A Little Bit of Exorcism of the Opera and a Little Bit of P

CLAUDIA DI LUZIO

“Un po’ esorcismo dell’opera e un po’ plurale di opus” (“A little bit of exorcism of the opera and a little bit of plural form of the opus”),1 Luciano Berio once stated with regard to the title of his music-theatre work Opera.2 Though he deems the opera to be an obsolete institution, with his “meta-theatre” he offers constructive criticism. By creating innovative music-dramaturgical narrative and shape, Berio’s music theatre conceived for performance on the opera stage constantly comments upon and references the genre’s tradition. Due to Berio’s pronounced historical consciousness, his ideal of musical meta-theatre consists in a theatre being aware of its “becoming”.3 In Opera, first performed in 1970 at the Santa Fe Opera and again in 1977 in a revised version in Florence, three dramaturgical levels are juxtaposed, each referring to a common theme: death. Arranged by Berio himself, the levels are respectively based on (i) Alessandro

1 Luciano Berio in a letter to Massimo Mila, sent from Weehawken (New Jersey) on 9 January 1970. Letter already quoted in Claudia di Luzio, Vielstimmigkeit und Bedeutungsvielfalt im Musiktheater von Luciano Berio, Mainz, 2010, 233. Original document: Massimo Mila Collection, Correspondence, Paul Sacher Stiftung, Basel (PSS). The translations from the original Italian texts are mine. 2 Opera (1969/70; 1977). Text: Berio (after Open Theater, Alessandro Striggio, Umberto Eco et al.). Italian translation from English: Vittoria Ottolenghi. Score: Milan/Vienna, Universal Edition 1977 (corr. 1982), UE 16655. Fair copy and sketches: PSS. Duration: c. 90 min. First performance: 12 August 1970, Santa Fe Opera (conductor: Dennis Russell Davies; director: Berio, Roberta Sklar). First performance of revised version: 27 May 1977, Teatro alla Pergola, Florence (conductor: Bruno Bartoletti; director: Giovanni Lombardo Radice). Further production: Opéra de Lyon, 1979, Maison de la Culture de Nanterre, 1979 (translation into French and adaptation by Céline Zins), Teatro Regio di Torino, 1980, Teatro dell’Opera di Roma, 1981 (conductor: Marcello Panni; director: Luca Ronconi; stage: Gae Aulenti). 3 Berio, “Morfologia di un viaggio”, in Outis, programme of the Teatro alla Scala, Milan, 1999, 38. 464 Claudia di Luzio

Striggio’s tradition-laden text for Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo, (ii) on textual fragments related to the sinking of the RMS Titanic, partly by Umberto Eco and Furio Colombo, which spring from the project Opera aperta (see below), and (iii) on Terminal (1969), a significant work by the New York group Open Theater directed by Joseph Chaikin. The title “Opera” refers to the genre, to the Italian term for work, and to the plural form of the Latin term “opus” – and thus to many works or, as Berio remarks, to an accumulation of vocal and scenic behaviours.4 Berio’s whole theatrical oeuvre reveals meta-referential, dialogic, parodistic, and polyphonic dramaturgical procedures. The idea of derivation from a “model” for an eventual “libretto” (a term that Berio like several of his contemporaries refused as they considered it both an object too detached from music or performance and too anchored in opera conventions) thus implies distance by indirect musical, textual, and scenic gestures, far from any idea of linearity of musical and theatrical narrative discourse. Berio outlined a first full-length stage work early in the 1960s. Initially, he planned an evening composed of three parts (different from those mentioned above): Passaggio, Duo, and Opera aperta. Each had been developed separately – only Opera aperta is partly resumed in Opera. Passaggio became Berio’s first composition for opera in 1963: with a text by Italy’s prominent avant-garde poet Edoardo Sanguineti, it was performed at the Milanese Piccola Scala. With Passaggio Berio and Sanguineti looked critically and provocatively at opera’s obsolete conventions while subtly reflecting them. Thus opera became both means and purpose of the work. The title Duo was three decades later given to a radio work growing out of collaboration with Italo Calvino.5 In Duo, two violinists enter an imaginary dialogue that alternates with strophes sung by a baritone. With the emblematic title Opera aperta (“Open work”), the third project dates to 1956 when Berio planned a work on the sinking of the Titanic (the second of the main dramaturgical references mentioned above that Opera comprises).

4 Berio’s comment (original text in Italian) in Opera, programme of the Teatro Comunale di Firenze, 40° Maggio musicale fiorentino, 1977, 143-44. 5 With Duo, “teatro immaginario“, broadcast by RAI, Radio Uno, in September 1982 the authors won the Premio Italia. The work is linked to the intricate genesis of the dramatic text of Berio’s Un re in ascolto (Salzburg, 1984).