Le «nove canzoni» di Gian Francesco Malipiero e il mito dell’antico

Gian Francesco Malipiero’s ‘nine songs’ are, by the author’s own admission, to be identified with his three works Le tre poesie di Angelo Poliziano (1920), Quattro sonetti del Burchiello (1921) and Due sonetti del Berni (1922). These songs for voice and piano belong to the cultural trend that laid the foundations for the recovery of antiquity, which became the so-called ‘historical mission’ of the 1980s generation. This didactic program, aimed at students in the second biennium of high school, starts with a morphological analysis of the verbal text, which is compared with that of the musical text, and continues with an exploration of the solutions that Malipiero adopted to highlight the ancient Italian tradition through interactions between music and literature. The activities suggested here, based on listening as part of the analysis of a poetic text, aim to encourage the various cross-disciplinary connections emerging from the “nine songs”.