1986

PAUSES OF SILENCE

The Italian Composer Gian Francesco Malipiero

The Venetian Gian Francesco Malipiero is one of the lesser-known Italian composers of our century. Unfortunately, the Italian music of the last eighty years is just as little known; for throughout the world Italian music is associated with the melodrama of the 19th century, the great operas of Verdi, Rossini, Puccini and so on. But composers such as Respighi, Pizzetti, Casella and indeed Malipiero had to fight all their lives for a new Italian music.

While in northern Europe composers such as Debussy, Ravel, Stravinsky or Schoenberg were enjoying their first great successes, the Italian public did not forgive its own composers for composing like the avant-gardists of the north. Malipiero had learned fully from the experience of Ravel, Stravinsky and Schoenberg. He had long known where European music was heading and what problems an Italian had to solve along the way. He went back to what he called the "unpolluted sources" of Italian music, by which he meant the music of the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries. His real teachers were Monteverdi, Palestrina and Domenico Scarlatti. It was Malipiero, too, who republished the complete works of Claudio Monteverdi, who had been almost forgotten at the beginning of our century. Malipiero knew practically all the famous composers of his time and corresponded busily with them, yet he felt more or less distant from all of them. He was bound by close friendship to poets such as D'Annunzio, Luigi Pirandello and Marinetti. But he rarely left the small town of Asolo in the Italian foothills of the Alps, where he had withdrawn to devote himself entirely to composing; for he was reluctant to leave behind his many pets, which meant more to him than most of his Italian contemporaries. He died in Asolo, too, in 1973.

VOICES	Alois Garg, Helmut Wöstmann, J.P. Gunsett, Ludwig Thiesen and others
MUSIC	Gian-Francesco Malipiero
DIRECTOR	Georg Brintrup
SOUND ENGINEER	Roland Sailer
EDITOR	Peter-Paul Schulz
DURATION	160 minutes
FIRST BROADCAST	SWF 25.10.1986

Photo: “Oggi Illustrato”, 8 April 1972 (upload: Alecnørpy), Wikimedia Commons, licence CC BY-SA 4.0 – cropped, border added.