Remembering Bruno Maderna: The Boy Who Conducted La Scala and Invented the Future

He died on 13 November 1973, in Darmstadt, in Germany, of lung cancer. He was 53 years old. Fifty-three years ago today, the music world lost one of its most remarkable figures: Bruno Maderna, an Italian composer, conductor and teacher who had been a child prodigy conducting the orchestra of La Scala in Milan before he was a teenager, who had fought in the partisan resistance during the Second World War, who had founded Italy’s first studio for electronic music, and who had become one of the great conductors of the twentieth century’s most difficult music. He was a man who lived at the centre of everything new in music for thirty years — and who, at the same time, never stopped loving the old music, editing Monteverdi and the Italian masters, conducting Mahler and Bartók, writing concertos for the oboe as if the instrument had been invented for him alone.

Maderna’s name is not as widely known today as those of his friends and contemporaries — Pierre Boulez, Luciano Berio, Karlheinz Stockhausen, John Cage. He was, by temperament, a maker rather than a self-promoter: a conductor who served other composers’ music, a teacher who served his students, a composer who wrote in every genre and never settled into a single style. But the composers who knew him understood what he was. When he died, Boulez wrote Rituel in memoriam Bruno Maderna. Berio wrote Calmo, for voice and orchestra. Earle Brown dedicated Centering to his memory, and ended it with a short quotation from Maderna’s First Oboe Concerto — as if to say that the best way to remember a composer is to let his own music have the last word.

The boy who played everything

Bruno Maderna was born Bruno Grossato in Venice on 21 April 1920. He later decided to take the name of his mother, Caterina Carolina Maderna — and it is as Bruno Maderna that history knows him. He was born Jewish, in a Venice that was still, in those years, one of the great musical cities of Europe: the city of Vivaldi and Monteverdi, of La Fenice, of music in the churches and in the streets.

At the age of four, he began studying the violin with his grandfather. He remembered the old man’s philosophy for the rest of his life: “My grandfather thought that if you could play the violin you could then do anything, even become the biggest gangster. If you play the violin you are always sure of a place in heaven.” It is a wonderful sentence, and it tells you a great deal about the household Maderna grew up in — a household in which music was not a luxury or a profession but a kind of insurance, a way of being sure of a place in the world, and in the next one.

As a child, he played several instruments — violin, drums and accordion — in his father’s small variety band. A variety band in Venice in the 1920s was a working musician’s life: dances, theatres, cafés, whatever the evening required. The boy who played drums and accordion in his father’s band was learning something that no conservatory could teach: how to play for people, how to change styles in the middle of a set, how to make music that worked in the room it was played in. He would carry that practicality with him for the rest of his life, through the most abstract music of the century.

He was a child prodigy. In the early 1930s, he was not only performing violin concertos, he was already conducting orchestral concerts: first with the orchestra of La Scala in Milan, then in Trieste, Venice, Padua and Verona. Think about that for a moment: a boy, not yet a teenager, standing in front of the orchestra of La Scala — the most famous opera house in the world — and conducting it. It is the kind of beginning that sounds like a legend, but it is documented, and it set the pattern for everything that followed. Maderna was never only a composer or only a conductor. He was both, from the very beginning, and he was both at the highest level.

His childhood was not only music. His mother died when he was four years old — the same year he began the violin with his grandfather. He was then adopted by a wealthy woman from Verona, Irma Manfredi, who saw to it that he received a solid musical education. It is impossible to know what that loss did to him, and it would be wrong to invent a psychology for it. What can be said is that the boy who lost his mother at four and was taken in by a stranger who believed in his talent grew up to be a man who took care of other musicians — who taught, who conducted, who founded institutions, who made sure the next generation had what he had been given.

He took private lessons in harmony and musical composition from Arrigo Pedrollo from 1935 until 1937, and studied composition with Alessandro Bustini at the Rome Conservatory from 1937 until 1940. After Rome, he returned to Venice, where he attended the advanced course for composers organised by Gian Francesco Malipiero at the Benedetto Marcello Conservatory from 1940 to 1942 — his Concerto for Piano and Orchestra dates from this time. He also studied conducting with Antonio Guarnieri at the Accademia Chigiana in Siena in 1941, and with Hermann Scherchen in Venice in 1948. It was through Scherchen that Maderna discovered twelve-tone technique and the music of the Second Viennese School — Schoenberg, Berg and Webern, the composers who had remade the language of music in the first decades of the century. The discovery changed his life. The boy who had conducted La Scala was now a young man who wanted to understand the most radical music of his time.

War, and the new music

During the Second World War, Maderna took part in the partisan resistance. Italy’s war was a complicated and terrible one: Mussolini’s Fascist regime, the alliance with Nazi Germany, the armistice of 1943, the German occupation of the north, the civil war between Fascists and partisans. To fight in the resistance was to risk everything, and Maderna did it — the violinist from Venice, the conductor of La Scala, carrying a gun in the mountains. His biography records the fact plainly, without detail, and it is best left that way: what matters is that he was there, that he chose a side, and that he survived.

After the war, from 1948 to 1952, he taught music theory at the Venice Conservatory. During this period, he collaborated with Malipiero on critical editions of Italian early music — the painstaking work of preparing reliable scores of Monteverdi and the composers of the Renaissance and Baroque, work that requires a scholar’s patience and a musician’s ear. It is a telling detail: the man who had just discovered the Second Viennese School was also editing the music of three hundred years earlier. Maderna was never a composer who believed the past was finished. For him, the old music and the new music were part of the same story, and a musician’s job was to know both.

The fellow composers he met at this time included Luigi Dallapiccola, the great Italian twelve-tone composer, and, at the Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik — the International Summer Courses for New Music at Darmstadt, in Germany — Boulez, Messiaen, Cage, Pousseur, Nono and Stockhausen. Darmstadt in the late 1940s and 1950s was the centre of the new-music world: the place where the young composers of Europe gathered every summer to argue, to listen, to present their latest works, and to decide what music would become. Maderna was there from the beginning, and he was not a spectator. He was one of the people the others listened to — a conductor who could make their difficult scores sound, a composer who understood their ideas from the inside, and a teacher who could explain them.

The studio in Milan

In 1950, Maderna started an international career as a conductor, first in Paris and Munich, then across Europe. But the decisive year was 1955. In 1955, he founded the Studio di fonologia musicale di Radio Milano — the Studio of Musical Phonology of Milan Radio — with Luciano Berio, and Incontri musicali, a series of concerts disseminating contemporary music in Italy. The Studio di fonologia was Italy’s first studio for electronic music: a place where composers could work with tape, with oscillators, with sounds that had never existed before, under the roof of the national broadcaster, RAI. It was, in its way, as important as anything Maderna ever composed. It gave Italian composers a home for the new music, and it gave the new music an Italian address.

Maderna had already shown what that music could be. His work Musica su due dimensioni, for flute, cymbals and tape, which premiered at the Darmstadt Summer Courses for New Music in 1952, is one of the earliest examples of a composer combining acoustic and electronic sounds. The title means “Music on two dimensions”: the live dimension of the flute and the cymbals, played by a human being in the room, and the recorded dimension of the tape, sounds fixed in advance and played back. The two dimensions meet, argue, overlap, and the piece lives in the space between them. It is a small work — a flute, some cymbals, a tape — but it opened a door that music has been walking through ever since. Every piece of music that mixes live instruments with electronics, every film score that layers a recorded sound under a live performance, every pop record that samples and loops, owes something to the experiments of 1952.

Maderna was, as his biography puts it, “a prominent composer in genres such as electronic music, experimental music and avant-garde music”. But he was never only that. He composed in all genres: instrumental, chamber, concertos and electronic music, as well as large amounts of incidental music for theatre and radio, and transcriptions and editions of early music. He was a working musician in the fullest sense, and he refused to be confined to a single corner of the art.

The conductor and the teacher

From 1957 to 1958, at the invitation of Giorgio Federico Ghedini, Maderna taught at the Milan Conservatory, and between 1960 and 1962 he lectured at the Dartington International Summer School in England. From 1961 to 1966, he and Pierre Boulez were the main directors of the International Kranichsteiner Kammerensemble in Darmstadt — the chamber ensemble that was, in those years, the finest instrument for new music in Europe. Despite this heavy workload, his biography notes, Maderna found time to compose. It is a dry sentence, and it hides a remarkable fact: that a man who was conducting across Europe, teaching in Milan and Dartington, directing an ensemble with Boulez in Darmstadt, and raising a family — with his later wife Beate Christina Koepnick, a young actress from Darmstadt, he had three children — still wrote music, and not a little of it, and not as an afterthought.

During the 1960s and 1970s, he spent much time in the United States, teaching and conducting. In 1971–72, he was appointed director of new music at Tanglewood, the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the most important centre for new music in America. In 1972–73, he became the principal conductor of the Orchestra Sinfonica of RAI in Milan. He was, by then, one of the most trusted conductors in the world for the music of his time — the man orchestras called when the score was difficult, when the composer was alive and in the room, when the music needed a conductor who understood it from the inside because he wrote it himself.

His recordings as a conductor show the range of his ear. He recorded Mahler’s Seventh Symphony with the Vienna Symphony Orchestra in 1967 and the Ninth with the BBC Symphony Orchestra in 1970. He recorded Bartók’s First Piano Concerto with Alfred Brendel and the BBC Symphony Orchestra in 1973. He recorded Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo at the Holland Festival in 1966. Mahler, Bartók, Monteverdi: three centuries of music, three different worlds, one conductor. It is the discography of a musician who believed that all music, old and new, deserved the same care — and who had the technique to give it.

The works

At the heart of Maderna’s output are a number of concertos, including one for violin, one for two pianos, two for solo piano and several for flute and orchestra. He was particularly drawn to the oboe, composing three concertos in all: the first in 1962–63, followed by two more in 1967 and 1973. The oboe is a lonely, singing instrument — the one that tunes the orchestra, the one that carries the long line — and it is easy to hear why Maderna loved it. The three oboe concertos, written across a decade, are among his most personal works: the instrument he returned to, again and again, as if it were a voice he trusted.

Other major orchestral works include Aura and Biogramma, both from 1967, and Quadrivium, for four percussionists and four orchestral groups, premiered at the 1969 Royan Festival in France. Giuseppe Sinopoli recorded all three of these pieces with the North German Radio Symphony Orchestra in 1979 — a sign of how quickly Maderna’s music entered the repertoire, and of how seriously the next generation of conductors took it. Sinopoli, himself a composer and a psychiatrist as well as a conductor, understood Maderna’s music from the inside, and his recordings remain a way into it.

Maderna’s Requiem, composed between 1944 and 1946, was rediscovered and performed in 2009 — more than sixty years after it was written, and thirty-six years after the composer’s death. The American composer Virgil Thomson saw an unfinished version of the score in 1946 and praised it as a masterpiece. It is a strange and moving fact: that a work written by a young man in the last years of the war, a Requiem — a Mass for the dead — should have waited more than half a century to be heard, and that when it was heard, it was recognised as what Thomson had said it was. Maderna wrote it when he was twenty-four, twenty-five, twenty-six years old, in the years when Europe was burying its dead. He knew what a Requiem was for.

He also produced scores for eight films and two documentaries. The last of these was for Giulio Questi’s thriller La morte ha fatto l’uovo — Death Laid an Egg — in 1968. And his opera, Satyricon, was premiered in 1973, the year he died. An opera as a last work: it is a fitting end for a composer who had conducted opera since he was a boy, who had spent his life in theatres and concert halls, and who understood, better than most, that music is at its most powerful when it has a story to tell and a stage to tell it on.

Death, and what the others wrote

Maderna died of lung cancer in Darmstadt in 1973, at the age of 53. Darmstadt was the city where he had spent so many summers, where he had directed the Kranichsteiner ensemble with Boulez, where the new music had its home. He died there, far from Venice, in the city that had made him a citizen of the new music. He was 53 years old — younger than most of the composers he had conducted, younger than Boulez and Berio, who would live on for decades and write his memorials.

A number of composers wrote pieces in his memory, including Pierre Boulez, whose Rituel in memoriam Bruno Maderna is one of the most beautiful memorial works of the twentieth century, and Luciano Berio, whose Calmo, for voice and orchestra, is a meditation on stillness and loss. Earle Brown’s Centering, dedicated to the memory of Maderna, ends with a short quotation from Maderna’s First Oboe Concerto — the oboe again, the singing instrument, having the last word.

It is a measure of Maderna’s standing that the composers who wrote for him were the greatest of his generation. Boulez did not write memorial pieces lightly. Berio did not write them at all, except for the people who mattered most to him. That they both wrote for Maderna tells you what the history books, with their lists of works and dates, cannot quite convey: that he was loved, that he was trusted, that he was the person other composers turned to when they needed something to be true.

What remains

Fifty-three years after his death, what remains of Bruno Maderna is scattered, and that is part of the point. It remains in the Studio di fonologia in Milan, which he founded with Berio, and in the whole tradition of Italian electronic music that grew out of it. It remains in the recordings he made as a conductor — the Mahler Ninth with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, the Bartók with Brendel, the Monteverdi — which are still listened to, still admired, still used as a measure of how this music should sound. It remains in the three oboe concertos, in Aura and Biogramma and Quadrivium, in the Requiem that waited sixty years to be heard, in Satyricon, his last opera. And it remains in the memories of the composers who wrote for him: Boulez’s Rituel, Berio’s Calmo, Brown’s Centering, with its quotation from the First Oboe Concerto.

Maderna’s life was short — fifty-three years — and it was full in a way that few lives are. He was a child prodigy who conducted La Scala, a partisan who fought in the mountains, a teacher at Venice and Milan and Dartington and Tanglewood, a conductor in Paris and Munich and London and Milan, a founder of a studio, a composer of concertos and operas and electronic music, a husband and a father of three. He did not live to see the electronic music he helped to invent become the sound of the whole world. He did not live to hear his Requiem performed. But he lived long enough to change the music of his century, and to be remembered by the people who mattered most to him, in the only language that mattered to any of them: music.

On the fifty-third anniversary of his death, the best way to remember Bruno Maderna is to listen — to the oboe concertos, to Musica su due dimensioni, to the Requiem, to Boulez’s Rituel — and to hear, in all of them, the boy from Venice who learned the violin from his grandfather, who was told that if you could play the violin you could do anything, and who spent the rest of his life proving him right.