Coro () is a large scale composition for forty voices and forty instruments by Italian composer Luciano Berio.
Composition
Coro was written at a time when, according to Berio, "the blood in the streets of Italy came out", partly due to the Years of Lead. Berio, a composer committed to social issues, often expressed his views and described the composition's central theme to be "the acute awareness of things at a tragic moment. On this line, he referred to Coro as being a tribute to Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. In his opinion, Neruda was "practically murdered (not physically, but spiritually); they broke his heart. [...] It is an invitation to be aware of the violence of the times, Fascist violence".
Berio composed Coro between 1974 and 1976 under a commission by the Westdeutscher Rundfunk Köln. It was dedicated to his wife, Talia Berio. Its premiere took place at the Donaueschingen Festival on 24 October 1976 by the WDR Rundfunkchor Köln and the WDR Rundfunkorchester Köln. However, Berio only premiered an initial version of Coro, which contained 29 movements. The final 31-movement piece was premiere later in Graz, on 16 November 1977, by the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, conducted by Leif Segerstam.
As customary in Berio's musical output, Coro has its place in a sequence of works whose titles refer to archetypal modes of musical expression. He started this sequence with his Sinfonia (1968–1969), followed by his outlook on the whole genre of music theatre in Opera (1960–1970), on the life and work of a solo singer in Recital I (for Cathy) (1972) and on the relationship between soloists and ensembles in his Concerto for Two Pianos and Orchestra (1972–1973). With Coro, Berio also further explored the kind of folk music he had already used in his Folk Songs (1964) and Questo vuol dire che (1969).
Structure
Coro is divided into 31 untitled movements of varying duration and takes around an hour to perform. Following is a full breakdown of the movements, with their duration as specified by Berio in the original score.
Text
The distinction between individual and mass music is also made clear in the use of two different kinds of text. On the one hand, Berio turned to folk poetry in various languages for the solo episodes. These folk utterances are often translated from a wide range of languages and dealt with very different topics, from love and death to the oneness between man and nature. All of these songs are authorless. For example, the initial episode in which a soprano is gradually joined by four other sopranos and five contraltos is based on an American Indian text, "Today is mine".
On the other hand, Berio used a different textual source for mass episodes, which is taken from a work by Chilean author Pablo Neruda. Here, the process is reversed: whereas in the previous episodes the poetry from different peoples are assigned to individual singers, in the case of Neruda, his poetry is here sung by all forty singers in the massive tuttis which are the pillars of this piece. Only a few fragments are taken from the poet's three-volume Residencia en la tierra (1933–1947). The most recurring cry in the piece, "Venid a ver la sangre por las calles" ("Come and see the blood in the streets"), is taken from the final verses of one of the poems included in this collection, entitled Explico algunas cosas ("A few things explained"). This cry appears many times throughout the piece as a refrain without any context whatsoever.
Since Coro tends to be something different especially for singers because they are soloists most of the time (given the fact that the large number of voices often calls for a choir and not solo performers), it is generally psychologically new and often challenging. Probably to make things simpler, Berio decided to use a wide range of texts in very different —and, often, little-known— languages; however, most of the texts in African, Iranian, and American languages are generally translated into German. Berio only used five different languages: French, Spanish, Italian, English, and German.