"The date when I heard the sound...My head swam to see so many years below me, and yet within me, as if I were thousands of leagues in height."—Proust, Time Regained

Luciano Berio's work reminds listeners again and again how memory and experience sit oddly astride each other. Though his temperament was very different from someone like Marcel Proust, Berio seems to perpetuate Proust's basic method in which the work in hand constitutes an experience, but the experience itself is one of remembering, of retrospection, and the labor of retrospection. The inimitable species of progression in many of Berio's compositions seems bound up in the psychology of recall, or what is more formally called anamnesis: things are sought and found in fragments, repeatedly invoked, pondered, and endlessly questioned. And like Proust's writing, Berio's often cross-pollinates the remembering of an experience with the experience of remembering so that time becomes a different, considerably less reliable animal.

In the case of Berio's Wasserklavier (Water Piano), the first of his element pieces for solo piano (including Earth Piano, Air Piano, and Fire Piano), the process of remembering carries a certain explicit twist. The score first materialized as a kind of cheeky corrective: Berio had heard a recording of a famous pianist playing pieces by Brahms and Schubert and, left staunchly frustrated, the composer decided to take up his own powers to remedy the situation. He promptly composed a short tonal piece for two pianos fusing figures from both older composers (Brahms' Op. 117/ii and Schubert's Op. 142/I) and in the process, notated with scrupulous care and detail the means and modes of articulation for the music.

The result, eventually titled Wasserklavier and recomposed for a solo piano, almost sounds as if it could have been created by a nineteenth century composer, perhaps someone living exactly between Schubert and Brahms. Indeed, in its compound duple barcarolle rhythms (with rubato pre-installed) and melancholic, wafting minor mode, it carries an air of Chopin and the sentiment of Schumann. But it also bears the smallest marks of a loving forgery, or at least of something that is not-quite-real, slightly less an experience than the memory of an experience. And possibly it is, to some degree, a remarkably complex memory, the memory not of a concrete object, but its idealized rendition (that is, not Schubert's Op. 142/i played by the master himself, but by an interpreter born perhaps 100 years after Schubert's death and whose gramophone recordings might have been some of the earliest sounds to wiggle into the young Berio's encyclopedic ears...) In the event Berio's Wasserklavier is yet another of the composer's countless essays in transcription, the consummately Proustian endeavor: "...all this long stretch of time...was my life, my very self...I must, every minute of my life, keep it closely by me..."

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