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Nella festa tutto? Structure and dramaturgy in Luciano Berio's La vera storia
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 August 2008
Extract
Stories, whether true or calculatedly false, have played at best an ancillary role in the evolution of Berio's approach to musical theatre. Indeed, to find a straightforward example of story-telling in his output, one would have to go back some twenty years from La vera storia to his previous collaboration with Italo Calvino, Allez Hop (1959), an ironic parable narrated in mime. But as soon as subsequent commissions offered Berio the resources of the human voice, he turned away from the seductions of a central narrative core, and instead built his vision of the potential of musical theatre around a more allusive and multi-layered conception. Narratives are still skeletally present – for instance, in Passaggio (1962), which employs the barest outlines of a scenario, spelt out explicidy only at the end, as a frame on which to hang a complex web of poetic and theatrical imagery, or indeed Opera (1970), with its intertwining myths of the ancient and modern worlds evoked through concentrated imagery, but not acted out. But the narrative twists and turns that are the chief pleasure of the story-teller – and the chief impetus behind the lyric outbursts of the operatic tradition – were no longer his concern.
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References
1 See Rabelais and his World (Cambridge, Mass., 1968), and for those who read Russian,Google ScholarTvorcestva Fransua Rable i narodnaja kul'tura stednevekov'ja i Renessansa (Rabelais and the Folk Culture of the Middle Ages and Renaissance) (Moscow, 1965). The latter text was a source of grave academic controversy when it was submitted as a doctoral thesis in 1940; eventually the Soviet authorities intervened to deny Bakhtin his doctorate.Google Scholar
2 Gossett, Philip, ‘Becoming a Citizen: The Chorus in Risorgimento Opera’, this journal, 2 (1990), 41–64.Google Scholar
3 The City in History (New York and London, 1961), particularly Chapter 2, sections 3 and 4.Google Scholar
4 Berio was to take up the ironies of this dilemma at some length in his next full-scale work of musical theatre, Un re in ascolto.Google Scholar
5 See Osmond-Smith, David, Berio (Oxford and New York, 1991), 105.Google Scholar
6 In this respect, it is worth noting the contrast with Coro, where, massive choral interruptions apart, a sense of the collective ‘we’ was created by a sequence of individual voices, ‘I’s singing on behalf of everyone.Google Scholar
7 As was demonstrated by Lavagetto, Mario in his Quei più modesti romanzi (Milan, 1979).Google Scholar
8 For examples, see Osmond-Smith, , Berio, 106–8.Google Scholar
9 Cited in Charles Hamm's introduction to his 1967 edition of Petrushka for the Norton Critical Scores, p. 5.Google Scholar
10 Petrushka's mix of urban popular sources with traditional Russian folk tunes is discussed in Frederick W. Sternfeld's ‘Some Russian Folk Songs in Stravinsky's Petnuchka’, reprinted in Hamm, 203–15.Google Scholar
11 For Berio's own diagrammatic summary of these relations, see Osmond-Smith, , Berio, 103.Google Scholar
12 See Osmond-Smith, David, Playing on Words (London 1985), 74–81.Google Scholar
13 A device first used by Berio, in Sinfonia (1968–1969) and immediately transposed to the opera house in Opera (1970), it has remained a standard part of his music-theatrical resources ever since.Google Scholar
14 An incident most familiar to English and American theatregoers through Dario Fo's sardonic comedy, Accidental Death of an Anarchist.Google Scholar
15 See also Berio's lecture ‘Of Sounds and Images’, printed elsewhere in this issue.Google Scholar