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“In the Beginning Was the Word”: The Sung Text as a Unifying Element in the Composition of Bruno Maderna’s Satyricon
- Edited by Angela Ida De Benedictis
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- Book:
- Utopia, Innovation, Tradition
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 17 January 2024
- Print publication:
- 27 June 2023, pp 59-84
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Summary
In an interview with Aldo Maranca in August 1964, Bruno Maderna spoke of the relationship between music and poetry in ancient Greece:
It was a single, indivisible art. It was impossible for the Greeks to imagine it as two parts of a whole. It was a unity. And actually, music had the task of catalyzing the words and the spoken word informed the music of its concepts.
These words are much more than a mere reflection on the artistic legacy of a remote era; in light of Maderna's musical production, they seem to contain a genuine creative manifesto which may have come to its greatest fruition in his last works.
Just seven years after the interview with Maranca, Maderna began composing the central nucleus of Satyricon, his last work for musical theater and a modern transposition of the homonymous Latin novel by Petronius Arbiter. He completed the work two years later, in March 1973. The opera is a mixture of languages, styles, genres, and musical quotations, and has until now been ascribed the status of “fragmentation au carre “ (fragmentation squared). Poised between the concepts of open work, pop-art, and an early postmodernism, Maderna's premature death in November of the same year also played a role in affecting the reading of Satyricon, further implanting the idea of it being an unfinished composition.
There is no doubt that Satyricon defies any analysis that tends to attribute the entire composition to a unitary compositional process or a univocal formal principle. As is known, Maderna makes use of several languages, styles, and compositional methods in the composition of the opera: alongside the massive use of quotations from popular classics, there are stylistic loans from the nineteenth-century operatic tradition, from cabaret, from operetta, and from twentieth-century musical theater (in particular Berg and Weill). And there is more: the stylistic imitations also contemplate the use of acoustic instruments to reproduce the typical sounds of early electronic music, and there is no shortage of parts (such as La Matrona di Efeso and Trimalchio e le flatulenze) where Maderna takes up dodecaphonic and serial composition again, in order to emphasize specific dramatic situations. In terms of dramatic structure and compositional choices, each of the episodes that make up the work seems to be an autonomous organism in its own right.
Analysis and Synthesis in Bruno Maderna’s Creative Process: Don Giovanni and Other Mozart Scores
- Edited by Angela Ida De Benedictis
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- Book:
- Utopia, Innovation, Tradition
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 17 January 2024
- Print publication:
- 27 June 2023, pp 227-244
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- Chapter
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Summary
Il Don Giovanni di Mozart e un’opera contemporanea. Volesse il cielo che tutte le musiche di oggi fossero avanguardistiche quanto il Don Giovanni.
(Bruno Maderna, 1967)Bruno Maderna's artistic personality was repeatedly the victim of an old prejudice: his intense and all-encompassing activity as an orchestra conductor was considered to have somehow damaged his compositional flair, preventing him from dedicating the necessary time and space to exercising his talent. Thus, from this perspective, notwithstanding his apparently bright and promising future as a composer, much of his creativity would have remained largely unexpressed, or at the very least hampered and in some way debased, by his activity as a composer.
This commonplace is a regular topos in Madernian exegesis and reappears also in Michela Garda's 1989 in-depth study of the themes recurrent in the musical criticism directed at Maderna during his life and in the decade after his death. The idea spread and took root particularly in the late sixties and early seventies, further endorsed by his frenetic life as a conductor without a permanent position who regularly appeared as a guest conductor in concert halls all over the world. Moreover, doubts about the reasons behind some of his compositional choices added further fuel to the fire. First of all, it was not clear as to whether his predilection for so-called “open form” composition was dictated more by practical necessity than by a poetic kind of urgency. Or again, whether this was a mere expedient to bungle up pieces he had conceived and composed in his free time away from conducting. The power of this prejudice was still recognized more than twenty years later by Ulrich Mosch (who edited the re-publication of Massimo Mila's Maderna musicista europeo, a collection of radio broadcasts transmitted between 1974 and 1975, shortly after the composer's death), although he does not go so far as to suggest that this was the only reason for the belated musicological interest in Maderna. Mila once said: “When he was alive, we were used to considering him as potentially a great composer and – shaking our heads – we would sententiously observe: shame, he seems to waste his talent on conducting.”