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...
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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
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...
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...
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