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Rating: Rummaging through memories has dual consequences. Some of them, if poked, defend themselves by releasing a sudden wave of heat, so much so that it seems like your insides are about to cook, the heartbeat races, and trying to cool them down is a daunting and difficult task. Others, on the contrary, are subcutaneous injections of mild melancholy, they evoke the suggestion of a homecoming, comfort, serenity, they have a different nature and a different origin, they offer shreds of more domesticated emotions, perhaps nostalgic but less painful.
The inspiration to write this review, which is more a description of a memory, came from a "memory" of the second type, recorded with a small device I brought with me to a concert, during Fabrizio De André's first theatrical tour.
It was April 1993, the theater was full of people from various places and of various generations: there were kids unexpectedly singing "La guerra di Piero" by heart, and more mature people who, between the two halves of the concert, recalled the genius of "Tutti morimmo a stento" and "La Buona Novella". Then, as always in any reputable theater, there were the powdered, wigged, furred, jeweled ladies, in short, the trendy ones, sitting with their cold vanity on the velvet chairs, more attentive to the gazes of onlookers than to the music of that genius sitting on the stage, but that's a completely different issue.
The concert was divided into two parts, and the characters of the songs were grouped by gender, as was once customary in church: women in the first part of the show and men in the second. The first part of the journey started and immediately began to explore the deeper recesses of life, trying to capture its characters and their truths, the first stop was a taste of La Buona Novella with "Laudate Dominum", "L’infanzia di Maria" and "Tre madri" with all that tremendous humanity that De André had brilliantly managed to filter from the sacredness of the official gospels through a reinterpretation of the apocryphal ones. Then there were two intense translations from Leonard Cohen: “Nancy” and “Joan of Arc,” introduced by his way of seeing the act of translating:
".. I’ve always thought that when an author is not sufficiently inspired to take on the burden, the responsibility of creating a work of their own, it's good to translate other colleagues who express themselves in languages different from our own. You achieve two sure goals immediately: to practice and to demonstrate subjective humility, I believe that without humility you can't do any kind of job well… and then, I believe, there’s another goal that is objectively useful to everyone, which is to spread whatever little or much poetry might be found in the songs of authors expressing themselves in foreign languages. There are many ways to translate… I couldn't care less about literal translation, in fact, I don't care at all, I try to get as much as possible into the spirit of the song and through the song itself, even try to reach the spirit of the one who composed it. I am comforted in my rather incorrect approach by what the greatest literary critic of our century, Benedetto Croce, used to say, who distinguished translations into ugly and faithful and into beautiful and unfaithful, and I, in front of what I personally consider to be beautiful, am willing to any perfidious unfaithfulness”.
He spoke about the female universe, quoting Madame De Staël and talking about the sacrifices that women have always had to reckon with:
"I have always considered the female world, women, as a symbol of sacrifice: the sacrifice of motherhood, a disease unknown to us men, a disease that lasts in its acute phase for nine months and then seems to continue throughout life. Another sacrifice, perhaps the most terrible for a woman, is that of prostituting oneself… I believe it can even be said that through this kind of pain, one can reach sanctification (applause) thank you also on behalf of the prostitutes, who have inspired many of my songs. And finally, another sacrifice, one that had been lost in recent years but has come back into fashion, respecting the taboo of virginity, perhaps it's not just a fad maybe there's also the problem of AIDS involved, the fact is that women, especially girls, sacrifice themselves to maintain virginity, so it's no longer like eight, ten, or twenty years ago when it was joked that you could now only consider a four-year-old girl virgin if she ran much faster than her brother. But there are many jokes you can make about women, you could say, for example, that bachelors know them much better than married men, otherwise, they'd have gotten married. Perhaps the most malicious of all, made by a woman, was by an intellectual from the late eighteenth century, Madame De Staël who, when asked what she thought of her feminine condition, replied I'm very glad not to be a man otherwise I would have had to marry a woman…”.
And then the poetic journey within the female universe continued with “Le passanti”, “Bocca di rosa”, “Marinella”, interspersed with rounds of applause, more and more involved and intense for a De André who appeared serene: he had stopped drinking a few years prior and in an interview of that period he said that he had almost reconciled with the public, he was starting to enjoy himself even at concerts, something that until a few years earlier, he maintained with his usual rude but courteous frankness, represented more of a necessity to sustain his beloved company in Sardinia.
There were smiles and jokes, like when he noticed that the guitar was out of tune and so:
“The problem is that animal rights activists now forbid us from using sheep gut to make guitar strings, environmentalists don't want nylon to be used, so we are left with only spaghetti but they are very difficult to tune!”.
And here's the second half and the journey with De André-Virgil resumed, taking us to see the men who, according to him, are the symbol of domination, due to an upbringing that has instilled, almost genetically, the propensity for violence. And so we went to find “Mégu Megùn”, “Don Raffè”, “Tito”, “Piero”, “Michè”, representative icons of the weaknesses and greatness of man, things that, as we know, very often coincide. Nothing was left to chance and even in a concert, as in one of his albums, everything had a very clear meaning, but perhaps with De André, any collection of his songs is bound to form a concept, therefore a "concept collection" where at the center of it all is precisely he who is on the margins: a magnificent example of Christianity!
And in the last encore with the lights on, he presented “Andrea”, the soldier who “collected violets”, stating:
“This song is dedicated to those whom Plato, a bit more poetically than us, called the “children of the moon”, those whom we instead call gay or with a certain sort of strange satisfaction "different" or even “asses”. I am pleased to sing this song with the lights on, also demonstrating that today in Europe, at least in Europe, everyone can simply be themselves without the need to be ashamed”.
It was truly exciting for me, then a sixteen-year-old, to understand how songs could give birth to stimuli that went on to tickle that precious curiosity that leads you to read Spoon River Anthology and get to know that wonderful woman Fernanda Pivano was, or the apocryphal gospels, to listen to Brassens and Cohen, and all that art which strongly contributes to making you no longer use the word tolerance, but the word respect. That is the greatness of De André, a greatness that goes well beyond his songs, indeed that begins with his songs. This dissemination of culture has to do with the formation of the individual, his songs and his words may or may not be poetry but they are undoubtedly bridges to knowledge, and sorry if that's not enough.
Let's hope they decide to put all this on a record, maybe we have to patiently wait for the next anniversary… probably few heard him when, about the enormous success of his latest tour, he said with his typical humility coated with irony, which he often used to mask embarrassment:
"..I would never want to end up in a museum or a square, like a statue at the mercy of pigeons...”.
P.S.: All italics are faithful transcriptions from the concert…
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