ABSTRACT
During 1945–8 Malipiero’s instrumental output was even more dominated by symphonies than it had been by concertos in 1934–8. His compositions of other kinds, written during the years under discussion, were surprisingly few; nor do they on the whole call for much comment. His only chamber work of the period – the Sixth String Quartet (1947), which bears the unexplained title L’arca di Noè (‘Noah’s ark’) – adds little that is basically new to what he had already achieved in earlier quartets. Apart from a few brief excursions into a rather more tense chromaticism, the idiom is still essentially that of Cantari alla madrigalesca, most of whose best qualities the new quartet shares – without, however, quite recapturing the structural compactness and inevitability of the splendid Fourth Quartet (cf. pp. 208–10). In one respect, indeed, L’arca di Noè harks back even beyond Cantari alla madrigalesca to the methods of Rispetti e strambotti; for whereas the two quartets of the 1930s contained only one general pause apiece, as momentary points of repose during their otherwise uninterrupted discourses, L’arca di Noè contains two such pauses (bars 179 and 296). Moreover, each of these is preceded (albeit at different pitches) by the same gently meditative six-bar passage, which occurs also a third time, slightly expanded, at the end of the work: it thus fulfils exactly the same function as the chorale-like second recurrent motif in Rispetti e strambotti (cf. p. 141).
