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Gian Francesco Malipiero (Venice, March 18, 1882 - Asolo (Treviso), August 1, 1973) was an Italian composer, musicologist, music teacher and editor.
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Born in Venice into an aristocratic family, the grandson of the opera composer Francesco Malipiero, he was prevented by family troubles from pursuing his musical education in a consistent manner: the father separated from the mother in 1893 and took Gian Francesco to Trieste, Berlin and eventually to Vienna. The young Malipiero and his father broke up bitterly their relationship, and in 1899 Malipiero returned to his mother's home in Venice, where he entered the Liceo Musicale[1].
After stopping counterpoint lessons with the composer, organist and pedagogue Marco Enrico Bossi, Malipiero continued study 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 ("Music High School"). After graduating, Malipiero became an assistant to the blind composer Antonio Smareglia.[2]
In 1905 Malipiero comes back to Venice, but from 1906 and 1909 he is often in Berlin[3], following Max Bruch classes.[4] Later, in 1913, Malipiero moves to Paris, where he gets acquainted to compositions by Ravel, Debussy, De Falla, Schoenberg, Berg. Most importantly, he attends there 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"[2][1] and after that, he repudiated almost all compositions written up to that time, with the exception of Impressioni dal vero (1910-11)[1] At this time he won four composition prizes at the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome, by entering five different compositions under five different pseudonyms.
In 1917, due to the Italian defeat at Caporetto, he is forced to flee from Venice and settle 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.
He was a professor of composition at the Parma Conservatory from 1921 to 1924. In 1932 he became professor of composition at the then Venice Liceo Musicale, which he directed from 1939 to 1952. Among others he taught Luigi Nono.
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.
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 works he called symphonies, of which however only eleven are numbered. The first one has been composed in 1933, when Malipiero was already over fifty years old. Prior to that, Malipiero indeed wrote several important orchestral pieces but avoided the word "sinfonia" (symphony) almost completely. This is due to his rejection of the Austro-German symphonic tradition.[5]. 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:
He regarded Impressioni dal vero, for the orchestra, as his earliest work of lasting importance[5].
Even if Malipiero rarely, if ever, dealed with dodecaphony, he was strongly critical of the sonata form and, in general, of the standard thematic development in composition. He declared:
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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] |
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The musical language of Malipiero is in fact characterized by an extreme formal freedom; he always renounced to the academic discipline of variation, preferring the more anarchist expression of sing, and he strongly avoided to fall into the program music descriptivism. Until the first half of '50s, Malipiero remained tied to a diatonic writing, that still maintained connection with the pre-XIX century Italian instrumental music and Gregorian chant, moving then slowly to increasingly eerie and tense territories, that put him closer to the total chromatism. He did not abandon his previous style but he reinvented it personally and up-to-date. In his latest pages, it is possible to recognize suggestions from his pupils Luigi Nono and Bruno Maderna.
His compositions are based on free, non-thematic passages as much as in thematic composition, and seldomly movements end in the keys in which they started[1].
When Malipiero approached symphony, he did not so in the so-called post-Beethovenian sense, and for this reason authors rather described his works as "sinfonias" (with the Italian term) to emphasize Malipiero's fundamentally Italian and anti-Germanic approach[1]. He remarked:
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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] |
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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, Malpiero's piano repertoire, including his complete concertos, has experienced a revival at the hands of noted Italian pianist Sandro Ivo Bartoli.
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.
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