Sylvano Bussotti, "Couple, for flute and piano"

Sylvano Bussotti, "RARA, for solo cello"

Continued Notes From Wergo 60048:

RARA (eco sierologico), for violoncello is the version for violoncello of the work composed for soloists on five instruments, of which each individually and in turn performs on one of a succession of evenings, with a combined offering on the final evening of a six day festival. This procedure was followed at the festival in Rome organised by the Nuova Consonanze Society, which commissioned the work.

As opposed to the "cosmic" music, accomplished by the accumulation of musical happenings or mathematical treatment of masses, which becomes more and more common from Stockhausen to Xenakis, the music of Bussotti is only accessible virtually. That means that its range and meaning can only be appreciated fully by reading the score, and not by listening alone. It would seem to be the conscious intention of the composer to complicate and render almost impossible the execution of his "great forms" through the diversity of the media which he employs. For the "Cinque frammenti all'Italia" alone he uses, for example, the vocal sextet, a mixed choir and 24 mixed voices. An ideal performance of this work can only take place on paper. Thus Bussotti confirms his inclination towards abstraction and his preoccupation with the written mode of expression, the possibilities of which are inexhaustible. Is that to suggest that Bussotti's work is perfect but impossible to perform? Quite the reverse is true. For all, to the very last detail is filled with the breath of life, with an intimate and pathetic pulsation, which could be compared to the music of a state of mind. This, the composer achieves by using his own highly individualistic handwriting combining a peculiarly expressive graphic style with the most precise, elaborate post-Webern notation. Encroached on from many sides, the exponent must exert himself here to the utmost, employing his virtuosity, his imagination and his sensitivity in a kind of loving dialogue with the score. Very few are equal to the task, for it requires more than mere aptitude.

Sylvano Bussotti, "Ancora odono i colli"

Continued Notes From Wergo 60048:

"Ancora odono i colli" is one of the "Cinque frammenti all'Italia", a remnant of a more comprehensive project in the form of a "representation de concert" which Bussotti abandoned.

Sylvano Bussotti, "Phrase À Trois"

PHRASE À TROIS, for viola, violin and cello

This string trio composed in 1959/60 bears a quotation from Marcel Proust as a motto: ... "il reconnut, secrete, bruissante et divisee, la phrase aérienne et odorante qu'il aimait...".

Here, it is a matter of employing a literary device which the French writer in question particularly likes - that of the extremely long sentence, which stretches for several pages, and defines the intricate course of a subtly articulated statement with light, almost unnoticeable, punctuation. In contrast to all his other works - with the possible exception of "Pour clavier" - the piece is for the most part linear, taken from the first to last note "at one go". The looseness of construction, the outbursts, the episodic unravelling of the texture of sound do not by any means impair its density or continuity, so that the music seems to be free of the breaks which are usually produced by an abrupt technique or by the contrasting nature of the three instruments. In his notes the composer states categorically that "the audience should not be allowed to become aware of any pause, interruption or break in the course of the performance, or in any of the three parts". Without renouncing the precise mechanism which governs all his constructions, Bussotti breaks with post-Webern pointillism which had resolved logical and expressive sequence. The reference to Proust would also seem to be justified by the elaborated, almost unrecognisable quotation from "petite phrase secrete" which originates from an earlier work of Bussotti ("Tre canti" for voice and piano, based on texts by Gide and Arienta, 1951/52). This quotation is played by the violin, like a magical sign in the course of a long movement, and recurs later, more clearly, in the falsetto and piano solos of the "RARA Requiem".

The arrangement of the instruments is not that of a traditional string trio, for the viola and cello are positioned to the right and left of the violin respectively. This peculiarity is reflected in the score except where the three instruments combine and the violin reassumes its natural leading role.

The score itself is presented in large format with the lines of notes running parallel, fusing, separating or dividing, depending on how the instruments relate one to another. When it was published in 1962 this was one of the first scores to be produced as a roll in the Universal Edition. The abundance, even superabundance of groups of appoggiatura, dashes and new specialised punctuation are by no means detrimental to the legibility of the musical development. On the contrary: the plasticity of the graphic symbols and the originality of the typography add to the meaning on reading the score. Nevertheless, the difficulties of interpretation were so great that "Phrase à Trois" had to wait for several years before it was performed by the trio of the Società Cameristica Italiana after six months' rehearsal.

The title "Phrase à Trois" refers not only to the three instruments, but also to the three persons to whom the piece was dedicated, Eduard Steuermann, Rudolf Kolisch and Theodor W. Adorno, who first established criteria for the interpretation of new music. In addition, the title suggests the involvement of three people in an erotic activity, with music expressing a rare, tense moment of union and harmony. In view of the pronounced sensitivity of the work, this is doubtless the most important symbol.

Sylvano Bussotti, "Il Nudo"

From Wergo 60048:

MAURICE FLEURET, Music within music

A kaleidoscope. Sylvano Bussotti's personality and work can be compared to a living kaleidoscope of infinite variety. The matter itself does not change - it has constant characteristics - but the slightest movement, the slightest change of view, causes the crystals to produce new, unanticipated perspectives, a hitherto unknown geometry and endlessly changing meaning.

Bussotti is not satisfied with a more or less linear organisation of sounds. For him music is more than music and he forms it ,,in close association with the arts of symbolism, colour of light, gesture, speech, writing and action". It would not only be wrong, but impossible to separate the composer from the grandiose violinist, from the accomplished exponent of new music, from the poet, analyst, critic, artist and sculptor, who has had 15 exhibitions in the last ten years, from the scriptwriter of cinema and television films, from the actor, producer and set-designer of more than 20 theatre productions from Puccini to Cage. The creative Bussotti is complex, not in the accepted intellectual way, but rather on account of his spontaneous elan. His work is conducted in the same manner as his life, with an insatiable thirst for innovation. In an age in which so many people follow the fashion or outdo it for being left behind, Bussotti is content only to follow or outdo himself, to do what he loves - but he loves so much! Thus, in a land which is full of social, sexual, religious and cultural taboos, he can reconcile the irreconcilable, without being frivolous or naive and without fear of scandal. For he puts on the ascetic cloak of creativity and gives free rein to an eminently Italian power of imagination, seeking the natural in art and artistic in the everyday and expressing himself with ease in the realms of concert and theatre, cinema screen and art gallery. Thus, like Couperin or Schumann, Bussotti is a unique and complex phenomenon, which defies attempts at labelling or categorisation, which takes up its stand on the periphery of every established historical movement, despite largely determining the development of the same.

Bussotti's entire musical output emanates from within. It commands continuity, emanating from living experience by means of a complex system of symbols. None of his pieces can be isolated from the larger context from which it sprang, any more than it could be divorced from those which preceded it or from those which are to follow. Thus, one must judge the corpus of his works from a distance, as part of a development and in relation to the Bussotti landscape. The abundance of references to earlier works, the abundance of symbols, of marginal notes, very often of an esoteric nature, of hints of future developments, all this testifies on every page of music to the unity and timelessness of the works as a whole. It is not without justification that Bussotti claims for himself the language of the "memory of things to come" with the intention of freeing himself of the bonds of time and transience.

Apart from "Phrase à Trois", which is the central piece and principal work of this record, which is to be viewed as a musical whole, the other three pieces on this record demonstrate the close, systematic relationship of Bussotti's works one to another. "Il Nudo" is composed of four fragments, each with its own individuality and architectonic and expressive function within the whole, which itself can be compared to a shorter, concentrated version of "Torso". Meanwhile "Torso" is related to other works inspired by Braibanti or dedicated to purity of voice...

"Ancora odono i colli" is one of the "Cinque frammenti all'Italia", a remnant of a more comprehensive project in the form of a "representation de concert" which Bussotti abandoned. RARA (eco sierologico), for violoncello is the version for violoncello of the work composed for soloists on five instruments, of which each individually and in turn performs on one of a succession of evenings, with a combined offering on the final evening of a six day festival. This procedure was followed at the festival in Rome organised by the Nuova Consonanze Society, which commissioned the work.

As opposed to the "cosmic" music, accomplished by the accumulation of musical happenings or mathematical treatment of masses, which becomes more and more common from Stockhausen to Xenakis, the music of Bussotti is only accessible virtually. That means that its range and meaning can only be appreciated fully by reading the score, and not by listening alone. It would seem to be the conscious intention of the composer to complicate and render almost impossible the execution of his "great forms" through the diversity of the media which he employs. For the "Cinque frammenti all'Italia" alone he uses, for example, the vocal sextet, a mixed choir and 24 mixed voices. An ideal performance of this work can only take place on paper. Thus Bussotti confirms his inclination towards abstraction and his preoccupation with the written mode of expression, the possibilities of which are inexhaustible. Is that to suggest that Bussotti's work is perfect but impossible to perform? Quite the reverse is true. For all, to the very last detail is filled with the breath of life, with an intimate and pathetic pulsation, which could be compared to the music of a state of mind. This, the composer achieves by using his own highly individualistic handwriting combining a peculiarly expressive graphic style with the most precise, elaborate post-Webern notation. Encroached on from many sides, the exponent must exert himself here to the utmost, employing his virtuosity, his imagination and his sensitivity in a kind of loving dialogue with the score. Very few are equal to the task, for it requires more than mere aptitude.

IL NUDO, and string quartet quattro frammenti da Torso, for soprano, piano

After Bussotti had completed "Torso", based on a text by Braibanti, for voice and orchestra after three years' work on it in 1963, he took 4 fragments from this piece, 4 specially selected pieces, to form a suite with the title "Il Nudo" ("The Naked One"). On account of its ingenious construction and almost classical composure he was awarded the first prize in the chamber ensemble class of the composition competition of the International Society for New Music in Rome the following year.

The composer takes up Rilke's idea that the human voice is like a naked body. In "Il Nudo", as in "Torso", he systematically strips the voice of the solo soprano and frees it, little by little, of the instrumental entanglement, until the purity, depth and origins of the voice are exposed. The piano disappears after the first fragment and the string quartet after the third, so that the last fragment is devoted to the voice alone. Thus the work develops asymmetrically, both on account of the progressive reduction in the instrumentation and on account of the elements of the composition themselves. It is a small-scale reproduction of the original work.

The most important pages of the score of "Torso" carry dedications (Max Deutsch, Mario Bartolotto, Heinz-Klaus Metzger, Dieter Schnebel, Henri Pousseur, Romano Amidei) and "Il Nudo" unites the four fragments which are dedicated to the Italian actor Romano Amidei, the composer's intention being to create a kind of musical portrait. In this connection the importance of Romano Amidei's initials for Bussotti's symbolism should be pointed out, especially since they are made to form the word RARA, which recurs in many titles. Finally it should be noted that the underlying unity of this suite can be attributed to the fact that the harmonic material in its entirety consists of a few selected chords, which recur in all possible combinations.

The first fragment is "Quartina II" from "Torso", for voice, piano and quartet, which is based on four verses from a poem on puberty by Aldo Braibanti:

Ecco che spunta gia 1'alba aurora
e tu ridi il tuo gioco spietato
quando viene il mattino hai giascordato
quando viene la sera impari ancora.

Freely translated:

The pale blush of dawn is already appearing
and you mock with your cruel game.
When morning comes, you have already forgotten it,
when evening comes you begin again.

This text is sung by the solo soprano. The instruments contrapunctuate every syllable or letter and form a pointillistic texture of sound which is unusually light and delicate, and from which now and then percussion and all possible kinds of discrete effects ring out. The surprising outcome of keeping the music to a minimum, is a kind of verbal alchemy, bringing forth remarkable utterings made up of the unusual vocabulary of piano and strings and the sounds brought forth by the voice. Further excerpts of the poetical text are to be found after the final pages of the piece. They may well have inspired the composer originally but they are not meant to be heard by the listener and may simply act as a guide to the exponent.

The second fragment from "Torso" - "Quartina III" - illustrates a typical Florentine association of ideas - that of the olive tree and the moon:

Lungo piove l'ulivo
fitti nodi di luna.

In translation:

For long the olive tree rains
the heavy nodes of the moon.

The relationship between the voice and the quartet - which still remains - is no less complex than in the first piece. But the instruments are more sharply separated, and the way in which they develop gives rise to a special annotation on the two pages of the musical text. The vocal part, with its intervals jumping to the extremities of the register, with its groups of melodical suggestions, its unusual structures of equal density and its dramatic interruptions, is reminiscent of the global, sophistic treatment of the voice in Chinese opera.

In the third fragment, "Atto" (Act), the string quartet is left to its own devices. There follows a kind of "instrumental liquidation" in the course of which the four stringed instruments play the sum total of what they had to play in "Torso". They commence simultaneously, but continue independently of each other until the material has been exhausted. In the score, the relevant poetical quotations from Braibanti are to be found in the margin.

The fourth and final fragment follows immediately. It is the one with which "Torso" concludes and that to which the suite owes its title, on account of the single verse which is set to music: "Il nudo violente dolce essenziale corpolinguaggio dell'intuito vitale" ("The violently gentle naked one, essential body-language of vital intuition"). A kind of great cadence, combining all the difficulties of reading and intonation. It is one of the most difficult and brilliantly executed pieces in contemporary music for the human voice without instrumental support.

Bussotti here adapts vocal writing in order to emphasize the underlying polyphony of the texts. He uses special articulation, hesitation, echoes and extra syllables which are produced through phonetic association. It is all borne by the same poetic impulse, without loss of comprehension. Small notes are often set at counterpoint to the main notes, producing the acoustic illusion of many interwoven lines of song. The third part of this piece gives the exponent a certain amount of choice in a large section. Depending on her temperament and possibilities, she must pick her way through overlapping areas, groups of symbols and free, but very suggestive graphic symbols. The last but one page of the score is a precise phonetic and literary analysis of the text, with similar consonants and sounds on one line, thus producing extremities of pitch and intensity.

From beginning to end, the most subtle, enchanting, but also the most conscious, musicality fuse, as do, with the same sensual elan, the spoken effects, murmurs, audible breathing, sighs, the compact masses of appogiatura, the arabesques, the extreme intervals and certain almost electronic distortions of the voice. Everything in the work has its own justification, and right till the cry at the end everything is subject to the logic of perfect, compulsive poetry, to a new vocal ethic rather than a vocal aesthetic. The score of "Il Nudo" was published in 1964 by Hermann Moeck in Celle.

Sylvano Bussotti, "La Passion Selon Sade" (excerpt)

From Dischi Ricordi CRM 1002:

LA PASSION SELON SADE

Extraits de concert

"... Bussotti utilizes - at times to happily ironic effect - the expedients of contemporary musical language, lends them coherence and binds them into a lucid mosaic, but it is obvious that he is definitively concluding a period..."
S. Manzoni, "L'Unlfa", 1966

"... Time has left untouched La Passion: a score as wrinkle-free as the face of its composer..."
M. Tannenbaum, "L'Espresso", 1973

"... A masterpiece; we would like to invite everyone, whether lovers of contemporary music or not, not to miss this rare, precious, jewel of a piece..."
C. Tempo, "II Lavoro", 1973

"...A work that presents remarkable qualities of dramatic integration of the musical values: a musical colour of dark passion, a tormented sense of " envoutement", highly original yet clearly descending from Alban Berg's " Lulu "..."
M. Mils, "L'Espresso", 1965

"... Sylvano's music in this gentle Passion is composed with great transparency in the single parts, with superb "chamber" qualities. The most notable musical passages are a few brief intermezzos for chamber ensemble in which the horn often emerges melodically from oneiric harmonies..."
G, Lanza Tomasi, "L'Ora", 1965

SYLVANO BUSSOTTI Lato 1 LA PASSION SELON SADEi Extraits de concert (1979) Direttore: Marcello Panni Elise ROSS, soprano MARIO ANCILLOTTI, flauto GIANFRANCO PARDELLI, oboe BRUNO INCAGNOLI, oboe d'amore LUCIANO GIUUANI, corno LUIGI LANZILLOTTA, violoncello ANTONIO STRIANO, percussione JEAN LOUIS GIL, organo MASSIMILIANO DAMERINI, pianoforte, armonium CARLO LEVI MINZI, pianoforte, celesta ALESSANDRA BIANCHI, arpa Registrazione dal vivo effettuata dalla RAI il 6.2.1979 presso L'Auditorium del Foro Italico di Roma

Sylvano Bussotti, "Fragmentations"

Sylvano Bussotti, "Frammento"

Notes From Time 58003:

This piece by Sylvano Bussotti is called FRAMMENTO only on this record and in corresponding performances. It is actually the piece VOIX DE FEMME from the PIECES DE CHAIR II (1958-59), an expanded cycle for piano, baritone and further instruments adjoining sporadically, occasionally gaining the dimension of a chamber orchestra. The original version of FRAMMENTO is for voice and orchestra rather than, as on this recording, voice and piano. The principle of the entire cycle is its non-economy which reaches possibly its extreme, at least in respect to its performance technique, when a female voice and an orchestra are being introduced solely for this single piece. In context it functions as an isolated fragment. When it is isolated from the context, its fragmentary character is no longer perceivable, and it becomes a fragment (FRAMMENTO) all the more. Equally fragmentary is the representation for voice and piano. The piano adaptation was written by the composer himself, who thereby thought to establish the piano arrangement as an autonomous compositional genre. The fragment again consists of fragments, and the totality of the fragmental universe results in its negation, that is, totality. The compositional procedure remains that of a collage as well in respect to the musical material as to the far-fetched texts taken from various languages and books. If in the orchestral version the principle of instrumentation has been replaced, as it were, by the principle of instrumental dramaturgy, i.e. by a disposition of the instruments' entrances and exits, so does this correspond with the principle of correpetition in the piano version which has been developed to a principle of composition.

Sylvano Bussotti, "O Atti Vocali"

Sylvano Bussotti, "Le Bal Miro"

Notes From Dischi Ricordi CRM 1002:

LE BAL MIRO'

Prima suite - Antologie per orchestra (1981)

Orchestra sinfonica di Roma della RAI, Direttore: Lothar Zagrosek

Registrazione dal vivo effettuata dalia RAI il 20.12.1986 presso L'Auditorium del Foro Italico di Roma

All'interno libretto di LA PASSION SELON SADE e note illustrative di Sylvano Bussotti. Foto di copertina di Jacques Cloarec

SYLVANO BUSSOTTI was born in Florence in 1931. He studied violin and composition. He has lived in Paris, Buffalo and New York (thanks to the Rockefeller Foundation) and Berlin (thanks to the Ford Foundation). In 1978 he settled in Genazzano (Roma). He has taught at Aquila's Accademia di Belle Arti and at the Bach Academy of Stuttgart. He currently teaches composition at the Scuola di Musica in Fiesole and is president of the Bussottiopera-ballet in Genazzano. He has been artistic director of Venice's Teatro La Fenice and of the Puccini Festival in Torre del Lago. He has directed and designed numerous operatic productions. He has won the following prizes: SIMC 1961, 1963, 1965, All'Amelia, Biennaie di Venezia 1967, Toscani d'Oggi L'Ulivo d'oro 1974, Psacaropoulo Turin 1973.

Sylvano Bussotti, "Lorenzaccio Symphony"

Continued Notes From Deutsche Grammophon 2531 011


"BERGKRISTALL" AND "LORENZACCIO" SYMPHONY, JOSEF HAUSLER

Sylvano Bussotti has followed in his own way a path similar to that of his brother the painter Renzo, from whose copy, illustrated with "astonishing landscapes", he became acquainted during his early youth with Stifter's "Bergkristall". The final pages of the score of Bussotti's "Bergkristall" contain an abundance of costume sketches, figurines and stage designs, belonging to an area of experience where romanticism, youthful style and surrealism meet. They therefore point to Bussotti's synaesthetic nature, to his many-sided gifts as a musician, designer, representer and producer. At the same time these illustrations unmistakably indicate the ambivalence of this work, which Bussotti describes as a symphonic poem, but which he has also called a "Ballet in one act and seven scenes". To remain with this visual concept, the score's seven sections provide Adalbert Stifter's novel with what might be termed astonishing musical landscapes; they transplant the characters and events of Stifter's tale of the simple yet artistic life amid high mountain peaks into the realm of Bussotti's abundant and indeed extravagant imagination, which peoples the region of glaciers with spirit manifestations, clothing the touching story of how two children are lost and miraculously saved on Christmas Day in a musical garment woven from a never-failing wealth of colours, rhythms, soaring lines and ornaments. This music openly proclaims its iridescent and descriptive character; it is of vibrant, highly sensualistic complexity, evoking with subtle tone colouring the sfumato atmosphere of Christmas-tree decorations and candlelight. In the tumultuous passages of the sixth section it enters the sphere of extreme realism, and in the concluding adagio, with its ostinato of plucked, percussion and keyboard instruments in their highest registers, it vividly depicts the glittering of a multitude of snow crystals in the rosy light of dawn. The constructive principle of varying repetition, important for Bussotti, is frequently employed; it may be described as operating with strata of sound conceived with a view to their potentialities for combination, strata which can be used to build up a substantial structure, or which can be taken out of their originally larger context. This procedure is demonstrated particularly clearly in the fifth section. This is based on five fragments distinguished by their different instrumental colouring; they are first heard one after another, then they are played in nine varying combinations, and finally all five appear simultaneously.

The same principle marks the first movement of the "Lorenzaccio" Symphony. This comprises extracts from the stage work which Bussotti based in 1968/72 on a drama of the same name by Alfred de Musset. The play concerns the assassination at Florence in 1537 of the tyrannical Alessandro de' Medici by his cousin Lorenzo, known as Lorenzaccio. The Symphony contains excerpts from the 3rd and 4th acts- not in the same order as on the stage but put together in such a way that they have an independent expressive shape. The first movement creates a sound picture of sombre splendour; the dramatic tension builds up in a movement of striking tonal and dynamic force for wind and percussion, and its climax is reached in a tutti passage which sounds like a completely aleatoric deluge of notes, but which in fact consists of forty precisely notated instrumental parts. The four-note opening motif of the next section recalls the movement for wind and percussion, but from here on the music becomes more and more lyrically subjective. There is a brief reminiscence of the "deluge of notes", but the final third of the work is dominated by cantilena melodies played by several solo instruments, as well as by the sense of beauty and sweetness in the style of a romantic adagio, with subtle effects of light and shade skilfully woven around a pedal point on A. In this wholly inward-looking final section, which with its unconcealed longing for beauty reveals one of the most striking aspects of Bussotti's concept of sound, the last word goes to a solo guitar which represents here the lute, the favourite instrument of the Renaissance age which saw the cultural flowering of Florence, the city in which "Lorenzaccio" is set, and of which Bussotti is a native.

(Translation: John Coombs)

Sylvano Bussotti, "Bergkristall"

Notes From Deutsche Grammophon 2531 011":



Bergkristall (for large orchestra, ballet in one act and seven scenes, concept based on the narrative of Adalbert Stifter)

I. Christmas Eve in the mountains - the children receive their presents
II. The Christmas-tree in the house of the grandparents
III. The disaster of the baker's boy
IV. Losing the path - the snowstorm
V. In the regions of eternal ice
VI. Bergkristall
VII. The mother's arms - the dawn

Sinfonieorchester deds Norddeutschen Rundfunks, Hamburg
Conductor: Giuseppe Sinopoli

Sylvano Bussotti (b. 1931): Bergkristal

SUMMARY

It is Christmas Day, and in the innumerable hamlets hidden in the high mountains there is a perpetual flow of villagers, there are dances and excited exchanges of greetings and presents just before the festival. The cobbler's children are despatched by their father on the path leading to the valley, where their grandparents live in the big dyeworks. They are to bring Christmas greetings and presents, and they receive a warm welcome from their grandmother, who has been expecting them. There is much excitement, spirits are high and Conrad's knapsack is filled with all the good things his grandmother has prepared; there is even little of the very strongest coffee to take home to mother. The children are fascinated by the glitter of the Christmas-tree, but they must be hurrying home. Night will soon be falling and the grandmother has noticed a cold shadow darkening the sky . . .

Grandfather tells them to go carefully, as the mountain can be really dangerous in some places - like the one where the little red column marks the scene of the disaster when a poor baker's boy was found frozen to death on his way with bread from one village to the next, though no one knows exactly how it happened. Conrad can just imagine it all, as grandfather tells the story - the baker's boy and his terrible fight with the cold. But he is not afraid, and never has been. On the other hand it is the memorial column, with its iron cross and naive painting, that marks the path he has to take ... The children are alone now on their homeward path, but it has already begun to snow and the woods that rise above the pathway seem never to come to an end. Gradually an impalpable wall appears to hem them in on every side and all traces of the pathway are obliterated; and it is only by instinct that Conrad guides his small sister through the snowstorm, which becomes increasingly dense and heavy. He makes a despairing effort to find the track, which has disappeared, and to his heated imagination the spirit of the baker's boy seems to be guiding them on towards the unknown... Night has completely fallen now and the cold is unbearable. Conrad takes off his waistcoat and makes Sanna put it on. But by now they do not know which direction to take; the going is increasingly steep and difficult and eventually becomes impossible. Sanna finds a frozen corner to rest in, but she is unable to go on again. And now Conrad realises that the direction in which they are heading is that of the "eternal glacier", the highest peak of all, where perhaps no one has ever been before! The sky there is so close that you can almost touch it with your fingers. And all the time the figure of the baker's boy, half fascinating and half frightening, keeps recurring to Conrad's alarmed consciousness, while above them the enormous glacier towers, like a fantastic castle of crystal.

Spirits of the sky, the wind and the night, blinding and enchanted spirits of the snows - these form the procession that accompanies the comets and unfolds the vast mantle of night from whose centre the Bergkristall spirit will issue. Conrad has given his sister some mouthfuls of the coffee which they are carrying, aware that it is absolutely essential for them to keep awake if they are not to be frozen to death. It is here that nature takes on the appearance of supernatural forms, and the boy can dance among all these spirits. Now the revelation is incarnate in the enchanting figure which combines the fascination of one of grandmother's fairy-stories and the beloved features of a mother's smile.

As soon as it grows light the spirits will vanish, each beneath its mantle of snow. It is the contemplation of that universe that has kept the children awake, and alive, all night. The village rescue team, which has managed to make its way to the summit, with its red flag fluttering, finds the children in each others' arms. Sanna is taken down in a sledge, covered with a mass of furs. Conrad knows the joy of being rescued in the warm embrace of his mother's arms. The rising sun, close above them and of giant size, burns like fire over the vast expanses of snow and the glittering quartz of the rocks, as though a mass of roses were shining, opening their buds and reflecting their own light.

(Translation: Martin Cooper)

PROGRAMME NOTE

It may seem like a fable. In spite of its three successive movements this is really and truly a symphonic poem, with a plot whose text is couched in highly unusual language. The ballet, with its minute descriptions of scene and gesture always meticulously integrated into the musical score, observes every one of the conventions which brought the form to its symbolic peak between 1890 and 1910 with the immortal works of the Russian swan, the divine Tchaikovsky. In fact it goes even further and underlines them; I feel it is absolutely essential for this ballet to be performed strictly according to the right choreographic conventions and adhering closely to the classical modes of expression. To use a comparison appropriate to the setting laid down for it, a virginal winter landscape-one is meant to be confronted with a real, icy Ballet blanc. I came across Adalbert Stifter's masterpiece as a boy, thanks to my elder brother Renzo, a painter, who had sketched fascinating pencil landscapes on the pages of our Italian translation. For more than 20 years I cherished the idea of a ballet as the perfect medium for conveying a drama of eternal innocence, and in "Bergkristall" I found the ideal opportunity. There was no getting round the chief difficulty - that of putting two children on the stage. Even the elder of the two, the boy, cannot be much more than ten years old, and he must be able to play a real protagonist's part on the stage for more than thirty minutes. Given the age of development among European dancers, such a role demands a virtuosity only found in an adult. Yet though this thorny problem could turn out to be a death-trap at the same time it provides a perfect opportunity for beginning to study the score and to see the ballet in the right light and also in the true sense, which makes art a question of accuracy in the use of shapes and language - scenic as well as musical, of course. The whole is illuminated by a quite deliberately old-fashioned light and this has nothing to do with any desire to avoid the present or, worse--refusal to believe in a more or less secure future, which would be a form of escapism. On the contrary, the present and reality take part in a scene which stands out above the orchestra, both pledged to look present-day existence in all its misery firmly in the eye. The unspoiled boy protagonist of this terrible tale loses his innocence, his untroubled childhood sleep when--in mortal danger from an imagined adversary, death, in the person of the baker's boy, who is his exact opposite--he has his first transcendent experience of nature, or as we would say, of the universe.

This awareness leads him to maturity under the spectators' very eyes. (There is also the suggestion here that a brat, who amongst other things has some of the wickedness inherent in all primitive beings, can be freed on the stage from his youthful hubris by being given a heroic part and acting bravely and victoriously in the face of a natural catastrophe). But above all he achieves this with that intact, uncorrupted sense of beauty deeply rooted in the heart of every child which makes his mother and his adored grandmother into marvels of creation, and convinces him it is perfectly natural that they can work unique miracles in the form of supernatural metamorphosis. On the stage, that miracle can, in fact, be repeated-- indeed, it is part of the very essence of the theatre, and of art itself, both vitalistic experiences which are at the same time, strictly speaking, illusory and yet tangible. Behind Stifter's invention, candid and at the same time cruel, rises the dazzling sun of Raymond Roussel, with his demand for a total transfiguration of the probable into the absolute - the pure artistic imagination, in fact. And so in the last resort the fable is wiped out - no princesses, no genii. It is natural enough, if not quite an everyday experience, that the mountain appears as a kind of enchanted castle; and the whole thoroughly credible story consists of quite precise and simple details all consistent with one another. The name "spirits" is given to all personages who are "creatures of the imagination", not simply in their relationship to the play's grammatical syntax, but in virtue of that spirit which inhabits every one of us in his first youth, providing sustenance for the growing man and gaining control over him.

I should like to reveal how this score - begun in Berlin on 15 November 1972 and finished in Rome on 31 March 1973 - in its turn represents a real and true metamorphosis of another kind, a musical one resulting from the extension of an earlier chamber-work (Nottetempo con lo scherzo e una rosa; "Night Time with a scherzo and a rose", on poems by Filippo De Pisis, 1954). The complexities of that metamorphosis will be analysed elsewhere. Here, it will be enough to say that the earlier work was also concerned with nature and the miraculous, with night and stars. Indeed, the real innermost kernel of the whole fable could be said to be precisely the birth of such a star as one sees shining on the low horizon of the proscenium curtain. As always, the shapes taken by my musical ideas led me to write for certain individual performers I had in mind. Elisabetta Terabust literally inspired the triple role of the "etoile"; the dancer Rocco, to whom the work is dedicated, took the role of Conrad, and he provided the rasison d'etre of the work. Just as children have the gift of abandoning themselves to the wonder of something to the point when it becomes reality, the dramatic and difficult music of BERGKRISTALL speaks its own precise language for those who understand the meaning of dance.

(Translation: Martin Cooper)