Fabrizio De André
Anime salve

THE REVIEW

The premise that I usually don't make before writing is, in cases like this, obligatory: this Work has already been commented on by other Users (certainly) in ways more competent than mine, which may render this comment superfluous. In that case, kind regards; otherwise, happy (I hope) reading.

The scenario within which this array of human beings unfolds, in a literary sense (a value far from being "added" compared to the album's music) with (metaphorical) references to Dante's Poetry, or the prose of endless narrators, from G. Boccaccio to V. Woolf, is what the album published 12 years before this "Anime Salve", namely the epochal "Creuza De Mä" had constructed. It might be (or seem) out of place, but the parallel with Renaissance and Contemporary Literature aims (in the feeling of the writer) to be understood in this sense, a grandiose and (poetically) suggestive "structure" within which "poetry" unfolds with its complement of dramatic, sad, joyful, amusing, epic, and elegiac suggestion, practically (if the "Crocean" structure vs. poetry framework passes) all possible registers. There's an element of absolute modernity, which consists in the fact that the narrative around these characters portrayed in their lives, and in the larger context of the human multitudes subtly linked to and more or less subtly indifferent to these lives, populate these scenarios. This element consists in the narrative device of traversing drama reaching to touch tragedy but withdrawing just a moment before, and on the opposite side, traversing the comic profiles of the contours of the protagonists' identities in "varied humanity" stories, without hitting the potentially grotesque core of their character.

Returning to the philological and artistic context of Fabrizio de André's production, it will become clear how (personally) I considered this "Anime Salve" the most direct successor of that "Creuza De Mä" rather than the more recent (and utterly atypical in its poetic and linguistic-musical eclecticism) "Le Nuvole". Not being able to define the latter as an "album of transitions" because it falls outside traditional definitions (and thus is not suitable as a measure of comparison), it seems, on the emotional level, that this Work is the "conclusion" of the discourse left "open" with the counterpoint of 1984. 

Where that sea mule track provided the vantage point from which to portray "en plein air", beyond as well as at a glance, a Mediterranean that (to use its Author's words) "runs from the Bosphorus to Gibraltar", and in which the weaving of traditional instruments (I mainly think of the meticulously chosen percussions, the strings, from the Andalusian Guitar to the Neapolitan Mandolin, united with even digital technologies), the use of the Genoese Language, the "realism" effects produced by recordings of market voices, the sound of the sea lapping the shore in "D'A me riva" (the most symbolically explicit in the poetic sense of the compositions) globally constituted an environment in which visual suggestion prevailed, and the evocative power of sound-noise-rhythms and language (never like in this case "musical" itself), formed a "portrait" of an environment, of a true protagonist space of that work, in this case, the poetic and narrative attention shifts towards people. 

"What are these souls doing
in front of the church
these divided people
this suspended story"

("Disamistade") 

In a sense, it is the same space no longer at the center of the representation, but within which the stories narrated unfold.

This is how it happens in "Khorakhané":

"I bear the name of every baptism
every name the seal of a pass
for a ford a land a cloud a song
a diamond hidden in the bread"

song of a Serbian-Montenegrin Roma tribe, a minority and as such fragile by definition, and more extensively (as the entire poetry underlying this collection of Songs indicates) protagonist, along with other minorities, or solitudes or simply people burdened by the solitude of their own existence, is placed at the center of the representation, in an implicit bond of belonging not declared by the same narrative voice, compared to the larger (more or less) formless, faceless majorities, and above all wordless.

This is how it happens in "Dolcenera", a literary jewel for the spoken figures, for the linguistic refinement ("black that takes away, that takes away the road, black that hadn't been seen in a whole life so sweetblack black") and above all for metaphors at the highest levels of Poetry (the entire story plays on the personification of water, in all its forms and modes of appearance, from overwhelming power to the sinuosity of that water which first "rises from the stairs rises without salt, it rises" then descends "from the clothes glued, from every chill of skin": immediate sensuality and violence of Passion: what is defined as a Demon, Love precisely).

But it is in the three moments (if I may symbolically choose three) that De André's Art of this period stands out in its usual almost sculptural clarity, though wrapped in a decidedly "feminine" sensuality and sensitivity. "Princesa"

"Princesa", rhythmic like the entire album, and like the Music that in it finds breath, caressed by a subtle South American breeze, has the most intensely endured text, dramatically gritty that more harshly strikes and tests the listener, and at the same time alternates the hardest moments with the most imaginable lyrical verses

"Under the lashes of these trees
in the chiaroscuro where I was born
that the horizon before the sky
was my mother's gaze"

"Disamistade", which (though the entire work is written with Ivano Fossati) more than any other feels the imprint of De André's Colleague and fellow citizen, particularly in this song, superb for the atmosphere it envelops, the dramatic tension, and its character of "glimpse" almost "documentary" on "enmity" (which crosses Humanity portrayed here like a wound), reveals a distant affinity with that Fossati masterpiece that was "La Pianta del Té" (particularly listen to "La Volpe": the two tracks are structured in a very similar way).

One cannot but place at the summit the "Smisurata Preghiera", which read on paper, has a "descending" flow, from the post-apocalyptic incipit ("high on shipwrecks from the viewpoints of the towers on the elements of disaster"), and alluding finally explicitly to minorities and those who "in an obstinate and contrary direction" have chosen (or "chosen") the difficult path of belonging to them, ends in an almost subdued, almost desperate, yet almost sarcastic manner with an invocation to some sort of "divine justice":

"do not forget their face
after so much wandering
it is only fair that fortune helps them
like an oversight
like an anomaly
like a distraction
like a duty".

On paper, reading it before having listened to it, as was said. It isn't so in the inseparable intertwining of words (music themselves) and music (word belonging to another language) which is this song: it is also rhythmic, it also with exotic essences, it also as in the Poetry of all times, as in Shakespeare, between "Tragedy" and "Comedy": even if, without touching either limit, it traverses the infinite, and inexhaustible, nuances.