Fabrizio De André
In Direzione Ostinata E Contraria 2

Clouds.

On January 11, 1999, they were invisible, but it rained on the streets and the wind cut through thoughts. I remember that morning as one of the saddest of my life.

It's impossible to separate the line of reason from the point where it tangentially intersects the curve of the heart.

The triple CD collection "In direzione ostinata e contraria 2" complementary to the eponymous first volume of last year reconstructs in a rigorous chronological perspective, with a difficult but perfectly successful selection the evolution and artistic production of the greatest, by far, Italian Songwriter.

Thus, one can speak of Song, even Author's Song, with a caveat: there are very few examples, on a global scale, of Poetry applied to Music, that is, verses that once transcribed on paper live their own poetic life, as if they had been written for that purpose.

Fabrizio De André is one of these rare examples.

The compositions taken from the early eponymous albums open the first disc: "La stagione del tuo amore" (from "Vol. I"), "Nell'acqua della chiara fontana" (from "Vol. III"), "S'i' fosse foco" (sonnet by Cecco Angiolieri, from "Vol. III"), some singles ("Fila la lana", "Il testamento", "Delitto di paese"). These are Songs in the most traditional sense, imbued with poetry and at the same time ironic and melancholic, with the same grandeur as life.

"Cantico dei drogati", "Leggenda di Natale and "Ballata degli impiccati" are excerpts from the album "Tutti morimmo a stento" (1968), the first (even if in embryo) of the concept albums. What characterizes these songs are more articulated and complex arrangements from a musical perspective, perhaps a turning point in the musical form of a theoretical "second creative period" of De André. The richer and orchestral, broader, and symphonic arrangements almost confer a sort of glorious and dramatic solemnity to the themes. Worth mentioning is the indescribable, Dante-like, biblical pearl that opened that album: "Cantico dei drogati": it's impossible not to be literally paralyzed by its poignant and cruel beauty and its sweet despairing and sweet despair:

"Who will talk to me again

of bright tomorrows

where the mute will sing

and the boring will be silent.

When I will hear again

the wind among the leaves

whispering the silences

that the evening gathers. "

"La Buona Novella" (1970), the second concept album, is represented here by the sequence "Laudate Dominum", "L'infanzia di Maria", "Il ritorno di Giuseppe", "Maria nella bottega di un falegname", "Tre madri", "Laudate Hominem" (the culminating moment, "Il testamento di Tito", appears in the previous collection and in other compilations and live albums): it is a representation in snapshots of the Story of Jesus, re-read through the apocryphal Gospels, an (apparently sarcastic) revisit of sacred themes in light of contemporaneity, but at the same time an incredible theatrical reconstruction that is as true as few works have managed to be regarding the same themes, in a garb far from profane.

The third conceptual album "Non al denaro, non all'amore, né al cielo" (1971) inspired by Edgard Lee Masters, with contributions from N. Piovani on the arrangements and G. Bentivoglio among others is summarized in three tracks placed at the opening of the second disc: "Un malato di cuore", "Un medico" and "Un matto (Dietro ogni scemo c'è un villaggio)".

The fourth and last of the themed concept albums, "Storia di un impiegato", still sees N. Piovani in the arrangement and writing of the songs, alongside other collaborators, and is represented by the segment "Al ballo mascherato", "Canzone del padre", "Nella mia ora di libertà". On the same disc shine the reinterpretation of "Suzanne", by L. Cohen and "Via della Povertà" by B. Dylan.

The second act closes with six songs from "Rimini" (1978), imaginative, fairy-tale-like, and precursory: the track that gives the album its title is a parabolic time journey, which, encapsulating the breath of history, allows for better understanding to bring clarity, or to better understand one's own confusion, on a loved person, a lost love, a fragment of life…

"She says burned in the square

by the Holy Inquisition

perhaps lost in Cuba

in the revolution

or in the port of New York

in the witch hunt

or nowhere at all

but no one believes her"

The intriguing, tortuous, and unknowable Feminine, which Poets have always chanted, as by human and divine law it has always evoked the Love of poets, and love in Poets…

"Teresa speaks little

has chapped lips

points to a lost love

in Rimini in summer. "

The third chapter narrates the stretch of road between the Eighties and the mid-Nineties, from the eponymous album "Fabrizio de André" (now re-titled "L'Indiano", due to the cover), of 1981, the most "rock/folk" in terms of arrangements, although limited to individual episodes, aspects, and profiles, but it is a "radical" rock, almost "ancestral": this can be heard in "Franziska", and especially "Quello che non ho", while "Ave Maria" is a traditional Sardinian song reworked from an adaptation by A. Puddu.

The landing of mid-eighties is at the "Mediterranean albums": the two masterpieces "Creuza de mä", of 1984 (practically conceived and written in full collaboration with M. Pagani) and "Le nuvole", of 1990.

The first will be mentioned by D. Byrne as "one of the ten albums to save from the eighties": rhythmic, clear, and atmospheric, it is at the top of De André's entire career for the "added value" of recovering the linguistic traditions of Genoese, a language (and not just a "dialect"), a meticulous work both linguistically and musically that ennobles the "folk song", that is, the one written by all of us, unknowingly, transforming it into an Author's Song. All the pieces mentioned here ("Sinàn Capudàn Pascià", "D'ä mæ riva", "'Â Pittima", "Jamin-à") reflect this significance, and the later work with Tazenda of A. Parodi, in this case done in Sardinian, an ancient and noble language, sits in perfect continuity with this creative phase.

The second, from 1990 is partly a conclusion of that phase and partly the opening of a new phase: from the two narrating voices in the poetic recitation that gives the album its title, against a backdrop of almost epic music, it shifts to "Ottocento", "opera buffa" style, in which the Author seems to return to the at times surreal irony of the beginnings, of those "Nuvole Barocche" 45rpm debut single released by RCA (1955). The linguistic aspect is documented by "Monti di Mola" and "Mégu Megùn", while "La nova gelosia", discovered years before thanks to a performance by R. Murolo is by an anonymous author. Lyrical, disillusioned, and suspended (between childlike dreams and adult disillusionment) "Le nuvole" is a more difficult and elusive work to define compared to the previous others.

The four songs from "Anime Salve", ("Dolcenera", "Le acciughe fanno il pallone", "'Â Cúmba", "Disamistade") form the concluding segment of the collection. The last Work, from 1996, dense, literary, and substantial, closed with "Smisurata Preghiera" from which the line giving the title to these two collections was drawn. The example in one of its jewels: "Dolcenera", personification of water and very fine stratification of bold metaphors and virtuosic linguistic plays, through the succession of images that unfold before the closed eyes of the listener, narrates an impossible love, but one that occurred

"like this love that from the anxiety of losing itself had in one day the certainty of having itself"

a passion with the same overpowering and wild abruptness of water, but which at the same time sinuously slips into the crevices of the most intimate dreams up to dressing it with ineffable sensuality, and eros culminating in the succession of images

"and the sheet swells on the hollow of the wave and the struggle becomes slippery and deep"

Stripped of the literary clothes of metaphor, and painfully returned in the garb of a fragile protagonist of that portrayed humanity, it moves away from the scene, sliding away and disappearing into the crowd…

"in its disconnected tram from any distance in the midst of the time that it now has left"

Entirely written with I. Fossati "Anime Salve" perhaps is something in which Fabrizio De André, although proving that much more could still be said, narrated, written of that varied humanity that paraded among the verses of his poems and the arpeggios of his acoustic guitar, even having widely demonstrated that artistic maturity was consolidated almost from the origins, managed to go beyond.

Beyond the limit of Song, beyond the very conception of Music in its form of "Popular Song" or "Author's Song". The assertion that in the Song, always considered (awaiting historicization) a "simple, albeit noble" form but still "inferior" to certain Music (classical, symphonic, sacred, etc.) actually displays the highest literary talent in the form of Poetry, to such an extent as to pose an almost urgent necessity to review parameters and measures of judgment.

There may not (perhaps) be a need for this, for us who still have these images vivid, the soul of emotions they ignited vibrant, these songs, so imbued with literature not "cited" but written firsthand, are already part of it before historical times adapt to them.

The words of this writing, however, are (fortunately) very little compared to the absolute genius of Fabrizio de André.

"Le passanti", the poetic manifesto of his artistic personality, has one of the texts that absolutely moved me the most (personally). Thank you.

"I dedicate this song

to every woman thought of as love

in a moment of freedom"

"To the traveling companion

her eyes the most beautiful landscape

make the journey seem shorter

and perhaps you're the only one to understand her

and you let her disembark without following her

without having touched her hand. "