ABSTRACT
Although Berio’s Sequenza IV for piano (1965–66) has become, like most of the other pieces in the series, a landmark of twentieth-century literature for the instrument, several factors set it apart from the rest. While almost all of the other pieces were written in close collaboration with eminent players, from Severino Gazzelloni (Sequenza I) to Rohan de Saram (Sequenza XIV), this is the only Sequenza to have been conceived and elaborated directly at the piano by Berio himself, although it is dedicated to Jocy de Carvalho. According to Albèra, the piece ‘results from the composer’s own instrumental gestures’, giving it ‘this improvised character, influenced by jazz’. 1 On the other hand, David Burge reports that Berio talked to him ‘with great excitement’ about Stockhausen’s Klavierstück X (1961) after he had heard it for the first time, saying that ‘this “new way of playing piano” had inspired him to write a big piece for the instrument’ that would use clusters ‘in a different way’ and ‘require the employment of middle pedal “most of the time’”. 2 These observations put Sequenza IV into a distinctive position within the whole cycle, as it is more likely to demonstrate affinities with Berio’s personal pianistic background and the acknowledged inspiration of Stockhausen, rather than with the other Sequenzas. Indeed, apart from the almost permanent use of the sostenuto pedal, this Sequenza contains none of the typically avant-garde extended instrumental and vocal techniques which supply the more theatrical and dramatic elements of the Sequenzas for voice and trombone, Sequenza IV’s adjacent pieces in the series. This is why Gale Shaub, comparing these first Sequenzas, can assert that Sequenza IV ‘achieves its uniqueness primarily through purely musical means’, 3 that is, through a more conventional idiomatic approach symbolized perhaps by the use of a time signature, an atypical feature in the Sequenzas as a whole.
