<<  -- 6 --  Jennifer I Paull    CATHY BERBERIAN - NEVER KNOWINGLY MISUNDERSTOOD

The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, edited by Stanley Sadie -- Macmillan Ltd 1980, pages 516-17 includes an extremely accurately written entry about Cathy, but that of Berio does not mention her strategic importance.

One could take a photograph of an iron structure in Paris and catalogue it as such, together with the reason for its construction. Alternately, one could give it a name and call it what it is. Cathy has less good fortune than the Eiffel Tower although to scholars of her work and its relevance to Berio's own, her stature casts as proportionately long a shadow.

'A man does not show his greatness by being at one extremity, but rather by touching both at once.' -- Blaise Pascal, philosopher and mathematician (1623-1662)

Cathy Berberian achieved precisely that in musical diversity! She was a musical acrobat. This does not imply that she should be framed by the lens of musical history uniquely when perching on the vocal high wire or swinging from an onomatopoeic trapeze (and if possible with a smudge of chalk dust on her tights and an unflattering zoom lens shot of her backside)! Why the need to caricaturise this exceptional woman and not the exceptional men (Dallapiccola, Eco, etc) in Berio's life?

In the Dictionaire des grands musiciens -- References Larousse, 1982, there is no individual entry for Cathy. However, within Berio's text his radio work and experimentation (sans Cathy) are followed by the implication that her appearance with the voice came after the liberating works had been written -- a cart-before-the-horse, role reversal. That she was his wife seems unworthy of mention.

'Initially, with the clarity of intuition and subsequently with discretion and lucidity, Berio probed original ground, long forgotten by our own western culture; in particular that of the voice, which he literally liberated. A strange and passionate figure, Cathy Berberian appeared in his life and became the soul of his creation as well as the "instrument" adapted to his research: C Berberian gave the premières of a number of his works.'

Somebody just removed the Eiffel Tower from Paris!

'To confront a person with his own shadow is to show him his own light.' -- Carl G Jung, psychiatrist (1875-1961)

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