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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
David Metzer*
Affiliation:
University of British Columbia
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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
Information
Journal of the Royal Musical Association , Volume 125 , Issue 1 , 2000 , pp. 93 - 114
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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3 Important precedents of this type of copying include works by Marcel DuChamp, John Clem Clarke, Andy Warhol and Larry Rivers. For a discussion of other artists working in this vein, see The Purloined Image, ed. Young, and Art about Art, ed. Jean Lipman and Richard Marshall (New York, 1978).Google Scholar

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7 These include realizations by Brian Newbould (London, 1995) and Peter Gülke (Leipzig, 1982). In 1982 the Swiss composer Roland Moser completed a ‘fragmentarisches Klangbild’ of the second movement.Google Scholar

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10 Another recent work focusing on Schubert's death and unfinished works is John Harbison's November 19, 1828. This work incorporates a Rondo fragment from 1816 and concludes with a fugue based on a subject derived from the composer's name, part of an assignment given by Simon Sechter to Schubert shortly before his death.Google Scholar

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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14 In the recording by Christoph Eschenbach and the Houston Symphony (Koch 3-7382-2 H1), Berio's interpolations make up around 11 minutes of the total 35’ 7” performance time.Google Scholar

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

16 Schubert–Berio, Rendering, preface.Google Scholar

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18 These quotations are most dense in the first movement and gradually thin out in the following two. Most of the quotations are drawn from the B♭ Piano Sonata (D. 960), the B♭ Piano Trio (D. 898) and Winterreise (Gute Nacht, Gefrorne Tränen, Wasserflut, Einsamkeit, Die Post and Der Leiermann). For discussions of the quotations, see Gruhn, Wilfried, ‘Schubert spielen Berios sinfonische Ergänzungen zu Schuberts Sinfonie-Fragment D 936A’, Musica, 44 (1990), 290–6 (pp. 292–3), and Thomas Gartmann, ‘… daß nichts an sich jemals vollendet ist': Untersuchungen zum Instrumentalschaffen von Luciano Berio (Berne, 1995), 133–5.Google Scholar

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), 26–32.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

24 Newbould, , ‘A Working Sketch’, 26–31.Google Scholar

25 Schubert–Berio, Rendering, preface.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

28 The interpolation might suggest the absence of theme 3 in the second half of the movement, which Schubert perhaps intended but never directed to be placed in an analogous position of that section. It could also respond to Schubert's scratching out of the coda, which, however, does not begin until several bars later.Google Scholar

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

30 On Europeras 1 & 2, see Laura D. Kuhn, ‘Synergetic Dynamics in John Cage's Europeras 1 & 2’, Musical Quarterly, 78 (1994), 131–48, and Herbert Lindenberger, Opera in History: From Monteverdi to Cage (Stanford, 1998), 240–64. A discussion of all the Europeras can be found in William Fetterman, John Cage's Theatre Pieces (London, 1996), 167–87.Google Scholar

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

32 Musicage, 300, 335.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

35 Europera 5, Durational Chart and List, The John Cage Collection, Research Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center, New York Public Library, New York.Google Scholar

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

37 Before Europera 5, Cage had discussed the idea of replacing singers with phonographs. David Revill, The Roaring Silence: John Cage, A Life (London, 1992), 293.Google Scholar

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42 A different sort of simulacrum autonomy is attained by Truckera, which remains beholden to opera but transforms the fragments of the genre into its own distinct sound, a noise unknown on the opera stage.Google Scholar

43 Although well produced, the CD on the Mode label (Mode 36) testifies to the inadequacies of recordings in capturing the piece.Google Scholar

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49 A similar gesture occurs in the Restored Painting, No. 5. A reproduction of that work can be found in Art News, 88 (March 1989), 143.Google Scholar

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

51 If the Starn twins had wanted to incorporate a true crucifixion image, they could have used Champaigne's own painting of that scene.Google Scholar

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

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55 For different approaches to the relationships between past and present in recent works, see Holloway, Robin, ‘Modernism and After in Music’, The Cambridge Review, 110 (1989), 60–6; Jann Pasler, ‘Postmodernism, Narrativity, and the Art of Memory’, Contemporary Music Review, 7 (1993), 3–32; and David Nicholls, ‘Avant-Garde and Experimental Music’, The Cambridge History of American Music, ed. David Nicholls (Cambridge, 1998), 522–34.Google Scholar

56 On the handling of the Mahler Scherzo in Sinfonia, see David Osmond-Smith, Playing on Words: A Guide to Luciano Berio's Sinfonia (London, 1985), 43–53.Google Scholar

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