The seeds of Luciano Berio’s Opera were sown one icy night in 1912. That night, April the 14th, the fabled Titanic went down on her maiden voyage, taking with her some 1,500 people. With her, this unsinkable marvel of technology, went the pretensions, the sumptuous fantasies of invulnerability, the boundless optimism of the just-ended 19th Century. The fact that those dead represented 20% of the 1st class passengers, 50% of the 2nd class and 80% of the 3rd class loaded the tragedy with even more symbolic weight, exposing the darkly mottled underbelly of the Belle Epoque. The Titanic was plunged into the gelid Atlantic by a mere bit of nature, an iceberg not contained in the thin-lined diagrams of ballrooms and promenades, of massive engines and safety devices.

If such was Opera’s conception, the first quickening came in Milan, in 1957, when Berio, Furio Colombo and Umberto Eco embarked upon the writing of a rappresentazione of the Titanic disaster. Berio writes of that effort, “By the time the project was almost completed I realized I could not approach it musically, not because, as Auden once commented, it is impractical to show so much water on stage, but because by that time it had become dear to me that my musical thinking was not compatible with the operatic attitudes implied in that excellent text; furthermore, I already regarded ‘modern opera’ as an extravagant form of irreverence toward otherwise meaningful ideas and situations.”

Though little remains of that original collaboration, the ideological background, the central images and some threads of thought have survived the 13-year odyssey from Milan to Santa Fe. 0pera is less a story about the Titanic than a latter day morality play framing the plight of the perfect ship whose doom is written in its very perfection, in the loss of course consequent to the pursuit and proliferation of perfection. “Furthermore,” Berio writes, “in the complex overlapping of many well-functioning things, one loses the notion of course itself, and thus, things function in an empty way. When complexity reaches its peak there is always a ‘wreckage’ which is felt as fate, anguish, expiation. The non-story of Opera is mainly based on this crossing and interference of circumstances and characters which only give an illusion of communication, because everything and everybody is prisoner of a situation that aims toward its own internal perfection without acknowledging the nature of other situations.”

This “non-story” is composed partly of fragments of what could be a story, but which, when taken together, do not quite make a story. 0pera is a tri-layered work, but without the hierarchy of importance implied by “layer”. One is provided by the image of the mortally-wounded Titanic foundering slowly in the night. Another is the Open Theatre’s remarkable work, ‘Terminal, present in Opera as selected portions, some presented intact and others adapted to Berio’s needs (in addition, of course, to new material). Terminal, a purposely ambiguous title, may refer to a station on a traveler’s journey, an ending, a ward in a hospital reserved for terminal cases. It is the latter two interpretations which predominate in Opera.

The third layer is supplied by the Orpheus myth. This, the third variation on the theme of endings, treats the idea of fate, inexorable and definitive. Three portions of the libretto by Alessandro Striggio from Monteverdi’s Orfeo, are used recurrently by Berio: a) joyful expectation, b) the message of the death of Eurydice, c) despair.

Throughout Opera, the relationships among the three layers shift constantly. One or the other dominates at any given moment, superimposition of two or three is common. Monteverdi’s Orfeo is present as sung text; Terminal and the Titanic, on the other hand are characterized by spoken texts and visual representation. This complex treatment of multiple threads and levels is typical of Berio, whose constant concern is integration of disparate materials, the creation of unity where no unity is apparent. Shunning collage in any simple sense, Berio strives for a profound synthesis of meanings, not of surfaces. In the context of the present work, however, this does not mean that surface characteristics cannot be used in the service of that goal. In Opera, Berio presents many musical, visual and textual situations, following each other not with the literary logic of story line, but rather with the logic of the dream, linkages by work association. rhyme and analogy. 0pera is a “Dream about endings” Berio says, “and the sequence of situations (I hesitate to say ‘scenes’ because the word suggests discrete, self-sufficient segments, and nothing could be further from the nature of Opera) can be taken as a metaphor of alliterative procedures in language.'”

The principle of alliteration is clear in “Melodrama” (Part I) in which the tenor performs for an audience of uncertain identity (they could be hospital patients or first-class passengers in a salon) on a text composed completely of alliterations. At times the chain of association linking the situations ranges a good distance from the core of the three basic images. (Everyone has had the experience of associating words or memories until the

original stimulus is forgotten.) This is so, for instance in the’ Agnus Dei “a comment on war endings,” Berio says, and in Dream I, “in which the operatic stage dreams its own past.” Opera is divided in four parts, each consisting of several episodes, as follows:

AIR a –  soprano. piano and actors

REMINDER a – baritone

TRIO a – actors and vocal ensemble

GAME – actors

MELODRAMA – tenor

LULLABY – vocal ensemble and actors

TRIO b – vocal ensemble and actors

REMINDER b – baritone

TRACES – orchestra and vocal ensemble

INTERMISSION

AIR b – soprano, piano ,and flute

REMINDER c – baritone

INTERPLAY – actors

DREAM I – tape

DREAM II – actors

AGNUS DEI -children

RETROSPECT – actors

CHEMINS – orchestra and vocal ensemble

INTERMISSION

AIR c/REMINDER d/LULLABY – soprano, piano, baritone, and actors.

EVENT – actors

INTERMISSION

AIR d – soprano, piano and orchestra

REMINDER e – baritone

CONCERTO – orchestra, vocal ensemble and actors

TRIO – actors

ADIEU – tape, actors and orchestra

At times it may seem that this work is an exorcism of opera; though many operatic gestures and references to opera are seen in Opera, its title is not to be taken in that sense. Rather, it is to be understood in its translation from the Latin: works, plural of the noun, work (opus). 0pera has absorbed and transformed parts of some of Berio’s own past works, including Nones (1954), Chemins II (1968), Tempi Concertati (1958), and Traces (1964), as well as the remnants of the original text by Berio, Eco and Colombo and of course, many long hours of work and works (labor and opera) by the composer himself.

Because of the particular treatment of texts in Opera, Berio has declined to provide a printed text. The texts used, in any case, do not constitute a libretto, but rather one of the musical elements of the work. As in many other works by Berio, spoken and sung texts are composed, resulting in varying degrees of perceptibility and varying musical functions. As Berio asserts, “The form of Opera is, essentially, a musical one – the only one that interests me because I believe that it is through musical thinking that a musician can discover new and still unnamed meanings in well-known situations, such as the endless confrontation with the End.” This archetypical moment, the “end game” which brings us face to face with our own imminent shipwrecks is the real subject of Opera – that 9th hour when

What we know to be not possible
Though time after time foretold
By wild hermits, by shaman and sybil
Gibbering in their trances
Or revealed to a child in some chance rhyme
Like will and kill, come to pass
Before we realize it …

(W. H. Auden, “Nones”)