ABSTRACT
Among the leading Italian composers in the so-called ‘generazione dell’Ottanta’, 1 Gian Francesco Malipiero was always the most prolific, the most capriciously uneven, and the most purely instinctive. If Pizzetti’s development was consciously guided, up to a point, by his philosophical and dramatic ideals (reflecting his association with the ‘vocian’ movement, with Bastianelli, etc. 2 ), and if the young Casella derived creative stimulus from his wide-ranging quasi-scientific interests in the styles of others and in the sheer ‘mechanics’ of music, 3 Malipiero’s torrential output may seem, at bottom, to have orginated simply from an irrepressible inner urge to compose, compared with which external, environmental factors appear secondary. Of few composers can it more truly be said that music came to them ‘as leaves to a tree’, and this uninhibited creative spontaneity, not always matched by adequate self-criticism, is one basic reason for some of the more disconcerting, but also some of the most rewarding, aspects of his art. There can be little doubt that Malipiero was, in a deep sense, the most original Italian composer of his generation: idiosyncratically personal factors played a proportionately greater part in moulding his stylistic development than was the case with Pizzetti or Casella, or indeed with Respighi, Alfano, Zandonai or any of his other immediate Italian contemporaries. It therefore seems appropriate to begin this part of our study by focusing on certain general aspects of his unusual psychological makeup, and on the ways in which they evidently influenced his creative choices.
