Luciano Berio

Sinfonia (1964)

Berio composed Sinfonia in 1968 on a commission from the New York Philharmonic. It is scored for a large orchestra plus 8 amplified vocal soloists, who seldom sing, but more often speak or chant solfege syllables. The work originally had four movements, but Berio added a fifth movement in 1969.

The third movement, entitled “In ruhig fliessender Bewegung,” is a collage of references to other musical works. The title comes from the third movement of Mahler’s 2^nd symphony (“Resurrection”), and in fact the orchestra plays Mahler’s scherzo more or less from beginning to end. But the performance is interrupted, overlaid, melded and fused with a large number of other pieces, for example La Mer (Debussy), Symphonie fantastique (Berlioz), La Valse (Ravel), Rite of Spring and Agon (Stravinsky), Rosenkavalier (Strauss) and many others. Berio quotes a passage, a melody or just a chord from another work, then returns to the increasingly distorted performance of the Mahler scherzo. The voices, meanwhile, recite passages from The Unnamable, a novel by Samuel Beckett (1953) as well as scraps of other words, including performance indications from the Mahler score, graffiti, and bits of Berio’s own writings. What sets of a quotation from this or that piece? Sometimes a chord or an interval in the Mahler symphony seems to have suggested another piece to Berio (e.g. a rhythm of repeated 8^th notes suggests Rite of Spring); sometimes a line in the text suggests a musical passage (“lowing cows” calls forth a quotation from Beethoven’s Pastorale Symphony); sometimes one quoted piece leads to another in a chain of suggestion (La Valse is followed by a waltz from Rosenkavalier, followed by a vocal passage from Rosenkavalier).

Berio never explained just what he intended by recomposing a famous piece by another composer and filling it up with quotations from so many other famous pieces. Perhaps he is saying something about the nature of musical memory – we see a meter maid and find ourselves humming a Beatles tune. Perhaps he is saying something about the web of connections between musical past and musical present that composers and listeners make their way through. Perhaps he was just having a good time.