It is not easy for contemporary composers to build a coherent and self-explanatory relationship with the logocentric culture that surrounds them. The pressure to ‘talk about’ their music is continuous, yet they know that the core of their work cannot easily be linked to other aspects of experience by the mediation of words. Some, like the late Franco Donatoni, launched a witty, often paradoxical verbal firework display to accommodate the tension. Others, like Harrison Birtwistle, maintain a gruff inarticulacy, even if they remain quite happy to set words in a musical frame.Footnote ¹

Luciano Berio has, on the contrary, built bridges between music and words with extraordinary and multi-faceted vigour. He has always been fascinated by intellectual enquiry; yet he has never sought to beat the intellectuals at their own game (unlike, for instance Pierre Boulez, the fellow-composer whom he most admires, who has done so with consistent panache). Instead, he has avidly quarried the intellectual adventures of his contemporaries, appropriating from them perspectives and images that might serve as raw material for his own creative work. That work has in consequence often taken the borrowed materials in directions of which their originators could hardly have conceived. (I think, for instance, of the correspondence – at first puzzled, but finally reconciled – that a perplexed Claude Lévi-Strauss initiated with Berio when he suspected that the first movement of Berio's much-acclaimed Sinfonia (1968–9) treated his own work as no more than an emporium of suggestive phrases.) As for Berio's many discussions of his own work, and of the responsibilities of the musical world in which he lives, they have been eloquent and impassioned. But he has never suffered from the professional intellectual's paranoid compulsion to pre-empt contradiction. When he talks about his work, he suggests a particular way of looking at things, but leaves people to make of that perspective what they will. To adapt a phrase of Umberto Eco to which we must return, when Berio talks, he constructs an ‘argomento aperto’, an open argument, and in this, his talk about music and his placing of words in music are of a piece.

Berio's own talk about music has in recent years become ever more explicit about the permanent tensions and non-congruences that exist between the world of language and the world of musically structured sound. This is merely to put into words tensions that had been explored intuitively within his creative work around the human voice many decades before. In that exploration two very different men of letters played a central role, and thus found themselves drawn into relationships from which no one of the three has emerged unaltered. The first was Umberto Eco, an aesthetician and semiotician, whose play with ideas has found a particularly engaging outlet in prose fiction. The second was Edoardo Sanguineti, a fertile and highly individual poet who has maintained a second career – since even poets must eat – as a Dante scholar. Although the purpose of this paper is to discuss the creative cross-fertilization between Berio and Sanguineti, it cannot help but draw some of Eco's work into the argument as well.

In part, this is because Berio's early work with Eco prepared the ground for his work with Sanguineti. Berio met Eco in Milan in the mid-1950s, when both were earning money preparing projects for the Italian radio. As is often the way with young men, their enthusiasms quickly cross-fertilized. Berio introduced Eco to Saussure's linguistics; Eco introduced Berio to the complexities of Joyce's Ulysses. One of the fruits of their discussions during 1957 was a projected radio programme, to be prepared with the aid of the electronic music studio (impressively but inaccurately labelled the Studio di fonologia musicale) which Berio and Bruno Maderna had succeeded in establishing at the Milan radio two years earlier. The project was to be entitled Onomatopea nel linguaggio poetico (onomatopoeia in poetic language) and it ranged over a wide selection of authors, principally Anglo-Saxon, that included Edgar Alan Poe, Dylan Thomas, and W. H. Auden. The crowning experiment with which this project was to conclude was an electronic exploration of a text by James Joyce: the ‘Overture’ to the Sirens chapter from Ulysses.

That Berio and Eco should have been engaged by the presence of onomatopoeia within language is perhaps understandable. Onomatopoeia is the process by which words are linked to meaning, not through the contingent conventions that govern much of language, but instead by their sonic similarity to the phenomena that they convey: ‘splash’, ‘hiss’, ‘thud’, ‘roar’, etc. Debate was raging in the 1950s over whether construing the world in terms of similarities constituted a more primitive but vivid modality of perception (as in totemism, or sympathetic magic) than did its explanation in terms of causality, impossible without the distanced, non-imitative relationship of linguistic sign to meaning that is characteristic of much human language. For Berio, that creative putting together of a sonic world through exploring similarities and differences has always been a fundamental source of creative energy. For Eco, it was rather more like playing with fire: his intellectual world has increasingly depended upon the demonstration that all aspects of perception and communication are governed by conventionally established sign systems, and debates around the social codification or the ‘naturalness’ of perceptions of similarity have been a perpetual thorn in his side.

This experiment, revisited and reworked during the following year, was to become one of the most famous of Berio's early works for electronic tape: Thema/Omaggio a Joyce. It is worth pausing to consider this work: it opens the door both to Berio's future collaborations with Sanguineti and to the distinctive vocal style that he created for his first wife, Cathy Berberian. Although its intrinsic aesthetic importance might seem now, at nearly fifty years' distance, to be relatively modest, it provided Berio with the conceptual tools to create a long series of works of the first rank. Indeed, it is one of the keys to Berio's astonishing fertility, his appetite for work, that he has been able to carve out a few basic creative principles and use them again and again.

That Berio and Eco's radio project should have steered towards Joyce is hardly surprising. Joyce's eyesight was extremely poor: he was used to deciphering the world through sounds. (The image of a man who configures his world through listening was to take centre stage, decades later, in Berio and Calvino's tortured attempt at collaboration on Un re in ascolto.) Joyce was also a fine musician: his tenor voice was good enough, they said, to rival the famous Irish tenor John McCormack had he chosen to train it properly. He of all people, therefore, understood how much the interface between music and words is a dangerous and confrontational one. They share the common medium of sound, yet because they obey different laws of proliferation, of making new things out of what is already there, they exist in constant tension – each striving to pull away into its own universe. That, of course, is why bringing them together is so memorable, whether through temporarily making the demands of those two universes simultaneously satisfied (as in many of the devices of poetry that lock together words not just by their fascinating potential for generating new meaning but also by their capacity to generate musical coherence out of rhythm, similar and contrasting sounds, and sound processes) or by combining them in song, where the formal demands of these two worlds are made temporarily congruent.

The ‘Sirens’ chapter from Ulysses is governed by the art of music. In it, the worldly-wise advertising agent, Leopold Bloom, haunted by premonitory images of his wife's forthcoming infidelity with Blazes Boylan, takes lunch in the Ormond Bar. Molly Bloom has her own long-established career as a singer, and through Mr Bloom's mind float songs from her repertoire of ballads and light classics. As is the perfidious way of such moments of involuntary recall, the words of the songs are cruelly pertinent: they are about romantic assignations. Meanwhile, in the next room, a group of regulars engages in sporadic music-making around the pub piano. In what he subsequently called the ‘Overture’ to the chapter, Joyce took isolated phrases from the narrative to come, and made from them an introductory prose poem. The fragments are associated in two ways: either by sound similarities, as in ‘A husky fifenote blew / Blew. Blue bloom is on the’Footnote ² (the latter four words are a fragment from the song-refrain, ‘Ah, meet me in the evening / When the bloom is on the rye’), or by generating new semantic links between the fragments. Two examples will suffice: ‘Chips, picking chips off rocky thumbnail, chips / Horrid! And gold flushed more’.Footnote ³ Turning over the pages, you will find that what the gold-haired barmaid Miss Kennedy actually considers horrid in the chapter is the hilarious image, proposed by her colleague Miss Douce over a cup of tea, of being married to the old fogey who serves behind the counter in the local pharmacy. When, moments later, Mr Dedalus senior strolls into the bar picking chips off his thumbnail, the ladies appear quite unconcerned. It is only the ‘open’ reader groping for a relation between the two juxtaposed fragments, who might infer that ‘Horrid’ was a reaction to somebody picking chips off their thumbnail. Or consider the start of the Overture: ‘Bronze by gold heard the hoofirons steelyringing / Imperthnthnthn’.Footnote ⁴ The latter is not an onomatopoeic imitation of the ring of hoofirons on cobbles. Instead, it derives from young Boots the waiter, who has brought in the tea, attempting badinage when he finds the two ladies peering over the blind of the Ormond bar as the viceregal procession goes clattering by:

Berio used Joyce's fragmented text up to the point where it had completed a tour round the female body: first visually, with hair and breasts; then aurally, with a garter smacking against Miss Douce's thigh; and finally, with the sibillants of ‘Liszt's rhapsodies. Hissss.’Footnote ⁶ – the sound of Molly Bloom pissing into her chamber pot, which Mr Bloom considers may aptly be called ‘chamber music’: ‘It is a kind of music I often thought when she. Acoustics that is. Tinkling. Empty vessels make most noise.’Footnote ⁷

But it was not just their shared delight in the female body that drew Berio to Joyce. For in Omaggio a Joyce Berio carried yet further the process that Joyce had begun, breaking down the text into its phonetic components, which are marshalled and rearranged so as to maximize its potential for unleashing structural games. Demonstrating the ways in which Berio used articulatory phonetics to accomplish that exploration is a matter for another paper. But the sustained intimacy with Joyce's fragmentary text that such analytical work entailed gave him ample opportunity to note how some of the richest resonances that can be propagated in the human mind occur when consciousness is at the edge of closing onto a clear, linear sense: when it thinks it recognizes, or understands, but has not yet had this confirmed by all the mechanisms that we employ in spoken language to reinforce our meaning, so that alternative possibilities still resonate in the background. And of the various devices by which Berio persuades us to reap the experiential benefits of the half-understood, that of fragmenting linear texts (and of working at the boundary where the word as bearer of meaning dissolves into the word as reservoir of sonic potentials), first explored in Omaggio a Joyce, has remained central.

Berio consolidated his grasp of this domain two years later with his settings and re-settings of e. e. cummings's poetry in Circles (1960). In the same period he had also had his first skirmish with musical theatre, producing in collaboration with Italo Calvino the witty mime-fable Allez Hop (1959). Here, evidently, was a striking new talent worth fostering, and in 1960 the management of Milan's Piccola Scala responded by offering him a commission for a new theatre piece. Berio began looking around for a collaborator: Eco shrewdly suggested that he should approach Edoardo Sanguineti. For here, close to hand, was an Italian poet of striking originality, who had felt impelled to make his own the provocations of pre-war Anglo-Saxon modernism, particularly of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot. The idiom of Sanguineti's first collection, Laborintus (written in 1951–4, published in 1956), had already established the idiosyncratic stylistic mix to which he was to remain faithful for many years: an exclamatory vernacular rubbing up against multilingual fragments from literary sources to create a semantic labyrinth, saved from bookishness by an unnervingly vivid evocation of the speaking voice. As Sanguineti himself has said: ‘The word, for the most significant representatives of that new [post-war] avant garde, was very much felt to be the spoken word, as a vocal act or, as I like to say, as a corporeal act, one of bodily investment in language […]. In brief, bodily energy invested in the voice.’Footnote ⁸

Since much of the rest of this paper is concerned with the aesthetics of fragmentation and juxtaposition, it is worth pausing to consider its nature a little more. The superabundance of mass-reproduced artworks means that rather than living in extended dialogue with a few ‘classic’ works, we tend to be ‘distracted from distraction by distraction’ (to borrow a well-known phrase from T. S. Eliot): we have a fleeting contact with a lot of stimuli, rather than intensive contact with a few. That mode of living with culture tends to fill our memories with a rag-bag of half-remembered fragments, of whose identity and original context we are often uncertain. One person's rag-bag of fragments will perforce be partially enigmatic to anyone else, a point underlined in Sanguineti's writing by his use of a wide range of languages. Thus, whatever the temptations that Sanguineti (or Joyce) may proffer to the scholarly exegete happy to shine by uncovering poetic larceny, it is not recognition of sources that is primary here. We will all bring degrees of recognition to the fragments placed before us. Some we will not recognize at all. And even where recognition is only partial, as with this sort of experience it usually is, our primary task is rather to sound out the semantic resonances of what is given, to make our own sense of it. The tendency towards collage is not, therefore, an abdication of creative invention: it is a way of coping with a chaos that we have ourselves created. And it is a particularly carnal mode of possession. Sanguineti's texts, again like Joyce's, demand vocalization. It is hard to read them silently. But reading them aloud forces one to make interpretative decisions about what sort of ‘text’ the listener is proffered for deciphering. Let [us take as] an example an extract from poem 23 [of] Laborintus.

Typographically, Sanguineti makes no distinction as he jumps from language to language. Readers must forever reorient their horizons of linguistic expectation. One may, of course, read in precisely the same undifferentiated way, compelling the listener to loop back and recognize the altered state of things. But the temptation for a musician is to underline, by [means of] vocal differentiation, the virtual semantic counterpoint that is being sustained by the leaps between languages. It was a temptation that came vividly to the fore when Sanguineti and Berio embarked upon their first collaboration.

Sanguineti did not simply write a text for Berio when he accepted the invitation to collaborate: for over a year, from 1961 to 1962, the two negotiated their way to a final result. Indeed, in a fashion that was to remain typical for Berio, the text only reached a final form after the music had been written. They entitled the work Passaggio. It received its first perform[ance on] 7 May 1963 in the Piccola Scala, with ‘scenic elements’ by Enrico Baj. In the programme book was a large essay by Umberto Eco. It concluded as follows:

The ‘different themes’ that Eco mentioned in his note were indeed diverse. Berio's initial conception was of a woman slowly crossing the stage, and stopping to sing texts derived from Kafka's Letters to Milena, particularly those where he voices his frustration at having to meet her in a public park for lack of anywhere more private. Sanguineti instead wanted the woman to sing materials suggested by Rosa Luxemburg's prison diaries. Traces of both starting-points are discernible in the final text, but they are simply strands within a more complex and innovatory whole.

The woman on stage (named simply ‘She’) does indeed move through a series of ‘stations’ that are those of a calculatedly secular passion. (The oblique snub to Catholicism is reflected in the punning title of ‘messa in scena’: either ‘thing that is staged’ or ‘mass on stage’.) From the poses in which we find her, we infer a story of arrest, interrogation, and subsequent release, reflecting the Luxemburg scenario that was Sanguineti's starting-point. But the words that she sings, often to a melodic line of great sophistication and beauty, are entirely a matter of inward-looking and confused recollection (some, at least, reflecting Berio's Kafka-based scenario) rather than of responding to outward circumstance. The musical fabric is enriched by a choir and an ensemble in the theatre pit. But the striking innovation lies elsewhere. Spaced round the auditorium are five groups of speakers, who give brutally revealing voice to what the authors goliardically insinuate the inner thoughts of cultured, bourgeois spectators to be, voiced in a polyglot barrage of Italian, French, English, German, and Latin. They invoke the social order; abuse and lust after the protagonist; pray that they may be saved from the wrath of the poor; and chant lists of consumer goods that turn into an appalling catalogue of armaments. They participate in the auction of a ‘perfectly domesticated woman’ and, as She is tortured, chant ‘kein Ende’ again and again. As the authors had anticipated, members of the first-night audience voiced their protests at this unflattering portrait of the spectator as voyeur, but found their exclamations taken up, echoed, and transformed by the speaking groups. (Subsequent audiences came forewarned by the critics, and so did not fall into the trap …)

Passaggio thus provides an exemplary instance of what Eco was simultaneously theorizing as the ‘opera aperta’, or open work. This is in essence a theory of a particular mode of reception, fostered by the work's characteristics. As Eco says:

Eco, of course, goes on to acknowledge that any work of art ‘demands a free and inventive response’, but suggests that what characterizes modern artistic production is the clear-sighted understanding of this aspect of artistic reception by the producers of art, who in consequence raise it to the status of a ‘productive programme’ (whereas those of former generations were concerned to focus those multifarious receptive energies onto a ‘correct’ interpretation or interpretations).Footnote ¹²

However, what was important in Berio and Sanguineti's experiment was the sonic destruction of the stage illusion of a transparent ‘fourth wall’, beyond which the paying public may sit in safety, licensed to stare, and to indulge their private thoughts under the safe cover of a darkened auditorium. In a retrospective conversation with Luigi Pestalozza, and prompted by the latter's allusion to Guy Debord's La societé du spectacle, Sanguineti has acknowledged that his work with Berio during the sixties has at its heart a critique of this ‘spectacularity’. Understandably, he sets aside any suggestion of being an intuitive precursor of Debord's seminal work, which was first published in 1967, but insists nonetheless that the focus of their work is best understood as being ‘the theme of the consumption of spectacle’.Footnote ¹³ This was equally explicit in their next project: an experimental work written for Venice in 1963, and subsequently withdrawn and extensively reworked to form the radio work Laborintus II of 1965. In its 1963 version it was called Esposizione, the title intended by Sanguineti to awaken echoes of Walter Benjamin's meditations upon the Universal Exhibitions in ‘Paris – the Capital of the Nineteenth Century’.Footnote ¹⁴ It was a sort of ballet-critique of consumerism, and featured Anne Halprin's dance troupe invading the theatre auditorium from the rear, carrying a range of those objects vied for by participants in the race to consume. Gradually the whole theatrical space was filled with a vast clutter of consumable objects, while voices chanted parallel lists of cultural junk – as random and semi-private as the contents of our houses. Rather than have spectators processing past stationary commodities, as Benjamin's ‘pilgrims to the fetish Commodity’ were obliged to do in the Parisian Universal Exhibitions, commodities in motion processed past seated spectators. (Television advertisements have taught the great-grandchildren of Benjamin's ‘pilgrims’ that a flicker of pleasurable desire is best kindled when at least one party is visually in relative motion to the other …). Esposizione concluded with a grand exhibition of wrapping: no more ‘universal’ a material show could be devised for our contemporary world.

This self-evidently belligerent play with material acquisitiveness was not – perhaps indeed not intended to be – a particularly subtle theatrical concept. But it featured some striking music by Berio, notably female soloists calling and responding from different theatrical boxes ([a passage that was] to become the opening of Laborintus II). And neither author felt disposed to discard effective musical and verbal materials. Their opportunity to give it an altogether greater depth of resonance came when the RTF offered them a commission for a work to mark the 700th anniversary of Dante's birth, which fell in 1965. At first, this might seem an unlikely conjunction, but the authors were now able to focus the theme of rampant acquisitiveness around the nodal point of Dante's critique of usury from the Inferno. However, the catalyzing force of Sanguineti's deep knowledge and love of Dante prompted the authors into assembling a far more complex tapestry of themes than was necessitated by the appetite for direct confrontation.

This process is one that recalls Umberto Eco's comments on Brecht when, in 1967, he wrote a new introduction for the third edition of Opera aperta. There he observed that

In this instance, the ramified perspectives were provided by a wide range of resources. Much of the text of what, in homage to Sanguineti's first poem-sequence, the authors now entitled Laborintus II was derived from fragments of Dante's own writing: first from the Vita Nuova; then from the first nine cantos of the Inferno; and finally, towards the close, a more extended passage on the nature of music from the Convivio. These are interlarded with rumbling Latin lists of names – commentaries on Hebrew genealogy from Isidore of Seville (functioning more as sonorous word-music than as cogent commentary) – and a frantic accumulation of fragmented images from contemporary life, reminding us that not only money (of which more below) but also knowledge can be insanely hoarded. This proliferating text is balanced by music of incisive clarity and economy: responding trios of clarinets, trumpets, trombones, and low strings, plus percussion (jazz resources whose filiation sometimes becomes explicit); a maverick flute pursuing its own crazy path; a narrator, three female singers, and eight actors, all close-miked to allow the exploration of every vocal nuance.

In essence, the text moves from the complexities of private experience (the strange illuminations of a first love) to a consuming hell with which we are in such a hurry to be intimate that we cannot wait for an afterlife to realize it. Finally back to privacy, and to the authors' own concerns, as young fathers, for the cultural fate of future generations. The Vita Nuova fragments with which Laborintus II starts are almost all extracted from the prose commentary with which Dante conjoins his poems in that hybrid work. These provide a highly stylized account of Dante's obsessive involvement, as much through dreams and visions as through real-life encounters, with Beatrice Portinari. They emphasize in an almost Proustian way how much our most vivid and transforming experiences of youthful passion are a matter of imaginative projection. At first Sanguineti's choice of fragments preserves the skeletal outline of the book, prompting recollection for those who are acquainted with the text, and at least an intimation of Dante's narrative for those who are not. They move from the opening passage where Dante recalls his first juvenile encounter with Beatrice at a May Day party, to that where, lying on his sick-bed, he receives a visionary announcement of Beatrice's death and calls on death to visit him too: these latter words set by Berio as an exquisite neo-madrigalian trio (rehearsal letter CFootnote ¹⁶), over part of which the narrator speaks the same words, if appropriate, in translation. On, then, to the Vita Nuova's closing pages, where, having seen a vision of the dead and glorified Beatrice, Dante resolves to write no more about her until he can treat of her more worthily, a resolution fulfilled at the very end of his life in the Paradiso (rehearsal letter F).

However, at this point Sanguineti's choice of fragments jumps back to the disturbing vision that Dante received after Beatrice first condescended to greet him in the street (rehearsal letter G). And, as if in homage to Dante's dream-like construction of a ‘Beatrice’ that can fulfil his own creative need for a muse, it is precisely here that Sanguineti comes closest to the techniques of fragmentary juxtaposition that we have already discussed in relation to Joyce. As in the prelude to the Sirens chapter, phrases are juxtaposed, and semantically interbreed to create surreal images that are at many removes from Dante's intentions. The original narrative sequence is as follows: having returned home after being greeted in the street by Beatrice, Dante fell into a sweet sleep (‘uno soave sonno’) in which he saw a marvellous vision (‘una maravigliosa visione’): he saw his room invaded by a fiery-coloured cloud (‘una nebula di colore di fuoco’), and within that cloud a figure, a lord fearful to see (‘una figura: uno segnore di pauroso aspetto’), who appeared suffused by great joyfulness (‘con tanta letizia’), and announced to Dante ‘I am your master’ (‘ego dominus tuus’). He carried naked in his arms a sleeping woman, lightly wrapped in a crimson cloth, whom Dante recognized as the lady of the salutation. In his hand he held a flaming object, saying to Dante ‘behold your heart’ (‘vide cor tuum’). Then he awoke the woman (‘la donna’), and persuaded her to eat the flaming object, which, unwillingly, she did (‘mangiando dubitosamente’). Thereafter, the lord's joy turned to bitter [tears] (‘in amarissimo pianto’) and, weeping (‘piangendo’), he gathered the woman up into his arms and departed towards heaven. Dante was left in great anguish (‘in grande angoscia’) such that he woke up. When Dante subsequently wrote a sonnet to commemorate his vision, he recapitulated how the fearful aspect of the lord of Love (‘Amore’) had caused him horror (‘mi dà orrore’), despite his joyful (‘allegro’) appearance.

These phrases[, given in parentheses in the preceding account,] are re-ordered and juxtaposed by Sanguineti as [follows:]

Typographically, Sanguineti is working in a manner very different from [the previous example, of poem 23 from Laborintus]. Although their sequence is far removed from Dante's narrative, the fragments are spatially distinct. But Berio intervenes to restore maximum semantic polyvalence. Although, as will be clear from his own commentary reproduced below, he regards differing degrees of comprehensibility as an important element within the musical structure, these fragments are not tossed from voice to voice or enunciated simultaneously. Instead, they are entrusted to the narrator, who reads straight through the text. Phrases are thus conjoined so as to create surreal juxtapositions such as ‘piangendo, mangiando dubitosamente una nebula di colore di fuoco’: ‘weeping, hesitantly eating a mist the colour of fire’. One fiery object, the cloud, is substituted for another, the heart. Similar emotional attributes of differ[ent] persons are conjoined so as to appear to refer to only one of them. The ‘amarissimo pianto’ of the lord of Love, the ‘grande angoscia’ of Dante, and the weeping ‘piangendo’ of the lord all sound as if they were attributes of the woman (‘la donna’).

Those who assume the role of narrator (if they have had access to Sanguineti's text, and time to reflect upon it) may of course choose to differentiate between these fragments by [means of] intonation. But there is no instruction to do so in the score, which in any case is mustering musical resources so diverse that any attempt to reflect Sanguineti's spatial presentation of the text would be quite impossible. As with [poem 23 of Laborintus], performers may through their interpretative choices have a role in shaping the nature of the operation that the listener is encouraged to attempt, but the likelihood is that they will resort, as did Sanguineti himself when undertaking the narrator's role, to the calm monotone that encourages maximum semantic proliferation. In other words, it is Berio's compositional decisions that have the upper hand in determining the listener's response to the text. And those decisions do not limit themselves to nuances of performance. Where Berio's setting of the text breaks off with ‘vide cor tuum’, Sanguineti had continued headlong with fragments evoking nightmarish images of women. Berio instead chooses to give particular resonance to these words from the lord of Love: they are passed from the narrator to the three singers. Thus projected into music, the echoes of the injunction ‘behold your heart’ may proliferate and multiply, where otherwise they would have been curtailed by the advent of the next fragment.

The Inferno fragments that follow set these evocations of the nexus between private passion and creative elaboration in a sobering context. Although some, extracted from cantos 3 to 5, evoke the physical nature of Hell, they are given a precise focus by the first extensive quotation – which, however, juxtaposes Dante's text with that of one of his great twentieth-century admirers. Florence was a great medieval banking centre, and Dante's reactive denunciation of usury, of making money unnaturally grow from money, is here juxtaposed with Ezra Pound's famous denunciation of the prostitution of art under capitalism from Canto XLV: with Usura. Apt commentary on insane accumulation in all its forms is appended with Dante's judgement on the misers in Canto 7: ‘And all the gold that is beneath the moon, and that once was the property of these exhausted souls, could not give rest even to one of them’ (rehearsal letter V). But, true to the Brechtian model evoked by Eco, we are not given a simple negative. Beneath these words Berio has a clarinettist, a trombonist, and a vocalist improvise over pizzicato double bass and percussion in the manner of sixties free jazz: an evocation of our gleeful haste to consume, to which the authors are as subject as is their audience. The point is rammed home from rehearsal letters W to Z, as brutal attacks from the full ensemble punctuate the voices as they rush through the last of Sanguineti's mad catalogues.

The anarchy at last subsides: first into a final word from the narrator, enunciating Dante's exquisite characterization of the nature of music from Convivio II, XIII, 23–4 (rehearsal letter DD), but then into images of sleeping children, and an oblique justification of the author's mode of operation. The words come from section 17 of Sanguineti's second poem-sequence, Purgatorio dell'Inferno. A few lines earlier in this poem Sanguineti had posed the question of how, as a committed political radical uninterested merely in the welfare of a cultural élite, he justified the use of so complex and allusive a style of writing. His response here is typically oblique: he is working to provide some sort of cultural patrimony, thus the references to sleeping children. But this final section starts with the phrase ‘ma vedi il fango che ci sta alle spalle’ (but look at the mud that he's got on his shoulders). This is a reference to the polemical essay Poesia informale, which Sanguineti published in 1961. There he wrote, quoting one of Cézanne's most famous dicta: ‘Turning the avant garde into museum art […] meant throwing ourselves head-first into the labyrinth of irrationalism and formalism, indeed, into a Palus Putredinis of anarchism and alienation, in the hope that […], having come through all that, we would emerge at the other side not just with dirty hands, but with mud all over our shoulders too”’.Footnote ¹⁸ Not for Sanguineti and Berio the ‘auguste retraite’ of Mallarmé and the Symbolists. The only way to confront the pleasurable subjection in which consumer capitalism held themselves and their fellow men was to infiltrate, embrace, absorb, and subvert.

Laborintus II was first performed for French Radio in Paris in 1965. But, at least to start with, Berio was happy to envisage the work returning to its theatrical roots. Indeed, when it was first staged in July 1968 for the Festival dei Due Mondi at Spoleto, Berio wrote, in an essay for the programme:

As with so many of Berio's nods in the direction of libertarian diffuseness and multivalency, repeated performance has eliminated most of these alternatives. Berio has preferred to perform it in the concert hall, where the theatre of the mind can flourish unimpeded, and the work's sound-world can make its freshest and most direct impact.

The creative relationship established between Berio and Sanguineti in the early sixties proved remarkably enduring. As Sanguineti himself commented in a 1996 article, ‘Rap e poesia’,

I have already shown that the performance of a Sanguineti text involves decisions about whether or not to respond to the breaks, the diversities of language and of tone, in the text. In the next important creative encounter between Berio and Sanguineti, which took place a decade later in 1974, Berio undertook that exploration for himself. Rather than negotiate the text into being, as had happened in their previous two projects, Berio now asked for a complete short text. Sanguineti responded with A-Ronne, a poem in three brief sections, each a characteristic montage of fragmentary quotations that echo its structural function: ‘beginning’, ‘middle’, and ‘end’. Berio then set to work with five improvising actors in the studio at Radio Hilversum, encouraging them to develop mini-dramas out of the multivalent possibilities offered by the text. From that first ‘laboratory version’ – in some ways reminiscent of the improvisatory experiments that he pursued with Cathy Berberian at the RAI studio in Milan during 1962 in order to build up the materials for Visage (though in that case there was no pre-established ‘text’) – Berio went on to prepare a first scored concert version for five singers, premièred by Swingle II in Liège in 1975, and then another for the full Swingle ensemble of eight singers in 1977, first performed at La Rochelle.

Berio himself points to the intermediary status of A-Ronne. As he has said of it, ‘this is not a composition in the normal sense of that word, even if the procedures employed are often musical (use of inflections and intonations, the development of alliterations and transitions between sound and noise, occasional use of melody, polyphony, and heterophony in elementary form).’Footnote ²¹ Previously, he had let Sanguineti's textual imagination develop its own resonances in the midst of his music, indeed, often after he had completed composition of the work's musical aspects; here instead he, a musician, offers through elements of his own craft a multiple rereading of a text designed by Sanguineti to license such exploration. Sanguineti's text offers itself up to Berio's disintegrative and recreative eye in rather the same manner as had Markus Kutter's text for Sequenza III a decade earlier, though with the difference that, being of substantially greater poetic density, it demands and receives from the composer a treatment more respectful of its potential autonomy. (In fairness to Kutter one should add that he was asked to provide ‘a few words for a woman to sing’, as the start of his text records, in full knowledge of the phonetic dismemberment to which they were likely to be subject, and therefore had the good sense to realize that any great degree of poetic autonomy would merely have been an encumbrance.) With great sobriety Sanguineti plays out verbal variations on his structural polarities of ‘beginning’, ‘middle’, and ‘end’. Gone is the exclamatory vigour, the confrontational intent of Passaggio and Laborintus II, where the proliferating energies of music and text serve to make more visceral the disturbing nature of their nodal images. Here instead Berio offers a demonstration of the inexhaustible abundance available to those ready to appropriate texts by giving voice to them: possessing them by a performer's praxis rather than by a scholar's fetishistic veneration, or, as Sanguineti puts it, by ‘a biological metamorphosis of the text’ [(‘metamorfosi biologica del testo’)].Footnote ²²

To conclude, I would briefly mention two later crossings of creative trajectories. When, in 1988, Sanguineti published a wry poetic last will and testament, Novissimum Testamentum, Berio was moved to respond. He did so in the manner familiar from the example of Joyce and of Sanguineti himself – fragmentation and juxtaposition – but was conscious of a particular challenge in finding what music might in this instance do for words. As he himself wrote,

To allow this echoing multiplicity its due, Berio had therefore to find for it a musical complement. Although he had first set some of Sanguineti's text as a short choral work in 1988, he found a more appropriate solution the following year. In Canticum Novissimi Testamenti he sets up an ‘echo chamber’ ensemble: his habitual vocal octet, responded to by four clarinets and four saxophones. It was an interface between word and sound that was to be redeployed to striking effect when, in 1995, Berio placed it at the heart of Outis, his most radical experiment yet in a theatre of juxtaposed images: now not merely verbal, but also visual. And in Outis he used it to allow texts from another poet close to Berio's heart, Paul Celan, to achieve a similarly full resonance as they echo the memory of the Holocaust.

If in 1989 Berio found himself able to come as close to ‘setting’ a pre-existent text as he had ever done since Epifanie (1959–62), in 1994 Sanguineti performed a complementary operation, writing two-line poems to stand beside Berio's long-established series of Sequenzas for solo performers. The inverse operation has perhaps been attempted more frequently: one has only to think of Debussy or Boulez finding means to allow music to exist alongside the poetry of Mallarmé. But either way, the sheer heterogeneity of these two ‘differing domains’ is respected. Sanguineti listens to Berio's music, or more accurately to the physical act of its performance, and gives structured voice to some of the imaginary dialogue (the verbal postulation of a ‘you’ and an ‘I’) that come to him after observing that (solitary) performer at work. For words do come to him when he listens to some music, just as music comes to Berio when he reads some words. ‘Heterogeneous’ these dimensions may be; as we have seen, both Sanguineti and Berio judge them to be so. But they are not impervious. As Sanguineti observed at the start of Carrousel, the text that he wrote for Vinko Globokar: