Luciano Berio’s Nineteenth Century

Abstract

Over the course of his career, Luciano Berio (1925–2003) devoted significant attention to transcribing the music of other composers. That this rich repertory of co-authored works has long been accorded a secondary status in assessments of Berio’s output has also meant that little attention has been paid to the question of what compelled him to engage with the music of his forbears in such a sustained fashion and, more specifically, how he approached the task of transcription. Drawing on an array of newly-available primary sources housed in the Paul Sacher Stiftung (Basel), I argue that the richly annotated ‘source scores’ used by Berio as a starting point for his transcriptions of works by a range of nineteenth century composers, including Franz Schubert and Gustav Mahler, offer evidence of how he listened to their music. Indeed, Berio’s own autograph annotations—many of which foreground the role of listening at the earliest stage of the transcription process—make clear that while these transcriptions rely on an intimate knowledge of an original ‘text’, his relationship to these texts has also been shaped by the lingering sonic traces of the performed work as remembered and misremembered over the course of a lifetime of listening.