Sinfonia (Berio)

Sinfonia (Symphony) is a composition by the Italian composer Luciano Berio which was commissioned by the New York Philharmonic for its 125th anniversary. Composed in 1968–69 for orchestra and eight amplified voices, it is a musically innovative post-serial classical work, with multiple vocalists commenting about musical (and other) topics as the piece twists and turns through a seemingly neurotic journey of quotations and dissonant passages. The eight voices are not used in a traditional classical way; they frequently do not sing at all, but speak, whisper and shout words by Claude Lévi-Strauss, whose "Le cru et le cuit" provides much of the text, excerpts from Samuel Beckett's novel "The Unnamable", instructions from the scores of Gustav Mahler and other writings.
Leonard Bernstein states in the text version of his Charles Eliot Norton Lectures from 1973 that "Sinfonia" was representative of the new direction classical music was taking after the pessimistic decade of the sixties.
Premieres.
Originally commissioned by the New York Philharmonic for its 125th anniversary, "Sinfonia" was premiered on October 10, 1968 by the orchestra and The Swingle Singers, with Berio conducting. At the time, the work was still in four movements. In the months after the premiere Berio added a fifth movement, which was first played when "Sinfonia" was performed during the 1969 Donaueschingen Festival by the Southwest German Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Ernest Bour, and subsequently in London at the July 22 Promenade concert, with the BBC Symphony Orchestra and The Swingle Singers conducted by the composer. The New York Philharmonic first played the five movement version of "Sinfonia" on October 8, 1970, conducted by Leonard Bernstein, to whom the work is dedicated.
Instrumentation.
The "Sinfonia" is scored for a large orchestra:
Movements.
The work is in five movements:
The first movement primarily uses a French text source and the third movement primarily uses English text sources. The text for the second movement is limited to the phonemes of the title, "O Martin Luther King." The remaining movements are primarily instrumental with occasional vocal elements. The overall form of the piece is an arch form with elements of the first movement reflected in the fifth and connections between the second and fourth. The third movement, a study of inter-relations, stands on its own.
First movement.
In the first movement of "Sinfonia", Berio uses texts from "Le cru et le cuit" ("The Raw and the Cooked") by the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. The form of the piece is also inspired by Lévi-Strauss, who in his work on mythology had found that many myths were structured like musical compositions, with some myths having a "fugal" form and others resembling a sonata. One mythical transformation however, had a structure for which he was not able to find a musical equivalent, and Berio himself said that he used this form in his "Sinfonia"—though Lévi-Strauss did not initially notice this. Interviewed by Didier Eribon, Lévi-Strauss said:
[Y]ou know that Berio used "The Raw and the Cooked" in his "Sinfonia". A part of the text is recited, accompanied by the music. I admit that I did not grasp the reason for this choice. During an interview a musicologist asked me about it, and I answered that the book had just come out and the composer had probably used it because it was at hand. Now, a few months ago Berio, whom I don't know, sent me a very disgruntled letter. He had read the interview, several years after the fact, and assured me that the movement of this symphony offered the musical counterpart of the mythical transformation I was revealing. He included a book by a musicologist who had demonstrated the fact. I apologized for the misunderstanding, which was, I said, the result of my lack of musical training, but I'm still baffled.
Second movement: O King.
In 1968, Berio completed "O King", a work dedicated to the memory of Martin Luther King Jr.. This movement exists in two versions: one for voice, flute, clarinet, violin, cello and piano, the other for eight voices and orchestra. The orchestral version of "O King" was shortly after its completion integrated into "Sinfonia". It uses a fair amount of whole tone scale motives (which also appears in the quote from "Le Sacre du Printemps" in the third movement).
Third movement.
In the third movement of "Sinfonia" Berio lays the groundwork by quoting multiple excerpts from the third movement scherzo from Mahler's Symphony No. 2 and has the orchestra play a slightly cut-up, re-shuffled and occasionally re-orchestrated version of it. Many have described Berio's third movement as a "musical collage", in essence using an "Ivesian" approach to the entire movement (American composer Charles Ives in his Symphony No. 2 first used musical quotation techniques on a grand scale at the turn of the 20th century about 65 years earlier).
The orchestra plays snatches of Claude Debussy's "La mer", Maurice Ravel's "La valse", Igor Stravinsky's "The Rite of Spring", as well as quotations from Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern, Johannes Brahms, Henri Pousseur, Paul Hindemith, and many others (including Berio himself) creating a dense collage, occasionally to humorous effect. When one of the reciters says "I have a present for you", the orchestra follows immediately with the introductory chord from "Don", the first movement from "Pli selon pli" by Pierre Boulez.
The quoted fragments are often chosen because they bear a rhythmic or melodic likeness to Mahler's scherzo. For example, Berio uses a violin line from the second movement of Alban Berg's violin concerto with chromatically descending sixteenth notes two measures before a similarly descending line appears in Mahler's scherzo. This is then accompanied by another violin descent, taken from Johannes Brahms' violin concerto. The text from Beckett at this point begins, "So after a period of immaculate silence there seemed", but, instead of continuing the quotation ("a feeble cry was heard by me"), Berio substitutes the words "to be a violin concerto being played in the other room in three quarters" and then, after the Berg quotation, alto 2 insists on "two violin concertos", at the point where Berg is interrupted by Brahms.
The eight individual voices simultaneously recite texts from various sources, most notably the first page of Samuel Beckett's The Unnamable. Other text fragments include references to James Joyce, graffiti Berio noticed during the May 1968 protests in Paris, notes from Berio's diary, and stage direction by Mayakovsky.
Berio himself describes the movement as a "Voyage to Cythera" in which a ship filled with gifts is headed towards the island dedicated to the goddess of love.
Musical quotations.
A partial list of musical quotations used in the third movement of "Sinfonia" in order of their appearance:
Fourth movement.
The brief fourth movement is a return to the tonality of the second, relatively serene after the frenetic third movement. It begins again with a Mahler quotation—the chorus taken from the end of the "Resurrection" symphony. The voices make use of various vocal effects, including whispers, syllabic fragments, and distortions of previous textual material.
Fifth movement.
This movement was added by Berio a year later, intended to balance the first four. The movement revisits the text from the previous sections, organizing the material in a more orderly fashion to create what Berio calls "narrative substance."
It opens with a quotation from Lévi-Strauss that is at the same time a veiled reference to Mahler's second symphony: the fifth movement of "Sinfonia" opens with the words "rose de sang" (French for "rose of blood"), and the fourth movement of Mahler's symphony begins with the words "O Röschen rot!" (German for "O red rosebud!").
References.
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