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 Otella 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.