Of Sounds and Images

Luciano Berio; David Osmond-Smith

Cambridge Opera Journal, Vol. 9, No. 3. (Nov., 1997), pp. 295-299.

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Cambridge %era Journal, 9, 3, 295-299 0 1997 Cambridge University Press

Of sounds and images

L U C I A N 0 BERIO
pranslator's note: This lectzire was delivered 63, Lziciano Berio in November 1995on the occasion
of his accepting an Honoray Doctorate from the Universig of Siena.]
Siena 1880. During his penultimate trip to Italy, &chard Wagner stayed for nearly
two months in the neighbourhood of Siena. He was completing the orchestration
of Parsfal, and went one day to visit the cathedral. Hardly had he got inside when
he dissolved into tears, exclaiming 'this the Temple of the Grail'. And indeed, if you
look at the stage designs for the third act of Parsifaal as they were prepared for the
first performance at Ba~reuthin 1882, you will find that the Temple of the Grail
does in fact open on to a fairly faithful reconstruction of the interior of this city's
exceptionally beautiful cathedral.
There's nothing strange about seeing a famous Italian monument on the
Wagnerian stage: just think of all the Scottish castles, Norman cathedrals, harems
and pyramids that have found their way into the opera house. But it's worth noting
that, in spite of all the tears, there is nothing in Wagner's approach to prevent Siena
Cathedral being replaced: it has in other words no specific narrative, descriptive or
even simply evocative functions. It becomes the emblem of an ideal trajectory and,
as with all signs, even emblems are arbitrary. Any of them can be replaced with
anything else. Indeed, it's no surprise that we can find a great deal of coherence
in 'alternative' and often quite properly provocative realisations of the Tetralogy,
or of Tristan. The transformation and metaphorisation of the orignal elements
(whether Mime's cave, Siegfried's forest, Walhalla or whatever) flows naturally
from the mythlcal - and therefore reinterpretable - basis of Wagnerian opera.
Indeed, in an opera as coherent in its expressive intensity as Wagner's, what is seen
on stage may, given its emblematic nature, actually be replaced by music. Music will
tend to govern all the different elements of the performance, and may indeed take
their place.
It was at about the same time that Wagner, faced with a question about how he
imagned his music dramas being realised on stage, replied that he thought of them
as musical action made visible. The profound and revolutionary coherence of
Wagnerian opera seems entirely to justify this assertion, whch is simple only in
appearance: because it also involves non-visible and non-explicit narrative &men-
sions; because it confers upon the visual dimension, as we've seen, an emblematic
function; and because it shows Wagner dstancing himself from the utopia of the
Gesamtkzinstwerk that he had earlier theorised.
In the great tradition of musical theatre, music is almost always in charge. It tends
to organise, to reveal, and indeed to 'direct' narrative and dramaturgical functions
that it has itself generated. Even in Mozart's musical theatre, there are moments
where the narrative seems to assume a shape, a dramaturgical organisation dictated
by the sonata and concertante processes that govern the rest of his work. The
musical processes at work in Le noxxe di Fkaro, Don Giovanni, Idomeneo, Cosifan tzitte
296 Luciano Berio

and so forth, actually seem to invent the psychology of the characters. Debussy
seems to gve scenic substance to the ellipses of his musical thought. His Pellias et
Mihsande has no sense of previous events. It seems to come from nothing and to
end in nothing, like the music that narrates it, and neither arouses nor resolves moral
conflicts. The scansion of the scenes in Pelle'as seems to evoke images from a book
of memory, leafed through with an eye to a music theatre that is yet to come. Nearer
our own time, Berg seems with W o ~ ~ e to c k narrate and to synthesise on stage the
intensity and the rigour of his musical thought. The gestures on stage seem like
episodes from a film determinedly edited by the music.
Musical theatre only seems to take on a deep and enduring meaning once the
dramaturgcal conception is generated by the music, and is structurally analogous to
it, though avoiding a tautological simdarity. More precisely, I would say that musical
and narrative dramaturges must be in accord, though not necessarily identical, in
terms of the larger scale and of global design, whilst individual moments can
maintain their autonomy, and enter into provocative conflict amongst themselves.
Music can express, comment upon, even straightforwardly describe what is on stage,
but it can also estrange itself, remain indifferent, enter into conflict. What is essential
in all events is that the global design and the narrative trajectories establish a
relationship, however dialectical or antagonistic, with the music. Operatic conven-
tions, however eminently efficient and semantically rich a set of rhetorical
instruments they may be, have not shown themselves to be particularly open to the
exploration of new relations between dramaturgy and music. In the last century,
Rossini's final works, Verdi and the early Puccini transcended the established
conventions of the Italian tradition, sublimating them into a new musical drama-
turgy. In this century, the theatre of Weill and Brecht, and that of Berg, contributed
to a constructive separating and intensifying of the various criteria governing
musical theatre, so that from Mahagony to Lz/lz/ one can trace a conception of
dramaturgy that is in continuous, self-conscious and salutary conflict with itself: a
sort of self-analysis pursued, or so it seems, within dimensions called into being by
the musical text.
It's clear that transferring musical thought on to a stage and developing a
significant dialogue between that thought and dramaturgy is, particularly in our own
time, a formidably wide-ranging process: one that can reach out to all possible forms
of spectacle, and to the inexpressibly large range of experiences that have
accumulated within them. Even a concert is a spectacle. Whether we like it or not,
a concert-hall performance is also potential theatre. But there everything happens in
a unanimous and homogeneous time, whereas in musical theatre the relation
between musical time and stage time, between what you hear and what you see, can
separate, become estranged, and thereby take on great complexity. It is a territory
that has to be explored anew every time.
Faced with a stage design or a picture, we are led to react in terms of form and
content, of meaning and sign-vehicle. Perception of what stands before us is
instantaneously global but is also slow and successive, immediate but also stretched
out. Scrutinising what's on stage engages a subjectively variable and discontinuous
temporal dimension. It's like loohng at a picture or a landscape, or reading a book:
 Of sounds and images 297

we can turn back, we can close our eyes, we can linger on one detail as long as we
want or equally we can skip over it.
But when we listen to music, time is self-evidently irreversible, and is not unlike
that lived time whch heaps together diverse temporal qualities. It allows us to turn
back only in memory. Our perception of musical processes cannot slow down,
speed up, or linger on a d e t d . We may repeat the experience in another time and
place - and the memory of a previous hearing will condition and enrich our
perception. Which is why a re-hearing may be qualitatively different from a first
hearing, and why, in the theatre, music will help us to reread in a dfferent way what
is presented to our eyes.
Listening to music may seem a fragde, vulnerable activity: it is without the
protection and validation of language and it is not as concrete an experience as is
the observation of scenic space, and all that lives within it. Yet in musical theatre it
is without doubt the strongest and most resilient dimension. In the dalogue
between the two temporalities of music and of images, it is the music's temporal
quality that prevails, and permits us to scrutinise, analyse and comment on what is
presented to our eyes, while condtioning our perception of it.
A staging that aspires to something more than manneristic decoration does not
have to concern itself with slavishly following and illustrating the action (even when
this seems to demand a specific or indeed a positively anecdotal setting): rather, it
should represent the emotional ambience, the 'Stimmung' of a musical, scenic and
poetic situation. 'We no longer try to give the dusion of a forest, but rather
the illusion of a man in the atmosphere of a forest', wrote Adolphe Appia in
1895, referring to one of hls stagngs of Siedried.Appia was the first opera producer
to react strongly to Wagner's own conception of how his works should be put
on stage. He maintained that Wagner's visual sense was not attuned to the novelty
of the music, and was the first to detach hmself from scenographc naturalism,
entirely abolishing the painted set, thus also abolishing our much-loved
Siena cathedral. It's the music, said Appia, that must dictate condtions to the
image - and as I said before, images may, like emblems and symbols, be open to
substitution.
Not so long ago, the presence of a story to be told, with its antecedents, conflicts
and catharses, words spoken or sung, and articulation through theatrical conven-
tions that increasingly and irrevocably became mannerisms, could heavily condition
not only musical functions and characteristics, but also the relations between eye
and ear. Opera's inexorable and self-protective supermarket of the already done,
already seen and already heard guaranteed the easy availability of materials with
which to assemble operas. For better or for worse, that process of conditioning was,
and still would seem to be, so substantial as to justify stagings essentially constructed
from stereotyped ingredents, even when opera no longer has any sense outside of
itself, outside of its stubbornly fetishistic be1 canto. In opera I sing therefore I am.
But we shouldn't forget that during the last century Italian opera, as much in its
most elevated and original moments as in its most crude manifestations, belonged
to the people, that it was the musical equivalent of a dialect, a form of collective
ritual, a cultural meeting point, and a primarily emotive instrument of social
298 Luciano Berio

understandtng that was at times no more sophisticated than songs, marches, hymns
and fireworks.
A modern musical theatre must have the capacity to seek out new techniques and
new possibilities for encounter between the elements of which it is made. It must
promote relative auto-sufficiency between musical discourse, scenic dtscourse and
text, and thus make it possible to develop a polyphony between three dtfferent but
jointly responsible discourses, between three narratives that become one. The
conditions that make this possible are numerous, complex and bristling with
compromises. Crucially, the composer should always be aware that most of the
operatic conventions, characters or ingredients on which he is so keen to turn h s
back are unavoidably present, in more or less explicit form, on stage. Whatever they
may do, say or sing, the figures that come and go on the operatic stage, be they
never so experimental, will always bear the mark of operatic associations. Those
figures, those 'characters' that advance towards us, seem to have already sung their
story, who knows where or when, to have already sung arias, duets, cavatinas and
ensembles. Even if still and silent or employed in unexpected vocal behaviour, they
seem all the same to be 'singng' because, whatever they may do, they implicitly
carry about them the signs of operatic experience. They are inhabited by them and
themselves inhabit a space - the opera house - that is never empty because it
throngs with memories and ghosts (operatic ones, of course) that impose their
presence and their model. Every form of musical theatre played out within an opera
house is also, inevitably, a parody.
Like all other aspects of our culture, every form of theatre - be it musical action,
opera, musical comedy, drama with music or whatever - carries with it the history
of its own evolution and of the social conventions that have conditioned its origins,
its meaning and its functions. The deeper sense of the relation between narrative
structure and musical structure is never an occasional, momentary or contingent
one. Consider Monteverdi, Mozart, Rossini, Wagner, - Richard Strauss. It's obvious
that the sense of their work can always be placed in history, can be perceived as the
result of a process of more or less dtscontinuous accumulation. Often that process
and the ever-changing history of all those encounters between narrative and musical
structure are ignored, betrayed or impoverished in the name of a false respect for
the past whch thus ends up betraying - as Adorno would say - its own hopes. And
then we may well take fright. For the danger lurks that, in such hands, not even
Mozart, Verdi or Wagner will be able to resist being flattened out by such sinister
'horizons of expectation' as are put in place by those experts, by those equally
sinister protectors of the past, in whose hands even the visionary accomplishments
of such composers run the risk of being offered to 'theatrical consumers' as any old
piece of words-and-music-ware, perhaps enlivened by the odd image.
Seeing music. The impulse to seek out a union between image and sound comes
to us from a long way off, from an ancient synaesthetic vision of the world. Exodus
20:18: 'And all the people saw sounds and lightning and the sound of the shofar'.
The link between light and sound, light and word, is common to almost all
narratives of origins, of primordtal events, of myths and of consciousness of the
world, and music often seems to become the most potent intermediary between the
 Of sounds and images 299

eye and the ear, between the shifting outer limits of a space that always needs to be
explored and interrogated anew. A space that seems at times to lead us to the
threshold of a mystery. A space that, by means of theatre, we insistently try to
explore and secularise, but that in fact always contains a nucleus that is intangible,
and maybe sacred.

(Translated by David Osmond-Smith)