ABSTRACT
The artistic career of Franz Schubert still presents a strange paradox. Some scholars have regarded him almost as an empyrean figure who has written the best Lieder in vocal literature. Luciano Berio's finely-imagined realization of Schubert's fragmentary sketches in Rendering combines all the approaches. The artistic intention is aptly signaled by Berio's title, Rendering, which carries multiple meanings, all relevant to the artistic principles of the score: namely translating a text from a foreign (musical) language or making this piece of music available to an audience in performance. By introducing Schubert's material with repeated sections and reserving any formal repetition passages solely for this final movement, Berio weaves together a developed scherzo finale. Schubert's inventiveness is taken up by Berio and reformulated dialectically in modern terms, so that Rendering becomes a performance of Schubert's individual musical thinking, where irreconcilable opposites are deliberately collapsed into each other.
