Symphony guide: Luciano Berio's

Sinfonia

This week, Luciano Berio's Sinfonia. Shurely shome mishtake? That's no

symphony, I hear you cry! But Luciano Berio's 1969 magnum opus - still his
single most famous and arguably most important piece - is precisely that: a
symphony. "Sinfonia", after all, is Italian for "symphony", it's just that while we
translate the titles of classical works by Mozart and Haydn that their composers
called sinfonias into symphonies, with Berio's piece, we somehow don't bother.
That gives "Berio's Sinfonia" a veneer of Euro-avant-garde exoticism, but it
distances a crucial part of what the piece is doing from our Anglo-Saxon
consciousnesses. This piece is an astonishingly intellectually rich and seductive
commentary on the idea of the multi-movement orchestral work, and a
labyrinthine musical-etymological analysis of the very notion of "symphony".

Luciano Berio photographed at the opening of the Academie Universelle des Cultures,
January 29, 1993. Photograph: Micheline Pelletier/ PELLETIER
MICHELINE/CORBIS SYGMA
Advertisement

Composed for the New York Philharmonic originally in 1968 as a four-

movement work, but expanded to five movements the year after, Berio's
Sinfonia takes as its starting point the notion, buried in the deep history of the
symphony, of "sounding together". That's the Greek root of the word, after all
(symphony is a combination of Greek words meaning "sound" and "together"),
and it's why the genre got going in the first place: instead of single expressive or
musical ideas being explored in individual movements, the 18th century
symphony was all about combining different moods, keys, emotions. Berio
simply - well, actually extraordinarily densely, but we'll come to that - takes that
idea as the fundamental aesthetic principle of his Symphony, so that the work is
about the sounding together of musical layers and textual references. It's a
kaleidoscope of musical pasts and presents, including a collage of orchestral
music from Beethoven to Stockhausen, as well as Berio's own oeuvre. It's a
symphonic palimpsest that's both obsessively, microscopically structured,
and completely open-ended in the variety of responses it induces in its listeners.
Advertisement

So let's begin at the beginning: the piece isn't just scored for large orchestra, but
includes crucial parts for eight amplified voices (at the premiere and many
subsequent performances, the Swingle Singers). That allows Berio to include the
entire range of vocal possibility as part of the soundings-together in the piece,
from austere vowel sounds to spoken quotations from Samuel Beckett, the
anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, self-reflexive commentaries on the
performance as it's going along, and even excerpts from Berio's own writings.
Berio's orchestra is a multi-layered reference machine that includes a shadowy
third section of violins who play at the back of the ensemble behind the
percussionists, as well as a couple of electronic organs and saxophones.

A "reference machine"? Here's what I mean - Berio's Symphony is a

flabbergastingly rich strata of writings-on and writings-over that includes, but is
not limited to, the following: in the first movement, the main textual material
for the singers is Lévi-Strauss's pioneering work in the deep structures of myths
from all over the world from which Berio chooses a sequence of myths and
connections that focus on water and death. The second movement is an
amplification of Berio's own piece, O King, written in 1968 as a memorial to
Martin Luther King; it's a musical meditation that circles around cycles of pitch
and rhythm and puts Martin Luther King's name together from the individual
phonemes that make up those words. The short fourth movement returns to a
world of myth and reflection, and the fifth movement turns the rest of the piece
itself into the basis of an even more extraordinary palimpsest that reviews, re-
writes, and reconstitutes the rest of the piece into a seven-minute kaleidoscope
that both sums up the project of this symphony, and opens up even more
questions about what it all means.

Advertisement

And there's the third movement, the Symphony's most famous section. It's
notorious because this entire central panel of Berio's Symphony is written on
top of the scherzo of Mahler's Second Symphony. The Mahler is inescapable
because Berio makes his music the foundation of a spiralling chaos of
quotations, allusions, and transformations of fragments of orchestral repertoire
from Ravel's La Valse to Debussy's La Mer and Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, from
Berg's Violin Concerto to Boulez's Pli selon pli. And dozens of others. (David
Osmond-Smith's detective work in tracking down nearly every reference in this
movement is extraordinary and unsurpassed.) Sometimes the Mahler is right
there in the musical foreground, almost exactly as it appears in the Second
Symphony, at other times, Berio reduces Mahler's music to a skeletal framework
of a melodic line, rhythm, or harmony. And at still other moments, it's
obliterated by Berio's own idiom - as well as the near continuous textual and
vocal polyphony of the eight singers, here mostly concentrating on words
from Beckett's The Unnameable. The structure of the scherzo is, however,
always there in the background, and Berio preserves the shape and trajectory of
the Mahler, however subcutaneously.
The question is: why? One answer is that Berio wants to reveal the essential
palimpsest of listening that defines all musical experiences. Every time you hear
a new piece of music, your brain is filtering it through the works you know
already, and the images, experiences, and words that it calls to mind. One way
of thinking about the Sinfonia's third movement is that it writes out that
process. (Although in fact Berio's range of references was limited to the scores
he could get hold while composing the piece - he was on holiday in Sicily and
had to confine himself to what he'd taken with him and those in the public
library.)

The other reason for the Mahlerian foundation of the third movement is that the
Second Symphony's scherzo fits perfectly into the bigger programme of Berio's
Symphony. Mahler's is a piece about water, existential futility, and by extension,
death. It's also itself another palimpsest: the scherzo, as David Osmond-Smith
shows, is not only an expanded version of a song that Mahler wrote setting a
text from Des Knaben Wunderhorn about St Anthony's unfortunately pointless
sermonising to the sinful fishes, it's also, in Mahler's own description, a tragic
vision of a dance watched by an observer who can't be part of the revels. And -
and! - Mahler's music quotes Bruckner's Fourth Symphony, Beethoven's violin
sonata, op.96, and a song from Schumann's Dichterliebe that imagines a lover
watching his beloved marry someone else. Even before Berio's intervention,
Mahler's scherzo is already multi-layered with musical and extra-musical
meanings.

Advertisement

Often held up as pre-figuring a joyful postmodernism in music, the expressive

effect of the third movement of Berio's Symphony is, I think, anything but an
indulgent wallowing in the mud of musical history. There is a funny, punning
reflexivity at the end of the movement when the singers list the performers
and thank the conductor, but the bleak quotations from Beckett and Berio's own
essay, Meditation on a Twelve-Tone Horse prove Berio's real point: to find a way
of keeping going, going on, even if music "can't stop the wars, can't make the
young older or lower the price of bread". Yet, "There must be something else,
otherwise it would be quite hopeless. But it is quite hopeless... Where now?
When now?" The true function of the third movement is revealed only in
the fifth movement, when Berio really does go through the mirror and pulpate
his whole Symphony in music that's a resolution and a dissolution of the entire
work's modus operandi.

Berio's Symphony is a search for meaning that's endlessly renewed every time
it's played or heard. If you haven't listened to it yet, throw yourself into the
labyrinth right now; and if you have, listen again - and again. You will always
find something new, I promise.

Luciano Berio/New York Philharmonic Orchestra: Berio's original recording of

the 1968 version - incomplete, as it proved, but essential listening.
Pierre Boulez/Orchestre National de France: Boulez gets stuck into Berio's
historical revels, and the results are a revelation.

Riccardo Chailly/Concertgebouw Orchestra: Chailly's account has a laser-like

clarity even in Berio's densest textures of music and meaning.

Simon Rattle/City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra: this video of Sinfonia is

a magnificently imaginative period piece with the singers of Electric Phoenix:
why don't they film classical music like this any more?