Tentativi di rinnovamento di un genere: dodecafonia e opera buffa in La donna è mobile di Riccardo Malipiero (1954)

Abstract

In 1957 Riccardo Malipiero’s La donna è mobile was staged at La Piccola Scala in Milan, with a libretto by Guglielmo Zucconi adapted from Massimo Bontempelli’s comedy Nostra Dea. The opera features several unusual characteristics. First, it belongs to the genre of opera-buffa, which composers of the time generally avoided. Second, the choice of an almost contemporary pièce, more-over, ran against the general trend of composing old-fashioned operas. Finally, Malipiero persisted in using twelve-tone technique, at that time deemed to be irrelevant to comic theatre. However, dodecaphony as it is employed in La donna è mobile is quite distant from Schönberg’s notion: Malipiero rejects the idea of musical elaboration, rather using tone rows as fixed melodic structures. Twelvenote composition is used for dramatic purposes instead of structural ones, since tone rows are employed as Leitmotiv in order to portray characters. Furthermore, in La donna è mobile twelve-tone composition and nearly every element of modernity is softened by more traditional compositional solutions, although this is done with parodistic, even mocking intent. The opera, as some reviews of the première in Milan point out, cannot be regarded as a model for a new conception of comic musical theatre, but rather as the last specimen of a past genre.