio com-
pleted his Stravinskian ‘exorcism’ than he threw himself into the study of Dallapiccola’s
scores. Study with the man himself was, however, difficult, since Dallapiccola had pointedly
resigned the ‘special professorship’ in composition created for him by the régime and had
returned to the modest job [of] teaching piano as a ‘second instrument’ by which he had
formerly earned his living at the Florence Conservatory. An opportunity to circumvent
the impasse came in 1952 [check],‡‡ when Dallapiccola was invited to hold composition
courses at the Tanglewood summer school in Massachusetts, Cathy Berberian’s home state.
Berio applied successfully for a grant from the Koussevitzky Foundation, and he and his
young wife set off for Tanglewood. As Berio afterwards admitted, he learnt more from
Dallapiccola’s scores than from the man himself. Indeed, Dallapiccola’s lyrical, contrapuntal
serialism may have provided Berio with a temporarily congenial entrée to the world of serial
thought, but it left no enduring mark beyond Chamber Music (1953), written for Cathy
Berberian, whereas his studies of contrapuntal technique with Paribeni and of the crafts-
manship behind the iridescent veneer of early twentieth-century orchestration with Ghedini
unquestionably did.
†† The date is given as 1950 in Osmond-Smith, Berio, 5, and in ‘The Tenth Oscillator’, 2. (CW)
‡‡ Berio studied with Dallapiccola at the Berkshire Music Festival, Tanglewood, in 1952. Dallapiccola had taught there
also in summer 1951. (CW)
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Impermanent as may have been the consequences of Berio’s Dallapiccolan ‘exorcism’,

one profoundly consequential byproduct of being on the East coast of the USA in the summer
and autumn of 1952 was that he was able to attend the first concert in that country to include
music composed directly onto tape. This was given at the Guggenheim Museum in New York
on 28 October. Although the short tape pieces by Otto Luening and Vladimir Ussachevsky
sat a little dispiritingly beside instrumental works by Varèse, they gave Berio a first glimpse
of potentials to be developed. Armed with a letter of introduction from Dallapiccola to
Luigi Rognoni, then in charge of the RAI’s BBC-inspired Terzo Programma, he began to
solicit commissions21 and to look for chances to pursue electronic experiment. His own first
tape piece, Mimusique No 1 (1953), was, with typical bravura, developed from a recording
of a single gun shot. The Milan RAI was in many respects a natural focus of ambition for
Berio. The Milan radio station, founded in the year of Berio’s birth, 1925, [had been] the
media showpiece of the fascist EIAR. From it issued forth the special programmes con-
ceived for members of the ONB, and those designed for use in school. We have no direct
evidence of whether as a child Berio listened to these, but he would certainly have been
expected to. And it has already been noted how much the teenage Berio had depended on
broadcasts during the war years to expand his awareness of opera. He was, in other words,
part of a radiophonic generation. To focus the first steps of his career towards working for
the radio was as innately appealing as for the following generation to dream of strumming
guitars in front of a television camera.
To persuade the RAI of the efficacy of such experiments was not a task to be undertaken
single-handed. Berio was as yet an unknown quantity – possessed of boundless energy and
curiosity, but with relatively few achievements to his name. But he knew where to turn. The
conductor Hermann Scherchen had played an important part in setting the performance of
new music in Italy back on its feet after the war years, particularly through his championing
of the music of Luigi Dallapiccola. When Berio discovered that Scherchen was scheduled to
conduct a concert in Genoa in 1953, he travelled back to Liguria, introduced himself, and
explained his ambitions. Scherchen shrewdly referred him to his pupil, Bruno Maderna.
A few weeks later Berio succeeded in meeting up with Maderna in Milan. The rapport
between them was immediate; but it was also an immensely advantageous one for the
relatively unknown Berio. Maderna had successfully transcended the embarrassments asso-
ciated with his childhood career as the prodigious orchestral conductor of the ventennio,
‘Brunetto’,22 and established himself as a pivotal figure among the musicians of the post-
war generation.
21 Documents show him receiving contracts there from December 1953. See Scaldaferri, Musica nel laboratorio
elettroacustico, 62.
22 Chronicled in sober detail in [reference missing. Information on Maderna’s youthful conducting career can be
found in Baroni and Dalmonte, ‘Notizie sulla vita di Bruno Maderna’, and Och, ‘Bruno Maderna a Verona’. (CW)]
This outline proposal, dated 2006, is published here by kind permission of the estate of David
Osmond-Smith. The proposal is headed with the following note: ‘Eleven chapters. Suggested
length: approximately 300 printed pages: so an average of 25 pages per chapter . . . Plus worklist,
bibliography, index (collectively, approx. a further 25 pages) . . . The chapters on the musical
œuvre will require numerous music examples. Whether there should be photographs to orna-
ment the biographical chapters may be left to the editor’s discretion.’
Outline Proposal for ‘The Music of Luciano Berio’

Anyone proposing to write an extended study of Luciano Berio’s compositions is faced with
a problem of method. On the one hand his works are in continuous dialogue with his
immediate cultural environment, and also, though perhaps less self-evidently, with residual
concerns stemming from Italian modernist culture of the first four decades of the twentieth
century. So that to follow the structuralist example (as he might have urged), and to treat
individual works as if their inner workings establish the rules whereby one may decipher
them, can prove limiting. Arguably, such issues are most effectively addressed within the
context of a ‘creative biography’. On the other hand Berio evolved at an early point in his
substantial output a range of compositional techniques that enabled him to plan works on a
large scale. These were then used time and again. It therefore makes only modest sense to
try to come to grips with the corpus that he left by a chronologically-ordered work-by-work
survey. One would find oneself constantly obliged to refer back to procedures discussed in
relation to previous works.
To address these tensions, I would propose first to establish a chronological frame by
means of a four-chapter ‘creative biography’. This would underline those aspects of his life
that proved pertinent to his musical work, but would pass over elements within his personal
life that, despite making for a piquant narrative, would entail description of people still
alive, who might not take kindly to finding themselves thus anatomized in print. These
four chapters would, however, seek to place Berio’s musical development in a substantially
richer social and cultural context than was possible in my short OUP book of a decade
ago.1
In the outline given below, I have proposed to chronicle Berio’s encounters with the
major figures that impacted upon his creative development in the course of the first three
chapters, but then to devote the fourth chapter2 to a more detailed examination of how his
creative dialogues with each of them developed. Clearly, it might prove possible to subsume
the contents of Chapter 4 into Chapters 1–3. The danger of so doing is that the reader’s
grasp of the chronological sweep of Berio’s development will be disrupted by diversions
into two or three pages of discussion of his creative rapport with a given individual (or by
my attempts to sustain a narrative network that traces them all concurrently). While some
1 That book was in fact published in 1991, fifteen years before the date of this outline proposal. (CW)
2 The description of these ‘creative dialogues’ seems to correspond with the material under the heading for the pro-
jected Chapter 2, rather than Chapter 4. (CW)
|
of those individuals (Boulez, Maderna) made a strong impact at a specific point in his
development, others (Sanguineti, Berberian) evolved through their long-standing creative
relationship with him. Accounting for such evolutions is perhaps more easily accomplished
by a self-contained mini-essay than by weaving them through the principal narrative of the
‘creative biography’.
In the remaining chapters, I would seek to trace the evolution of major creative obsessions
throughout his output, devoting one chapter to each. This inevitably means that certain key
works that synthesize a number of these concerns (for example Sinfonia, Coro, and some of
the late theatre works) will appear at several points in different chapters, but that the prece-
dents for the technique under discussion will be immediately apparent. Readers intent upon
studying a single work will have to be prepared to consult the index, but will be rewarded by
a multi-dimensional view. Chapter titles are provisional.
Chapter 1 Biographical 1: 1925–1953 – Oneglia to Milan

Berio’s childhood environment in Oneglia. The Berio family’s traditions of musicianship.
Father’s relationship with the fascist cultural ‘establishment’: the impact of the policies of
MinCulPop upon provincial musical life. The régime’s cult of youth – and use of its ‘star’
station, Milan radio, to address the youth of the region. The impact of the fascist youth
movement, the Balilla, upon Ligurian life. Wartime disruptions. Problems of identity for
those who, like Berio, arrived on the verge of manhood during the Italian ‘civil war’ of
1943–5. The impact upon Liguria of the civil war. Berio is conscripted into the ‘Repubbli-
chino’ army, and suffers a severe hand injury while undergoing military training.
Studies at the Conservatory in Milan in the immediate post-war years. The distinctive
(and for Berio strongly formative) Milanese cultural environment, as the city reanimated
itself after the war years. Encounter with Cathy Berberian while both were still completing
their studies: their marriage. Influence of Ghedini (and through Ghedini, Stravinsky) and of
Dallapiccola. Starts work at the Italian Radio. Introduced to Maderna through Scherchen.
Their plans (with Rognoni and Leydi) for an electronic studio – eventually established in
1955, with Berio as director.
Chapter 2 Biographical 2: 1953–1962

Seminal influence of work for the radio. Encounter with Eco and with major Darmstadt
figures, above all Bruno Maderna. Oblique relationship to the Darmstadt summer schools.
Resigns studio directorship in 1959: undertakes teaching to compensate for the loss in salary.
Berberian relaunches her career in 1958: increasing strains upon their marriage. Through
Eco, meets Sanguineti: first collaborations.
It is a distinctive and consistent feature of Berio’s work that it was nourished by exchange
with creative thinkers both within music and beyond. Eight are of particular importance.3
He was much engaged with the diverse musical speculations of Bruno Maderna (notably his
games with automatism), of Pierre Boulez (notably his ideas of ‘troping’), and of Henri
3 Only seven people are in fact listed in this paragraph. (CW)

Pousseur. (The latter in the fifties sowed questions in his mind about twentieth-century
harmony that only came to fruition many years later.) The aesthetic and semiological
thought of Umberto Eco was a strong formative influence upon Berio in the later fifties
and sixties. Equally, his creative relationships with the writers Edoardo Sanguineti and Italo
Calvino proved enduringly important to him – the former particularly. The complex creative
relationship that he developed with Cathy Berberian provided a model for his work with
other exceptional performers in years to come.
Chapter 3 Biographical 3: The USA 1962–1972

Works at Mills College, California. Meets Susan Oyama, whom he marries in 1965 [recte
1966]. Move to East Coast, and teaching at the Juilliard School in New York. Constant
travel, promoting his compositions. Despite the popularity and accessibility of the vivid,
gestural idiom that characterized his work of the sixties, at the end of that decade he asserts
as his own priority the primacy of harmonic thought, both on the level of musical detail and
on that of large-scale structural control. Breakdown of relationship with Oyama and return
to Italy. Acquisition of property at Radicondoli which is to remain his home for the rest of
his life. Evolution of relationship with Berberian.
Chapter 4 Biographical 4: 1973–2003

Paris and IRCAM. Third marriage to Talia Pecker. Death of Bruno Maderna (1973). Re-
establishing of relations with the Italian musical ‘establishment’ (from Maggio Musicale
Fiorentino through to Accademia di Santa Cecilia in Rome). Foundation of Tempo reale.
Death of Cathy Berberian (1983). Domestic stability, at last achieved, enables production
of large-scale works from Coro and La vera storia through to Outis and Stanze. Through
his third wife also establishes an ongoing relationship with the Israeli cultural establishment,
an affiliation reflected in a number of his later works.4
Chapter 5 Plus/Minus 1: From Series to Re-reading

Berio’s relation to Darmstadt serialism was oblique, and strongly inflected by the generous
and all-embracing musical personality of Bruno Maderna. Although Berio tried out various
of the techniques associated with fifties serialism (e.g. in Nones), and with Maderna’s
advocacy of the ‘magic square’ (Serenata), it was really with the well-nigh endless generative
4 Aside from a brief period (1976–7) during which he acted as musical consultant to the Israel Chamber Ensemble
(now Israel Chamber Orchestra), Berio never had any relationship with the ‘Israeli cultural establishment’. He was
outspokenly critical of Israel’s ongoing occupation of the Palestinian territories and, indeed, of the programming
strategies of its hegemonic musical institutions. During the nearly three decades of our companionship and marriage
he instead cultivated his knowledge of Jewish and Hebrew culture, from the Bible to Spinoza to Paul Celan and
Israeli contemporary poetry. Works such as Coro, Ofanı̀m, Outis, Cronaca del Luogo, and Stanze contain various
examples of this ‘affiliation’. (TPB)
|
potential of ‘re-reading’ and partially modifying pre-established musical ‘texts’ that Berio
found one of the techniques that greatly contributed to his prodigious productivity. (The
procedure clearly has a certain amount in common with Boulez’s notion of ‘troping’.)
While this chapter would trace a history of such re-readings from the later fifties through
to the end of the century, it would seek to emphasize that there are substantial continuities
of technique between earlier and later examples (e.g. Allelujah I and II or Sequenza I in
the fifties, La vera storia and Un re in ascolto in the seventies and eighties.) It would also
emphasize how technical considerations, such as possible fingerings, might provide a reduc-
tive filter for re-reading an underlying harmonic text, as occurs in Sequenza VI for viola.
Chapter 6 Plus/Minus 2: Text and Commentary

Where the re-reading of musical ‘texts’ functioned by a process of continual small additions
and subtractions, Berio’s notion of musical ‘commentary’ instead distinguishes itself by the
fact that the original ‘text’ survives intact amidst the musical context that it generates about
itself. The locus classicus of this process is the relationship between the fourteen Sequenzas
and the Chemins that developed around various of them. But other works, such as Sinfonia
and Opera, must also be considered to round out the scope of Berio’s conception.
Although Berio remained faithful to the global metaphor of commentary, it is clear that
the relationship between Sequenza ‘text’ and Chemins ‘commentary’ undergoes a substantial
mutation between Chemins I–III, and the various works – not all of them entitled ‘Chemins’
– that follow on from Chemins IV for oboe and strings. The harmonic projections from a
line that characterize the latter are central to some of the issues addressed in Chapter 7.
Chapter 7 Plus/Minus 3: From Density to Harmony

Although Berio’s work of the later fifties might appear as a voyage away from the thorough
but traditional harmonic formation of his youth towards treating pitch aggregates as a func-
tion of aural density (along with texture and complex timbre), his concern for coherent
harmonic thought never retreated far below the surface. One symptom of this was his
fascination with Henri Pousseur’s attempts, during the later fifties, to theorize a continuum
between the tonally based harmony of the past and the rigorous atonal thought of certain
of their contemporaries. Berio, however, was quick to find his own solutions to reinstating
the structural functions of harmony within his music. Three distinctive approaches may be
discerned during the sixties and seventies:
a) How many chords?

In discussing one of his cardinal essays in harmonic control from the sixties, Sequenza IV
for piano, Berio liked to quote the old jazzman’s inquiry ‘How many chords you got?’. If
the chromatic voice-leading of Schoenbergian harmony was a dead letter for many of his
contemporaries, then Berio would instead start by establishing for a piece a small repertoire
or vocabulary of chords, usually unchanging in their transpositional pitch location, and
|
Osmond-Smith Two Fragments of ‘The Music of Luciano Berio’ 59
proceed to explore the range of syntactic relations that offered themselves through juxtapos-
ing these harmonic ‘objects’. Often such explorations entailed a series of minor changes
to these ‘objects’ (characteristically a side-stepping upwards or downwards of one or two
pitches). Such a kaleidoscopic approach to harmony was not confined to local detail: a
macroscopic layer of harmonic change governs the evolution of Sequenza IV, and the four
‘Festas’ that provide the cornerstones of the first part of La Vera Storia are organized in
analogous fashion.
b) Harmonic fields
In common with many of his contemporaries, Berio found great stimulus in the exploration
of possible vertical combinations selected from a field of fixed pitches. In principle, at least,
the Sequenzas are ‘sequences’ of such ‘harmonic fields’. (In practice, though, this is not
always the most telling metaphor for the harmonic processes that underlie certain of
them.) While in the Sequenzas such considerations may be relatively local, by the later
seventies they had expanded to provide a unifying conceptual frame for large-scale works
(see section d).
c) Projections from a line

Berio’s career is remarkable for the confidence with which, having created in the later sixties
an idiom that commanded widespread public enthusiasm, he set it down at the start of the
seventies to pursue an ever more disciplined exploration of complex harmony. Those works
from the early seventies that spell out the generation of harmonic possibilities by projec-
tions from an undulating and slowly evolving central line (in effect an arpeggiation of the
range of pitch resources currently in play) were not to be among his most popular (with the
partial exception of Points on the curve to find . . .), but without them the formidably refined
harmonic control of the works of his later years (from Ritorno degli snovidenia on) would
hardly have been conceivable.
d) Global harmonic planning of large-scale works

Berio had many means at his disposal for giving a unifying ‘tinta’ to his late large-scale
works. One is a distinctive range of instrumental colour (see Chapter 10), but another is
the establishing, throughout the total orchestral pitch-range, of areas of dense activity and
‘empty’ pitch ranges. The individuation of active pitch ranges may be reinforced by charac-
teristic melodic gestures, instrumentation, etc., but all serve to enhance awareness of the
containing pitch architecture.
Chapter 8 Plus/Minus 4: Subtraction and Filtering: from Studio to Orchestra

One crucial legacy from the technical idiosyncrasies of the Studio di Fonologia was the con-
viction that ‘subtractive synthesis’ was not a concept confined to the filtering of complex
noise-objects. It made just as stimulating a compositional sense to generate a densely com-
plex sound-object, and successively remove different elements from within it, as it did to
|
build up complexity from a unitary base (an additive process to which there is no logical
end-point). The enduring impact upon Berio’s approach to the orchestra of this way of
conceiving the compositional process can be demonstrated from works such as Epifanie
through to Formazioni. Berio particularly enjoyed making of the subtractive element some-
thing that was entirely concrete and practical (cf. Chapter 6, fingering in viola Sequenza). In
consequence, the choice of performing resources would often be guided by their potential
for filtering of pre-established pitch resources (cf. Chapter 7, section d).
Chapter 9 Multivox
It has long been remarked that one of Berio’s most engaging characteristics was his handling
of the human voice. As was typical of his approach in many fields (cf. Chapter 10), his
curiosity regarding different types of vocal production was all-englobing. This had its roots
in a) the formidable vocal flexibility of Cathy Berberian, developed through the encourage-
ment of John Cage; b) his enduring fascination, consolidated during his radio work of the
fifties, with the expressive potential of different modes of vocalization (Visage, Sequenza III,
Coro, Naturale).
The sonic qualities (or, as Roland Barthes would have it, the ‘grain’) of the voice, being
that which tends to be sacrificed in the training of the ‘projected’ singing voice, Berio
favoured, and made extensive use of, ‘close-miking’ in his work (Laborintus II, Sinfonia, A-
Ronne, Cries of London), working with such specialists in the field as the Swingle Singers.5
Such amplified voices became an obligatory part of the orchestra for his major theatrical
works (cf. Chapter 11).
The hegemony of verbal meaning was consistently challenged by his approach to the
voice. Using the analytic and notational means developed by articulatory phonetics, he
would break texts down into their sonic components, allowing them to re-form into mean-
ingful verbal propositions only temporarily (Omaggio a Joyce, Sequenza III, O King, A-Ronne,
La vera storia). Differing degrees of semantic clarity thus became an independent element in
the planning of musical structure.
Chapter 10 Nella festa tutto: The Encyclopaedic Work vs Work on the Encyclopaedia
Berio’s avid and multifarious curiosity drove him to make of his major works explicitly
encyclopaedic ventures. That which the critic Massimo Mila [recte: Fedele d’Amico] famously
dubbed his ‘omnivorous’ quality6 resulted in a number of distinctive traits:
5 Cries of London (1974–6) for eight voices does not prescribe the use of microphones. Berio, however, allowed the
work’s performance with close miking, notably by the Swingle Singers, who premièred the revised version in 1977.
(TPB)
6 It was in fact Fedele d’Amico who dubbed Berio ‘omnivorous’. He, along with Massimo Mila, was one of the most
outstanding music critics of the postwar decades in Italy. Berio himself was responsible for rendering the description
famous: ‘Lele D’Amico dice che sono onnivoro [. . .]’; Berio, Intervista sulla musica, 110. The phrase was omitted in
the English edition of the interview; see Luciano Berio, Two Interviews, 100. (TPB)
|
Osmond-Smith Two Fragments of ‘The Music of Luciano Berio’ 61
a) Encyclopaedic syntheses
Having such heterogeneous interests, Berio favoured using his major works to demonstrate
that their co-presence within a single brain at a given time was not contingent. By seeking
out relations between those interests, he would in a most literal way ‘pull himself together’.
The interweaving of vocal and orchestral cycles in Epifanie is an early, and relatively con-
ventional, instance of this. More indicative of his determined search for ways of living with
superabundance are the manic lists and catalogues of Passaggio and Laborintus II, and the
provocative syntheses of seemingly disparate elements in Sinfonia and Opera. Sometimes
this buccaneering all-inclusiveness lacked focus (as in Questo vuol dire che), but each of the
major theatrical works (cf. Chapter 11) builds persuasively upon this creative habit.
b) Responding to the global village

Berio’s awareness of what gets lost in a consumerist mass-market found a particular focus in
his long-standing fascination with folk musics (a concern that echoes the fascist exaltation
of rural culture discussed in Chapter 1). This fascination was partly intra-musical. His
interest in Sicilian folksong in particular was an important source for his focus upon melodic,
linear musical thought in his later works (E vó, La vera storia, Outis). But it was as much a
fascination with the role of music in the everyday lives of disparate peoples that prompted a
major essay such as Coro, as well as the late Sequenza for accordion.
c) Living with the museum

Berio was also acutely aware of the implications for a composer of living in a historicist cul-
ture. This entailed on the one hand taking creative, hands-on decisions about his relations
with the institutions of ‘classical’ culture, such as the symphony orchestra and the opera
house. It also involved creative ventures that defined his relations with the ‘classical’ canon.
Unlike Pierre Boulez, whose example he otherwise admired, he felt disinclined to confine
himself within an idiom that had no points of direct interface with that canon. In conse-
quence, he produced a wide range of works that range from straightforward orchestrations
to such adventurous experiments as the third movement of Sinfonia, and Rendering.
Chapter 11 The Functions of Music in Theatre

Like several others of his generation, Berio’s own discussion of his work does not readily
acknowledge creative precedents. But the evolution of his theatrical work from Passaggio
through to Outis 7 resonates to a striking degree with the Italian modernist experiments
in image, music, and movement during the 1910s and 20s (with the work of Malipiero,
Casella, and the painters Balla, Prampolini, and Depero); with the conjunctions of abstract
image and music explored by Veronesi and Rognoni during the late thirties; and the theatrical
experiments of Aldo Clementi from 1961 on. The apparent idiosyncrasy of certain of Berio’s
theatrical concerns diminishes markedly when viewed within this wider context.
7 Berio’s last work for the stage was Cronaca del Luogo (1998–9). (TPB)
|
A second and more direct impact upon his theatrical imagination was made by his work
for Italian radio in the later 50s. The radiophonic imagination, with its capacity flexibly to
articulate a labyrinthine range of sound-imagery, acquired no more than a visual dimension
when projected wholesale onto the theatrical stage. Such all-inclusive flexibility enabled
Berio to work with writers such as Sanguineti, Calvino, and Del Corno in a distinctive
way, one in which music determined the larger dramaturgical structure. Indeed, one may
argue that the most consistent feature of Berio’s theatrical œuvre is the ‘projection’ of
image and word onto musical processes that had been repeatedly explored in previous
instrumental works.
This chapter will discuss not only major works for the stage, but also such radio-based
dramaturgies as governed Visage, Laborintus II, or Diario immaginario.
Bibliography
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Mario Baroni and Rossana Dalmonte. Milan: Suvini Zerboni, 1985. 7–80.
Ben-Ghiat, Ruth. Fascist Modernities, 1922–1945. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.
Berezin, Mabel. Making the Fascist Self. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997.
——. ‘Political Belonging: Emotion, Nation, and Identity’, in State/Culture: State-Formation after the Cultural
Turn, ed. George Steinmetz. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999.
Berio, Luciano. Intervista sulla musica, with Rossana Dalmonte. Rome and Bari: Laterza, 1981. Eng. edn in Berio,
Two Interviews, with Rossana Dalmonte and Bálint András Varga, trans. and ed. David Osmond-Smith.
London: Marion Boyars, 1985.
——. Remembering the Future. Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2004. It. version, Un
ricordo al futuro: lezioni americane. Turin: Einaudi, 2006.
De Benedictis, Angela Ida, ed. Luciano Berio: nuove prospettive / New Perspectives. Florence: Olschki, 2012.
De Grazia, Victoria. The Culture of Consent: Mass Organization of Leisure in Fascist Italy. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1981.
Doumanis, Nicholas. Inventing the Nation: Italy. London: Hodder, 2001.
Forgacs, David. Italian Culture in the Industrial Era, 1880–1980. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990.
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Hirst, David. Giorgio Strehler. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
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twentieth-century music 9/1–2, 39–62 8 Cambridge University Press, 2013

Two Fragments of ‘The Music of Luciano Berio’

WITH AN INTRODUCTORY NOTE BY TALIA PECKER BERIO

14 Roberto Leydi, [quoted in] Nuova Musica alla radio, 216.

17 Hirst, Giorgio Strehler, 5–6.

classes there, he also took on occasional engagements as assistant conductor in provincial

Impermanent as may have been the consequences of Berio’s Dallapiccolan ‘exorcism’,

Outline Proposal for ‘The Music of Luciano Berio’

Chapter 1 Biographical 1: 1925–1953 – Oneglia to Milan

Chapter 2 Biographical 2: 1953–1962

3 Only seven people are in fact listed in this paragraph. (CW)

Chapter 3 Biographical 3: The USA 1962–1972

Chapter 4 Biographical 4: 1973–2003

Chapter 5 Plus/Minus 1: From Series to Re-reading

Chapter 6 Plus/Minus 2: Text and Commentary

Chapter 7 Plus/Minus 3: From Density to Harmony

a) How many chords?

c) Projections from a line

d) Global harmonic planning of large-scale works

Chapter 8 Plus/Minus 4: Subtraction and Filtering: from Studio to Orchestra

b) Responding to the global village

c) Living with the museum

Chapter 11 The Functions of Music in Theatre

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