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Musical Decay: Luciano Berio's Rendering and John Cage's Europera 5

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

David Metzer*
Affiliation:
University of British Columbia

Abstract

Restoration and reproduction have served as two of the primary means by which the present has approached the past. These practices are the focus of Luciano Berio's Rendering and John Cage's Europera 5, two recent works that draw upon earlier compositions. In Rendering, Berio ‘restores ’ the drafts for what would have been Schubert's Tenth Symphony. Contrary to conventional restorations, Berio not only builds up the sketch materials but also fragments them, having Schubert's themes disappear into musical voids. Europera 5 looks back at eighteenth- and nineteenth-century opera, which is presented in a collage of live performance and reproductions. During the course of the work, opera gradually disappears into a world of reproductions, losing its vocality and presence. In both compositions, restoration and reproduction ultimately make the past more distant and inaccessible. A similar use of these two practices occurs in recent visual artworks by Igor Kopystiansky and Mike and Doug Starn. Both the musical and visual artworks create scenes of decay, in which the past appears as crumbling and the present as an emptiness.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Musical Association, 2000

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Footnotes

For their advice and encouragement I would like to thank Richard Kurth, Vera Micznik, Robert Morgan and John O'Brian.

References

1 For a discussion of Kopystiansky, see Kontova, Helena, ‘Igor and Svetlana Kopystiansky’, Flash Art, 26/clxxii (1993), 109–12. Recent exhibition catalogues that contain reproductions and discussions of his work include Adaptation and Negation of Socialist Realism: Contemporary Soviet Art (Ridgefield, CT, 1990); The Purloined Image, ed. Christopher R. Young (Flint, MI, 1993); and Igor Kopystiansky, The Museum (Düsseldorf, 1994).Google Scholar

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11 In a recent interview, Berio asserted: ‘I have an especial dislike for musicologists who decide to complete an unfinished work. It has been done with Schubert piano sonatas for instance, where people tried to squeeze an artificial form out of the sketches, basing them on the sonata form. But things didn't work that way for Schubert’ Theo Muller, ‘“Music is not a solitary act”: Conversation with Luciano Berio’, Tempo, 199 (January 1997), 19.Google Scholar

12 Franz Schubert–Luciano Berio, Rendering (Vienna, 1989), preface. In the interview with Theo Muller cited above, Berio offered a more offhand description of the piece: ‘Renderingis both orchestration and a restoration, like the reparation of a painting damaged by time. When you go to Assisi, you will find beautiful Giotto paintings, some of which are damaged. Now instead of having them repaired by some stupid painter who pretends to be Giotto and fills in what is missing, they decided to leave the white, the concrete as it was, which is very expressive too. I did the same thing with Schubert. I orchestrated, completed some parts, but where the sketches stop I created a kind of musical concrete, a plaster made of many different things, with a totally different sound. Then you go back to the next Schubert sketch.’ Muller, ‘“Music is not a solitary act”’, 19.Google Scholar

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15 Berio's restoration involves not only orchestration but often filling in the drafts harmonically and contrapuntally.Google Scholar

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19 Wilfried Gruhn also discusses the sense of loss in Rendering ('Schubert spielen Berios sinfonische Ergänzungen’, 294). David Osmond-Smith has described how the work creates a sense of distance between the present day and Schubert's time ('La mesure de la distance: Rendering de Berio’, Inharmoniques, 7 (1991), 147–52).Google Scholar

20 A similar fascination with loss and incompleteness emerges in Alfred Schnittke's Concerto Grosso No. 4–Symphony No. 5, the second movement of which draws upon a piano quartet left unfinished by the young 16-year-old Mahler (as opposed to the dying 31-year-old Schubert). Schnittke ends the movement with four musicians from the orchestra playing the original and leaving off where Mahler did.Google Scholar

21 For a discussion of the formal problems surrounding this movement, see Newbould, Schubert and the Symphony: A New Perspective (London, 1992), 269–75, and Schubert, Symphony no. 10, realization by Newbould, iii–iv. In his preface to Rendering, Berio states: ‘These sketches alternatively present the character of a Scherzo and a Finale. This ambiguity (which Schubert would have solved or exasperated in some new way) was of particular interest …'.Google Scholar

22 Brian Newbould, ‘A Working Sketch by Schubert (D. 936a)’, Current Musicology, 43 (1987), 2632.Google Scholar

23 A similar idea is used in the first movement. Berio contrasts Schubert's two different sketches of the exposition, separating them with an interpolation.Google Scholar

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27 In his realization of the symphony, Peter Gülke describes the movement as blending elements of double variation and song forms. The movement does suggest both formal types. The repetition of two themes in recurring units hints at a double variation, although the surprise appearance of a new theme and the absence of conventional variation procedures are atypical of that structure. On the other hand, the subtle changes between the different units, not to mention the lyrical quality of the themes, suggest a modified strophic design. Newbould, on the other hand, views the movement as a sonata-allegro form. This description is less convincing. The tonal structure and repetition of two theme units (the back-to-back pairing of themes 1 and 2) argue against such an interpretation. In addition, the movement lacks a development section, although Newbould unpersuasively claims that the brief transition between the two A blocks serves as an abbreviated development. Drei Sinfonie-Fragmente, ed. Peter Gülke (Leipzig, 1982), 97; Newbould, Schubert and the Symphony, 266–7.Google Scholar

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29 Musicage: Cage Muses on Words, Art, and Music, ed. Joan Retallack (Hanover, NH, 1996), 226.Google Scholar

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31 The directions for the work list ‘one antique mechanical horn phonograph (His Master's Voice Victrola)'. They also state that a jazz station is ‘preferable'. Sections of the score can be found in Musicage, 333–9.Google Scholar

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34 'Shadow playing’ also serves as another means of reducing the obstruction produced by the three live musicians performing simultaneously.Google Scholar

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36 Cage's droll direction that each of the vocalists at one non-singing moment in the work wear ‘a head and shoulders animal mask’ also effaces the performer's presence, besides adding some levity to the work.Google Scholar

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50 In their recent work, the Starns have focused on images of the sun, often incorporating digital shots taken by a NASA satellite. These works have appeared in a variety of media, including video.Google Scholar

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52 Quoted in Andy Grunberg, Mike and Doug Starn (New York, 1990), 38.Google Scholar

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57 These two works are further discussed in my in-progress study of quotation in twentieth-century music.Google Scholar