ABSTRACT
Despite such forward-looking qualities, Torneo notturno in some ways marks the end of a period: on the whole it is less prophetic of Malipiero’s music of the 1930s than Le aquile di Aquileia and certainly less so than La Cena. Immediately after the completion of the opera there came a marked change of direction in several important respects, not least in Malipiero’s operatic development as such. For Torneo notturno was not only his last stage work that is in the full sense ‘symbolic’ throughout (as distinct from being capricious and fantastic with incidental symbolic overtones): it was also his last published opera for some time in which he invented his own plot or groundplan, and compiled his own composite libretto. This ‘quintessence of everything that [he had] always hoped to be able to achieve, from Sette canzoni onwards, in [the] theatre’ 1 seems at last to have exorcized his need for idiosyncratic symbolism; and from that moment onwards (after the transitional crisis represented by the repudiated I trionfi d’Amore) his operas tended for the time being to become more conventional, less perplexing, and on the whole (one has to admit) less interesting.
