ABSTRACT
Unlike that of the First World War, the impact on Malipiero of the Second, though considerable in personal terms, 1 did not have an immediate drastic effect on his basic musical style. It is true that at least two works of the period – Vergilii Aeneis (1943–4) and the Third Symphony (1944–5) – were explicitly linked in his own mind with the war experience: the former was ‘an outlet for my despair at the events which […] were threatening to destroy Italy’, while the latter was ‘connected to a terrible date, 8 September 1943’ when ‘the bells of St. Mark’s cathedral […] did not ring for peace but to announce new torments, new suffering’. 2 Nevertheless there is little in the musical substance even of these two works (impressive though they are in their own terms) which can be compared, even remotely, with the unbridled turbulence and disruption that pervades parts of such First-War-period pieces as Pause del silenzio I, the Ditirambo tragico or Pantea (cf. pp. 119–21, 127–9, etc.). On the contrary, Malipiero’s compositions of the early 1940s continue, for the most part, in the manner already established in his music of the previous decade, again with occasional – but still only occasional – foretastes of that new, more pervasive chromaticism which was to become really widespread in his music only after the war was over.
