Il teatro musicale di Gian Francesco Malipiero negli anni Sessanta: il “ciclo” di Bonaventura

The studies dedicated to Gian Francesco Malipiero have paid much attention to the theatrical production written between the ‘20s and ‘50s. Although the dramatic production of the composer was uninterrupted throughout his artistic career, the last works have not yet received a lot of attention from critics. The reasons are partly due to the new demands expressed in the same years by young emerging composers, in part to the size of epigonism that features the latest production of Malipiero, which produced the sensation of a musical theater almost folded in on itself, lacking an evolution, unable to renew. That’s why the lens have been focused on the works of the '60s, after bringing back Malipiero to his contemporary cultural field and intercepting the peculiarity of his dramaturgical conception. In particular, Le metamorfosi di Bonaventura (1965) and Gli eroi di Bonaventura (1969) represent a major synthesis of the artistic career of Malipiero, because in them converge characters of his dramas but also new intellectuals instances, that on one hand look at late-Romantic culture of German origin, and on the other manifest an aesthetic vision properly of the twentieth century. A significant novelty consists in the construction system of the two works which, although different in the results, reveals the “aesthetic presence” of the composer as the only true protagonist of the scores. At a linguistic level, an intersection between different models could be perceived (whole-tone scale, atonality, twelve-tone), in any case taken slavishly, but partially “masked” themselves as the characters of Malipiero. This game of disguises and revelations, in which consists the composer’s dramatic strategy, refers to the complex existential attitude that he assumes respect to the contemporary reality: it appears to his eyes with an uncertain physiognomy, changing, not leading to a complete and definitive form.