ABSTRACT
In the six previous chapters we have already met several works which contain passages, and even complete sections or movements, that in one way or other foreshadowed the music of Malipiero’s final period. 1 Such passages would seem to indicate that his more systematic move, in the years around 1950, away from diatonicism and towards the refined linear chromaticism of his last years was motivated by creative forces which had been building up within him for quite some time, and for which the relatively gentle idiom that predominated in his music of the 1930s and 1940s could not provide an adequate outlet. In this connection it is noteworthy that in May 1963 he told me that he had recently come to feel an ‘antipathy’ towards many (though by no means all) of his compositions of those two decades, which no longer seemed to him adequately to reflect his inner being. At all events, such relatively drastic departures from his established style of the time as the ‘Journey to the Underworld’ episode in Vergilii Aeneis, or the first movement in the Fifth Symphony, can now be seen, in retrospect, as powerful omens of things to come.
