Luciano Berio: Rendering (1989) – after sketches by Franz Schubert
It was in 1978 that scholars first identified a group of sketches Schubert had made during the final weeks of his life. These sketches were written on only one (sometimes two) staves, with incomplete harmonies and only occasional markings of instrumentation. Yet it was determined that the sketches amounted to the “continuity draft” of a symphony, covering a three-movement work from beginning to end. Thus, Schubert had the outline of the entire symphony already planned.
Two musician-scholars, Peter Gülke and Brian Newbould, have each grappled with the problems of this unfinished manuscript, and produced two different performing versions of the symphony. Luciano Berio (1925-2003), one of the greatest composers of the second half of the 20th century, did something else entirely: he wrote an original composition utilizing Schubert's sketches while also freely incorporating musical commentary of his own.
In his own introduction to Rendering, Berio compared his intentions to the restoration of a fresco. And, in fact, a sketch by Schubert is in some ways like a fresco ravaged by the centuries. There is an artistic message from long ago that we can't quite decipher. By way of analogy, we might think of listening to a radio broadcast coming from a distant place, with intermittent reception and limited intelligibility. Berio conveyed the blurring of the message by periodically making Schubert's music disappear and replacing it with musical “mist” involving a whole array of distinctly un-Schubertian orchestration techniques. For the rest, he made use of most of the material in the sketches in the order in which it appeared in the manuscript.
Schubert seems to have outlined a rather peculiar tonal plan for the first movement of his symphony. The first movement, like any classical sonata form, has the objective of moving from the home key (in this case, D major) to the key a fifth above (A major) and then back, after a number of tonal adventures. Yet Schubert was planning to choose a rather circuitous route to reach A major this time. He started out in the opposite direction, moving downward instead of upward in the circle of fifths. Berio emphasized the dramatic connotations of this harmonic motion by excited accompaniment figures in the strings. The first “misty” interruption comes at the precise moment where A major is finally reached. Schubert's music eventually resumes with a new second theme in A major, which Berio entrusted to the cellos. The exposition is followed by a second interlude by Berio, and then by a short and mysterious passage by Schubert. In the sketch, a most unusual “Andante” section was inserted in the middle of the opening movement, with a hymn-like melody marked “trombones.” This melody turns out to be a near-quote from Beethoven's Drei Equale for four trombones – music that was played in 1827 at Beethoven's funeral procession where Schubert was a torchbearer. Apparently not bothering to write out the recapitulation, Schubert moved from this “Andante” directly to the concluding “Presto” section of the movement, and Berio followed suit.
Schubert's second-movement Andante (in B minor) is preceded by another Berio interlude. The extreme simplicity, not to say bareness, of this Andante, and the persistent emphasis on the second degree of the scale, recall the piano introduction of “Der Leiermann” (“The Hurdy-Gurdy Player”), the stunning last song from Schubert's 1827 song cycle Die Winterreise (“The Winter's Journey”). Berio added a palpitating string accompaniment to the melody. The first major segment is followed by an extended interlude with an elaborate celesta part. The next Schubert section includes a melodic idea of extreme delicacy and a series of extremely bold modulations, followed by a recapitulation, where the “Leiermann”-like melody slowly fades away into silence.
As far as we can tell, Schubert's third movement would have incorporated both scherzo-like and contrapuntal elements. The cheerful main idea, an heir to Haydn's contradance-rondo themes, emerges from the background of Berio's introduction only gradually: it is first presented with some countersubjects that don't sound exactly like Schubert. By the time the second theme arrives, Schubert's style is more clearly established.
Schubert reserved a further surprise by suddenly introducing a fast section in a new meter and a new key. This section is based on the contradance melody played by the bass in augmentation (i.e. in notes twice their original length). Soon after, we hear a fugal section by Schubert – one of the most extensive he ever wrote. (We remember he had been studying counterpoint intensely during the last months of his life.) At this point, the Schubert sections also begin to include some modern features (for example the instruction col legno, or touching the strings with the wood of the bow). Yet the ending is pure and (almost) unadulterated Schubert, “rendering” a positively 19th-century closure to a work consistently straddling the fence between two eras. A highly unorthodox realization of Schubert's (partially unexpressed) wishes, Berio's composition stands as a monument to the modern person's desire to recapture the past and build the future at the same time.