ABSTRACT
This splendidly swift and compact action, which in its musical setting lasts barely sixteen minutes, is certainly one of Malipiero's most effective post-war libretti - comparable in its eventful terseness to that of II capitan Spavento.7 If the total result cannot quite match that opera's sparkling inventiveness, the fault lies mainly in that recurrent weakness which in varying degrees (as we have repeatedly had occasion to note) weighs on almost all Malipiero's later operas - the recitative dialogue's tendency to lapse into an under-characterized routine.s Because of its brevity, the Rappresentazione e testa is protected from this tendency's more drastically negative effects (albeit not quite as completely as was the case in Il capitan Spavento). However, the lack of any clear musical differentiation between Carnival's vocal utterances and those of his minions - or indeed those of Lent's grotesquely comic warriors - brings an inevitable threat of monotony, which is offset to a fair but not always sufficient degree by an orchestral fabric that crackles and fizzes with racily pungent imagery.
