ABSTRACT

The calmly spacious yet poignantly melancholy expressiveness that pervades much of Antonio e Cleopatra and Ecuba produced more lastingly successful results in the ‘mistero’ La Passione (1935), which – unlike even Giulio Cesare, let alone the other two operas of those years – has continued to be revived in Italy and occasionally even elsewhere. This deeply felt if uneven and in the long run (it too) rather monotonous piece is in a very direct sense a successor to La Cena – being a setting of the latter half of the text whose first half was used in the earlier work. 1 It is therefore natural enough that the two pieces should have much in common. The most obvious difference between them is that although, like La Cena (and unlike San Francesco d’Assisi), La Passione was not conceived for the stage, it is perceptibly more dramatic (if austerely so) and less exclusively contemplative than its predecessor. In this it reflects not only the more obviously dramatic events depicted, but also the fact that Malipiero’s post-1930 style, which La Cena had foreshadowed, was now firmly established and had acquired a variety and confidence that could hardly have been foreseen in 1927.