Within the context of the wide and multifaceted creative activity of Gian Francesco Malipiero (Venice, 1882–Treviso, 1973), piano production represents a marginal branch, or at least one that was developed less systematically. However, there are about thirty titles – spread over more than sixty years – in which the most typical forms of Malipiero’s language find perfect expression: from the melancholy restlessness of the first works to the clear expressive intensity of the last ones.

Malipiero is not a pianist – in his youth he half-heartedly studied the violin and then for some time the bassoon – but the piano will always be his working instrument. In the large studio on the first floor of the Asolo house, surrounded by a vast library, a grand piano from the FIP (Fabbrica Italiana Pianoforti) will be his companion for a long time. “Pianists who perform my piano works are rare. Perhaps they feel that the piano does not love me. However, I bear no grudge against this strange enemy of mine, on the contrary, I am very much in love with certain piano sounds, with their bright-ness. I understand the poetry of the keyboard and the vibrations of the most complete sound organism, but acrobatic virtuosity sickens me.” The result, however, is an imaginative and coherent world, one of the most original and unique of the first half of the twentieth century in Italy.