Successful Encounters with Tradition

Works by Luciano Berio and Igor Stravinsky

Every attempt at human communication reflects the desire for productive encounters and fruitful dialogues. In everyday life, but also when one of the dialogue partners is a work of art - a text or musical composition - with which another artist, a composer, for instance, enters into a creative relationship, with the goal of producing something new as a result of this encounter. As Luciano Berio and Igor Stravinsky did, for example - each with a different intent and approach to composition, but with similar success.

Luciano Berio chose distance for his creative encounters: "I think it is sometimes important to suggest a certain indifference towards a particular text, in order to be able to maintain a certain degree of musical distance from it." Berio's pivotal childhood dream of crossing the oceans of the world as a captain and calling at many ports without being tied down to one place may have inspired this belief in productive "indifference". Beyond every experience, every discovery from distant lands, always keeping the open horizon in view, where everything that is ostensibly adapted retains the character of irreconcilable foreignness.

Berio's penchant for deliberately chosen, wide-ranging text material may well be rooted in this childlike fantasy. In Coro for 40 Voices and 44 Instruments he uses translated song texts from the Sioux, Zuni - a Pueblo Indian tribe - and Navajo. Others texts are from Polynesia, Peru, Chile, Persia, Africa, Croatia, Venice, Sicily and Piedmont; a Hebraic text fragment is taken from the Old Testament book, the Song of Solomon. This compilation is by no means an example of nonchalant, even naïve exoticism, however, since the collage is dramaturgically linked by poetry of the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda.

By selecting a montage of lines drawn from Neruda's poetry collection Residence on Earth as the framework for Coro, Berio combines the bright colours of his childhood dream of becoming a captain with the dark undertone of disillusionment - for example, when individual lines of poetry ("Come and see the blood in the streets") stand out from the finely woven texture of his composition like unexpected, sharp edges.

Berio conceived Coro as a large musical organism - an impression which is already conveyed by the direct interaction of voices and instruments. In Coro the customary physical separation between the chorus and orchestra is eliminated in favour of a close integration of singers and instrumentalists. With the exception of the piano, organ and percussion section, each orchestral instrument forms a sound pair with one of the 40 singers.

In 31 episodes of widely differing lengths, Berio presents the texts with varying degrees of intelligibility, continually reiterating the connections between the poetic and acoustic dimension of the words. Neruda's poetry is sung by the chorus alone, while the traditional song texts are treated at times soloistically, at times chorally, with numerous intermediate stages. Direct, quotation-like references to the musical forms of the traditional songs from which the texts are derived are barely discernible, however; only during the fifth episode is a brief melodic fragment from a Macedonian folk song heard.

In Coro Berio constantly emphasises the fact that single individuals, with their hopes and experiences, are always behind the manifestations of every culture. The composition begins like an art song, with a soprano solo accompanied by the piano, later expanded to a duet with a solo contralto voice. The subject of an established Western European cultural tradition seems to express itself here, in sharp contrast to the at times almost sacred sound field passages which follow.

Art song versus sacred composition. In this juxtaposition, the different compositional preferences of Berio's father Ernesto and grandfather Adolfo - both organists - are reflected from afar. Luciano Berio appears to have incorporated his own familial roots into the broad spectrum of his dialogic composition, with impressive results.

How different, on the other hand, was the encounter that led to the composition of Pulcinella, Igor Stravinsky's first neoclassical work! Serge Diaghilev, with whom Stravinsky had already been collaborating for several years by then, surprised him with a collection of scores in the spring of 1919. "Diaghilev showed it to me in order to entice me," Stravinsky later observed in his memoirs.

Stravinsky gladly allowed himself to be enticed into arranging the ballet music for the amorous adventures of Pulcinella. An episode from the seventeenth century was chosen: two jealous lovers want to kill the womaniser Pulcinella and disguise themselves in his costume in order to seduce their sweethearts. Pulcinella escapes, however, with the aid of his friend Furbo and arranges the marriages of the couples, wedding his own girlfriend Pimpinella to complete the happy ending.

Fifteen musical numbers were to be composed for the eight scenes of the ballet, with three vocal soloists singing the individual roles from the orchestra pit. Pablo Picasso was commissioned to design the sets and costumes. The prospect of this collaboration was also tempting to Stravinsky, since he had attended a commedia dell'arte performance with Picasso in Naples two years earlier. "The Pulcinella was a great drunken lout whose every gesture, and probably every word if I had understood, was obscene."

Stravinsky presumably did not have obscenities in mind during his work on Pulcinella, although Diaghilev was initially shocked at the results. "I began by composing on the Pergolesi manuscripts themselves, as though I were correcting an old work of my own," Stravinsky later wrote, describing his approach. Composition meant montage, condensation, intensification, overpainting to him at that time; it meant literally recomposing the originals in instrumental colour, rhythm and tonality - and not simply delivering a "strict, mannered orchestration of something very sweet." That was apparently what Diaghilev had expected, however. If one believes Stravinsky's caustic comment, Diaghilev "went about with a look that suggested The Offended Eighteenth Century."

Stravinsky defended his attitude as "the only one that can usefully be taken up with regard to the music of bygone times" and exonerated himself "from the absurd accusations of sacrilege levelled against me. I am only too familiar with the mentality of those curators and archivists of music who jealously guard the intangibility of relics at which they never so much as look, while resenting any attempt on the part of others to resuscitate these treasures which they themselves regard as dead and sacrosanct." Stravinsky emphatically objected to a detached attitude which in the end only turns out to be digging the grave of musical tradition: "Respect alone remains barren, and can never serve as a productive or creative factor."

Stravinsky's experiences while orchestrating the music of Pergolesi (and other composers, some of whom are still unknown) for Pulcinella influenced his composition for decades. He came to know the eighteenth-century master, who died young, as a "brother in spirit". "Evoking his musical spirit" made Stravinsky "productive and prolific", and he laconically concluded, "This phenomenon is called love."