Ulysses without Ithaca

Find out the installation and the talks

‘Outis’ in ancient Greek means ‘nobody.’ It was the pseudonym that the astute Odysseus used to mock Polyphemus and save his own life and that of his companions on the Island of the Cyclops. It is also the title of Luciano Berio's last theatrical work, which was performed at La Scala on October 5, 1996. That Saturday afternoon—the show began at 3 p.m.—the audience left the theatre somewhat disoriented after two hours of magnificent music but also inscrutable dramaturgy, developed over five cycles in constant permutation, starting always with the same situation—the killing of Outis.

Outis/Ulysses was a persistent archetype in Berio's world. He had declared many times his admiration for both Joyce's Ulysses and Dallapiccola's Ulisse.

The journey is a key metaphor of Berio's music, which would have perfectly identified with the last verses of Dallapiccola's libretto: “Trovar potessi il nome, / pronunciar la parola / che chiarisca a me stesso / così ansioso cercare.” (If only I could find the name, utter the word that would clarify to myself, so anxious to seek).

The performance of Outis was scheduled for October 2, but with December 7 looming, a heated autumn was on the horizon at La Scala, and the unions issued a stern warning to the Superintendency, causing the premiere of one of the most eagerly awaited productions of the season, the new theatrical piece by one of Italy's leading composers, to be cancelled.

Outis was an extreme piece, perhaps the most daring of Berio's works for the stage. It renounced any form of narration, any desire to tell a story verbally, relying completely on a dramaturgy woven into the fabric of musical figures and sophisticated, iridescent harmonic processes.

The text (not a libretto) for the musical action (not an opera) was the result of Berio's collaboration with Dario Del Corno, a “great and extravagant Greek scholar,” as the composer described him. Together, they wove a dense web of already told story fragments, drawing from a multitude of restless hearts—from Homer, Joyce and Catullus to Auden, Melville, Sanguineti, and Celan.

“We often found ourselves,” wrote Berio, “having to guide, like crazy compasses, the course of a wandering Outis, alone and perhaps without Ithaca.”

The score was a boundless odyssey of vocals and orchestra, perhaps never so splendidly chameleonic and articulate, in which the reflections of Berio's countless explorations in instrumental music and the echoes of his prolific output of the previous decade could be glimpsed in filigree.

In addition to the La Scala ensembles, the Swingle Singers, Berio's favourite vocal ensemble, and the electronics of the Tempo Reale Centre for Musical Informatics, founded in Florence by the composer in 1987, enriched an already varied soundscape. The performance was entrusted to a team of young, enthusiastic, and talented artists. The musical director was Californian David Robertson, who at the time was at the helm of the prestigious Ensemble Intercontemporain in Paris. He was skilled at holding together an extremely dense score and winning the trust of a composer as demanding of his performers as Berio.

For the stage design, La Scala invited Graham Vick, an English theatre director who was still relatively unknown in Italy but who had already acquired a reputation as a genius, thanks to the shows he had created in Birmingham with his Opera Company. His first theatrical challenge at La Scala was more than demanding, bordering on impossible, but Vick and his collaborators managed to create a coherent, imaginative, and visibly fascinating show.

The audience left the theatre with the forest of lights in which Ulysses lost his way for the umpteenth time still in their eyes, ready to embark on a new journey. With his imagination, intelligence, and humanity, Vick immediately won over the Milanese audience, so much so that La Scala immediately offered him the chance to direct the opening performance of the following season, Verdi's Macbeth, conducted by Riccardo Muti.

The cast on stage was a mix of singers making their La Scala debut, such as English baritone Alan Opie in the role of Outis and Russian soprano Tatiana Poluektova, and artists trusted by Berio, such as Luisa Castellani, who in those years was an imaginative interpreter of Sequenza III for female voice. There were also three clown-musicians on stage, all proven performers of his Sequences, including Aldo Bennici on viola, Claudio Jacomucci on accordion, and Michele Lo Muto on trombone.

Outis was the arrival point of Berio's long journey at La Scala, which began way back in 1963 with Passaggio, a “staging” written in collaboration with one of the leading exponents of the literary neo-avant-garde of Gruppo 63, Edoardo Sanguineti, who remained a constant intellectual reference point for Berio until the end.

After this roughly experimental work, intended for the innovative stage of the Piccola Scala, Berio returned to La Scala—indirectly—only in 1977, with music composed for a choreographic project conceived in collaboration with Maurice Béjart in New York and then brought to Milan, entitled Per la dolce memoria di quel giorno, which was inspired by the poetic and mystical world of Petrarch's Trionfi.

The 1980s, on the other hand, was a golden decade for Berio at La Scala, with two pieces coming from his collaboration with Italo Calvino. The relationship was controversial and hard-fought, filled with grumbling, silences, and half-words, as befitted two introverted and taciturn but fruitful and inventive Ligurians. In 1982, La vera storia was performed with the irreverent participation of Milva, a singer of humble origins, and in 1986, Un re in ascolto, a few months after the writer's premature and painful death.

Finally, Outis closed the circle of Berio's long and not always easy relationship with Milan, a city that had welcomed him into its Conservatory as a student of provincial background and provided him with the means to carry out his studies as an enterprising and avant-garde composer with the RAI Phonology Studio.

The studio gave him a vibrant and open space for work when Berio, after marrying the charismatic Armenian-American singer Cathy Berberian, realized that his music journey would take him farther, confront him with greater intellectual challenges, and introduce him to more complex cultures.

Subsequently, Berio encountered some misunderstandings with the Milanese music scene, dominated by the intransigent radicalism of the avant-garde, which was suspicious of postmodern transversal thinking, and it cast a shadow over his relationship with Milan, where some of Berio's deepest ties remained, first and foremost with Umberto Eco.

Outis was an opportunity to dispel those clouds, thanks especially to Luciana Pestalozza, who planned an entire Milano Musica festival dedicated to Berio around the La Scala performance. Outis was revived again in 1999, Berio's last appearance at La Scala.

After the composer's death in 2003, the Filarmonica della Scala paid tribute to the maestro's memory in the following season with the Italian debut of Berio's final, poignant orchestral masterpiece, Stanze, conducted by Roberto Abbado and performed with the magnificent baritone Dietrich Henschel, who had first performed the piece in Paris. This was followed by a grand evening dedicated to his music, in collaboration with Milano Musica, featuring Maurizio Pollini, Pascal Gallois, Monica Bacelli, and other artists connected to Berio's world.

Oreste Bossini