Probably one of the best-known—and coolest—imitations of fire in music comes at the conclusion of Richard Wagner's opera Die Walküre from his Ring cycle. As the head god Wotan regretfully punishes his disobedient daughter, Brünnhilde, by putting her to sleep, he gets his sidekick god Loge to ignite a massive ring of flame around her that is impenetrable by no man (except the right one—Siegfried—but that's another story). As Loge does his thing, the high winds in the orchestra spark into sharp, angular arpeggios and draw an efflorescent frame around the dark-hued cellos, who meanwhile spin out a smooth, taut melody in an elevated register.

Being the tireless transhistorical citationist that he is, Luciano Berio was probably well aware of this precedent and to some degree sought to gloss it in his brief 1989 encore piece for piano Feuerklavier (Fire Piano). The last of his element pieces (the others are Water Piano, Earth Piano, and Air Piano), the score seems to delight in the same dialectic Wagner did, between a music entirely made up of hard angles, edges, and vertexes, and another music "inside it," contiguous and fluent in contrast; somehow, the two rub together like a couple of sonic sticks and set sound alight. And hence the general trajectory of Feuerklavier is similar to Wagner's episode in its risky balance and occasional eruption: Berio's score begins as a tense series of churning arpeggios in both hands, flickering under the rapid changes of the pedal; eventually, outbursts begin to ensue in increasingly voluminous waves and in the climactic middle section, the texture breaks loose from itself in jagged, darting rays and explosively attacked chords. Equally fire-like, the piece self-extinguishes into nothing, as if to both remain true to the physics of its programmatic substance and to confess that it was but a figment of Berio-land, the composer's chimeric pen.

As the last of the quartet of pieces, however, Feuerklavier does stamp the set with a wonderful thesis-like embrace, underlining its method. Basically, the light of another medium—word, image, or in these case, earthly matter—is sent through the piano as if through a prism, and in the process is thoroughly distorted, refracted, separated from itself, and reconfigured. And rather than becoming seduced by the "image itself" or the "music itself," we become captivated by the process of transformation itself, its gifts and abuses, efficiencies and inefficiencies in transcribing the original material for a piano, of all things.

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