Introduction
This research wants to investigate the nature of the connection between music and text in Claudio Monteverdi's music and Luciano Berio's music, highlighting through singing the similarities. My interest in the practical singing approach to the music of these composers comes from my wish of being able to express clearly with the voice the feelings behind words, and I found in this music the perfect, fertile ground to build this vocal study path, that I documented with recordings. I wish my research can be useful for other singers who want to approach this kind of music for the first time or simply have new stimulations, talking about this emblematic and immense world of possibilities called interpretation. The title La pratica degli affetti (=the practice of affections) wants to pay homage to Monteverdi and the teoria degli affetti (=the doctrine of affections) and at the same time suggest with the word “practice” the nature of this research which is aimed at the vocal practical experimentation, a concept that both Berio with his poetic of the “vocal gesture” and Monteverdi with his seconda prattica have transmitted to us.
I got to know the music of Luciano Berio (1945-2003) for the first time through an audio cd entirely sang by Cathy Berberian, Berio's wife between 1950 and 1964. The audio cd was including three pieces: Recital I dedicated to Cathy Berberian (scored for mezzo-soprano and 17 instruments) a piece of musical theater starting from Monteverdi and moving through Purcell, de Falla, Stravinskij and Berio himself; the Folksongs in the ensemble version (1964) and three songs of Kurt Weill arranged by Berio. I had been inspired by her vocal personality that was suggesting a very deep understanding of the connection between text and music, and an incredible capacity to color differently the voice and the music itself, depending on the style, the language, the composer, the period and the atmosphere. I heard for the first time one hundred voices in one body and I thought what a huge field of possibilities the voice has, and at the same time, how limiting can be for the creativity of a singer the fear of singing “out of style” or the fear of doing an ugly sound. Furthermore, I immediately recognized the particular attention of Berio to the music-text relationship, valued by a sophisticated research of the right sound at the right moment.
Being aware of the influences that led him to form his poetics of the vocal gesture, which will be presented in the third chapter, taught me how to look at his music, and this had been very useful during my singing study approach at Quattro canzoni popolari for voice and piano (1947) and Sequenza III for voice (1965-66). During the inspiring reversible path between the musical analysis and the performing phase of the pieces, I noticed that singing Berio had a lot in common with singing Monteverdi. In other words, I noticed that I instinctively adopted the same vocal style to approach both composers, and I realized this happened because my musicality (and consequently my voice) was perceiving in the same intense and direct way the text-music relationship, which I found very clearly and deeply connected in both Berio and Monteverdi, even though four centuries of music and history pass between them.
On one side the open, honest, full of love and modern language of Monteverdi which I was more confident with since my early studies and because of my early Italian music background but with which I always felt the necessity to deepen more and more in my singing studies to reach the pure and powerful heart of his music; on the other side the inspiring, rich, creative and fascinating writing of Luciano Berio that seems to reveal directly and elegantly a world of infinite possible colorful combinations between sounds and words.
How the relationship between music and text in Luciano Berio's music has been influenced by Monteverdi and his teoria degli affetti? How deep is this connection between these two composers/periods? Which are the similarities in vocal writing and how can a singer enhance them? What are the technical and expressive challenges for a voice that approach the music of these two composers?
Therefore I chose to go deeper into the music understanding of both these two composers in a parallel way, getting to know them better, singing more of their music and looking at similarities and differences. This exploring path, started from what at the beginning was just an instinct, it is still going on and this is the reason why I have chosen to document it with this research.
This research exposition, is divided in four main chapters. The first one is an introduction to Monteverdi and his seconda prattica in whichthe doctrine of affections is exposed with a special focus at the Lamento d'Arianna along with my research about vocal interpretation. The second chapter describes the musical context in Italy at the beginning of the 20th-century observing how the new composers looked back at the past and in particular at Monteverdi and his contemporaries; in the third chapter Luciano Berio's poetics of gesture will be exposed and it will be observed how some of his composition refer to Monteverdi's seconda prattica. A final chapter will show, with a video recording, my vocal research during the approach to their music.