ABSTRACT
The second movement of Sinfonia, like the Chemins, had been the result of reopening a set of creative questions that were temporarily closed. But in the third movement Luciano Berio undertook a more daring and problematic project: that of building fresh layers of material not out of the residue of his own past compositional decisions, but around a work by another composer. But Gustav Mahler's scherzo provides a further and rather more curious precedent for Berio's experiment. The idea of using materials from other composers' works as a means of blocking out the Mahler text is complemented by Mahler's own use – conscious or unconscious of alien materials in his Fischpredigt. Since Mahler's scherzo was originally associated with a song-text, and he subsequently provided two partly discrepant programmatic descriptions for it, the range of images that may be brought into play is considerable.
