In memory of Massimo Mila

Text from Novissimum Testamentum by Edoardo Sanguineti.

Approaching Sanguineti’s final “anti-poetry” through music becomes increasingly challenging and, perhaps for that very reason, increasingly rewarding. One of the most complex and novel aspects of Sanguineti’s later work is its simplicity. It is a poetry inhabited by everyday images, sentimental stereotypes, harsh and bitter figures, ironic inventions, parodies, and quotations that reverberate within a kind of echo chamber of memory, where the everyday and the universal, the banal and the speculative, the private and the political merge into a rigorous and at times relentless construction.

In 1988, I first approached Sanguineti’s Novissimum Testamentum through a short choral work. In this new attempt to penetrate the poem’s “simplicity” musically, I have sought to expand that echo chamber of memory by bringing together distinct and parallel sonic layers. This is, of course, a work in progress (I have used only part of the original text), conceived according to modular principles and open to further development.

Luciano Berio