Recital I (for Cathy)

Recital I (for Cathy) is a stage work by the Italian composer Luciano Berio. It was written for Cathy Berberian, with whom Berio was married from 1950 to 1964, and is scored for mezzo-soprano and 17 instruments. It was first performed on 27 April 1972 in Lisbon in the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation Grand Auditórium by Cathy Berberian with Orquesta Gulbenkian, conducted by the composer.

In the piece a singer—who is, in Berberian's description, not a singer who gives a recital but an actress-singer who plays the role of a singer who gives a recital (Vila 2003, p. 285)—enters the stage to find that the pianist who is to accompany her hasn't arrived. Accompanied by an off-stage harpsichord she starts her recital with a performance of Claudio Monteverdi's "Lettera amorosa" and "Lamento della ninfa" but stops to look for the pianist. She then begins a long spoken monologue that is interrupted by over forty, often very brief musical fragments taken from Berberian's repertoire, including works Berio had written for her voice in earlier years, Avendo gran disio and Epifanie. As the recital progresses the singer's descent into madness is emphasized by quotations from Hamlet, Pierrot Lunaire and the mad scenes from Gaetano Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor and Giacomo Meyerbeer's Dinorah (Metzer 2003, p. 93). She ends the piece with a prayer for liberation ("libera nos"), her vocal range reduced to a semitone.

In Quotation and Cultural Meaning in Twentieth-Century Music by David Metzer, the sources of the musical fragments quoted in Recital I (for Cathy) are identified as follows (Metzer 2003, pp. 219–220)—the track numbers and time indications refer to the only recording that exists of the piece (RCA 09026-62540-2, with Berberian and the London Sinfonietta conducted by Berio):

...
Wikipedia