One Day Seminar//The Operas of Luciano Berio

Luciano Berio’s stage works greatly infl uenced the music of the second half of the 20th century. They not only broke the mould of traditional opera culture but became a landmark of richly diversifi ed experimentation in musical dramaturgy. These results were achieved thanks to his musical art and his awareness that he was working in a world in which communication, expression and the way of interpreting and experiencing culture were changing rapidly.

Studying Berio’s operas means going to the heart of that change in musical drama which has paved the way to 21st-century opera made of new dimensions in communication, “new scenes” (new places, ways and forms of representation) but still characterized by the need for artists to give priority to the human condition.
The vast range of the topic made it necessary to plan a large-scale project, developed over time in various stages to arrive at a comprehensive study. The traditional format of the conference was thus replaced by study meetings divided in six sessions, each focused on one opera.
The study days will take place in France and Italy and will be held in French, Italian and English.
The fi rst study day, at the Giorgio Cini Foundation on September 25, entitled Passaggio e dintorni (“Passage and Thereabouts”), will focus on works that played a key part in the development of Berio’s approach to opera in the early 1960s (i.e. Circles and Laborintus II).
Individual papers from the meetings will be published on the site Dramaturgie Musicale Contemporaine en Europe ( www.dmce.org ), as a preliminary to the publication of the conference proceedings at the end of the project.
For this purpose, the last meeting will be followed by a supplementary study day devoted to more general discussion and an overview of Berio’s whole output for theatre. On this occasion leading experts will be invited to read summaries of their papers and of discussions at the earlier meetings. Each meeting will include a general presentation of the opera in question, a general survey of the existing documentation (preparatory materials, publications, audiovisual material, etc.) and fi ve or six papers on the musical and dramatic analysis of the opera, the aesthetic context and various attendant issues raised by the work in question.