Luciano Berio, R.I.P.

Luciano Berio, 77, Composer of Mind and Heart, Dies
By PAUL GRIFFITHS

Luciano Berio, an Italian composer whose many compositions, ranging from chamber music to large-scale orchestral works and from operas to songs, combined innovative imagination and analytical depth with a richly sensuous feeling for sound and form, died yesterday in Rome. He was 77.

An outstanding orchestral and vocal composer who was perhaps most remarked upon for his works with solo voice, he was especially known during his long residence in New York City for conducting his own works with the Juilliard Ensemble, which he founded.

Mr. Berio's love for music was exuberantly promiscuous, and it drew him close to Italian opera (especially Monteverdi and Verdi), 20th-century modernism (especially Stravinsky), popular music (the Beatles, jazz), the great Romantic symphonists (Schubert, Brahms, Mahler) and folk songs from around the world. All gave him models for original compositions or arrangements, or for works that were neither entirely new nor entirely old, works in which threads of the old could be combined with new strands. An outstanding example is the middle movement of his "Sinfonia" for orchestra and vocal octet (1968-9), where the entire scherzo from Mahler's "Resurrection" Symphony rolls along, supporting a tapestry of short quotations, new ideas and spoken interjections. Even when his music is ostensibly original it conveys a homage to the past. For him to write an opera, a concerto, a string quartet or a piece for solo clarinet was to contribute to a tradition. That did not mean following traditional forms, which would have been far from his thinking. Rather, the piece would emerge and develop as if it were a memory, evoking textures and situations from the past.

Mr. Berio was born on Oct. 24, 1925, into a musical family long resident in the Ligurian coastal town of Oneglia. His grandfather was his first teacher, and he grew up surrounded by chamber music. Immediately after World War II he entered the Milan Conservatory, where he studied composition with Giorgio Federico Ghedini, whose neo-Baroque style was an early influence, along with the music of Stravinsky.

Among his fellow students was the American singer Cathy Berberian, whom he married in 1950, and with whom he made frequent visits to the United States, encountering a fellow Italian, Luigi Dallapiccola, at Tanglewood and electronic music in New York. Under these influences he entered the modernist stream with works like "Chamber Music" (1953), a set of James Joyce songs he wrote for Ms. Berberian to sing with clarinet, cello and harp.

A meeting with another Italian, Bruno Maderna, brought him to the Darmstadt summer school, the annual meeting place in Germany for the European avant-garde. He attended regularly between 1954 and 1959, and so came to know Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Gyorgy Ligeti, Mauricio Kagel among others. Contributing to their endeavors for radical innovation, he produced his most complicated conceptions, notably "Tempi Concertati" for flute, violin, two pianos and four instrumental groups (1958-9).

Other works of this period include his first electronic pieces. He was co-director with Maderna of a studio for electronic music at the Milan station of Italian radio and produced one of the early classics of tape music: "Thema (Omaggio a Joyce)" (1958), based on a recording of Ms. Berberian's reading from Joyce's "Ulysses." In the same year, with "Sequenza I" for flute, he instituted a series of solo studies, each considering the history, performance style and aura of an instrument. By the time of his death he had composed 14 such pieces, for most of the standard Western instruments, including the human voice.

As patterns of virtuosity, these pieces often prompted elaboration. For example, "Sequenza VI" (1967), which has a viola player scrubbing vigorously at tremolo chords, generated in succession "Chemins II" for the same viola player with nonet (1967), "Chemins III" for the viola with orchestra (1967), "Chemins IIb" for small orchestra (1969), a score from which the original solo viola has disappeared, and "Chemins IIc" (1972), in which it has been replaced by a bass clarinet. Here Mr. Berio was using his own music in the ways he often used others' music, as material to be analyzed, explored, imitated and developed.

Meanwhile, he was pursuing his fascination with the human voice and with the drama of song.

Mr. Berio's first composition for the theater, "Passaggio," had its premiere at the Piccola Scala in Milan in 1963 and was a provocative expression of its sole female character's subjection to social pressures. Subsequently his dramatic works became more poetic than political. "Laborintus II" (1965) is based on an anticapitalist poem by his longstanding friend Edoardo Sanguineti, but the music provides a gorgeous, dreamlike flow of imagery for voices and chamber orchestra, more engulfing than supporting the reciter.

Between 1963 and 1971 Mr. Berio lived largely in New York with his Japanese-American second wife, Susan. He taught at the Juilliard School, where he founded the Juilliard Ensemble, and became more active as a conductor. He wrote "Sinfonia" for Leonard Bernstein and the Philharmonic, and his first full-scale opera, simply called "Opera," for the Santa Fe Opera, which produced it in 1970.

In 1972 he returned to Italy, to a house on the edge of the hill town of Radicondoli, near Siena. In the mid-70's he became a co-director of Mr. Boulez's computer music institute in Paris, which he left in 1980 to establish his own facility in Florence, Tempo Reale.

His biggest work of the decade after "Opera" was "Coro," for 40 singers and 40 instrumentalists (1975-6), an interweaving of folksong-inspired melodies with massive choral settings of words by Pablo Neruda, contrasting individual freedom with oppressive authority. He then returned to opera for two collaborations with Italo Calvino: "Una vera storia," first performed in Florence in 1982, and "Un re in Ascolto," written for the 1984 Salzburg Festival.

Both these works were, like "Opera," deconstructions of the genre. The first part of "Una Vera Storia" is a theatrical analysis of Verdi's "Il Trovatore," the second a new synthesis of the discovered musical-dramatic elements. "Un re in Ascolto," which was given its American premiere by the Lyric Opera of Chicago in 1996, reworks parts of Shakespeare's "Tempest" in a form in which rehearsal, performance and memory coalesce.

Narrative is still more dissolved in "Outis," first performed at La Scala, Milan, in 1996. The opera is loosely based on the myth of Odysseus and incorporates 20th-century images of assassination, exile and genocide. "Cronaca del Luogo," performed at the 1999 Salzburg Festival, was a return to the format of "Passaggio," with a single female character but now representing the heroic women of the Hebrew Bible.

The concern with Jewish subject matter in these later operas — as well as in the magnificent "Ofanim" for instrumental groups, children's voices, electronic resources and, again, a solo female vocalist (1988-97) — was stimulated by his third wife, the Israeli-born Talia Packer Berio, who was as important an influence on the music he wrote in his 60's and 70's as Berberian had been in his 20's and 30's. Ms. Packer Berio created the libretto for "Cronaca del Luogo" and also drew her husband's attention to the symphonic sketches by Schubert that he used in "Rendering" for orchestra (1988-90).

Other late orchestral works, notably "Formazioni" (1985-7) and "Concerto II" with solo piano (1988-90), show Mr. Berio's continuing ability to find new ways for the orchestra to speak, vividly and beautifully, while solo instruments went on having their say as he extended the "Sequenza" series. But perhaps his most personal and powerful achievements are works centered on a solo female voice, all the way from "Chamber Music" to "Cronaca del Luogo": music that celebrates an individual's capacity, even in an unhearing world, to go on expressing pathos, love and imagination.

He is survived by Ms. Packer Berio, of Radicondoli and Florence, and by two daughters, two sons and two grandchildren.