<<  -- 7 --  Jennifer I Paull    CATHY BERBERIAN - NEVER KNOWINGLY MISUNDERSTOOD

One could be forgiven for thinking that these books are of yesteryear and therefore today, things have fallen into more accuracy of perspective. Sadly, this is not the case. On 29 July 2005 in The Guardian's Friday Review, Andrew Clements removed several basic facts and modified others. The following are extracts from his text.

'Berio (who died two years ago) would have been celebrating his 80th birthday this year, and there's no better way for The Proms to mark that anniversary than by putting on a performance of this extraordinary, life-enhancing piece. The music of Coro is passionate, involving and humane -- all the things that composers of Berio's generation in Europe were supposed to have eliminated from their expressive vocabulary when they set about making a new musical start after the second world war.

'... His music was always organised with fastidious attention to detail, but it also looked outwards in a way that the works of some of his more hermetically sealed colleagues seemed unable to do.

'This range was partly the result of his meeting writer Umberto Eco, who became a close friend and a major influence on Berio's musical and intellectual development. Eco introduced Berio to the writings of James Joyce, while in turn Berio got Eco interested in the linguistics of Saussure.

'... Eco had the initial idea for the collage of texts (from Joyce, Proust and Brecht, among others) that Berio set in 1961 in Epifanie, one of his early international successes ...

'... the importance of the vernacular and dialect in art reinforced Berio's fascination with folk music. Pieces that deal with the raw material of the folk tradition became an enriching strand in his work from the 1960s onwards. The best known was the cycle called Folk Songs that he created for his first wife, Cathy Berberian, in 1964.'

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