Luciano Berio, "E Vó"

In Opera; Agnus is immediately followed by E Vó. A woman picks up the body of one of the slain children and, rocking it in her arms, begins to sing this lullaby to a traditional Sicilian text. The flavor of a piece of folk music is conveyed first through the nasal manner in which the music is sung and secondly by the quarter-tone inflections of an on-stage solo viola. The music begins calmly enough, but it soon becomes tense and then desperate. Unlike Melodrama, which displays a similar process of accumulation, E Vó has a "closed" structure, finally returning to the subdued mood of its opening.

Pieta, Glynn Williams