Bruno Maderna

Bruno Maderna (Venice, April 21, 1920 - Darmstadt, November 13, 1973) was an Italian composer and conductor and one of the great figures of his country's music in the 20th century. With his compositions, his teaching and conducting the orchestra, he contributed to spreading the masterpieces of the European avant-garde. Together with Luciano Berio, he founded RAI's Studio di Fonologia Musicale in 1955.

Maderna's compositional style —different from that of his friends and contemporaries Berio, Boulez, Stockhausen and Nono— is based on the use of pre-compositional deterministic techniques, on a personal interpretation of the concept of "open work" and on a melodic treatment It appears even on the most complex textures. His best-known works are: Musica su due dimensione (1952), Piano Concerto (1959), Oboe Concerto (1962), Don Perlimplín (1962), Hyperion (1964), Stele a Diotima (1965) and Quadrivium (1969) and Juilliard Serenade (1970)

Biography

Formative Years

Bruno Maderna was born on April 21, 1920 in Santa Ana di Chioggia, a small town near Venice. His mother, Caroline Maderna, never confessed who his father was (although many indications point to it being Umberto Grossato, his paternity was never officially recognized). At the age of four he began to play various instruments, including the violin, and his grandfather already commented that the boy was a genius. His family ran a place with a dance floor and there he began to play. In 1930, he was already the main attraction of the band "Happy Grossato Company", which played arrangements of songs in hotels, cabarets, and music halls.

Two years later, at the age of twelve, Bruno conducted the La Scala Orchestra in an operatic concerto from 19th century repertoire . Between September 1932 and December 1935, he also conducted with great success in Milan, Trieste, Venice, Padua and Verona, at the Arena. His fame alerted the fascist authorities in 1933, who, upon discovering that Grossato was not his legal father, placed him under the tutelage of a musician from La Fenice and began to show him internationally as a glory of the regime, a child prodigy known as "Brunetto ». This exhausting life ended when Irma Manfredi, a fashion designer in Verona, stepped in and welcomed him into her own home. He enrolled in the Milan Conservatory, and studied violin and composition; At the same time, he had private tutors, like the composer Arrigo Pedrollo, who gave him music lessons. Even so, he failed the intermediate course at the Conservatory in 1937. He moved to Rome —thanks to the intervention of the Vatican, with a letter of recommendation from Cardinal Montini, future Pope Paul VI— and studied at the Accademia di Santa Cecilia. He graduated in 1940 with a degree in composition and musicology, under the direction of Alessandro Bustini, who also taught Goffredo Petrassi, Guido Turchi and Carlo Maria Giulini.

Despite such an eventful childhood, Maderna matured without further ado, and according to the testimonies of those who knew him, he was a sensible young man, aware of his limitations and fully aware of all the publicity that had surrounded him. After graduating, he expanded his knowledge of conducting in 1941 at the Accademia Musicale Chigiana, in Siena with Antonio Guarnieri, and of composition in Venice, in the international doctoral course for composers (1942-43) taught by Gian Francesco. Malipiero. Malipiero instilled in him his great love for ancient music, especially Venetian music. Maderna will always be grateful to Malipiero, as a composer and above all, as a man.

World War II

During World War II, Maderna was in the Army in 1942 and 1943. In February 1945 he joined the partisans and was captured and imprisoned in a concentration camp. After the war, Maderna found it difficult to follow his musical career in a desolate country. The friendship with Malipiero helped him obtain a position as solfeggio professor at the Venice Conservatory, a job that he carried out, with some discontinuity, until 1952. In those years he had a very large class, attended by Luigi Nono, with whom he established a lifelong friendship (at that time, Nono was just a young law student and he later met him as a fellow student at the "Darmstadt International Summer Courses").

In those years at the Conservatory he studied ancient and medieval music in depth, studies that were the basis for many of his early compositions. The Malipiero introduced him to the publisher Ricordi, for whom he transcribed numerous Vivaldi concerts between 1947 and 1949. Malipiero also got him to premiere one of his works, the Serenata per 11 instrumenti , at the 1946 Venice Biennale, the first to be held after the war. In February of that same year, 1946, he married his first wife, Raffaella Tartaglia. Due to the economic straits they were going through, Maderna was forced to accept all kinds of commissions, composing for radio and cinema, and also dance music.

In 1948 he attended the International Conducting Course in Venice given by Hermann Scherchen, who suggested that he attend the «International Summer Course of New Music» in Darmstadt («Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik]. The following year, in 1949, he premiered one of his works there, the B.A.C.H. Variationen per due pianoforti, in a framework in which he performed many of his works and in which he would become a teacher from 1956. (Many details of his activity as a teacher, director and administrator can be studied in the correspondence voluminous book that he maintained with the founder of the courses, Wolfgang Steinecke).

On January 25, 1950, he conducted his first concert abroad in Paris and at the invitation of Karl Amadeus Hartmann, he did so in Monaco on February 28 of that same year. (Hartmann also called him to conduct a concert at the "Música Viva" festival in Munich, the first time a foreign conductor had been called in). It was the beginning of a tiring but successful and incessant career as a conductor, which led him to conduct in Italy, Germany, Sweden, Belgium and Austria.

In Darmstadt he met over the years the composers most involved with new music, Boulez, Messiaen, Stockhausen, Cage, Unruh, Pousseur and also the most important performers of contemporary music, such as the Kontarsky brothers, Lothar Faber, Severino Gazzelloni, Han de Vries, Christiane Edinger and Theo Olof, many of whom requested new pieces from him (for example, the piece Musica su due dimensioni was written for Gazzelloni). Also in Darmstad he met his new partner, Beate Christine Köpnick —with whom he lived from 1950 (but did not marry until 1972), and who gave him three children— and the playwright Harro Dicks, whose influence is evident in his stage work. In 1951, while he was at the "Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik" in Darmstadt, he participated in the founding of the "Kranichsteiner Kammer-Ensemble" (chamber ensemble).

In 1952, Nono and Maderna joined the Italian Communist Party (PCI). He worked for long periods in Milan with a group of intellectuals —Luigi Rognoni, Luigi Pestalozza and Roberto Leydi— and musicians —Luciano Berio, Cathy Berberian and Giacomo Manzoni— who rejuvenated the Italian music scene with new initiatives. Maderna, Nono and Berio (and others), founded in 1955, in Milan, the “Studio di Fonologia Musicale” of RAI, in order to explore the composition of electronic music, being very important the use of magnetic tape. They also organized the «Incontri Musicali», for the dissemination of contemporary music (1956-60), an initiative that included a musical magazine (supervised by Berio), a group (founded and directed by Maderna) that offered concert cycles and a series of lectures, lectures that resulted in a twelve-tone technique course that he gave at the Milan Conservatory in 1957-58, at the request of its director Giorgio Federico Ghedini,

In the years 1960-62, he also gave composition seminars at Darlington's Summer School of Music in Devon, Great Britain. From 1961 to 1966 he was stable director, with Pierre Boulez, of the "Internationales Kranichsteiner Kammerensemble", conducting concerts in Tokyo (1961) and Buenos Aires (1964).

The years in Germany

Photo of 1963.

In 1963, Maderna settled permanently in Darmstadt, although he often returned to Milan to conduct the Radio Orchestra and use the facilities of the “Studio di Fonologia Musicale”. Despite the time that his assignments in Darmstadt and Milan occupied him, he continued composing and above all conducting, so that he will now be better known as a conductor than as a composer. He soon acquired a reputation as an exponent of contemporary music, especially of the Second Viennese School —Berg, Webern, Schöenberg— and of the group of composers linked to Darmstad —Berio, Boulez, Nono, Lutovslawski, Ligeti—, although he was nonetheless a eclectic director, who could alternate different musical styles. Later he expanded his repertoire to include the main classical works of the XX century —Debussy, Ravel, Bartok, Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Messiaen—, Austro-German symphonists —Brahms, Mahler— as well as some operas —Dido and Aeneas, by Purcell; Parsifal, by Wagner; Pelléas et Mélisande, by Debussy; and various works by Mozart. His interpretations of Mahler's symphonies opened up new channels. (There remains a good testimony of this stage, since Maderna made many recordings, which were sold on LP and can now be obtained on CD). In addition, his experiences as a composer made him a figure of enormous significance for many Italian composers not much younger than him: Nono, Clementi and Donatoni, among others, have recognized the decisive influence he exerted at the beginning of their careers.

During the 1960s he developed important concert work in the Netherlands and in 1965 he toured the United States, conducting the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. In 1967 he taught at the Rotterdam Conservatory and in 1967, 1968 and 1969 he taught conducting courses at the Salzburg Mozarteum. That same year, 1969, he also taught conducting courses in Darmstadt. Among his students he had Lucas Vis, Yves Prin and Gustav Kuhn.

In 1970 he adopted German nationality, but never renounced Italian. In the seventies he frequented the US, being invited to conduct the Juilliard Ensemble and the orchestras of Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, Miami, New York, Cleveland, Washington and Detroit. In 1971 and 1972 he was director of the "Berkshire Music Center" (now Tanglewood Music Center, (Berkshire, Massachusetts, USA).

In 1972 he was appointed director of the "Orchestra Sinfonica della RAI" in Milan and that same year he won the Italian Prize with his radio work Ages. In April 1973, in Amsterdam, during the tests of his opera Satyricon , he was diagnosed with lung cancer, but he continued to compose and conduct until a few days after his death. He died on November 13, 1973 in Darmstadt, when he was working on Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande , and was buried with civic honors.

In 1974, the city of Bonn posthumously awarded him the Beethoven Prize for his work Aura. Many composers wrote works in his memory, such as Boulez —Rituel in Memoriam Bruno Maderna—, Berio —Calmo—, Franco Donatoni —Duo pour Bruno — or Paul Méfano —To Bruno Maderna, 1980).

The city of Cesena named the conservatory in his honor, “Conservatorio Bruno Maderna di Cesena”. In 1997, in Forli, the "Orchestra Bruno Maderna" was founded, the main orchestra of the Romagna.

Works

Musical Features

Maderna's early compositions were influenced by his studies with Malipiero. The work Introduzione e passacaglia: «Lauda Sion Salvatorem» (1942), shows how he had learned to apply ancient techniques in the modes of the century XX, preferring the clarity of the design to the color of late romanticism. To the contrapuntal technique learned at the Conservatory, Maderna added the instrumental mastery learned from his studies of the Italian masters of the XIX century. Although he did not consciously imitate Hindemith or Stravinsky, he did allow himself to be influenced by the wave of neoclassicism then prevailing in Italy. Around this time, in 1942, Maderna began to study the twelve-tone technique — he conducted the Variations op. 30 of Webern, he analyzed the compositions of Luigi Dallapiccola, Riccardo Malipiero and Camillo Togni—and to become familiar with and use his compositional principles in a very personal way. In 1948 he wrote his first serial work, Tre liriche greche , which was published by Ars Viva, probably through Scherchen's intercession.

Maderna was also attracted to new sonorities, as in the Concerto per due pianoforti e strumenti (1947-48) —with Bartókian influences and a special attitude towards difficult sonorities— or in the piece Honeyreves, for flute and piano (1961), built with complex flute melodies and strange piano sound effects (clusters, direct plucking of the snare strings, etc.).

The following years he explored the ways of serialism, although understood with great freedom and fantasy, in which he united the exactness of transformational operations with some unexpected ancient melodic evocations —such as the quote from the «Epitaph of Seikilos» (Greek music) in Composition no. 2 (1950)—or with the use of folk melodies —as in Composizione in tre tempi (1954)—. This period ended with the composition of the work Quattro lettere: Kranichsteiner Kammerkantate , in which he used texts by Frittaion, Kafka and Gramsci.

The Serenata II, for 11 instruments (1954, revised in 1957 for 13 instruments) and the Quartetto per archi, in due tempi, (1955) show maturity from this stage, which is credited with the large amount of surviving preparatory material—diagrams, series tables, number matrices, patterns for distribution of timbre and dynamics, plans for periodic sound events, and, particularly, magic squares— in which one can follow the tension that the compositional rigor produces in the work, the almost mathematical logic that one wants to impose on the materials. This dialectic between rigor and fantasy probably set him apart from his avant-garde colleagues. However, today, it is one of the most modern and distinctive features of him. For Maderna, this contradiction was a necessary and highly productive part of a composer's job:

I am increasingly convinced that one should not be consistent in one's life, particularly if one is a composer or artist; I think one should at all costs avoid being too consequential.'

Baroni and Dalmonte, 1985.

In those years the new paradigm of electronic music also obviously influenced him, and he began to experiment with the production of sounds electronically, with the use of magnetic tapes. At the «Studio di Fonologia Musicale», with the help of sound engineer Marino Zuccheri, he wrote some of the most impressive electroacoustic works of his time: Musica su due dimensioni (1952, revised 1958) for flute and magnetic tape; Notturno (1956) and Continuo (1958) both for magnetic tape. He also composed an electroacoustic diversion called Le Rire (1964).

His compositions for tape combined live and recorded sound, for example, in Musica su due dimensioni (the first work to do so) or in the Concerto nº 1 per oboe. These works also show a form of controlled randomness, in which the exact timing of the musical fragments is left unspecified in the score, and it must be the conductor (originally Maderna himself) who sets their exact sequence and timing. Maderna also used aleatory techniques in the works that followed, leaving the performer great freedom, particularly after Aulodia by Lothar (1965). He did so in Quadrivium (1969), in Ausstrahlung, for a woman's voice, compulsory flute and oboe, large orchestra and magnetic tape —Irradiation, 1971, a tribute to Persian culture—, in Serenata per un satellite, a random composition for eight instruments (1969) (ad libitum, violin, flute, oboe, clarinet, marimba, harp, guitar and mandolin); in Grande Aulodia for solo flute and oboe with orchestra (1970) and in Satyricon, in which interchangeability becomes an essential principle, with the component sections of the two scores published separately. Perhaps the extreme of this way of working, of this opera aperta, is the Serenata per un satellite in which a single page contains the exact parts annotated, but with the instruction that the performers must play as they wish, together, separately or in groups, improvising with the notes.

A characteristic of all of Maderna's stages is his taste for the treatment of instrumental parts for soloist: for the flute, in the Concerto per flauto (1954) and in Don Perlimplin (1962) and Hyperion; for violin, in the Concerto per violino (1969), in Widmung (1967) and in Pièce pour Ivry (1971); for the viola, in Viola (1971); and, particularly for the oboe, his favorite instrument, for which he wrote three concertos (1962, 1967, 1973), Aulodia by Lothar (1965) and Solo (1971). Maderna saw in the oboe the perfect “aulodic” medium that he was looking for to build the “absolute melody” ("aulodía" is a word that mixes the Greek terms aulos —a Greek instrument similar to the oboe— and "melody").

Another notable feature, especially in his later big works, but not only, was the orchestral writing. In works such as Quadrivium, for four percussionists and four orchestra groups (premiered at the Royan festival in 1969), Aura (1972) or Biogramma (1972), the instruments are divided into small groups, like small orchestras, in a manner analogous to Stockhausen's Gruppen, but with very different mood and results. Maderna's interest was not to highlight the interferences between the different sound sources, but the balance that can be achieved by contrasting the timbre and texture of the different blocks, an effect reminiscent of Venetian polychoral music of the 16th and 17th centuries..

Other compositions of his are the Piano Concerto (1959), the radio opera Don Perlimplín (1962) —based on the play by Federico García Lorca— and the Juilliard Serenade (1970). He also wrote many chamber works and various other works. He was also a lover of jazz music, a style in which he even composed some small pieces.

The Hyperion Cycle

From a structural point of view, Maderna conceives the work as a montage of sections or passages, each of which is, to a certain extent, independent of the whole. The composition of the opera Hyperion (1962-69), which deals with the relationship between the poet —representative of the most noble of the individual and underlined by a flute accompaniment— and the machine —representative of the alienating violence of the masses—, exemplifies his way of proceeding.

Hyperion became, in its numerous concert and stage versions, a great cycle in which other works were added and modified. The first version —«Hyperion, lírica en forma di spettacolo», premiered within the framework of the Venice Biennale, on October 6, 1964, at the Teatro de La Fenice, by Virginio Puecher— consists of the following pieces: Le rire and Dimensioni II (for tape), three sections of Dimensioni III (for flute and orchestra) and the first part of the Aria from Hölderlin (for soprano, flute and orchestra). Maderna later added the orchestral sections Entropia II and Stele per Diotima (1965), and, for the Berlin performance in 1969, entitled Suite aus der Oper Hyperion , added two more choral sections, an orchestra section, and several musette solos. Almost all the pieces in the cycle —Dimensioni II (1960), La rire (1962), Entropia I (1963), II (1963), III (1969), Dimensioni IV (Dimensioni III + Stele per Diotima, 1964)), Hyperion III (Hyperion + Stele per Diotima, 1965), Gesti (1969) and Suite (1969)— can be performed in isolation in a concert version, or combined with other parts of the opera, as Maderna himself showed when he performed it in Bologna as Hyperion-Orfeo dolente (on July 18, 1968, at Palazzo Bentivoglio, edited by Belli) and in Brussels as I morituri (edited by H. Claus).

Catalog of works

Discography

Maderna was a conductor who made many recordings, both of his own works and those of other composers.