LUCIANO BERIO: With the death of Luciano Berio, aged 77, music has lost more than a marvellous composer who wrote some of the most moving and beautiful scores of the postwar period. It has lost one of its intellectual mentors, one of that handful of radical reforming composers who redrew the landscape of music.
With Stockhausen and Boulez, he was a pioneer in the exploration of new technical resources, and in the extension of Schoenberg's serial principle.
However, what really made Berio's name were those exhilarating pieces of the 1960s and '70s, written when he was living in the US; from 1965 onwards, he was professor of composition at the Juilliard School, New York. In works such as Laborinthus II (1965) and Sinfonia (1968-69), which now have the status of modern classics, music, language and theatre were woven into a total experience.
In the 1980s, a more grave and reflective tone came over his work, and the echoes of music of the past became more overt - something that many critics, missing the exuberant complexity of his earlier works, held against him.
His music, including the Dante-inspired Laborintus II (text by the poet Eduardo Sanguinetti), and SOLO for trombone and orchestra, featured in RTÉ's Living Music Festival last October, to which the composer contributed a live telephone interview with the festival's artistic director, composer Raymond Deane.
Berio was born in Oneglia, in the remote Italian province of Liguria, and, in his teens, he followed in the footsteps of his grandfather Adolfo and father Ernesto Berio, both leading figures in the musical life of the town, which Berio remembered as being hardly changed since Verdi's day.
The second World War almost passed Oneglia by; only in the conflict's closing days was Berio conscripted into the army of Mussolini's short-lived northern republic of Salo. After an accidental wounding, he fled from hospital to join the partisans and, when the war ended, he was able to enrol at the Milan Conservatoire.
As his course came to an end in 1953, an intellectual revolution was taking place: postwar neo-realism was already being elbowed aside by the neo-avanguardia, which had a similar left-wing stance but substituted for gritty social observation an ironic, often playful, kind of formal experimentation.
Two members of this movement would later become Berio's chief collaborators and intellectual comrades-in-arms: Eduardo Sanguinetti and the philosopher Umberto Eco. And in the 1970s and 1980s, Italy's most renowned living writer, Italo Calvino, would collaborate with Berio on his operas La Vera Storia (A True Story, 1977-81) and Un Re In Ascolto (A King Listens, 1979-84).
But first Berio had to come to terms with the ideas emanating from the Darmstadt summer school, a hotbed of musical avant-gardism. Here the exploration of new sound-sources, particularly electronics, and the search for ever more rigorous and powerful systems of composing, went hand-in-hand. Inspired by what he heard there, and on his first visit to the US in 1952, he began experimenting with electronics. With the late Bruno Maderna, he co-directed the new electronic studio at the Italian state radio from 1953 to 1960, and in 1958 produced an acknowledged classic of electronic music in Omaggio A Joyce.
Through works in the late 1950s and early 60s he elaborated techniques for injecting into the stiff, immutable serial principle the idea of evolving process. The change could be summarised as a move from "always the same thing, seen from different angles", to "the gradual emergence of something, which then dissolves into something else". That something need not be self-created but already existing, like a folksong or a fragment of Schubert.
The blurring of boundaries between different artistic forms is a constant feature of Berio's music from the 1960s, to the extent that defining the works is often difficult. In the radio composition Visages (1961), the material assembled and cross-cut on tape is the voice of Berio's first wife, the singer Cathy Berberian. Is this a vocal composition, a radio drama, an experimental poem, or a study in pure sound?
Later works project this ambiguity on to ever bigger canvases. Sinfonia, Berio's best known and probably most characteristic work, is a richly complex, hour-long collage, in which spoken and sung texts in many languages are combined with an orchestral score of huge sophistication. The second movement, O King, is a homage to Martin Luther King Jnr, in which the phonemes of the martyr's name provide the text. The central movement is a whirlwind of memories of western music, superimposed on the scherzo of Mahler's Second Symphony.
Whether the collage of words hurled into the texture amplifies, or distracts from the work's coherence is a moot point.
In July 1997, his opera Outis (1995-96) was premiered at La Scala, Milan. Outis is a latter-day Ulysses, who, in five separate narratives, is killed and reborn to undergo allegorical adventures in ever more bizarre surroundings: an ocean liner, a bank, a supermarket. The music, as one reviewer remarked, is "a kind of ocean in which one regularly gets lost and finds oneself again".
In his last years, Berio's productivity, already remarkable by contemporary standards, actually increased. In 1999, his opera Cronaca Del Luogo, a meditation on biblical themes, was premiered at the Salzburg festival.
Among the numerous recent premieres, Sequenza XIV for solo cello (2001-02) stands out, as this was the last of his long series of pieces for individual instruments, which began with Sequenza I, for flute, more than 40 years earlier.
The pieces are a testament to what Berio described as the slow, majestic evolution of instruments across the ages, an evolution for which he had profound respect. And as if all that were not enough, he threw himself, at the age of 75, into the rejuvenation of that remarkable, but moribund, Roman institution, the unique conglomeration of orchestra, promoter, venue, library and school known as the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, of which he became president and artistic director in 2000.
He married Cathy Berberian in 1950, and they had a daughter. They divorced in 1964, and Berberian died in 1983. His second marriage, to Susan Oyama in 1964, also ended in divorce, in 1971; they had a son and a daughter. He is survived by his third wife, Talia Pecker, whom he married in 1977; they had two sons.
Luciano Berio: born October 24th, 1925; died May 27th, 2003 .