La parola e la cultura ebraica nella musica di Luciano Berio: una ricognizione ragionata

The dialogue with Jewish culture is a relevant aspect of Luciano Berio’s music and writings, and yet it has not been tackled systematically and in its multiple ramifications. This chapter offers a thorough investigation of the different steps and aspects of this dialogue over the decades: from the allusion to a Jewish prayer in Visage (1961), through the Yemenite song in Per la dolce memoria di quel giorno (1974) and the presence of the Hebrew language in episode 29 of Coro (1975-1977), to the deepening of the dialogue, with the increasingly important mediation of Talia Pecker Berio, from Ofaním (1988-1992, 1997) to the later works. The structural presence of excerpts in Hebrew from the Book of Ezechiele and Song of Songs in Ofaním and the rich texture of multiple strands of the Jewish ancient and modern traditions woven by Talia Pecker Berio for the text and dramaturgy of Cronaca del Luogo (1999) represent the most significant steps of Berio’s dialogue. This is also present in the composition for choir and orchestra based on Paul Celan’s Die Posaunenstelle, performed and published in 1995 with different titles (Hör and Shofar) and then included in the third cycle of Outis (1996). With the composition of Kol od (Chemins VI) (1996) Berio contributes to making explicit a musical allusion to Hatikvah that was ‘hidden’ in Sequenza X (1984), on which Kol od is based. Finally, the five episodes of Berio’s last work Stanze (2003) are based on as many poems by different authors and inhabited by different ideas of God. The idea of Stanze is intertwined with Jewish religion, in which the sacred is mainly conceived in terms of a never-ending search. On the whole, the chapter aims at illustrating how Berio’s interaction with certain aspects of the Jewish tradition coincides with some of his principal poetic and compositional concerns: the human voice, the concept of bodily and theatrical gesture, the incidence of oral traditions, the exploration of sound and space by means of live electronics.