Gian Francesco Malipiero (1882-1973)

The Life, Times and Music of a Wayward Genius

John C. G. Waterhouse

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134409174
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

In recent years Gian Francesco Malipiero has been recognised increasingly widely as one of the most original and strangely fascinating Italian composers of the early 20th century. He was the teacher of Maderna and Nono, and was revered by (among many others) Dallapiccola, who even called him the most important (musical) personality that Italy has had since the death of Verdi. He was also a key figure in the revival of the long- neglected music of Italy's great past, and himself edited what remains the only virtually complete edition of the surviving compositions of Monteverdi. The present book not only provides the first monographic survey of Malipiero's life, times and music to appear in English, but covers the subject more comprehensively than any previous publication in any language. Dr Waterhouse draws on hitherto unpublished documents, and with the help of numerous musical examples, analyses the composer's works, style and idiosyncratic personality.

Part One

Life and Times

I

Introduction

The enormous span of Gian Francesco Malipiero’s life stretches across the most sustained period of rapid and drastic change in the entire history of Italian music: even the great transitional upheaval between the Renaissance and Baroque periods seems limited in scope by comparison. When Malipiero was born on 18 March 1882, Verdi’s last two operatic masterpieces Otello and Falstaff were still to come, and Puccini had not yet written his first opera; by the time he died at the age of ninety-one on 1 August 1973 the careers of post-war avantgarde composers such as Nono, Berio and Donatoni were at their heights, and that of Maderna – himself a devoted pupil of Malipiero – was already approaching its untimely end, with his death on 13 November of the same year.

Malipiero himself was torrentially productive as a composer throughout an amazingly large proportion of his life. His earliest surviving composition – the orchestral tone poem Dai Sepolcri, written in 1904 – was completed soon after the premiere of Madama Butterfly; and he remained creatively active, with only minor interruptions, right through until 1971, by which time the definitive version of Berio’s justly famous Sinfonia was already nearly two years old. It would be an exaggeration, of course, to suggest that Malipiero’s own stylistic development reflected all the complex twists and turns of Italian musical trends throughout those sixty-seven years: on the contrary, certain basic aspects of his highly individual art remained remarkably constant and impervious to external influences. Nevertheless, to see his achievement properly in context, one clearly needs to take account of the changing environment (cultural and political as well as musical) in which he lived and worked, and of the ways in which his career and personality interacted with those of his leading contemporaries.

In Part I of this book successive periods of Malipiero’s life are outlined briefly, and each section of biography as such is preceded by a short summary of various aspects of his background which were to influence him for better or worse during the period in question. No attempt has been made at comprehensiveness in the coverage either of ‘life’ or of ‘times’, and not only for reasons of space in a book whose main concern is with the music. One of the most basic problems is that Malipiero was notoriously secretive, and at times downright mendacious,¹ about many aspects of his past experience, especially where his earlier years (before 1922) were concerned: a would-be biographer is therefore repeatedly frustrated by unsolved mysteries and by a shortage of documentation. One may hope that in due course a determined and fortunate researcher may succeed in shining a light into at least some of the many areas that at present remain obstinately in the shadows. Until then a relatively sketchy and fragmentary account must suffice, in the hope that it may nevertheless help our understanding of how Malipiero’s music came to be as it is.

1. See n. 1 on p. 10.

II

To 1906

When Malipiero first began to find his feet as a composer, the kingdom of Italy, which had as yet been united for only a few decades, was gradually becoming more prosperous with the belated partial industrialization of (especially) the northern part of the country². The national musical culture was still predominantly operatic, in a way that increasingly reflected the tastes of the newly affluent bourgeoisie of the time, and was also strongly influenced by the commercial interests of two almost all-dominating Milanese publishing houses, Ricordi and Sonzogno. These two firms together had a control over composers’ public success which could be devastating for those who failed to find favour with one or other of them.³ Ricordi had the advantage of publishing both Verdi (1813–1901) and Puccini (1858–1924); Sonzogno responded by taking on several other promising and easily saleable opera composers who first made their marks in the 1890s, including Mascagni (1863–1945), Leoncavallo (1857–1919), Giordano (1867–1948), Cilea (1866–1950) and Franchetti (1860–1942).

Meanwhile, outstanding among the less fortunate figures was the Istrian composer Antonio Smareglia (1854–1929), a richly talented Wagnerian who for personal rather than musical reasons had evidently earned himself the displeasure of both firms:⁴ he consequently remained marginalized and unjustly neglected in his own country, though highly regarded abroad by judges as eminent as Brahms and Hans Richter. Smareglia understandably grew increasingly embittered, especially after total blindness had redoubled his sense of isolation from 1900 onwards. By his later years he had become the archetypal ‘outsider’ in the Italian musical world of the time. There is a certain symbolic appropriateness, therefore, in the fact that the young Malipiero – who (as we shall see) was himself not accepted by his country’s major publishing houses until the 1920s – acted for a time, around 1905, as Smareglia’s amanuensis.

In one respect at least, despite all, Smareglia remained typical of the predominant musical trends in Italy: he too was active mainly as a composer of operas. By the end of the 19th century, however, the Italian public’s seemingly overriding preference for experiencing its music in the opera-house was increasingly being challenged by a serious-minded and vigorous élite, centred on the various concert societies that had been growing up in some of the peninsula’s major cities. Small chamber music organizations were by then fairly numerous, but Italy’s first really systematic series of public orchestral concerts (the Concerti Popolari, founded in imitation of Pasdeloup’s famous Concerts Populaires in Paris) had been launched in Turin as recently as 1872.⁵ Further progress in this sphere remained slow, and it was not until 1908 that the opening of the famous Augusteo concert hall in Rome came as another major point of arrival in the resurgence of orchestral musical life in Italy.

In such circumstances, an Italian composer who chose to turn his back on opera, and to devote his energies principally to writing concert works instead, might be deemed somewhat unrealistic, even foolhardy. Yet such composers, surprisingly, had existed throughout the 19th century, and were becoming increasingly influential and prestigious as the turn of the century approached.⁶ Unquestionably the outstanding non-operatic composer in Italy at that time was Giuseppe Martucci (1856–1909), whose two symphonies, Second Piano Concerto and several major chamber compositions had raised Italian instrumental music to a level of excellence which had seldom if ever been reached by anyone else working south of the Alps since the 18th century.⁷ Inevitably Martucci’s larger pieces could find comparatively few regular outlets in his own country, and much of his music significantly had to be published abroad. But the beneficial influence of his ideas, and of his practical activities as an enterprisingly exploratory pianist, conductor and organizer of musical life, can be discerned in many of the more idealistic aspects of Italian music in the years when Malipiero was first getting his bearings as a composer. Although Martucci’s strong debt to the Austro-German instrumental tradition, and especially to Schumann and Brahms, did not in itself appeal greatly to Malipiero as his sympathies became increasingly anti-Germanic, this still did not stop him from retaining a great respect for the older man: as late as 1956 he described him as ‘a genius in the fullest sense’ and his Second Symphony (1904) as ‘the starting point of the renaissance of non-operatic Italian music’.⁸

Malipiero was himself a pupil not of Martucci but of a lesser but by no means negligible composer who likewise played a significant part in the resurgence of serious Italian music for the concert hall: the organist-composer Marco Enrico Bossi (1861–1925) is often mentioned alongside Martucci – together with the slightly older Giovanni Sgambati (1841–1914) – as one of the three leading figures in Italian non-operatic music at the time of Malipiero’s youth. In later life Malipiero’s comments about Bossi’s work tended to be far less respectful than his views about Martucci, or indeed about Smareglia;⁹ yet the simple fact that he studied with Bossi at all must surely have a bearing on his decision to write three ambitious orchestral pieces before he even tried to compose for the stage.

One of the main factors which was increasingly to draw the young Malipiero away from the high-minded, Germanically-influenced 19th-century romanticism favoured by composers such as Smareglia, Martucci and Bossi was his growing awareness of alternative sources of inspiration in the remoter Italian past. At the turn of the century Italy’s rediscovery of her own rich pre-19th-century musical heritage was still in its early stages; yet pioneering Italian musicologists such as Oscar Chilesotti (1848–1916) and Luigi Torchi (1858–1920) had already started to publish substantial collections of previously-forgotten Italian music, mainly from the 16th and 17th centuries.¹⁰ Consequently, when in 1902 the twenty-year-old Malipiero began – seemingly almost entirely on his own initiative – to investigate the long neglected early music preserved in the Biblioteca Marciana in Venice, he was doing something for which there were already illustrious precedents, in Italy as well as abroad.

Malipiero was born into an old Venetian aristocratic family whose members in earlier centuries had included two doges.¹¹ The family’s musical talents had emerged rather more recently; but by 1843 Gian Francesco’s grandfather, Francesco Malipiero senior (1824–87), is said to have won praise from Rossini for his early opera Giovanna di Napoli (Padua 1842; revived in 1843 at Bologna). Two years later Francesco senior wrote an Attila which brought him into unintended rivalry with Verdi: the painful results of Ricordi’s rather drastic response to this coincidence seem to have left lasting scars on the entire family’s attitude to the operatic Establishment. Even at the very end of Gian Francesco’s life this distant family crisis continued to haunt him. As he explained in a letter to Dallapiccola, dated 20 November 1970,

From my childhood, at home, I heard people speak of Verdi as the cause of our family catastrophe. It was said that the success of my grandfather’s Attila enraged the Ricordi publishing house because Verdi’s Attila was a fiasco. The publisher acquired my grandfather’s opera, changed its title [to Ildegonda di Borgogna] and prevented it from being performed. My grandfather therefore placed himself in the hands of an impresario: villa, country estates, everything was eaten up, and in my childish imagination the catastrophe was called Giuseppe Verdi.¹²

Whether this is an exact account of what really happened is less important for our present purposes than the impact the family’s version of events had on Malipiero’s future prejudices. Verdi’s Attila indeed had a mixed reception when brand new, although it quickly recovered to win an early popularity...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction to the series
• List of plates
• Preface
• Preface to the Italian edition
• Part One: Life and Times
• Part Two: The Works
• Catalogue of Malipiero’s music and books
• Abbreviations and select bibliography
• Discography by Peter Bromley
• Index of Malipiero’s work
• Index of persons