Luciano Berio: Music Analysis

The 20th century was an extremely rich period for the arts, including music. Artists pursued new means of expression, and many musical artwork including compositions caused euphoria among the critics and audiences because of their innovative character. Modernism replaced the romanticized aesthetics of the 19th century and composers ventured to discover new sonorities, forms, organizational systems, rhythms and instruments. Luciano Berio was born in the midst of this cultural whirlwind which was taking place between both World Wars. The Italian composer whose career flourished after World War II in the United States had contact with the most prominent composers of his time such as Dallapiccola, Boulez, Stockhausen, Ligeti, Posseur and Cage.

The four initial movements received a premiere in 1968, while the fifth movement was added to the work after the first performance, and received its first performance in the Donaueschingen Festival by the Southwest German Radio Symphony Orchestra in the following year. It was only in 1970 when the New York Philharmonic performed the now complete work under the baton of Leonhard Bernstein. Sinfonia quickly drew attention from the critics and scholars. Bernstein himself stated that the piece was a representative of the new direction classic music was taking after the pessimistic decade of the sixties . Among its five movements, the central movement seemed to attract more attention due to its enigmatic metalinguistic character and to the multiple musical quotations incorporated into the work. In this paper, I will compare analytical strategies on the third movement of Sinfonia in order to prove that Luciano Berio intention was to trace a personal narrative about music history by the examination, commentary, and extension upon the scherzo of Gustav Mahler’s 2nd