Interviste e colloqui by Luciano Berio (review)

Interviste e colloqui, edited by Vincenzina C. Ottomano, collects fifty-four interviews and conversations the Italian composer Luciano Berio had with several Italian and international journalists and intellectuals. The volume contains texts spanning exactly forty years, from 1962 to 2002, and was issued in 2017 by Giulio Einaudi Editore, a historic Turin-based publishing house. The publication is entirely in Italian, and, besides the interviews and conversations, it features a chronology of Berio's works by Angela Ida De Benedictis; indexes of names, works, and subjects; a foreword by the British critic and librettist Paul Griffiths (who is known to Italian readers through Einaudi's translations of two of his books); and an extensive editorial note by Ottomano, who observes that Berio's ability to speak fluently in English and French gave him the chance to conduct several interviews in foreign languages. Only twenty-eight texts were originally published in Italian; many of the conversations were originally published in English and French, and some appeared in Spanish, Finnish, and Dutch magazines. Thus, as Ottomano rightly stresses, the international relevance of Berio clearly emerges from these interviews. The choice of publishing all the interviews in Italian, however, limits the readership of this compilation.

The volume is the latest fruit of an admirable partnership cultivated between the Centro Studi Luciano Berio and Einaudi. Indeed, the publisher has promoted knowledge of the composer's oeuvre by making available other texts by Berio, namely Un ricordo al futuro: Lezioni americane (2006) and Scritti sulla musica (2013). Like these previous volumes, Interviste e colloqui is suited both to the general public and to the scholar. Indeed, the texts are naturally aimed at a large readership. The interviews, most of which are for nonspecialized magazines, offer a colloquial yet nonsuperficial narrative of the Western cultural landscape of half a century, a point of view that any reader interested in those years will appreciate. The composer is in conversation with international figures such as the architect Renzo Piano, the philosopher (and Berio's collaborator) Umberto Eco, the physicist Tullio Regge, and the British producer Simon Emmerson. Together, they discuss problems that range from the postwar boom era and city planning, to mass culture, to music education. Through these pages, the lay reader will encounter a composer able to sketch effectively in just a couple of sentences the connection between Johann Sebastian Bach and Ludwig van Beethoven, to present a fresh perspective on music history, and to highlight similarities and differences between aesthetic tendencies and problems in twentieth-century music as well as in twentieth-century poetry.

As pointed out by Ottomano, the nature of the interview as a writing form is peculiar: it is a "genre with an ambiguous nature" as it is "a dialogical experience in which the writing sinks its roots into orality" (p. xvii, my trans.). Indeed, the form has several pitfalls for the reader who plans to approach the book linearly. For example, different journalists repeatedly ask Berio similar questions—for example, about his relationships to Darmstadt, to serialism, and with other composers (Henri Pousseur, Karlheinz Stockhausen, etc.). These questions direct Berio to similar topics text after text. Given this, it is quite admirable how Berio manages to keep his answers fresh most of the time, for example when he shows how to locate his production within music history through a witty mathematical equation featuring as variables Claudio Monteverdi, Claude Debussy, and Igor Stravinsky, among others (p. 19). It is also interesting to see how some relationships and topics evolve over time and how certain topics are presented with the same convictions year after year. One example is his view on the relationship between music and language. Berio remains loyal to his structuralist background throughout the interviews, from the very first to the last. Nevertheless, this does not mean that Berio is unaware of contemporary developments. If anything, it...