ABSTRACT
The early 1930s were the last period in which Malipiero’s musical language underwent really rapid and fundamental changes all within the space of a few years. Since then one can, it is true, detect considerable further developments – not least a broad though gradual drift away from the prevailing diatonicism of the 1930s towards a new, refined linear chromaticism (very different from the chromaticism of his pre-1930 works) which was only fully to assert itself in the early 1950s. But developments such as these proceeded at an altogether slower rate, natural enough in a composer of his age: from now on one can rarely point to particular pieces, or even to small groups of pieces, that introduced and fully realized significantly new musical methods ‘all at one go’. Fedele d'Amico was drastically simplifying yet not altogether falsifying the truth when he compared Malipiero’s music from the late 1930s onwards to ‘a subdued soliloquy, continuing uninterrupted for years and years, passing from one work to another, apparently always the same’. 1
