Introductory note

What follows is an introduction to the only two segments that have come down to us of David Osmond-Smith's major book on Luciano Berio, a project truncated by the sudden and premature death of the author in 2007.Footnote ¹ They consist of a detailed outline proposal and a through-written draft of a first chapter, covering the period from the composer's birth in 1925 to 1953.

The biography of an artist is an audacious enterprise, doubly so if its subject is alive (or, as in this case, had passed away only recently at the time of the biography's drafting). Osmond-Smith's first, eponymous book on Berio, issued by Oxford University Press in 1991, was the second attempt at a comprehensive study of the composer's output to that date,Footnote ² and the first to follow a loosely yet essentially chronological timeline, with concise information on the most relevant biographical elements and events in Berio's life.Footnote ³ No other scholar could have obtained a more balanced result then, or equalled David's all-embracing and insightful knowledge of Berio's music when he set out to outline what he called ‘the big book’:Footnote ⁴ ‘an extended study of Luciano Berio's compositions’ within a frame that would ‘seek to place Berio's musical development in a substantially richer social and cultural context than was possible in my short OUP book of a decade ago’ (see below, 55).

The outline contains a solid and articulate plan for an interpretative study, which, had it materialized, would have been an important contribution to Berio scholarship. The rather complex architecture and content-projection of the outline reflect the originality of David's intellectual and analytical approach. His mastery of the composer's output enabled him to convey the essence of his ideas in the concise thematic paragraphs that comprise the second part of the outline, offering a large yet specific set of features for an outstanding musical portrait. But Osmond-Smith was aiming for something broader than just an essay in analysis and interpretation. He conceived the book as a ‘creative biography’:Footnote ⁵ ‘an account of biographical elements impinging upon Berio's creative development, rather than a full, personal biography’ (see below, 46).

The introductory part of the outline testifies to David's awareness of the complexity of his task. His decision to distinguish between the biographical section of the book (chapters 1–4) and the survey of the music's evolution according to a number of ‘major creative obsessions’ (chapters 5–11 – see below, 56) is motivated by his conviction that ‘Berio evolved at an early point […] a range of compositional techniques that […] were then used time and again’, so that ‘a chronologically-ordered work-by-work survey’ would not have made much sense (see below, 55). The paragraphs outlining the four biographical chapters reveal David's dilemma. Their layout does not correspond to the one proposed at the beginning of the outline (see below, 55, n. 2): they are shorter and sketchier than the thematic paragraphs, and, with the exception of the one related to the first chapter, they do not contain any biographical data that was not known from previous surveys of Berio's life and career. The planning and realization of this part of the book would no doubt have undergone substantial modifications in order to have it stand up to the author's ambition to achieve a balanced and musically significant biographical account.

The rest of this note will concern the first and only written-up chapter.Footnote ⁶ Its scope and undeniable interest for those wishing to enhance their knowledge of the early years of Berio's life and career should be recognized: but so too should its limitations in the form in which it survives. Firstly, the text comes down to us as a draft that the author himself evidently considered to be incomplete and in need of further research and editing.Footnote ⁷ Secondly, beyond that, a lot more would need to be said in order to achieve a balanced and authoritative account of the first crucial stage of the composer's personal and creative evolution.

The idea of a ‘creative biography’ implies a selection, and any such selection relies first and foremost on the biographer's sources. This is an aspect of the project on which we lack sufficient information. No draft of a comprehensive bibliography for the projected book has been found among David's papers. A digital file named ‘search out’ lists anglophone sources from which Osmond-Smith clearly sought to augment his references to the history and politics of modern Italy.Footnote ⁸ The footnotes to the draft of the chapter itself explicitly acknowledge Nicholas Doumanis and Tracy H. Koon.Footnote ⁹ A further file, named ‘Balilla e Imperia’, contains a miscellany of texts on the fascist youth movement and Berio's home town of Imperia (Oneglia), some from internet sites whose validity is questionable. The rest of the chapter is mostly oral history, much of which was transmitted to David by Berio himself in countless conversations held over some thirty years of close friendship and collaboration. It is quite likely that in a later stage of his work the author would have added a general note, similar to the one he included in the Preface to his previous Berio book.Footnote ¹⁰

Moreover, much information, both from the rich sources of oral history that were available to Osmond-Smith and from extant documentation, is missing from the chapter. Osmond-Smith's research into and around Berio's childhood and adolescence was evidently conditioned by his desire to shed light on the ‘obscure’ side of that part of the composer's life: namely the fact that, as the son of a pro-fascist father, and in adherence with common practice under the compulsory law of the régime, he was enrolled in at least two stages of the fascist youth movement (see below, 46, n. *; 48, n. †). As David had assumed, Berio did not discuss this aspect of his youth with the members of his family who did not live with him through that tumultuous period in Italy's history. This did not prevent those family members who have survived him from sensing his embarrassment; nonetheless the opportunity offered by this Journal to render public David's contribution is to be welcomed, in the hope that it will make possible its integration into future, more complete reconstructions of Berio's early biography.Footnote ¹¹ The chapter's incompleteness concerns more than just its materially unfinished state: David's interest in revealing heretofore unknown elements of those years, and his search for sources that would support it, seem to have diverted his attention from other aspects of Berio's youth. The result is a biographical account that is manifestly partial and lacking the balance one would expect to find in a chapter intended to set the tone of a ‘creative biography’.

There is no need to ignore or diminish the effect of education, official culture, and political propaganda on the creative development of a person who grew up in fascist Italy in order to acknowledge the equal weight and relevance of other factors in his or her childhood and youth. Beyond his reticence about his own contact with the fascist régime, Berio was anything but ‘silent […] about the experiences of his youth’ (see below, 46). He did share with family and friends many reminiscences and lively anecdotes of his early life, the spirit of which is recorded in diary pages, letters, drawings, and photographs. A glimpse at the colourful and adventurous world of Berio's youth is offered by the well-known ‘Grock connection’ of Sequenza V – an evident case of creativity ‘impinged upon’ by an autobiographical element.Footnote ¹² Luciano Berio's mother, Ada Dal Fiume (1904–89), and his sister Miriana (1922–2004) both recalled a highly imaginative, sometimes naughty boy, whose acceptance of rules and discipline were combined with a natural inclination to disobedience and independence of thought and conduct. Love of nature, company, outdoor explorations, and practical jokes coincided in the young Berio with a strong desire for withdrawal, lonesome fantasy and silence – and, above all, music. These and other dualities of his character had a deep and tangible bearing on his future poetics and work. The ways in which such undercurrents took shape suggest something far more complex than the straightforward cause-and-effect relationship suggested by Osmond-Smith between Berio's lifetime attraction to folksong and the fascist régime's cult of popular culture (see below, 51 and 61), or between the composer's feeling at home at the Milan RAI and his earlier exposure to the radio programmes of the fascist EIAR (see below, 54). These experiences in and of themselves form an integral part of the composer's early biography, and still await a thorough exploration.

Osmond-Smith's account of the cultural context of postwar Milan in the second part of the chapter, dedicated to Berio's years in the conservatory (1945–51) and to his first contacts with the RAI (1953), is, as it stands in this draft, concise and efficient, though somewhat out of balance in comparison with the amount of historical-political argumentation that animate the first part of the chapter. This account of Berio's higher musical training, while it has hardly any new objective data (and contains a number of inaccuracies concerning the composer's earliest unpublished worksFootnote ¹³), makes insightful observations on the importance of the practice of rigorous counterpoint for the composer's future capacity of ‘englobing concurrent musical processes, and organizing their simultaneous development’ (see below, 51) and on the lasting benefit of Ghedini's teaching for his conception of instrumental colour and orchestration (52).

Berio scholarship, of which David Osmond-Smith was an influential voice, has progressed considerably in the years following the composer's death in spring 2003. Late works such as the Sonata for piano (2001), the cello Sequenza XIV (2002), and Stanze (2003) became known to the musical world, providing new perspectives on older works of the same genre; compositions with live electronics, such as Ofanìm (last version, 1997), Cronaca del Luogo (1998–9), and Altra voce (1999), have shed new light on Berio's lifetime engagement with the electronic studio and with the dramaturgy of sound. Berio's six Norton Lectures (1993–4) were published in 2006,Footnote ¹⁴ and a complete edition of his writings is forthcoming in 2013.Footnote ¹⁵ The years 2008 and 2010 saw a substantial increase in the manuscript collection held at the Paul Sacher Stiftung, Basel: this, together with the gradual reorganization of the unpublished notes and texts in this collection, has furthered research work in the period following David's passing. He himself was due to join the board of the then nascent Centro Studi Luciano Berio,Footnote ¹⁶ as well as the Scientific Committee of the first major symposium ever devoted to the composer, which was held in Siena on 28–31 October 2008. The symposium's proceedings, recently published in Italy,Footnote ¹⁷ bear witness to David's fundamental contribution to research on Berio's music in their frequent references to the scholar's writings. At the same time this collection of essays marks a turning point in the study of the composer's poetics and compositional techniques, as it covers a wide spectrum of his output and a considerable number of its specific aspects, including particular works hitherto unexplored. There is no doubt that David would have participated actively in the lively debate generated by the symposium and its proceedings, and that he would have integrated the findings of the new scholarship into his projected book. With all their merits and flaws, the two surviving segments of the book thus stand out as a token of their author's ongoing devotion to Berio's music, and of his unfulfilled intention to encompass and investigate its many facets within an unconventional biographical framework.

The following texts have been left essentially intact, apart from corrections of typographical or spelling errors, punctuation, number and date forms, and orthography. Amplifications of source citations, supplementary bibliographical references, and changes to the original phraseology in the interests of clarity have been made by Charles Wilson (CW), with the assistance of Ben Earle (BE). All these are indicated using square brackets. The original footnote numbers have been kept; additional footnotes are marked by symbols. Talia Pecker Berio (TPB) has kindly provided some factual corrections.

Chapter 1

Luciano Berio was born on 24 October 1925 in Oneglia, a small, hard-working commercial port on the Ligurian coast. Situated on the western cusp of the Gulf of Genoa halfway between Genoa and the French border,Footnote ¹ the town's modest prosperity depended upon trade in the olive oil of the region, and upon the thriving local pasta manufacturers, Pasta Agnesi. The town council (among whose members had been several [representatives] of the Berio clan) had long dreamt of augmenting the port's economic potential by encouraging construction of a railway line north through the mountains into Piedmont.Footnote ² But such entrepreneurial ambitions were repeatedly frustrated, and Oneglia retained its modest size. Other attempts at expansion were more successful. A little further westward round the bay, but too close for commercial comfort, lay Porto Maurizio. In 1919 this relatively elegant resort town acceded somewhat warily to economic logic, and entered negotiations to form a single port authority alongside its more hard-nosed neighbour. Mussolini, who knew the area and its aspirations well, since he had worked in Oneglia as a primary school teacher in 1908 and had edited the local socialist newspaper, La Lima, gave his blessing to the union in 1923, a year after he had assumed governmental power. The combined towns were renamed Imperia (after the river Impero that flows into the sea between the two towns). Nevertheless, Berio always referred to his native town as Oneglia.

The Berio clan had made its presence felt in and around Oneglia for many generations.Footnote ³ Although men of business and the law primarily,Footnote ⁴ they had shown a propensity for music over a number of generations. The first of whom direct evidence is preserved was the ‘dilettante’ Angelo Filippo Berio, two of whose compositions (a Tantum Ergo for solo bass and instruments of 1827, and a Benedictus Dominus of 1831) are still preserved by the family. However, the adoption of music as a profession, rather than as a cultivated pastime, fell to Luciano Berio's formidable grandfather, the organist and composer Adolfo Berio (1847–1941). The victor of many Ligurian improvisation competitions, he began to publish during the 1870s not only organ music but also well-turned recreational music: parlour songs, waltzes, marches, not to speak of polkas and mazurkas. His grandson took pride in Adolfo's capacity to write a good tune, and sought to emulate him when the need arose. Adolfo Berio had his son Ernesto (1883–1966) playing in light orchestras from an early age, and sent him [first] to the Milan Conservatory and then to Parma to study with Pizzetti.

As befitted the beneficiary of such schooling, Ernesto Berio preferred to turn his hand to more sophisticated projects. He produced settings of Carducci and Heine, as well as a good deal of church music. But swayed like many of his generation by the fascist régime's aspirations to national regeneration, he reacted eagerly to its encouragement of living Italian composers. Responding to a competition set up by MinCulPopFootnote ⁵ as part of the régime's celebrations, in 1937–8, of the bimillenario augusteo (the two thousandth anniversary of the birth of Augustus),Footnote ⁶ Ernesto Berio wrote a tripartite symphonic poem whose programme chronicled: first the glory of the Roman empire under Augustus; secondly the dark ages when the Roman eagles flew away to take refuge in the Alps (even if the latter-day exploits of that headstrong embodiment of Ligurian boldness, Garibaldi, intimated that the spirit of Augustus was not entirely eclipsed); and finally the glorious present when the Imperial eagles returned to Rome under the aegis of the ‘stirpe d'Augusto’ (descendant of Augustus) Mussolini, to whom the work was dedicated. Sadly, this combination of ingenuous flattery and solid musical workmanship, typical of many such produced in the thirties, did not win the prize.

Although Ernesto Berio saw to it that his son received a thorough grounding in music, his enthusiasm for the fascist national regenerative project naturally induced him to enrol Luciano Berio in the various stages of the fascist youth movement, the Opera Nazionale Balilla [(ONB)]. In this, Luciano Berio was no different from approximately three quarters of his Ligurian peers.Footnote ⁷ Granted the ever more stringently ideological turn of Italian schooling during the 1930s, boosted by the output of Italian radio, Berio thus found himself one of a generation whose world-view was torn asunder by the experience of civil war in their late teens, and who thus had to build themselves ex novo from 1945 on. Berio never discussed this aspect of his childhood (not even with members of his family) but photographic evidence in the possession of his daughter Cristina confirms his membership of the Balilla by 1937 (he would have been entitled to membership since 1933) and, later, of the Giovani Fascisti under the auspices of the Repubblica di Salò.Footnote ⁸ Verbal evidence from his first wife, Cathy Berberian, would suggest that he was enrolled in the youngest section, the Figli della Lupa (4–8 years old); and (granted the Starace law of 1939 making membership of the youth movement compulsory) it is highly probable that he was enrolled in the intermediate bridge between the Balilla (8–14 years old) and the Giovani Fascisti (18 years old and upwards), the Avanguardisti (14–18 years old), though no photographic evidence to confirm this has yet come to light.Footnote ^*

A book such as this offers only an account of biographical elements impinging upon Berio's creative development, rather than a full, personal biography. So it might seem appropriate to emulate the composer himself, and dismiss as a tragicomic waste of time Berio's youthful exposure to fascist ideological preoccupations, both at school and through his activities in the ONB. [As with] so many of his Italian contemporaries, the child was not father to the man, and his developed creative personality was synthesized from the explosive inrush of new experiences in the fifteen or so years following 1945. But it is [sic] worth noting, not just as the negative backdrop to those seminal years, but because the fascist attempt to raise up a generation of youths whose world-view was qualitatively different from previous generations left certain traces (much transformed, because refracted through a liberal, humanistic glass) in Berio's later preoccupations. These will be noted as we come upon them.

Silent as Berio may have remained about the experiences of his youth, it may be reasonably assumed that Oneglia offered him little or nothing of the discrete ‘counter-culture’ that older generations in major urban centres such as Turin or Milan kept up unopposed throughout the fascist ventennio. That he was no mere sponge for fascist orthodoxy may be inferred from some of his reading. Ibsen, whose plays were banned from the school curriculum,Footnote ⁹ he nonetheless read. Likewise Brecht, whose anti-bourgeois barbs might have been relished by the fascist cultural éliteFootnote ¹⁰ but who was certainly not going to make his way onto the list of ‘approved authors’. But for much of provincial Italy it was in fact the ONB, and above all the Giovani Fascisti, that provided a (highly selective) introduction to cultural challenge. Much of the most striking Italian modernist architecture of the thirties was erected to house the sporting and cultural activities of the ONB, and the mix of children who pursued such activities within them transcended class barriers in a way that would have been unthinkable in pre-fascist, liberal Italy. Excursions and summer camps likewise opened provincial eyes to a wider world. That all this was conducted under the aegis of a grotesque cult of the ‘Duce’, and an absurdly chauvinistic nationalism, may have been enough to constrain many former participants to embarrassed silence. But it should not be assumed that such experiences were unrelievedly counter-productive.

On the other hand, Berio's musical education was purely domestic, and very thorough. Between grandfather and father, he was brought up in a professional household that took a marked pride in musical craftsmanship and placed a strong emphasis upon practical music-making. Ernesto gave lessons to local singers, and the better local instrumentalists gathered at the Berio household to play chamber music, in which, once the eight- or nine-year-old Luciano's piano playing had reached a sufficient standard, he was encouraged to join. The Berios were musicians who expected to serve the local community. Both Adolfo and Ernesto presided at the organ in church on Sundays, and Ernesto sallied forth to the local cinema to play between films.Footnote ¹¹ Only once, and briefly, did his son doubt his vocation to continue in the family profession. At about age eleven, the sights and sounds of the bustling port in which he had grown up persuaded Luciano Berio that he wanted to become captain of his own ship. That dream soon faded; the obsession with the sea did not. Fifty years later, after a career that found little room for easy musical pictorialism, he could, for the final part of Outis, conjure up a sea picture of uncanny immediacy. A competing phantasy, though one with as yet little greater likelihood of realization, was prompted by a reading of Romain Rolland's novel about an imaginary composer, Jean Christophe. In response, the young Luciano tried his hand at composition with a Pastorale for piano (1936) and subsequently with a Toccata for piano duet (1939). But at this stage, this was merely one of the many activities at which any aspiring musician might try his hand. And even though it transpires, from a diary now in the possession of his daughter, that he was left wondering how one might acquire the technical competence necessary to make of composition a vocation, the strongly practical tenor of his formation encouraged him primarily to dream of a career as a concert pianist. No doubt it was that aspiration, as much as any nascent wish to develop skills as a composer, that caused him pangs of envy when, [having] travel[ed] along the coast to attend his first orchestral concert in San Remo around the age of fifteen, he witnessed a performance of a Rapsodia for saxophone and orchestra by Gino Marinuzzi jr, the scion of another musical dynasty, with the young maestro performing his own obbligato part at the piano.Footnote ¹²

The entry of Italy into the Second World War in 1940 drew even tighter the horizons of the provincial musical world in which Berio passed his youth. Liguria was quickly brought to a rude awakening – after endless official encomiums of the salutary effects of war and the heavily edited newsreels of belligerent foreign excursions into Ethiopia, Spain, and Albania – as to its genuine consequences. Soon after Mussolini declared hostilities, the British fleet sailed into the Gulf of Genoa, and subjected Genoa to devastating bombardment on account of its extensive port facilities and rapidly developing steel-works. (The thwarted ambitions of Oneglia's city fathers at least spared the Berios' home town any similar fate.) Liguria likewise became an invasion route for the Italian army's ill-judged attempt at annexation of the south-east corner of France. [Hence,] although it is well-nigh certain that a fourteen-year-old Luciano Berio would have taken his next (and by now obligatory) step towards ‘Fascist perfection’ by joining the Avanguardisti in 1939, the pre-military indoctrination to which he was thereby subject was inevitably undercut by an ever more widely diffused awareness of the country's disastrous military record between 1940 and 1943. Like most other provincial families not yet directly involved in the conflict, the Berios would seem to have kept their heads down and concentrated on their professional concerns. But, inevitably, the young Luciano's musical explorations were almost entirely confined to the home. EIAR, the national radio, underlined the country's musical patrimony by broadcasting Italian opera of the generations up to Puccini and Mascagni. Ernesto's chamber music evenings, less emphatically nationalistic, took in a fair swathe of the nineteenth-century repertoire.

If the photographic evidence is correctly interpreted, [the] then Avanguardista Berio took the final step up the ladder of the Fascist youth movement in late 1943.Footnote ^† There could not have been a more disastrous time to do so, for Liguria was fast succumbing to the disastrous civil war that tore northern Italy apart between 1943 and 1945. After the fall of Mussolini in 1943, German forces occupied northern Italy, and having rescued Mussolini by a spectacular raid upon his place of confinement in the Abruzzi, installed him as puppet head of the Fascist Social Republic, whose headquarters were at Salò on Lake Garda, and whose writ ran throughout northern Italy. The immediate consequence was a polarization of the youth of Liguria. Some enrolled voluntarily in the Republican forces, deeming the true ‘invaders’ to be the Anglo-American forces fighting their way northwards up the peninsula. Others instead took to the mountains lying behind the coastal plain, whence they organized guerilla raids on the German and Republican forces. Brutalities multiplied on both sides.Footnote ¹³ Those amongst the partisans who were captured were sometimes executed and, more often, deported to German concentration camps. The Republican authorities responded by imposing mass conscription, and in 1944 Berio was called up to join the Republican army. The 19-year-old was torn as to how to respond. Acquaintances of his had already taken to the hills to enlist with the partisans, and he was half-tempted to follow their example. But his father, having gained the benevolent approbation of the fascist authorities, could not now be seen to fail in his most elementary duty, that of ensuring that his son presented himself for military training, without risking reprisals. Unwillingly, Berio therefore presented himself at the barracks in San Remo. The situation there was chaotic: on the first day, without any previous instruction, he was handed a loaded gun. He tried to work out for himself how to operate it. It blew up, severely injuring his right hand. He was forced to spend the next three months in a military hospital. His wounds became infected, but as the civil war proved ever more disruptive, there was no longer any available medication to treat them. When at long last his injuries began to heal of their own accord, he took advantage of spiralling chaos as Allied troops advanced ever nearer up the peninsula and successfully faked his discharge. It would have been imprudent to return to Oneglia lest his fraud was discovered, so he fled northwards first to Milan and thence to Como, in hope of at last joining up with his sister, who was providing support to one of the partisan groups.

But by now the German forces had decided to withdraw from Italy altogether, and with the props thus removed from under the Repubblica di Salò, and Mussolini captured and shot, the civil war in northern Italy was drawing to a ragged close. Berio accordingly returned to Milan in the autumn of 1945, where, following in his father's footsteps, he enrolled in the Conservatory. In deference to his father's wishes (and to family tradition) he also enrolled in the faculty of law at Milan University, although his legal studies were to be laid aside within a year. Milan had suffered terribly under allied bombardment, but was resolute in its attempts to restore its civic and cultural pride. In his reminiscences of Milan as it was in that year, the critic Roberto Leydi takes pains to undermine the easy cliché that would depict 1945 as the year in which ‘cultural vitality […] exploded […] magically and inexplicably […] out of nothing’.Footnote ¹⁴ For a young man like Berio, emerging from war-torn Liguria, it may well have seemed that his fifteen Milanese years were marked by a sudden and overwhelming access to the riches of the modernist tradition, of which a provincial childhood had denied him any previous knowledge.Footnote ¹⁵ But the renaissance of Milanese cultural life among the post-war ruins was, as Leydi properly emphasizes, the fruit of a singular civic resilience. Profiting from the relatively benign attitude to artistic radicalism maintained by certain members of the fascist régime,Footnote ¹⁶ pre-war Milan had successfully kept alive an awareness of wider artistic horizons. Although the Second Viennese School was not welcomed into the major cultural institutions, the Milanese had been able to listen to small-scale works by Schoenberg and Webern at the Milione gallery [check]. And Ferdinando Ballo, one of the instigators of the Milione concerts, had also promoted the writings of Joyce and Brecht through his small publishing house. Now that post-war Milanese cultural life was reasserting itself, Ballo once again placed himself at the helm, founding in late 1945 a new orchestra to play unfamiliar repertoire (notably [that of] the seventeenth and twentieth centuries) at his Pomeriggi Musicali concerts. Cheap tickets for students encouraged them to explore the music of Bartók, Hindemith, Milhaud, and Schoenberg, often for the first time. The impact of such sudden exposure upon the young Berio was profound. Nor was this influx of new experiences merely musical. From 1947 another pioneering institution of post-war Milan, the Piccolo Teatro, erupted into provocative life under the direction of Paolo Grassi and Giorgio Strehler, taking over the Cinema Broletto that had been employed during the final months of civil war by the republican Muti regiment as a centre for the interrogation and torture of captured partisans.Footnote ¹⁷ Strehler's championing of Brecht at the Piccolo Teatro a decade later was to make an enduring mark upon Berio's conception of musical theatre. But during Berio's student years the Piccolo's repertoire was more traditional: Shakespeare, Goldoni, Ibsen, and an international range of twentieth-century playwrights.Footnote ¹⁸ Furthermore, a strong emphasis was put, as with the Pomeriggi Musicali, upon attracting a new audience of students, schoolchildren, and workers. Naturally, the sheer availability of such a rich variety of theatrical experience could not fail to make its mark on a provincial youth, eager to explore wider horizons.

The Milan Conservatory prided itself on offering a ten-year course that covered the full range of components necessary to create a ‘rounded’ musician. Because of the thorough grounding that he had received at home from father and grandfather, Berio was able to take the fourth-year exam as soon as he enrolled, and thus to proceed directly into the fifth year of the course. Although when he resumed his studies Berio still hoped that his injured hand would heal sufficiently to allow him to develop his skills as a concert pianist, it soon became dispiritingly obvious that this was not going to prove possible. Consequently, he found increasing fulfilment in the technical studies that would lead him through, three years later, to Ghedini's composition class.

As has already been underlined, there was little in Berio's youth that suggested the likelihood of his graduating from a composition class. The handful of pieces that he had written prior to enrolling in the fifth year of the Milan Conservatory strongly reflected his family's musical concerns. Even after he had started his studies in Milan, the flow of compositions prior to his entry into Ghedini's class was modest, but again resonated strongly both with his provincial background and with some of his future concerns. A choral O bone Jesu (1946) simply echoed his family's tradition as local church organists.Footnote ^‡ But in 1946 he also came upon an anthology of folk-song texts, and set three of them in what seemed to him a melodically appropriate style. Two of these eventually came to form part of one of his most popular works from the sixties: Folk Songs (1964). But it is not simply as a harbinger of the fascination with folk song that runs thread-like through Berio's output that the Tre canzoni popolari Footnote ^§ merit a moment's consideration. The fascist régime had been strongly aware that one crucial way of encouraging identification with the corporate state was by fostering popular culture. Dismissive as were forerunners of fascist culture, such as [Giovanni] Papini, of the ‘picture-postcard’ Italy created by the wistful imaginings of northern European tourists, the fascist cultural hierarchy took the view that where a traditional popular culture had already been undermined by the modern world, it was salutary to invent it – not as a tourist-trap, but rather as a means of fostering pride in ‘italianità’ and of underlining to the predominantly bourgeois, northern Italian supporters of the régime the importance of its agricultural exploits: the ‘battaglia del grano’, or the reclamation for cultivation of the Pontine marshes.Footnote ¹⁹ Although Berio was to express virulent disdain for the cultural products of the fascist ventennio, and in due course to find telling musical means to mark the distance between modern urban life and evocations of rural musical culture, there is a measure of continuity between the folk confections dear to the régime under which he had grown up and Berio's abiding fascination with inventing simulacra of folk idioms.

Looking back on his Milanese studies in later years, Berio repeatedly underlined his debt to the (relatively unfrequented) counterpoint class taught by the vice-director of the Conservatory, Giulio Cesare Paribeni. This is not merely the retrospective gratitude of a student for a fine teacher (Paribeni had been holding these classes for thirty years, and was one of the most respected teachers of the elements of musical technique in the country). At first glance, the demands of ‘classical’ counterpoint might seem remote from the post-war neo-modernist generation among whom Berio was soon to make his mark – as indeed from the interests of the younger generation in general, if one is to judge from the paucity of fellow-students attending classes. Yet it was a discipline that habituated Berio's mind to englobing concurrent musical processes and organizing their simultaneous development. It was the exhilarations of negotiating perceptual complexity that were to give to post-war neo-modernism its militant edge – its explicitly assumed stance against the empty bustle of neo-classicism, and the deliberately circumscribed technical means that permitted commercial music to persuade people that they belonged together if they consumed the same things. Music's cardinal role in the passage from ideological totalitarianism to its consumerist equivalent established a ferociously vivid sense of aesthetic polarities in the minds of Berio's generation, and to a greater degree than many of his peers, Berio was to feel confidence in negotiating between those polarities. A well-honed contrapuntal sensibility was by no means the only technical marker of a modernist musical aesthetic (as we shall in due course see, a technical understanding of how one might master radically diverse experiences of subjective time was equally pivotal, and equally polarizing vis-à-vis popular culture), but it did allow a young musician such as Berio a generous but technically grounded sense of the ever-widening gap between the aesthetic of the concert hall and that of the assertively omnipresent mass media.

In 1948 Berio proceeded to the composition class of Giorgio Ghedini, with whom he was to study until he received his diploma in 1951. It was a felicitous moment at which to cross Ghedini's path. Stravinsky had been a major focus for admirationFootnote ²⁰ and emulation among musical modernists during the fascist ventennio. The 1930s had seen a marked reactivation of appreciation for Italy's Baroque tradition, and Stravinsky's demonstration of how the contemporary world might redeploy Baroque instrumental gesture provided the generation of Casella and Ghedini with a piquant example. But the generic sub-Stravinskian neo-baroque of fascist modernism received a markedly individual inflection at Ghedini's hands. He suffused it with the austerity of Pizzetti and, seminally for Berio, with the ultra-fastidious study of the potentialities of instrumental timbre of Ravel. From these [Ghedini] created in the earlier 1940s a distinctive sound-world whose gelid reserve and, in the case of his operatic masterpiece Le baccanti (1941–4), unblinking dissonance marked a calculated distance from the eager-to-please splashes of orchestral colour dear to many of his compatriots. Under his tutelage Berio began an avid study of the master technicians of the early twentieth-century orchestra: Ravel, Debussy, Mahler, Prokofiev. This was a brave new world. Prior to his arrival in Milan Berio had attended only the one orchestral concert at San Remo mentioned above. But now, absorbed attendance at the Pomeriggi Musicali concerts and relentless attention to details of instrumental technique on the part of Ghedini were to establish the foundations of an enduring relationship with the full symphony orchestra that few other post-war modernists could match. Unsurprisingly, the first extended compositions that Berio produced in his class – a Concertino for clarinet (Berio's own ‘second instrument’ at the Conservatory), violin, celesta, harp, and strings (1949),Footnote ^¶ and particularly a Magnificat for two sopranos, chorus, two pianos, wind, and percussion (1949) – showed just how profoundly Ghedini's students were encouraged to immerse themselves in the Stravinskian example. This process of learning by a concentrated period of imitation Berio subsequently referred to as his ‘exorcisms’. The Stravinskian exorcism, which hardly lasted beyond 1949, was not his last.

Unlike instrumental students at the Conservatory, Ghedini's composition students had few chances to earn money through the skills that they were labouring to acquire. Accordingly, Berio supported himself by a wide swathe of practical activities. He often acted as accompanist to vocal classes at the Conservatory. Having attended Giulini's conducting classes there, he also took on occasional engagements as assistant conductor in provincial opera houses. But it was his work as a jobbing accompanist that precipitated the next crucial encounter of the early fifties. Cathy Berberian had come to Milan in 1949 [check]Footnote ^†† to pursue further vocal studies with Georgina del Vigo. These were proving sufficiently fruitful that, in 1950, she applied for a Fulbright scholarship to continue her studies in Milan. She needed an accompanist for the recordings demanded in support of her application, and Berio was recommended to her. The attraction between these two vivid personalities, voraciously exploring everything that post-war Milan had to offer, was immediate and enduring. Within a few months they were married.

Profound as was the impact of Ghedini's teaching, he lacked one thing that young Italians emerging from the enclave of fascist cultural life coveted: international acclaim. As the culture and ideology of the ventennio was consigned to a strenuously maintained oblivion, they looked for an internationally acknowledged incarnation of forward-looking and ‘ideologically correct’ musicianship. They thought to find it in the work of Luigi Dallapiccola. Not only had Dallapiccola during the war years created his own distinctive rapport with the music of the Second Viennese School – a lyrical serialism whose international impact was far greater than [that of] the work of other Italian serial pioneers such as Camillo Togni or Riccardo Malipiero – but he had also accomplished a potent reversal of his public image. Having risen to prominence as one of the major talents of fascist musical modernism, he had (like many of his compatriots) found himself alienated by the régime's rapprochement with Hitler, and had led a fraught existence seeking to protect his Jewish wife, Laura, when German forces occupied Florence. His one-act opera Il prigioniero was the first Italian work of the post-war years to create a profound international impact. No sooner had Berio completed his Stravinskian ‘exorcism’ than he threw himself into the study of Dallapiccola's scores. Study with the man himself was, however, difficult, since Dallapiccola had pointedly resigned the ‘special professorship’ in composition created for him by the régime and had returned to the modest job [of] teaching piano as a ‘second instrument’ by which he had formerly earned his living at the Florence Conservatory. An opportunity to circumvent the impasse came in 1952 [check],Footnote ^‡‡ when Dallapiccola was invited to hold composition courses at the Tanglewood summer school in Massachusetts, Cathy Berberian's home state. Berio applied successfully for a grant from the Koussevitzky Foundation, and he and his young wife set off for Tanglewood. As Berio afterwards admitted, he learnt more from Dallapiccola's scores than from the man himself. Indeed, Dallapiccola's lyrical, contrapuntal serialism may have provided Berio with a temporarily congenial entrée to the world of serial thought, but it left no enduring mark beyond Chamber Music (1953), written for Cathy Berberian, whereas his studies of contrapuntal technique with Paribeni and of the craftsmanship behind the iridescent veneer of early twentieth-century orchestration with Ghedini unquestionably did.

Impermanent as may have been the consequences of Berio's Dallapiccolan ‘exorcism’, one profoundly consequential byproduct of being on the East coast of the USA in the summer and autumn of 1952 was that he was able to attend the first concert in that country to include music composed directly onto tape. This was given at the Guggenheim Museum in New York on 28 October. Although the short tape pieces by Otto Luening and Vladimir Ussachevsky sat a little dispiritingly beside instrumental works by Varèse, they gave Berio a first glimpse of potentials to be developed. Armed with a letter of introduction from Dallapiccola to Luigi Rognoni, then in charge of the RAI's BBC-inspired Terzo Programma, he began to solicit commissionsFootnote ²¹ and to look for chances to pursue electronic experiment. His own first tape piece, Mimusique No 1 (1953), was, with typical bravura, developed from a recording of a single gun shot. The Milan RAI was in many respects a natural focus of ambition for Berio. The Milan radio station, founded in the year of Berio's birth, 1925, [had been] the media showpiece of the fascist EIAR. From it issued forth the special programmes conceived for members of the ONB, and those designed for use in school. We have no direct evidence of whether as a child Berio listened to these, but he would certainly have been expected to. And it has already been noted how much the teenage Berio had depended on broadcasts during the war years to expand his awareness of opera. He was, in other words, part of a radiophonic generation. To focus the first steps of his career towards working for the radio was as innately appealing as for the following generation to dream of strumming guitars in front of a television camera.

To persuade the RAI of the efficacy of such experiments was not a task to be undertaken single-handed. Berio was as yet an unknown quantity – possessed of boundless energy and curiosity, but with relatively few achievements to his name. But he knew where to turn. The conductor Hermann Scherchen had played an important part in setting the performance of new music in Italy back on its feet after the war years, particularly through his championing of the music of Luigi Dallapiccola. When Berio discovered that Scherchen was scheduled to conduct a concert in Genoa in 1953, he travelled back to Liguria, introduced himself, and explained his ambitions. Scherchen shrewdly referred him to his pupil, Bruno Maderna. A few weeks later Berio succeeded in meeting up with Maderna in Milan. The rapport between them was immediate; but it was also an immensely advantageous one for the relatively unknown Berio. Maderna had successfully transcended the embarrassments associated with his childhood career as the prodigious orchestral conductor of the ventennio, ‘Brunetto’,Footnote ²² and established himself as a pivotal figure among the musicians of the post-war generation.

This outline proposal, dated 2006, is published here by kind permission of the estate of David Osmond-Smith. The proposal is headed with the following note: ‘Eleven chapters. Suggested length: approximately 300 printed pages: so an average of 25 pages per chapter … Plus worklist, bibliography, index (collectively, approx. a further 25 pages) … The chapters on the musical œuvre will require numerous music examples. Whether there should be photographs to ornament the biographical chapters may be left to the editor's discretion.’

Outline Proposal for ‘The Music of Luciano Berio’

Anyone proposing to write an extended study of Luciano Berio's compositions is faced with a problem of method. On the one hand his works are in continuous dialogue with his immediate cultural environment, and also, though perhaps less self-evidently, with residual concerns stemming from Italian modernist culture of the first four decades of the twentieth century. So that to follow the structuralist example (as he might have urged), and to treat individual works as if their inner workings establish the rules whereby one may decipher them, can prove limiting. Arguably, such issues are most effectively addressed within the context of a ‘creative biography’. On the other hand Berio evolved at an early point in his substantial output a range of compositional techniques that enabled him to plan works on a large scale. These were then used time and again. It therefore makes only modest sense to try to come to grips with the corpus that he left by a chronologically-ordered work-by-work survey. One would find oneself constantly obliged to refer back to procedures discussed in relation to previous works.

To address these tensions, I would propose first to establish a chronological frame by means of a four-chapter ‘creative biography’. This would underline those aspects of his life that proved pertinent to his musical work, but would pass over elements within his personal life that, despite making for a piquant narrative, would entail description of people still alive, who might not take kindly to finding themselves thus anatomized in print. These four chapters would, however, seek to place Berio's musical development in a substantially richer social and cultural context than was possible in my short OUP book of a decade ago.Footnote ¹

In the outline given below, I have proposed to chronicle Berio's encounters with the major figures that impacted upon his creative development in the course of the first three chapters, but then to devote the fourth chapterFootnote ² to a more detailed examination of how his creative dialogues with each of them developed. Clearly, it might prove possible to subsume the contents of Chapter 4 into Chapters 1–3. The danger of so doing is that the reader's grasp of the chronological sweep of Berio's development will be disrupted by diversions into two or three pages of discussion of his creative rapport with a given individual (or by my attempts to sustain a narrative network that traces them all concurrently). While some of those individuals (Boulez, Maderna) made a strong impact at a specific point in his development, others (Sanguineti, Berberian) evolved through their long-standing creative relationship with him. Accounting for such evolutions is perhaps more easily accomplished by a self-contained mini-essay than by weaving them through the principal narrative of the ‘creative biography’.

In the remaining chapters, I would seek to trace the evolution of major creative obsessions throughout his output, devoting one chapter to each. This inevitably means that certain key works that synthesize a number of these concerns (for example Sinfonia, Coro, and some of the late theatre works) will appear at several points in different chapters, but that the precedents for the technique under discussion will be immediately apparent. Readers intent upon studying a single work will have to be prepared to consult the index, but will be rewarded by a multi-dimensional view. Chapter titles are provisional.