"Any historical process semiotically telescopes itself..."—Nietzsche

Luciano Berio has always excelled at stratification, at the exponential multiplication of meaning through a pile-up of layers and levels. If we are all either foxes (who know many tricks) or hedgehogs (who know one really good trick), Berio is an odd amalgam—a hedgehog whose one trick is making works which act like foxes. In some cases, like that of the Sinfonia, Berio creates a hurricane of intertextuality by bringing in literally hundreds of different pieces (of literature, or music, or scholarship, or myth); in the case of the Chemins pieces, Berio creates a trick-turning radiance by cannibalizing his own earlier solo pieces and exploding them into harmonic and gestural labyrinths.

In the case of the Quattro Versioni Originali della Ritirata Notturna di Madrid (Four Original Versions of the Retreat by Night of Madrid), Berio adopted a new strategy: the score is actually, save of few details here and there, totally the work of another composer, eighteenth century celeb Luigi Boccherini; Boccherini had a hit with this six-minute processional, and in good business form made at least four arrangements of it for different performance forces. When asked by 1975 La Scala for a short concert opener, Berio decided to superimpose all four versions for a large orchestra. The result is at first just a fun little jaunt; but soon enough a magical subcutaneousness begins to reveal itself.

Of course, we also hear a good bit of Berio shimmering through this little endeavor, not least in the shuddering, automated drum-pulses which quiver like idling engines through the entire piece; these textures define whole sections of Berio's works from the mid-'70s onwards (as in Coro, Corale, and Points on the Curve to Find...), indeed become a hallmark of the Berio sound. Here they cast a kind of Eliotian back-glance on history, making Boccherini sound (just a bit) like an imitator of Berio.

But what perhaps impresses more than the Berio-ness or Boccherinicity of the Ritirata is Berio's brilliant ability to cast the whole piece in the unstable light of delicate irony, an irony which does not pass judgment, which refrains from parodizing or glorifying the piece. Anyone who could make the middle of the arrangement—as brassy and bathetic a passage as anything west of the 1812 Overture—not bombastic is working a miracle. Instead, the arrangement begins to shine with a translucent depth which far exceeds its relatively low status in the world of eighteenth century popular occasional pieces—a depth which we usually associate with the gradual gathering of experiences which marks a life lived. By sandwiching upon each other these four versions of one cute little piece, Berio manages to project upon it a kind of new physiological dimension, an underneath.

Perhaps, in retrospect, Nietzsche's "semiotically telescoping historical process" doesn't do the eloquence of Berio's arrangement justice. A better epigraph for the Ritirata comes from Heidegger—who read Nietzsche quite closely, and who wrote, quite simply, "I am my own time."

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