ABSTRACT
As we have noted, 1 the one relatively long theatre piece which Malipiero gave to the world during these very last years of his career was that extraordinary operatic compilation Gli eroi di Bonaventura (1968), in which less than one eighth of the work was genuinely new: the rest is built of extended excerpts taken word for word and note for note from earlier compositions, apart from a few very minor revisions of detail. In previous chapters, while discussing the various works concerned, I have repeatedly spotlit the passages that were later to be included in Gli eroi; and I have also sometimes considered the composer's likely motives for choosing these particular excerpts for recycling.2 It would therefore be redundant (for the most part) now to re-examine the quoted passages in themselves: we may more appropriately study the ways in which Malipiero has sought to bind them all together into a coherent structure, as well as the dramatic effect and probable inner motivation of the opera as a whole.
