Fabrizio De André
Non Al Denaro, Non All'Amore Né Al Cielo

Music. Poetry.

I've always been told that these are two unattainable things, two elements that cannot coexist, too different and contrasting. The risk of bringing them together, they say, is to break the golden balance called ART.

When I told some people I know that De Andrè was one of my favorite poets, their faces alone were the prologue to what they said next: from the height of their intellectual, conservative mindset, looking at me like one looks at Marzullo at 2 AM after a long day, they replied, "...De Andrè, yes! He made nice songs, but poetry... let’s not joke!"... From the height of their joking laughter, they treated me just like a poor immature kid, convinced that the singer of the moment was the poet of the situation. Seeing the wrinkles on their thinker faces overlap in a smile styled "I'm mocking you," I thought: who are we, humans, to give an absolute, undeniable, and necessarily shared criterion of poetry???... What is poetry???... I quote a definition from Wikipedia (not the ultimate source, but in this case, I agree): Poetry is the art of using, to convey one's message, both the semantic meaning of words and the sound and rhythm they imprint on phrases; poetry thus has some qualities of music and manages to convey emotions and moods more evocatively and powerfully than prose does. Am I reading this right???... "some qualities of music"... If I had had a computer in front of me with the Wikipedia page on poetry open, at that moment (something that could easily happen by chance, don't you think?), I probably would have responded that way. Instead, I simply replied by saying, "Try taking a poem by Neruda (another of my favorite poets!) and put it to a melody that accompanies the flow and meaning of the text, with the words sung so that they don’t lose the poetry that characterizes them... Don’t you think that by combining verbal poetry and musical poetry, the result would be greater and better???"

Not fully convinced of my theory, they preferred to smile again, no longer like "I'm mocking you," but more like "you need to grow up, son!", with a rather smug and annoying tone. Considering that it’s also possible that I'm hugely mistaken and talking a load of nonsense, their traditionalist behavior was not enough to shake from my mind what is for me a firm belief: Fabrizio De Andrè was a poet, lent to music, who knew how to express through it, words of incredible depth, profound metaphors with great human and social meaning, which would be worthy of being included in school programs. Saying that Faber wrote ALL poetry is an exaggeration, but in all his texts, even the most ironic and irreverent, there is that sense of depth and a taste for reflection that, for the prepared and accustomed ears, is a delight for the senses.

An album that for me is a collage of pearls is "Non al denaro, non all'amore né al cielo," the fifth studio album by Fabrizio De Andrè, released in 1971. Inspired by "Spoon River Anthology" by Edgar Lee Masters, De Andrè takes the main characters from the work, locking them in the sweet, always-open prisons of his music. The album is a collection of stories, a gathering of lives lived, the testimony of 8 lives each characterized by a different aspect, each differently happy, each differently suffering. There is no narrator weaving the thread of this almost concept album, but it is directly the characters who sing their personal stories, offering us their thoughts, their doubts, their events: they themselves who suffer, laugh, think, and act. They are alive, not locked away in the song, but entering and exiting through our ears, leaving ideas, thoughts, and reflections in our minds.
The opening is "La Collina", where a few brushstrokes trace many broken lives, each in one way or another, some for love, some by mistake; lives that now rest on the same hill, all equally damned by a life lost either chasing illusions or doing what they loved most. After the introduction, there is the first character, one of the most recurrent in De Andrè's lyrics: the Madman. The one whom society does not accept because he is too willingly distant from the unscripted canons of so-called "normality"; someone who, convinced of redeeming himself in the eyes of the presumed normals, learns the Treccani encyclopedia by heart, in vain; someone who, not knowing to whom he owes his life, returns it first in an asylum (isn’t this poetry?) and then definitively to whoever gave it to him so deformed and anarchic, leaving the normals with the memory of free madness, different from their constrained normality.

Next follows the story of the dwarf judge: a man of very short stature, raised among insults and mockery, whom people approach only to see if the famous rule of the L is a legend or not, a feared man because a dwarf is surely a scoundrel, having his heart too close to his behind (but where did these phrases come from????), a lonely man who prepares his revenge through books; once he becomes a Judge, with the same cruelty he endured, he sends people to the executioner’s hands with cynical ease; but in the end, still a man, he is forced to bow to a court whose judge's stature is unknown: God. And it is precisely because of God, and the disbelief in him, that the subsequent Blasphemer has his soul “searched with blows” for his ideas, because he claims that man is forced to dream in an enchanted garden, chasing the illusion of a nonexistent Eden.

After this, the so-called scientific-medical part of the album opens: it begins with a Heart Patient, someone who dreams of being like others, but who cannot withstand running in the boundless fields of youth, forced to only watch the happiness of others and make his own only a dream; then a Doctor, eager to first heal the cherry trees he believes are wounded, and then men, eternally wounded; to pass, later, to the Chemist, who does not understand the reaction called Love, until the special Optician, who sells his clients lenses outside the norm. All this then concludes with the story of Jones: the flute player, who in a whirlwind of dust manages to see Jinny's skirt (Jinny in the original text, Jenny in the more well-known revised text), who lived a life of music and freedom, who has often seen sleep and awakening and then sleep again, like a melody that repeats and then ends; just as the musical staff of his life ends, where he finds himself on the last line without, however, even a regret. And it is without regrets that this record ends, which knows it has said everything it could and fades away, but remains, still playing within our emotions.

An album never old because it tells stories that are always current, an album that doesn’t get lost in time. Because as Nicola Piovani said: "De Andrè was never fashionable. In fact, fashion, ephemeral by definition, passes. Fabrizio's songs remain."