Bruno Maderna's artistic personality was repeatedly the victim of an old prejudice: his intense and all-encompassing activity as an orchestra conductor was considered to have somehow damaged his compositional flair, preventing him from dedicating the necessary time and space to exercising his talent. Thus, from this perspective, notwithstanding his apparently bright and promising future as a composer, much of his creativity would have remained largely unexpressed, or at the very least hampered and in some way debased, by his activity as a composer.

This commonplace is a regular topos in Madernian exegesis and reappears also in Michela Garda's 1989 in-depth study of the themes recurrent in the musical criticism directed at Maderna during his life and in the decade after his death. The idea spread and took root particularly in the late sixties and early seventies, further endorsed by his frenetic life as a conductor without a permanent position who regularly appeared as a guest conductor in concert halls all over the world. Moreover, doubts about the reasons behind some of his compositional choices added further fuel to the fire. First of all, it was not clear as to whether his predilection for so-called “open form” composition was dictated more by practical necessity than by a poetic kind of urgency. Or again, whether this was a mere expedient to bungle up pieces he had conceived and composed in his free time away from conducting. The power of this prejudice was still recognized more than twenty years later by Ulrich Mosch (who edited the re-publication of Massimo Mila's Maderna musicista europeo, a collection of radio broadcasts transmitted between 1974 and 1975, shortly after the composer's death), although he does not go so far as to suggest that this was the only reason for the belated musicological interest in Maderna. Mila once said: “When he was alive, we were used to considering him as potentially a great composer and – shaking our heads – we would sententiously observe: shame, he seems to waste his talent on conducting.”