1960–73

By the early 1960s the Italian ‘economic miracle’ had entered a truly spectacular phase. Despite continuing drastic inequalities (especially between the north and the south of the country), an unprecedented level of affluence was now being achieved by a substantial proportion of the population, and the industrialization of the north had progressed far beyond anything that might have been envisaged during the earlier decades of the century. ¹ The materialistic temptations of the resulting modern consumer society naturally had negative as well as positive consequences, and it is not surprising that the misanthropic Malipiero on the whole viewed such developments with little sympathy. ² Yet it is worth noting at once that in 1963 he of all people was willing to respond (along with the more naturally modern-minded Petrassi) to a commission from the influential Istituto per la Ricostruzione Industriale (I.R.I.) for a short composition ‘inspired by the contemporary world’. The fact that the commission gave rise to Macchine ³ – an overt evocation of modern machinery and one of the most playfully (if perhaps partly satirically) inventive of all his later pieces – shows that even now Malipiero was less wholly resistant to the changing world around him than he would sometimes have wished that world to believe.