Beethoven and his three Leonore... but we're not talking about love

Some of you probably listened to La Scala's premiere, in december. Some of you were there (lucky guys!), some of you watched it on television as I did. I remember it well: I was sitting in front of my TV with popcorns in my hand waiting for Fidelio to start, but when Barenboim arrived and the opera began, I had a big suprise. In fact, I was waiting the orchestra to play this overture...

...but unfortunately, what came out from the orchestra when they began to play was this:

My first reaction was: Daniel, what are you doing exactly? Why did you change the overture playing Leonore II instead of the actual Fidelio overture? Have you completely gone mad? Then, I stopped worrying and loved the opera. And I loved the overture too, because Leonore II is surely far more beautiful than the actual Fidelio ouverture, which is not exactly one of Beethoven's musical peaks (while Leonore II probably is).

You can see in more detail what happened in the following image. I am the guy on the left, the girl on the right is my sister, who loved the opera and the overture and didn't have any reaction to Baremboim's funny musical choices.

Probably, after having read all this you will have two reactions:

1) Who is this Leonora II you're talking about? Is she your girlfriend or maybe Barenboim's one? Don't worry, guys, you will meet her soon.

2) You're gone mad, my friend! And you're probably right (years and years of double bass playing can have serious effects on mental health): my sister didn't even notice the overture was different and this either didn't affect her judgement on the opera nor she saw the spirit of Beethoven coming to complain for the odd choice of Baremboim.

So, if you want to go on reading be careful: after having known the wonderful story of Beethoven and Leonora, you could have the same shocked reaction I had when you listen to a conductor who, as Baremboim did, decides to replace the original Fidelio overture with Leonore II. Read at your risk, the author of this blog is not responsible for the end of long-lasting relationships after a row on Barenboim's musical choices.

1. Mum, I want to write an opera! - Beethoven and opera

Beethoven wanted to write an opera since 1800, but he had a very small problem: he could not find anywhere a libretto he liked. You know, operas at the time were tragic dramas about heroes and gods of Greek and Latin mithology (as you can see, for instance, in Mozart's Idomeneo, about which we talked here) or very vain comedies about a girl and a boy who were in love but who, for some reasons, could not marry. Nothing very different from today's Hollywood movies about Marvel heroes or boy-meets-girl stuff, indeed.

But Beethoven did not like that: he wanted to write an opera which could express great moral values, an opera which could deal with the universal values of freedom and of the struggle against absolute power. So, he could not stand the comic operas which were liked very much in Vienna at the time and he had the desire to write an opera about less vain subjects. So, he kept on refusing librettoes for years, before finding the right one.

Like - Dislike - "I can't find any good libretto!"

It is not so strange, indeed: in fact, we can see in Romanticism a very radical change in subjects of operas. Operas began to talk about medieval stories (see, for instance, Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor), about devil and witchcraft (as we can see in the first romantic opera ever, Weber's Der Freischütz), about politics (as we can see in Verdi's Don Carlos), so we should not be suprised that an author like Beethoven, who represents the bridge between classical and romantical music, was interested in finding brand new subjects for his musical dramas.

After having read many librettos and having liked none of them, Beethoven at last found what he needed: a French drama which was written in 1794, during the French Revolution, and which talked about freedom and love. Its title was Léonore ou l'amour conjugal (Leonore or the conjugal love) and it was written by Jean-Nicolas Bouilly. We can see his reaction when he found the right libretto in the following image:

Léonore ou l'amour conjugal was a "pièce au sauvetage": what does this mean? The so-called pièces au sauvetage were very popular in France after the Revolution of 1789 and their name explains what they were about: the French expression pièce au sauvetage simply means drama-in-which-someone-is-saved. So, they were dramas and musical operas in which the plot was about a character who was in danger and who at last was saved by someone. That's what happens in Bouilly's Léonore as well: in this drama, Leonore disguises herself as a man and go and work in a prison where she thinks her husband Florestan is imprisoned; she wants to save him and, as we'll see, at last Florestan will be saved.

So, now Beethoven had the plot he wanted: he only had to write the opera...

2. Bad luck for Ludwig

...but his problems with his desire to write an opera had only begun.

You know, Beethoven was a perfectionist: he wanted everything to be in the right place in the music he wrote and so he kept on changing things in the musical pieces he was writing until he was completely sure that everything was perfect. But, in Fidelio's case, it was not only his desire to write something perfect which gave him problems: he had also bad luck.

After having chosen the subject of the opera, Ludwig entrusted the librettist Sonnleithner to write the libretto and then wrote the music for the opera. Well, actually, what Beethoven was writing wasn't exactly an opera. It was a Singspiel and Singspiel was a music drama which was different from Italian opera mainly for two things:

1. It was sung in German
2. In Singspiel we haven't Italian opera Recitatives (if you don't remember what Recitatives are you can read this), which are replaced by spoken dialogues, by parts in which the singers act instead of singing. So, Singspiel was very similar to modern musicals: the characters on scene acted, then sang, then acted again and so on.

Anyway, Beethoven managed to finish his opera and the Singspiel was first represented in Vienna in 1805.

Oh, you know, Beethoven believed very much in this opera: he had put in it all the strong beliefs he had, showing both his desire for freedom and his desire to struggle against the tyrants: Florestan, in Fidelio, is imprisoned for being an enemy to the tyrant Don Pizarro, Leonora, in the end of the Singspiel, points a gun against Don Pizarro and she'd kill him if a man sent by the King of Spain (the opera is set in XVII Century in Spain) didn't come and arrest the tyrant before she could do that. At last, Freedom triumphs, the tyrant is defeated and Florestan is set free!

Wonderful, isn't it?

There was only a little problem: the opera was first represented in Vienna in 1805 and Vienna, in 1805, was occupied by the French army. Napoleon had defeated the Emperor of Austria and so the French boys were in town (and went to theatres). As you may imagine, the French did not like this opera, which talked about freedom and struggle against tyranny, because, for some reasons I really cannot understand, they thought: "Well, in this opera there are two heroes who fight against a tyrant... Is Monsieur Beethoven saying that we are oppressing the Austrian people as Don Pizarro does and that the Austrian people should revolt as Florestan and Leonora do?"

You can imagine what happened: the opera was first represented in a theatre which was full of French soldiers, as you can see in the following image...

...and didn't have success. End of story.

But Beethoven did not like that: he had worked a lot and now everything ended like that? That was nonsense! So, he changed something in the opera and this new version was represented in 1806: now, everything could be fine, the French had went back to France, the opera was brilliant...

"Did you enjoy your stay in Vienna?"
"Well, you know... the Austrian people are strange: they kept on saying Fidelio, Fidelio and looked at us!"

...but now Beethoven himself didn't like the result and kept on re-writing the opera. It became sort of a hobby: when he had a little free time, instead of doing crosswords, he wrote music for Fidelio. The only problem was that Beethoven didn't have much free time and the final version of the opera was represented only in 1814.

So, if we want to sum up, Beethoven wrote three versions of Fidelio:

1. The first version was represented in 1805 in front of an audience composed mainly by French soldiers
2. The second version, which is a little bit different from the first, was represented in 1806
3. The third version, which is the one which is played today and which is very different from the other two, was first represented in 1814

Fidelio didn't have a great success when it was first represented. It was only in the 1820s that the opera became very popular and represented everywhere in Austria and in Germany. Why? Well, like in detective stories what you have to do is to look for the woman, cherchez la femme, as the French say. And the woman, in this case, is a very famous opera singer of the XIX Century: Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient.

Frau Schröder-Devrient is a very important figure in history of music for many reasons: she inspired very much Richard Wagner when he was moving the first steps in the world of opera and she supported him while, in the 1840s, both she and Wagner lived in Dresden: she invited him at her house and, what's more, she sang in the first representation of many Wagner's operas (Rienzi, The Flying Dutchman, Tannhäuser). Which is quite kind from her part, given that at the time she was a very famous opera singer and Richard Wagner a quite unknown composer who hadn't had success in Paris some years before. The importance of Wilhelmine for Wagner's career is shown by the fact that Wagner, who liked to speak ill of everybody, always expressed a deep respect and gratitude to Schröder-Devrient.

Well, Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient had sung in Fidelio when she was seventeen and she'd liked the opera. So, when she became famous, she began to play Fidelio in all the theatres in Germany and she made the German audience love this opera. Fidelio began to be represented more and more in German theatres and it still is today.

Thank you, Wilhelmine!

3. The three Leonores: back to the beginning!

Now we know everything about Fidelio (well, we haven't talked very much about the plot, but I promise I'll do that in another post) and we can talk about what we were saying in the beginning of this post: we can talk about the three Leonore overtures.

We've said that Beethoven wrote, re-wrote and re-wrote again Fidelio and one of the things that he didn't like and that he kept on changing was the overture to the opera. In 1805, for the first representation of Fidelio (yes, the representation in front of the French soldiers), he wrote the overture which now is known as Leonora II...

...then, in 1806, for the representation of the second version of the opera, he changed the overture and wrote Leonora III. Wait, wait... and Leonora I? Well, Leonora I was written later, for a representation of Fidelio which had to take place in Prague (and which at last didn't take place).

But Beethoven didn't like the three Leonore overtures and there's a reason for that: they were wonderful, maybe a bit too long but musically stunning, but they had a problem: they revealed to the audience how the opera ended. In order to understand this, I have to make a little spoiler and say what's the end of Fidelio: in the end of Fidelio, Leonore, who until now has been disguised as a man, reveals her real identity and saves Florestan from death by pointing a gun against Don Pizarro, the governor of the prison. She'd probably kill him but suddenly...

...the trumpet plays and a man sent by the king of Spain arrives, sets Florestan free and arrests Don Pizarro.

Well, all three Leonore overtures have in the end this here-come-the-goodies trumpet sound. So, from the very beginning of the opera you know that in the end the man sent by the king of Spain will come and set everyone free. Which is not exactly very good, from a theatrical point of view.

So, Beethoven at last decided to write a short overture, which was featured in the 1814 version of Fidelio and which is the one we can listen to nowadays. The three Leonore overtures continued and still continue to be played in concerts, since they're really beautiful. Mahler used to play Leonore III before Fidelio's act II and many conductors did that after him, even if this tradition is less followed today.

So, can you understand now what was my problem with Baremboim's choice? He used Leonore II instead of the traditional Fidelio overture, but Beethoven himself had rejected Leonore II as an overture to Fidelio and had decided to replace it with the overture we can listen to nowadays!

But, after all, Fidelio is a wonderful opera and I hope you'll go and listen to it. I will write again soon and we'll talk about the operas of Verdi you should absolutely listen to.

See you soon!

When "Il Trovatore" met contemporary music: Luciano Berio, Italo Calvino and "La vera storia" - Part 2 - Looking for the true story

Now that you know Luciano Berio and Italo Calvino, let's move on and talk about La Vera Storia. Let's start from basics: La Vera Storia is strictly related to Il Trovatore. In fact, the plot of the first act shows us both what in Il Trovatore is represented on scene (two men fight because they love the same woman) and what in Il Trovatore is not represented on scene but is only told by Azucena and Ferrando.

1. Act 1: the story of Ada and Ugo

So, let's see what happens during the first act. When the curtain opens, we are in a square in a town in Southern Italy. It's feast day and all the people are happy; there's a brass band playing and everything seems to be going well.

But suddenly something happens: the police arrives...

...they take a man...

...and they execute him, as you cannot see in the following image (sorry, the scene was too violent. But here below you can see some people having a nice party during the popular feast).

What happens right now? It is very easy: Ada, the executed man's daughter (to be fair, Calvino in the libretto write that she could be his daughter, giving to this a certain degree of uncertainty, while Berio writes in the score that she is the executed man's daughter, showing this relationship to be certain) abducts the son of Ugo, who is the Governor of the Town and who she thinks is responsible for her father's death. So, she takes Ugo's son away and takes him to the big tentacular city...

...where he'll become a broker without heart (ok, I made up the last point).

Now, after the abduction of Ugo's son, a cantastoria enters and sings a Ballad. It is the first of six Ballads the cantastoria will sing during the first act: the six ballads comment what's happening on scene and have a musical style which can be archaic, modern or popular. In the first representation of La Vera Storia, the cantastoria was interpreted by the famous Italian pop singer Milva and in the following video we can see her singing the first Ballad from La Vera Storia. In this Ballad, the cantastoria explains why Ada decided to abduct Ugo's son:

We've already said that Berio was very interested in popular traditions and that's why one of the characters in this opera is a cantastoria, who sometimes enters and sing a ballad to comment what happened on scene. Do you know what a cantastoria is? Cantastorie were, in Southern Italy (but we can find them also elsewhere, for instance in the Balkans), popular storytellers who went in towns and villages and there told stories and sang songs about various subjects: love, death, heroes of the Carolingian cycle (let's think for instance about Sicilian Opera dei Pupi) and about events which had recently happened in the region or in the country (for instance, there are many Cantastorie songs which speak about bandits in Southern Italy in the second half of 1800). So, they both entertained and informed about various subjects the audience who listened to them during the feasts.

Berio puts this form of popular storytelling in his opera and makes a pop singer play the cantastoria: this creates an opera in which two worlds coexist and interact. In fact, we have:

1) The world of the "characters" (Ada, Ugo, the condemned to death, the choir and the other characters we'll meet later): the characters act on scene and are the protagonists of what's happening. They are interpreted by "traditional" opera singers, even though Berio make those singers use their voices in lots of different and sometimes uncommon and not-so-traditional ways: he make them sing, he make them talk, he make them use sprechgesang and so on. Do you remember when we talked about Berio's interest for voice and ways of singing? Well, in La Vera Storia we can see an example of that.

2) The world of "narration", which is represented by the cantastoria (to be fair, there are two cantastorie): the cantastoria does not take part to what happen on scene, but comment, repete or tell in a poetic way what's going on. What's more, the cantastoria, as we've already said, is not interpreted by a traditional opera singer but by a pop singer.

But now let's move on...

After the abduction of his son, Ugo dies of sorrow...

...and his other son Ivo takes his place, promising to avenge him.

2. Act 1: the story of Ivo, Luca and Leonora

What follows is very simple: Ivo falls in love with Leonora, who is loved by Luca as well. The two men quickly begin to struggle for Leonora's love and Ivo is supported by the police, while Luca is supported by the people. Luca and Ivo fight a duel...

...and Ivo gets wounded and Luca is arrested and condemned to death.

Now Ivo is in hospital and Luca is in jail, while Little Ugo joined a populist movement and is candidate for MP in general elections (ok, I made the last point up).

3. "La Vera Storia" and "Il Trovatore": two operas on narration

Now that we've talked about Act I, we'll make what you all expect us to do...

...and we won't talk about Act II. Oh, you'll say, that's nonsense! Let us now what happen in act II, come on! Well, actually, that's the problem: in act II nothing happens. Act II is simply a re-elaboration of musical and textual materials which have already been used in Act I. In other words, in Act II we listen to the same music and words we've listened to in Act I, but put in a different order and with changes and cuts.

Act II is, as Berio said, a repetition or a parody of Act I and this is proved also by the fact that, if we go and read the libretto, we discover that there's no libretto for act two; instead, there is a table in which Berio writes in what scene of Act II we'll find the texts and the musical pieces we've heard in Act I. The table, for those who are interested, is this:

What does this mean? Basicly, that Act I and Act II tell the same story, with (almost) the same words and (almost) the same music. What changes is simply the way in which the story is told: in Act I, the facts are shown on scene in chronological order, in Act II they are shown in a more chaotic order, as  if the story was set in a dream.

Why does Berio do that?

To understand that, we should go back to where we started, which is Il Trovatore's narrative polyphony. In fact, Berio writes that Act I and Act II talk about the same story in two different ways

as if two cantastorie told two different stories about the same event.

(from Berio's Author's note to La Vera Storia - the full text (in Italian) in avaiable here)

Does it remind you of something? Where have we listened to two people telling in two different ways the same story? Of course: it was in Il Trovatore! There, both Azucena and Ferrando told the story of Azucena's mother death and of the abduction of Count of Luna's son, but they told it in a very different way.

It is not a casual relationship: in fact, as you've probably noticed by reading the plot of act I, La Vera Storia and Il Trovatore tell exactly the same story. The difference between the two operas is simply that in La Vera Storia we can see on scene two events which in Il Trovatore are only told by some characters and never shown on scene:

1. the execution of Azucena's mother (who in La Vera Storia is replaced by Ada's father)
2. ...and the abduction of the son of the Count of Luna (who in La Vera Storia is replaced by Ugo).

That's the only difference, but the stories the two operas tell are basicly the same.

And, as in Il Trovatore we may ask what's the true story, whether it is Ferrando's one or Azucena's one, so Berio asked, in his Author's note, whether in La Vera Storia the true story is the one which is told in the first act or the one which is represented in the second act. He wrote:

But where is the true story? In Act I or in Act II? I don't know.

(ibidem)

And this statement makes the name of Berio's opera (La Vera Storia means "the true story" in Italian) sound a little bit ironic, doesn't it?

Besides, La Vera Storia's title comes from Il Trovatore as well: in fact, in the beginning of Il Trovatore, the soldiers ask Ferrando to tell them about Azucena's mother by telling him:

...la vera storia ci narra di Garzìa...

...which means: "Tell us Garzia's true story" (I won't stress again that the story Ferrando will tell after this request won't be the true story, it will simply be his point of view on the story: Azucena will have a different view on the events he speaks about and she will let us know that in the second act of the opera. So, again, you can see here the impossibility of knowing which one of the two stories is the real true story). What's more, lots of Sicilian and in general Southern Italian cantastorie began their stories by telling the audience: "I'll tell you the true story of...", so we can also see the influence of popular narration on the title of this opera.

So, La Vera Storia helps us understand more about Il Trovatore: both operas deal with the impossibility of telling completely the truth through narration (and in general through art) and so they try to solve this problem by using multiple narrators and point of views.

Both those two operas feature characters whose role is sometimes to tell what happened and not to take part to the action: in Il Trovatore, we can see that sometimes the action on scene suddenly stops and some characters which are involved in the development of the story tell a story which can speak about a far past, as in Ferrando and Azucena's case, or about something recently happened, as in Manrico's case when he tells about his duel with the Count of Luna. Berio, in La Vera Storia, goes even further: here, there are some characters who have only what we can call the "narrative" function and never take part to the action and some characters who are only part of the action and never stop to tell. Again, what in Verdi was immature is largely developed in Berio's opera, where, as we've already said, we have a separation between the world of the characters who tell and the world of the characters who act.

It would probably excessive to see in this difference between the two operas a different view the two authors had on the role of the narrator: someone who is part of the flow of life in Verdi's case, someone who look to others' lives and tell their stories to other people without taking part to that show of actors who struts and frets their hour upon the stage (as someone sometimes said) which we call life in Berio's case.

We could go on talking for hours about this two great operas. Sadly, we have to stop now, but I'd like you to remember two things, after what we've said:

1. Italian music and Italian opera are not dead after Puccini's death
2. Il Trovatore definitely is not simply "a wonderful opera with an idiot libretto". We know that Verdi had very clear in mind what he wanted to do when he wrote it (we can see that for instance by looking at the changes he made to the original plot, which as we know came from Spanish drama El Trovador), so we should treat this opera with a little bit more respect. We should think about Il Trovatore as if it were an opera of Verdi's, which it actually is, and not as if Verdi had written it because he thought: "Oh, you know, I have some wonderful music, let's look for some stupid words to put on that. The audience is so silly and they won't notice the opera is complete nonsense!"

After that, I say you goodbye but don't be afraid: I'll be back soon and we'll talk about Verdi's Rigoletto, about the 5 operas by Verdi you should absolutely listen to and about Beethoven's three Leonore overtures.

So, stay tuned and see you soon!

When "Il Trovatore" met contemporary music: Luciano Berio, Italo Calvino and "La vera storia" - Part 1 - Meet the authors

Hello and welcome back to "A punk at the opera", the series which explains you opera with images and words. In our latest episodes, we talked about Verdi's Il Trovatore and we said that one of the things I like most in this opera is the fact that we never see on scene the events which were the cause of all that happens (Azucena's mother's death and Azucena's revenge), but we listen to many characters telling them from their point of view. We called it "narrative poliphony": characters tell the same story, but they don't do it in the same way; when Azucena tells us the story of her mother's death and of what happened after that, she stresses the horror of that death in order to justify her revenge. On the contrary, when the same story is told by Ferrando, we hear the voice of those who condemned Azucena's mother believing her to be a witch and who thought that Azucena's revenge was cruel and bloody.

Well, we have to remember that "narrative poliphony" because what follows is exactly about this. In fact, when in the last part of the Seventies a brand new opera inspired by Il Trovatore was written (Berio and Calvino's La Vera Storia, which was first represented in 1982), it was based exactly on this feature of the original opera.

But let's start from the beginning and let's meet the authors of La Vera Storia: Luciano Berio and Italo Calvino...

1. Meet the authors: Luciano Berio and musical tradition

A friend of mine once said: "Italian music ended when Puccini died". I can understand his point, but I cannot agree with it. Paraphrasing Neil Young, I could say: "Hey hey, my my, Italian music will never die": there were many Italian composers after Puccini's death and some of them were, in my opinion, even more important and more interesting than Puccini (who of course remains one of best opera composers ever). Let's think about, for instance, one of the masterpieces of the second part of the XX Century, Battistelli's Experimentum mundi. You can hear it here (and I promise that I will make a post about it very soon): do you still think Italian music has nothing to say? We can put it in this way: Italian opera, in its traditional sense of a show which was able to mix wonderful music, interesting stories and sometimes serious stuff and subjects, ended with Puccini's death. But after that, many composers came and Italian music moved on, with new ideas, new kinds of music, new subjects. And with beautiful new music, of course. 

One of the most important composers (or probably, to be fair, the most important composer) in Italian music of the XX Century is Luciano Berio, who is the guy you can see in the following image.

Berio was born in Italian region Liguria, in the town of Imperia, which is the place you can see in the following image...

...and he wrote music for more than fifty years, from his first works in the Forties until his death in 2003. 

Berio was interested in many things. For instance, he had the idea that contemporary music could use musical materials and ideas coming from other authors and from authors of the past. So, there was no need to write "new" music, composers could simply take music which someone had already written, place it in a different context, with different instruments, different orchestration, repeating it several times and so on and create in this way a brand new musical composition.

Right now you'd say: oh, well, you're joking. Everyone could write music like that! Well, I must admit that if you compare the already-written music Berio uses in his works to the compositions in which he puts it, well, you'd probably agree with me that Berio's compositions have nothing to do with the original musical pieces. Let's make a simple example, let's talk about, say, Berio's Sinfonia ("Symphony"): there, Berio uses various musical quotes (mainly from Mahler, but also from other works, you can see a list of the quotations he uses here), but, when you hear the symphony, you're not able to recognize the single quotes because they're mixed among them, melt with brand new music Berio wrote for this composition and the final result is absolutely astonishing and original, probably one of the masterpieces of XX Century:

I think you can understand now. The choir talks and says various things about various topics, the voices and the orchestra create rhythms and colours which sound very "modern" to our ears and at last it is quite difficult to isolate the musical quotes Berio uses from the context in which he puts them. Yes, he used music which someone else had already written, but created with it an architecture which was completely and absolutely new.

Already-written music is easier to recognize in Rendering: here, Berio takes the sketches Schubert had written for a Tenth Symphony he was never able to conclude and joins them by using sort of a "musical glue" which is made by Schubert compositions re-orchestrated in order to make them sound "strange" and "not-Schubertian" (for instance, to do so he uses celesta, an instrument which didn't exist in Schubert's time, in his re-orchestration). So, the audience can understand what are the parts of the composition which were part of Schubert's sketches for his Tenth Symphony (which are the parts which sound "right" and "Schubertian") and the parts which are the "musical glue" added by Berio (which are the parts which sound "strange" and "not-Schubertian"). This is what restorers do when they restore a painting: they don't add parts which lack, they simply put there a grey colour in order to show that those parts are lost. And this is exactly what Berio does.

You can try to identify original Schubert music and Berio's added music yourself, by hearing Rendering in the following video:

It wasn't difficult, was it?

We have to say that this idea of using already-written music and already-existing materials in a brand new context is something we can often find in contemporary music: for instance, many Minimalist composers will compose their works by using loops of already-written music or of recorded voices (listen to Steve Reich's It's gonna rain for further informations). But this is something we can find also in pop music: many rappers use samples of someone else's songs to rap and sing on it and so do many pop singer and many authors of dance music.

2. Meet the authors: Luciano Berio and the use of voice

But we'll talk more about that in another post... right now, let's go back and talk about Berio.

Another important feature in Berio's works is voice. Berio was very interested in exploring the possibilities of human voice and he was deeply influenced in this by Cathy Berberian, an American mezzo-soprano who was his wife for fourteen years and who, even after their marriage had ended, sang in many first performances of Berio's compositions. Berberian had a wonderful voice and wanted to explore all the colours her voice could express. She could sing wonderful themes and then speak or growl, she could perform very difficult and not-so-pleasant-to-hear contemporary music tunes and then sing some folksongs. Berio learned very much from her and used her extraordinary vocal skills in his works, as we can hear in this Sequenza III for female voice which he wrote in 1965 and which is here performed by Cathy Berberian herself:

What's more, Berio later developed an interest for singers who usually sang music genres which were different from classical music. For instance, he chose the Swingle Singers to sing in his Symphony (it is the composition we've heard before) and, as we'll see, his 1982 opera La Vera Storia features Italian pop singer Milva as a ballad singer. Again, don't think that this is something strange (What? Using pop singers in contemporary music? This guy must have gone mad!): many other authors in contemporary music made folk singers or pop singers sing in their compositions: two years after La Vera Storia's first representation, for instance, Salvatore Sciarrino represented in Florence his opera Lohengrin, in which the vocal part was performed by...

...yes, of course, it was performed by Italian pop and folk singer Daisy Lumini.

3. Meet the authors: Luciano Berio and folk music

The third important feature in Berio's music is his interest for folksongs and folk tunes. In many compositions, he uses tunes which come from popular tradition and puts them in the context of a sperimental music composition. This interest for popular tradition is something common in modern and contemporary music: Bela Bartok, for instance, used to go in Rumanian and Hungarian villages in order to find new tunes to place in his compositions and we can find the influence of popular music in many Stravinskij's works as well. More recently, popular music has a great importance in the compositions of Argentine contemporary composer Osvaldo Golijov, whose works mix samba, flamenco, Yiddish music and many other musical traditions with contemporary music.

This does not mean that Berio went in small Sicilian villages in order to record popular songs and tunes, as you can see in the following image...

...(he lived in times in which finding popular tunes was simpler than that), but it means that many of his compositions feature or are based on popular music.

The most important example of that are his Folk songs, which besides are my favourite composition of Berio's. Here, Berio takes some tunes coming from the popular tradition of various countries and some pieces he had written in his youth and re-arranges them and re-creates them for a seven players ensemble. In doing that, he puts in this pieces musical colours and rhythms that the original tunes did not have and the result of all that is that Berio's composition is very different from the original tunes. That means that when you hear Berio's Folk Songs you think: "Oh, that's a composition by Berio!" and you don't think: "Oh, that's a new arrangement Berio composed for some folk songs!". You can hear this yourself in the following video:

Berio writes that he wrote his Folk songs because

I never was at ease when I listened to folk songs accompanied by piano. That's why [...] in 1964 I wrote this Folk songs for mezzosoprano and seven performers and then for voice and chamber orchestra (1973). [...] I obviously re-interepreted [the folk songs I used] from a rhytmical and harmonic point of view; so, I sort of re-composed them. The music which is played by the instruments wants to suggest and comment the cultural roots of each song. This roots are related not only with the origins of these songs, but also with the history of the ways this songs were used.

(taken from Berio's Autor's note on Folk Songs)

In Berio's Folk Songs, we can find folk songs which come from various country, in this work and we can even listen to an Armenian folk song (it is the last song you hear in the composition) which Cathy Berberian heard on an old record of URSS folk songs when she was a child and which she sang by heart to Berio trying to reproduce phonetically the sound of the original Armenian text; so, the lyrics of this last song mean nothing, being simply an attempt of reconstructing how the original lyrics sounded like.

There are other compositions in which Berio uses folk tunes: for instance, his 1986 composition Naturale for viola, percussion and tape features the recorded voice of Sicilian storyteller Peppino Celano singing some folk songs and his 1984 composition Voci for viola and orchestra is based on worksongs, lullabies, abbagnate (songs of hawkers) and lovesongs coming from various Sicilian towns.

At the end of our discussion on Berio's works, you may think Berio is somewhat different from the other contemporary composers. And the reason for that is simple: you're probably used to thinking that contemporary music is all about cacophonous compositions and tunes which are unpleasant to hear, while, as you could see, many Berio's compositions are quite easy to listen to. Does this mean that Berio is an "anomalous" contemporary composer?

No. And to explain that, let me introduce you Mr. Theodor Adorno.

Adorno was a German philosopher and part of the Frankfurt School (a school whose aim was to develop Marxist analysis on capitalistic society and where the so-called Critical Theory was born); what's more, he was a musician and a composer. He studied with Alban Berg and he wrote lots of books about music of various authors and about contemporary music.

In one of those books, Adorno wrote that Schoenberg is "revolutionary", because he destroys the tonal system and does not care about what the audience's reaction will be...

...while Stravinskij is reactionary, because he gives the audience what they want, that is melody.

Apart from the "revolutionary" or "reactionary" label, with which one can or cannot agree, but which are not so important for what we are going to talk about, we must admit that in XX Century music we can see two main trends, which are exacty the ones Adorno detected:

1) Some authors did not place melodies in their works and refused any compromise with the tonal system, as Schoenberg had done
2) Other authors placed in their works melodies which sometimes were popular tunes, sometimes were newly written tunes, as Stravinskij had done

For instance, Pierre Boulez and the authors who met at the Darmstadt school tried to refuse any influence of the music of the past in their works. There were a reason for that: World war two had just finished and the Nazis had used the tradition of Austrian and German music in order to celebrate the superiority of the Aryan race. We can understand, so, that composers who came just after the war wanted to write something  which had to be completely different from the music which the Nazis had used in their celebrations and which was played in concerts on the occasion of Hitler's birthday.

On the other hand, we can see an interest for inserting melodic tunes in sperimental compositions in many authors. Berio is one of them, but we must admit that probably on the long run Stravinkij's position has won: today, there are probably more authors who try to put some melody in their compositions than authors who still believe in the need to write something completely different from traditional tonal music. We've already named some of those authors (Golijov, for instance) and we could name many others, but this will take a lot of time and we want to talk about La Vera Storia.

What I wanted to say was simply that: don't be suprised if Berio does not match your idea of the typical contemporary composer just because he puts melodies in his music: that's quite normal in XX Century music!

4: Meet the authors: Italo Calvino between surrealism and reality

And, now that we've known the composers, let's go further and let me introduce you the librettist. Ladies and gentlemen, here's Italo Calvino!

Italo Calvino is probably the most important author in Italian literature in the second part of the XX Century. In his works, he shows an interest both for realism (as we can see, for instance, in his novel on Italian Civil War The Path to the Spider's nest) and for fantastic stories, as we can see for instance in his book Invisible Cities. In this book, Calvino imagines that famous Italian explorer Marco Polo tells Kubla Khan about the cities he saw during his travels; the description of those cities is not a realistic one (nor the cities are actual ones: they are fictional cities to whom Calvino gives female names), it is an evocative, fantastic description which deals with philosophical and literary issues. In 2013, American composer Christopher Cerrone wrote an opera based on this book, Invisible Cities, which was first performed in Los Angeles and which seems to be interesting, from what I can hear from the various excerpts which are avaiable online (when I buy the record I'll let you know more about this opera).

Calvino, who was born in 1923, suddely died in 1985 because of a stroke, but his legacy as a writer is still very important in contemporary literature: for instance, Portuguese writer and poet Gonçalo Tavares payed homage to Calvino by calling one of the characters which live in the fictional neighbourhood in which many of his stories are set "o senhor Calvino", Mr. Calvino and by making this Mr. Calvino the main character in one of those stories.

But here we're not interested very much in Calvino as a novelist (even though he is a wonderful novelist and short stories writer): this is an opera blog and so we're more interested in Calvino as a librettist. Calvino was always interested in music: in the Fifties, he wrote lyrics for some songs whose music was written by composer Sergio Liberovici. The best known of these songs is Oltre il ponte (Beyond the bridge, you can find the original lyrics and an English translation here), in which Calvino gives us a poetic memory of his experience as a partisan during the Italian Civil war and which you can hear below performed by Italian folk band Modena City Ramblers and by Italian theatrical actor and author Moni Ovadia:

But the most important collaboration of Calvino with composers is surely represented by the librettos he wrote for Luciano Berio. Calvino, who in an interview he gave in 1982 denied to be a librettist (you can find it here, unfortunately, it is only in Italian) because

[...]librettists such as Francesco Maria Piave had an authority I haven't!

(taken from Calvino's interview in Musica Viva, february 1982)

had known Berio since 1956, but it was only in the end of the Seventies that they decided to write an opera together. The result of this collaboration was the opera we're going to talk about, La Vera Storia; after that, Berio and Calvino wrote another opera, Un re in ascolto ("A king listens"), which was first represented in 1984 and which was based on a short story by Calvino. Un re in ascolto, like La Vera Storia, deals with a famous theatrical work of the past: here, the two author do not make reference to Il Trovatore, as they do in La Vera Storia, but to Shakespeare's The Tempest.

And now that we know the authors, we can go on and see what they wrote together. We're going to talk about La Vera Storia...