Born in
Venice into an aristocratic family, the grandson of the opera composer
Francesco Malipiero, Gian Francesco Malipiero was prevented by family troubles from pursuing his musical education in a consistent manner. His father separated from his mother in 1893 and took Gian Francesco to
Trieste,
Berlin and eventually to
Vienna. The young Malipiero and his father broke up their relationship bitterly, and in 1899 Malipiero returned to his mother's home in Venice, where he entered the Venice Liceo Musicale (now the
Conservatorio di Musica Benedetto Marcello di Venezia).[1]
After stopping
counterpoint lessons with the composer, organist and pedagogue
Marco Enrico Bossi, Malipiero continued studying on his own by copying out music by such composers as
Claudio Monteverdi and
Girolamo Frescobaldi from the Biblioteca Marciana, in Venice, thereby beginning a lifelong commitment to Italian music of that period.[1] In 1904 he went to
Bologna and sought out Bossi to continue his studies, at the Bologna Liceo Musicale (now the
Conservatorio Giovanni Battista Martini).
In 1906 he returned to the Venice Conservatory Benedetto Marcello of Music to continue his studies. After graduating, Malipiero became an assistant to the blind composer
Antonio Smareglia.[2]
Musical career
In 1905 Malipiero returned to Venice, but from 1906 to 1909 was often in Berlin,[3] following
Max Bruch's classes.[4] Later, in 1913, Malipiero moved to Paris, where he became acquainted with compositions by
Ravel,
Debussy,
Falla,
Schoenberg, and
Berg. Most importantly, he attended the première of
Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps, soon after meeting
Alfredo Casella and
Gabriele d'Annunzio.[2][3] He described the experience as an awakening "from a long and dangerous lethargy".[1][2] After that, he repudiated almost all the compositions he had written up to that time, with the exception of Impressioni dal vero (1910–11).[1] At that time he won four composition prizes at the
Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome, by entering five compositions under five different pseudonyms.[citation needed]
In 1917, due to the Italian defeat at
Caporetto, he was forced to flee from Venice and settled in Rome.
In 1923, he joined with Alfredo Casella and
Gabriele D'Annunzio in creating the
Corporazione delle Nuove Musiche. Malipiero was on good terms with
Benito Mussolini until he set
Pirandello's libretto La favola del figlio cambiato, earning the condemnation of the fascists. Malipiero dedicated his next opera, Giulio Cesare, to Mussolini, but this did not help him.
After permanently settling in the little town of
Asolo in 1923,[5] Malipiero began the editorial work for which he would become best known, a complete edition of all of
Claudio Monteverdi's oeuvre, from 1926 to 1942, and after 1952, editing much of
Vivaldi's concerti at the Istituto Italiano Antonio Vivaldi.
Compositions
Malipiero had an ambivalent attitude towards the musical tradition dominated by Austro-German composers, and instead insisted on the rediscovery of pre-19th-century Italian music.[1]
His orchestral works include seventeen compositions he called symphonies, of which however only eleven are numbered. The first was composed in 1933, when Malipiero was already over fifty years old. Prior to that, Malipiero had written several important orchestral pieces but avoided the word "sinfonia" (symphony) almost completely. This was due to his rejection of the Austro-German symphonic tradition.[5] The only exceptions to that are the three compositions Sinfonia degli eroi (1905), Sinfonia del mare (1906) and Sinfonie del silenzio e della morte (1909–1910). In such early works, the label "symphony" should not, however, be interpreted as indicating works in the
Beethovenian or
Brahmsian symphonic style, but more as
symphonic poems.[5]
When asked in the mid-1950s by the British encyclopedia The World of Music, Malipiero listed as his most important compositions the following pieces:[citation needed]
Pause del Silenzio for the orchestra, composed in 1917
Rispetti e Strambotti for string quartet, composed in 1920
L'Orfeide for the stage, composed between 1918 and 1922, and first performed in 1924
La Passione, a mystery play composed in 1935
his nine symphonies, composed between 1933 and 1955 (he would compose additional symphonies in the years after this list was made)
He regarded Impressioni dal vero, for orchestra, as his earliest work of lasting importance.[5]
Musical theory and style
Malipiero was strongly critical of
sonata form and, in general, of standard thematic development in composition. He declared:
As a matter of fact I rejected the easy game of thematic development because I was fed up with it and it bored me to death. Once one finds a theme, turns it around, dismembers it and blows it up, it is not very difficult to assemble the first movement of a symphony (or a sonata) that will be amusing for amateurs and also satisfy the lack of sensitivity of the knowledgeable.[6]
Malipiero's musical language is characterized by an extreme formal freedom; he always renounced the academic discipline of
variation, preferring the more anarchic expression of song, and he avoided falling into
program music descriptivism. Until the first half of the 1950s, Malipiero remained tied to
diatonism, maintaining a connection with the pre-19th-century Italian instrumental music and Gregorian chant, moving then slowly to increasingly eerie and tense territories that put him closer to total chromaticism. He did not abandon his previous style but he reinvented it. In his latest pages, it is possible to recognize suggestions from his pupils
Luigi Nono and
Bruno Maderna.[citation needed]
His compositions are based on free, non-thematic passages as much as in thematic composition, and seldom do movements end in the keys in which they started.[1]
When Malipiero approached the symphony, he did not do so in the so-called post-Beethovenian sense, and for this reason authors rather described his works as "sinfonias" (the Italian term), to emphasize Malipiero's fundamentally Italian, anti-Germanic approach.[1] He remarked:
The Italian symphony is a free kind of poem in several parts which follow one another capriciously, obeying only those mysterious laws that instinct recognizes[1]
As
Ernest Ansermet once declared, "these symphonies are not thematic but 'motivic': that is to say Malipiero uses melodic motifs like everyone else [...] they generate other motifs, they reappear, but they do not carry the musical discourse – they are, rather, carried by it".[1]
Recently, Malipiero's piano repertoire, including his complete concertos, has experienced a revival at the hands of noted Italian pianist
Sandro Ivo Bartoli.
^
abcdefghiJohn C.G. Watherhouse (1993). "Gian Francesco Malipiero (1883–1973)". In Symphonies nos.3 and 4 · Sinfonia del mare (pp. 3–5) [CD booklet]. Germany: Naxos.
^
abcdJohn C.G. Watherhouse (1993). "Gian Francesco Malipiero (1883–1973)". In Symphonies nos.1 and 2 · Sinfonie del silenzio e della morte (pp. 3–5) [CD booklet]. Germany: Naxos.
^«L'opera di Gian Francesco Malipiero» – essays from Italian and foreign scholars, introduced by Guido M. Gatti, Edizioni di Treviso, 11952, p. 340. – cited from M.Sorce Keller, A «bent for aphorisms»: Some remarks about music and about his own music by Gian Francesco Malipiero, The Music Review, 1978, vol. 39, n. 3–4 – available at
[2]
Bibliography
Sorce Keller, Marcello. “A Bent for Aphorisms: Some Remarks about Music and about His Own Music by Gian Francesco Malipiero”, The Music Review, XXXIX(1978), no. 3–4, 231–239.
Lanza, Andrea (2008). "An Outline of Italian Instrumental Music in the 20th Century". Sonus. A Journal of Investigations into Global Musical Possibilities. 29/1: 1–21.
ISSN0739-229X.