Cathy Berberian

Cathy Berberian was born in Attleboro, Massachusetts to Armenian parents, who settled in New York soon after. At Columbia University, she studied opera, voice and diction, stagecraft, pantomime, and radio writing under Milton Smith, Herbert Graf, and silent screen and stage actress Getrude Keller. In 1949, Cathy journeyed abroad to the Conservatorio di Musica Giuseppe Verdi in Milan and received vocal training from Giorgina del Vigo. Her studies with Del Vigo were a turning point, for under her tutelage Berberian retrained her voice as a mezzo-soprano and discovered a vast repertoire of chamber music that highlighted the multi-faceted qualities and texture of her voice. While looking for a pianist to play at her Fulbright audition, Cathy was introduced to Luciano Berio (1925-2003), at that time a composition student and vocal accompanist at the Conservatorio. They married shortly after on October 1, 1950 and settled in Milan, where Berberian received her Fulbright award and where she lived for the rest of her life. On November 1, 1953 their daughter Cristina was born. Though her marriage to Berio eventually ended in 1964, their professional relationship flourished during the 1960s, marked by a succession of groundbreaking works for voice that remain essential to the vocal repertoire today: Circles (1960), Epifanie (1959), Visage (1961), Folk Songs (1964), and Sequenza III (1966). While Berberian was a devout exponent of contemporary music, performing new compositions at concerts and festivals throughout the world, she also gave nuanced interpretations to familiar works by Monteverdi, Purcell, Stravinsky, and Debussy, and included regularly in her recital programs music by Weill, Gershwin, The Beatles, or salon and cabaret songs as well as traditional folk songs. In 1966 Berberian composed her first musical work, Stripsody for solo voice, and then in 1969, a piano composition entitled Morsica(t)hy. Cathy Berberian's reputation as a recitalist of new music was firmly established after her performances at the Darmstadt Music Festival (Germany) in September 1959, and she quickly became the muse to numerous composers who wrote new works expressly for her, including Bruno Maderna, Roman Haubenstock-Ramati, Igor Stravinsky, Darius Milhaud, Sylvano Bussotti, Henri Pousseur, and William Walton, among others. Cathy Berberian died at age 57 on March 6, 1983 after suffering a massive heart attack in Rome. She was due to appear the following day on Italian National television in a performance to commemorate the centennial death of Karl Marx and had planned to sing a rendition of the Communist Party anthem "Internationale" in a 'Marilyn Monroe' style. Berberian was the most celebrated vocal recitalist of her time. Her contributions to postwar music are amply and unequivocally evident, and the historical impact of her activities continues to be highly appraised.