Five works by Bruno Maderna: 1948-1971

Just after the end of the Second World War, at the age of twenty-eight, Bruno Maderna was a musician of not inconsiderable experience whose future as a composer was uncertain. He was well aware that he immediately had to break free of everything associated with his musical education if he intended to be truly contemporary and involve himself in the difficult task of rebuilding the international musical community -as he felt he should.
In a period of two years, between 1947 and 1949, Maderna wrote what he termed his "early" works - and then "rewrote" them. In all probability, he intended that a future date someone would be able to look back and explain his origins as a composer in terms which Maderna himself felt would be appropriate. It was thus essential for him to make certain choices quickly, hence he concentrated his energies on two closely related works, as agile in style as they are demanding. Both exploit the huge resources available from a small instrumental grouping - and a typically twentieth-century one at that - centering on two pianos.
Maderna's Concerto per due pianoforti e strumenti and his Fantasia per due pianoforti have often been confused with each other because of uncertainty about what their exact titles were supposed to be. Indeed, the variety of titles used for these pieces has led to confusion about them tout court. The origins of the Concerto were certainly far more complicated than those of the Fantasia. Maderna had sent the first movement of the Concerto to Luigi Dallapiccola for his opinion and advice and the earliest mention of the work appears in Dallaplccola's reply (11 December 1947). Maderna had got hold of Dallaplccola - having made a one-sided decision that he was the man to go to - through Gian Francesco Malipiero. Malipiero had recognized Maderna's talent and did what he could to nuture it, although it would be wrong to say that he actually taught Maderna. Maderna took an approach of his own accord, quite different from that of Malipiero, (Dallapiccola used the term "orientation"), and was already tending to employ a twelve-tone style of composition. He was notheless subject to a number of other very strong influences, such as Stravinsky and Bartók, but also Debussy and Ravel. These were the men who Maderna took as his models, far more than any member of the Second School of Vienna - for the moment, at least.
Dallapiccola was pleased with what he saw but pulled Maderna up over the rigour he should apply when constructing his music. He advised the young composer to be objective when writing and take his example from Bach and employ contrapuntal techniques. Dallapiccola also criticized the over-reliance on devices inspired by the teachers and composers Maderna so evidently admired and voiced his doubts concerning the form of the work. If Maderna was going to employ four changes of tempo in just one movement, he might as well leave it at that. Whatever could he put into the other two, (which he was still working on at the time), that was really essential to the composition? Maderna clearly felt he had plenty to add, as is apparent from the tripartite form of the piece, i.e.:
I: Allegro moderato, ma energico; Poco meno; Vivace; Tempo (presto).
II: Grave; Andante calmo.
III: Lo stesso tempo; Andante maestoso.
So much for Dallapiccola's advice -for the time- being. This, then, was how the piece, nearly half an hour long, received its first performance in Venice at the Festival Internazionale di Musica Contemporanea on 11 September 1948. It had a different title, its amusingly stilted tone evidence of being a hasty, last-minute decision - Concerto per due pianoforti, due arpe e batteria (“Concerto for two pianos, two harps and drumkit”). The two pianists were close friends of Maderna's - Gino Gorini and Sergio Lorenzi -and it was conducted by Ettore Gracis. Gino Gorini was also entrusted with keeping the score of the first performance. In 1949 it was performed the second time in Palermo (Taormina) on 30 September, conducted by Maderna himself. The title was the one by which it is now known, i.e. Concerto per due pianoforti e strumenti, but the work itself was the same as that presented the previous year in Venice. Meanwhile in Palermo, through Dallapiccola and the German composer Karl Amadeus Hartmann, there was already talk of a third performance for the Concerto at Darmstadt in a series of concerts associated with the Ferienkurse and correspondence was exchanged on the matter with Wolfgang Steinecke. The first score sent to Darmstadt was then replaced by another to which Maderna had made three changes: two in the Grave of the second movement and one in the Lo stesso tempo (Andante) of the third. This slimmed-down version of the second movement now floats like a memory of what has gone before and acts as an introduction to the great crescendo of the final Allegro, anticipating its concluding figure. The lyrical atmosphere is, however, disprupted by some of the most violent outbursts in the history of music. As it turned out, the Concerto was not performed at Darmstadt for such eminently practical reasons as getting the players for the percussion section and needing to do something quickly about the cuts Maderna had made to the score - which Maderna's absence made virtually impossible. Hence the decision was taken to perform the Fantasia per due pianoforti, which Maderna had composed in Venice before 30 September 1949, (the date on the list of the composer's works in the programme printed for the concert in Palermo), and would thus prove trouble-free.
However, that was by no means the end of the Concerto per due pianoforti e strumenti - nor of the Fantasia per due pianoforti, come to that. The Concerto was subjected to further revisions following the events of 1949: Maderna completely eliminated the first two movements and, before the third, put in a new 29-bar "introduction" which was highly effective and developed aver the gradual appearance of the four notes which make up the letters of the nome "Bach", I.e. A -B flat -B natural -C. The original half-hour score had been cut down drastically to a mere ten minutes - perhaps Dallapiccola's original advice had not, after all, gone unheeded, (although Maderna had salvaged only the third movement from his original composition, while Dallapiccola had, of course, based his opinion on the first movement). This was to be the definitive form of the work and between 1949 and 1955 the Concerto per due pianoforti was performed on a number of other occasions.
In 1949 Maderna had delivered to the music publishing company Suvini-Zerboni a hurriedly arranged manuscript score, much of which was based on the Venice version of 1948 and which made no attempt to hide the joins of this "cut and paste" effort. In 1955, however, Suvini-Zerboni received the final version of the score, duly cleaned up and written out with knife-like precision. Maderna evidently had no intention of making the work's ups and downs public knowledge and dated the composition "1948". All the composers who had influenced the original, (and so drawn Dallapiccola's disapproval), had been consigned to the scrapheap - with the exception of Bartók -and the new 29 bar 'introduction' was clearly a product of the desire to put Maderna's own stamp on the work in no uncertain terms.
Questions of aesthetics aside, the differences between the two versions of the Concerto per due pianoforti e strumenti are sufficiently marked to enable them to be considered two different compositions, although they may indeed be the product of the some compositional processes. The three-movement concerto - originally entitled Concerto per due pianoforti, due arpe e batteria - demonstrates a high degree of craftsmanship in Maderna's approach to composition and a wholly natural sensitivity towards music. No sketches have survived to show how much of the material employed by Maderna was predetermined - indeed, they may never have existed at all. To a certain extent, Maderna's attitude to his own work is empirical and he is more interested in the effects created by using certain techniques than in any theoretical value those some techniques may have. Indeed, Maderna subscribed to no ideology - musical or otherwise - and wrote his score in a perfectly conventional manner with traditional notation. Maderna was also exceptionally attentive to detail in the Concerto and in light of his concern that posterity should properly interpret his intended view of himself as a composer. as indicated at the beginning of these notes. It could scarcely be otherwise.
There is no denying that the Concerto is a veritable hotch-potch of styles and influences. It hardly requires a musical Sherlock Holmes to detect Stravinsky and a twelve-tone approach in the first movement, an aura of neoclassicism with a hint of Ravel wafting through the second and compositional techniques based on microcanons and Bartók dominating the third. Yet it is in the third movement - as emerges in a recent analysis published by the composer Stefano Bellon - that Maderna succeeds in pushing himself beyond his influences. Here, unlike anyone else, Maderna makes use of permutation and employs not so much motifs as figures. The contrast between sound and silence, i.e. notes versus pauses, leads to the perception that the composer is not writing anything which might be interpreted as a motif - and yet there is a marked sensation of continuity as the work moves towards the huge Crescendo dominating this part of the composition. This ensures that the listener experiences the work as a living, breathing entity which possesses its own sense of unity and inner logic, while avoiding thematic development and its attendant danger of an over-obvious display of scale-spelling and academic learning. Bringing the first version of the Concerto per due pianoforti e strumenti back to life was made possible by recent research but an account of how this was done would be impossible in the limited space available here. What is of significance is that this research has at last led to a critical edition of the score. "Scores" would perhaps be more accurate, since performers now have a number of options: (l) the three-movement version as performed in Venice and Palermo in 1948-49; (2) the "shortened" version made for Darmstadt in 1949 which retained three movements; (3) the final "definitive" version prepared by Maderna for the edition published by Suvini-Zerboni of 1949 (subsequently 1955) in a single movement preceded by the “introduction”.
And there is no doubt that the latter is a masterpiece and a milestone in contemporary music. Nonetheless, the earlier two ore more than worthy of interest. particularly if compared with the various recordings available of the final version, for anyone wishing to delve into Maderna's approach to the business of composition as an ongoing process in which a work is "open and many-sided", to quote one commentator.

As pointed out earlier in the course of these notes, the Fantasia per due pianoforti was the first composition by Maderna to be performed at Darmstadt in 1949 with the title BACH Variationen. There is only one version of the score in Maderna's own hand, (published by Susanna Pasticci), and a great many preparatory sketches. The performers on that occasion were Carl Seeman e Peter Stadlen and it appears that there was only one more performance of the work in 1952 in Düsseldorf. The Fantasia takes the form of one single long movement, although it is in fact made up of three sections, a great Fugue preceded and followed by two less tightly-structured episodes. The piece concludes with a quote from the melody of the Bach chorale Vor deinen Thron tret’ich hiermit. In looking to Bach, Maderna was taking Dallapiccola's advice to heart and getting to grips with counterpoint as a compositional technique. The fact that he did so by employing a quote from a piece which, legend has it, was written down by those attending Bach on his deathbed, might be seen in relation to the romantic (and decidedly “unmodern”) notion of the artist seeking the source of his art in darkness and mystery.
Such matters aside, this was quite definitely the first of Maderna's compositions to make use of twelve-tone material, albeit in a highly personal manner. Maderna employs three main twelve-tone rows, building them up in such a way as to contain the notes spelling the name of Bach. However, these four notes themselves are treated differently by the composer; Maderna's approach here moves outside classic twelve-tone procedure into more markedly serialist territory. Thus, the Fantasia may be seen as a testing ground for Maderna's use of twelve-tone technique and a harbinger of things to come beyond it. It is also the result of a rigorously contrapuntal style of writing and an initial step on the road to polyphony, an element which was to prove a major factor in Maderna's subsequent work.
The Fantasia lies unquestionably more within the bounds of tradition than the Concerto, although here too Maderna went to great lengths to ensure the Fantasia would have the effect he sought, both as a work of art to be taken appropriately seriously and in terms of the sheer impact of its sound. That it went unpublished is, in all probability, due to the 'introduction' added by Maderna to the final version of the Concerto which employed a heavily disguised contrapuntal form, (in actual fact a canon). As a statement on Maderna's interest in Bach, this was far more oblique than anything in the Fantasia and the composer may have felt this to be more appropriate. One reason is that this obliqueness was consistent with Maderna's desire to present himself as an artist whose works avoided the obvious and the facile. Another is that it mode no use of twelve-tone techniques and, as is well-known, Maderna was becoming more and more resolute in his refusal of anything to do with this approach to composition. So much so, in fact, that this refusal was to become almost idiosyncratic.

Serenata n. 2 was composed in 1954 and appeared the some year in an edition by the music publishers Ars Viva Verlag whose head was Hermann Scherchen and to whom the work is dedicated with the title Serenata-Komposition Nr.3. The first performance was conducted by Maderna himself in 1956 and this was also the year when he revised the work, cutting it by 58 bars from 327 to 269. There are plenty of sketches and tables illustrating the processes of composition and revision and these were the subject of an illuminating study by Giordano Montecchi which appeared in 1989. Serenata n. 2 lies at the limits of Maderna's experience with structuralism at Darmstadt and is in two parts, each containing a differing series of notes. Incidentally, both the versions of 1954 and of 1956-57 follow this structure. By this time, Maderna had developed a very particular conception of what the term “serial” meant when applied to his own work. The initial sequence is a “series” of eleven sounds which are treated until they are completely cancelled out, although it would perhaps be more accurate to describe them as progressively transformed into an 'invisibile' abstraction of their former selves. This is done by degrees, so that the listener remembers the sequence in which events occur. In Montecchi's words, memory “is jealously guarded as the key element” and ensures that the musical material retains its identity as it is transformed. Yet this transformation is not the result of a rigidly mechanical approach but of keeping such an approach at a distance. Maderna himself liked the image of a machine functioning of its own accord and then being interrupted by something secretly human - a subjective spanner in the objective works, if you will. In purely musical terms, this means freeing the composition from the shackles of logic or over-obvious demonstrations of structure.

Pièce pour Ivry is the title of a very late piece by Maderna for solo violin and was written for Ivry Gitlis in 1971. It is the composer's last work, in fact, for a solo instrument and the score consists of a set of sections which the performer con arrange as he or she sees fit. The duration of the piece is also dependent upon the performer's decision and so will vary each time it is played. This idea of the aleatory, in other words of freedom and chance, and of co-opting the player into the act of creation with each new performance, lies at the heart of Maderna's approach to his art as his life drew to a close. The concept of a set sequence in a composition appeared highly questionable to Maderna, as did the traditional roles of the various figures involved in the business of composition and performance and indeed, of the written score itself. The latter has never been wholly possible at any time in the history of western music, of course, and Maderna's view was that it does not represent, or rather should no longer claim to represent, the finished work but is a reflection of the very essence of the art of music, i.e. something which is heard, something which exists only when played on a real instrument by a living being. Thus, in the last years of his life, Maderna's work was an interaction between the composer who set the direction, perhaps writing out an indication of a melody line, and the performer who was free to play this material as he or she chose. This combination, then, is what shapes the music and what makes the "score" as unique as each performance of it.
Pièce pour Ivry actually makes use of written material tram what Maderna had prepared for his Juilliard Serenade which he had composed that some year. And like Julliard Serenade, Solo (“for musette, oboe, oboe d'amore, or cor anglais - for solo performer”) is intended to be performed over the prerecorded tape entitled Tempo libero (1970, but other versions also exist).

Solo is a demonstration of the great friendship between Maderna and oboist Lothar Faber, who gave the work its first performance. Like Pièce pour Ivry it is aleatory and so allows the performer a great deal of freedom. In this case, however, the material used in the score comes from Ausstrahlung, (“Irradiations”), 1971.

Paolo Cattelan