ABSTRACT
A rather special aspect of Malipiero’s transition away from his pervading manner of the 1930s and ’40s can be seen in the field of the symphony. At first sight the very idea of writing symphonies at all – even symphonies as unorthodox in method as his – might seem to belong so decisively to those two decades of relative ‘rationality’ in his work that the subsequent undermining of that rationality by mounting disruptive tensions might have been expected, in its very nature, to mark the end of his symphonic period. Malipiero himself, indeed, evidently for a time believed that this would happen: in 1948 he confidently declared 1 that ‘today we are almost certain that the Seventh Symphony marks the end of the cycle running from 1933 to 1948’. Yet the urge to continue to write symphonies of a kind (even if not, as we shall see, of quite the same kind as before) refused to die altogether – though it is true that this urge was to lie dormant throughout the years 1952–61 inclusive.
