Homage to Umberto Eco

Umberto Eco has left us. Under media spotlights by now dimmed, the Centro Studi Luciano Berio wishes to remember this great protagonist of international culture by recalling the principal stages of the long personal and professional journey that tied him to Luciano Berio.
The friendship between Umberto Eco and Luciano Berio began at the outset of the 1950s, when both worked for the Milanese headquarters of RAI on the Corso Sempione. The years immediately preceding and succeeding the foundation of the Studio di Fonologia were, on the creative and personal levels, significant for both: indeed it was to Berio, and to the research conducted in those years in the environment of the Milanese electronic studio, that Eco owed his acquaintance with the Cours de linguistique générale by Saussure and with Principes de phonologie by Troubetzkoy, volumes «borrowed from the Studio di Fonologia, and which naturally I [Eco] have never returned through right of conquest.» It was again in the milieu of the electronic studio that ever new commonalities of life and work were established, ones that extended also to Roberto Leydi and Cathy Berberian.

During the 1950s, the most significant result of the collaboration between Eco and Berio was the realization of the radio transmission Omaggio a Joyce. Documenti sulla qualità onomatopeica del linguaggio poetico [Homage to Joyce: Documents on the Onomatopoeic Quality of Poetic Language] (RAI, 1958), harbinger, for Berio, of new experiments in the complex territory of the sound-word binary, and prelude for the noted electronic work Thema (Omaggio a Joyce). One important testament to the exchange of ideas and to the “intellectual construction site” in which Eco and Berio worked in the intense postwar years was their planning of new forms of cultural circulation and promotion: among these, one must surely remember the foundation, by Berio, of the music journal Incontri Musicali (published in four issues between 1956 and 1960), to which Eco participated in 1959 with a fundamental contribution entitled L’opera in movimento e la coscienza dell’epoca [The work in movement and the era’s conscience], which anticipated by some years the reflections contained in one of his most well-known and widespread books, Opera aperta [Open Work] (1962). The presence of Eco was decisive also for the composer’s first experiences of musical theater: from the conversations between Eco, Berio, and Furio Colombo was born the idea to write a “representation” of the sinking of the oceanliner Titanic (which thereafter merged into the theatrical production Opera of 1970), while already on the occasion of the premiere of Passaggio at the Piccola Scala of Milan, in 1963, Eco signed the introductory text distributed to the audience. A new occasion for collaboration materialized for the Italian performance of the great “musical container” that bears the title Questo vuol dire che… [This Means That…] (Rome, Foro Italico, October 24, 1970), for which Eco lent his voice as speaker. The ideas on musical theater also constituted the central theme of the interview Eco in ascolto[Eco Listening In] (1968)—in whose title there is also a clear allusion to Berio’s work Un re in ascolto [A King Listening In] (1986)—a reflection, in two voices, that plays between provocation and perfect harmony between the two friends. Again, in 2000, it is to Umberto Eco that we owe the reprise, at the Università di Bologna, of the famous American Lectures held by Luciano Berio at Harvard between 1993 and 1994. Published by Einaudi only after the death of the composer in 2006, those critical and theoretical pages by Berio were saluted by Eco as the reflections of “an across-the-board thinker, of whom these pages are perhaps the spiritual testament.” The fraternal friendship between the two continued until Berio’s last days: an intellectual and emotional commonality experienced through “understatement” and sweet irony.

Translated by Bibiana Vergine