Sinfonia (Berio)


Sinfonia is a composition by the Italian composer Luciano Berio which was commissioned by the New York Philharmonic for its 125th anniversary. Composed in 1968–69 for orchestra and eight amplified voices, it is a musically innovative post-serial classical work, with multiple vocalists commenting about musical topics as the piece twists and turns through a seemingly neurotic journey of quotations and dissonant passages. The eight voices are not used in a traditional classical way; they frequently do not sing at all, but speak, whisper and shout words by Claude Lévi-Strauss, whose Le cru et le cuit provides much of the text, excerpts from Samuel Beckett's novel The Unnamable, instructions from the scores of Gustav Mahler and other writings.
Leonard Bernstein states in the text version of his Charles Eliot Norton lectures from 1973 that Sinfonia was representative of the new direction classical music was taking after the pessimistic decade of the sixties.

Premieres

Originally commissioned by the New York Philharmonic for its 125th anniversary, Sinfonia was premiered on October 10, 1968 by the orchestra and The Swingle Singers, with Berio conducting. At the time, the work was still in four movements. In the months after the premiere Berio added a fifth movement, which was first played when Sinfonia was performed during the 1969 Donaueschingen Festival by the Southwest German Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Ernest Bour, and subsequently in London at the July 22 Promenade concert, with the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Swingle Singers conducted by the composer. The New York Philharmonic first played the five movement version of Sinfonia on October 8, 1970, conducted by Leonard Bernstein, to whom the work is dedicated.

Instrumentation

The Sinfonia is scored for a large orchestra :
;Soloists:
;Woodwinds
;Brass
;Percussion
  1. timpani, glockenspiel, tam-tam, snare drum, bongos
  2. marimba, tam-tam, sizzle cymbal, bass drum, snare drum, tambourine, 3 wood blocks, whip, güiro, sleigh bell, triangle
  3. vibraphone, tam-tam, cymbal, bass drum, snare drum, bongos, tambourine, castanets, güiro, sleigh bells, 2 triangles
;Keyboard
;Strings

Movements

The work is in five movements:
The first movement primarily uses a French text source and the third movement primarily uses English text sources. The text for the second movement is limited to the phonemes of the title, "O Martin Luther King." The remaining movements are primarily instrumental with occasional vocal elements. The overall form of the piece is an arch form with elements of the first movement reflected in the fifth and connections between the second and fourth. The third movement, a study of inter-relations, stands on its own.

First movement

In the first movement of Sinfonia, Berio uses texts from Le cru et le cuit by the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. The form of the piece is also inspired by Lévi-Strauss, who in his work on mythology had found that many myths were structured like musical compositions, with some myths having a "fugal" form and others resembling a sonata. One mythical transformation however, had a structure for which he was not able to find a musical equivalent, and Berio himself said that he used this form in his Sinfonia—though Lévi-Strauss did not initially notice this. Interviewed by Didier Eribon, Lévi-Strauss said:

Second movement: O King

In 1968, Berio completed O King, a work dedicated to the memory of Martin Luther King. This movement exists in two versions: one for voice, flute, clarinet, violin, cello and piano, the other for eight voices and orchestra. The orchestral version of O King was, shortly after its completion, integrated into Sinfonia. It uses a fair amount of whole tone scale motives.

Third movement

In the third movement of Sinfonia Berio lays the groundwork by quoting multiple excerpts from the third movement scherzo from Mahler's Symphony No. 2 and has the orchestra play a slightly cut-up, re-shuffled and occasionally re-orchestrated version of it. Many have described Berio's third movement as a "musical collage", in essence using an "Ivesian" approach to the entire movement.
The orchestra plays snatches of Claude Debussy's La Mer, Maurice Ravel's La Valse, Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, as well as quotations from Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern, Johannes Brahms, Henri Pousseur, Paul Hindemith, and many others creating a dense collage, occasionally to humorous effect. When one of the reciters says "I have a present for you", the orchestra follows immediately with the introductory chord from Don, the first movement from Pli selon pli by Pierre Boulez.
The quoted fragments are often chosen because they bear a rhythmic or melodic likeness to Mahler's scherzo. For example, Berio uses a violin line from the second movement of Alban Berg's violin concerto with chromatically descending sixteenth notes two measures before a similarly descending line appears in Mahler's scherzo. This is then accompanied by another violin descent, taken from Johannes Brahms' violin concerto. The text from Beckett at this point begins, "So after a period of immaculate silence there seemed", but, instead of continuing the quotation, Berio substitutes the words "to be a violin concerto being played in the other room in three quarters" and then, after the Berg quotation, alto 2 insists on "two violin concertos", at the point where Berg is interrupted by Brahms.
The eight individual voices simultaneously recite texts from various sources, most notably the first page of Samuel Beckett's The Unnamable. Other text fragments include references to James Joyce, graffiti Berio noticed during the May 1968 protests in Paris, notes from Berio's diary, and stage direction by Mayakovsky.
Berio himself describes the movement as a "Voyage to Cythera" in which a ship filled with gifts is headed towards the island dedicated to the goddess of love.

Musical quotations

A partial list of musical quotations used in the third movement of Sinfonia in order of their appearance:
The brief fourth movement is a return to the tonality of the second, relatively serene after the frenetic third movement. It begins again with a Mahler quotation—the chorus taken from the end of the "Resurrection" symphony. The voices make use of various vocal effects, including whispers, syllabic fragments, and distortions of previous textual material.

Fifth movement

This movement was added by Berio a year later, intended to balance the first four. The movement revisits the text from the previous sections, organizing the material in a more orderly fashion to create what Berio calls "narrative substance."
It opens with a quotation from Lévi-Strauss that is at the same time a veiled reference to Mahler's second symphony: the fifth movement of Sinfonia opens with the words "rose de sang", and the fourth movement of Mahler's symphony begins with the words "O Röschen rot!" .

Discography

Four-movement version