The early 1960s: theatre works, especially ‘Le metamorfosi di Bonaventura'

Malipiero’s three theatre compositions of the early 1960s, in which he returned to writing for the stage after a six year interruption (bridged, however, by the semi-dramatic interlude of the ‘rappresentazioni da concerto’), are none of them masterpieces; but they contain plentiful points of interest. Of the three, the Rappresentazione e festa di Carnasciale e della Quaresima (1961) is the most compelling and theatrically effective, thanks partly to its extreme brevity and to the delightfully Malipierian fantasy implicit already in its anonymous Florentine source. ¹ The most complex and most wide-rangingly representative of the composer’s very personal approach to music-drama is, however, Le metamorfosi di Bonaventura (1963–5, based on the likewise anonymous Die Nachtwachen des Bonaventura published in Penig, Saxony, in 1804/5), although the result may at times seem rather confused and long-winded. Don Giovanni (1962), by extreme contrast, has a libretto whose derivation from an acknowledged literary classic (Pushkin’s Kammennïy gost [‘The Stone Guest’], set also by Dargomizhsky) is as respectfully straightforward and unproblematical as one could ever possibly expect in a work by Malipiero.