Berio (Hmv 12) Poem by johannes lewinsky

If on a winter's night
When the clouds have obscured
All but the faintest
Glimmers of light
And the curtains conceal
More from without than within

And all is silence
And lack of
And hearts are out of tune
And the celeste takes precedence
Over all other instruments

I repeat

If on a winter's night
When the clouds have obscured
All but the faintest
Glimmers of light
And the curtains conceal
More from without than within

And all is silence
And lack of

Then is the vertigo of dissolution
Complete

Then redundancies proliferate
More conspicuous than
And as irrefragable as
The drift of continents

And it is then
In the melange of neutrons and neutrinos
That the wound opens

And I would speak to her
Speak to her
But that she no longer receptive is

Caught as she is
In the mesh of her own insomnia

In the cumulus of galaxies
Where myriad suns are born
And are deceased
As in the single flare of a match

There no longer is
An option to unite

And the best we can hope for is
A minimum working hypothesis
With which to grab hold of

The centrifugal writhing
Of our limbs our frailties
This ill-begotten life

My books now have crumbled
And it is to the traveller caught
In the gathering shadows we turn
And without compunction

Since I let myself go
Space and time
Have ceased to have any meaning other

Than as a medium for exchanging
Wise cracks and witticisms

This is the aleatory
Ending of all beginnings

Borrowed fame
Dust in the wind
An intermingling of limbs
Without ending



Note: In his realisation of Schubert's 10th Symphony Berio uses the celeste to indicate the points in the score where there is nothing to be gleaned from Schubert's original manuscript. It thus becomes something of a calling card for Berio himself, and signals an expansion or dissolution of classical proprieties.