Orietta Berti
Orietta Berti

Hello everyone!

Welcome back after a week from my new debut and the possible beginning of a new career as a reviewer on our site. Today, I would like to dedicate my attention, with and for you, to a singer who, over the years, has become almost a symbol of Padana music and a certain peaceful way of Italian homegrown melody, like Orietta Berti from Cavriago (RE).

The name Cavriago might ring a bell if you're from the area or if, like me, you know the "Little Leningrad" by hearsay, thanks to the famous namesake piece by Offlaga Disco Pax, who described the life of the small town "where Orietta Berti was born," emphasizing its intimate ties with the solidaristic tradition of real socialism infused with tigelle and gnocco fritto. And so, there's a strong temptation to review Orietta almost like a spin-off of Max Collini's pieces, describing through her career the small provincial Italy that, moving from dance halls, finds itself in front of the home fireplace trembling for the beautiful and reassuring – in her forms, style, education, and bel canto – Orietta. I'll try not to do this, just to avoid being predictable.

At the same time, many of you will remember Orietta always indirectly, due to the fact that during the 1967 Sanremo Festival, she was indirectly involved in the tragic suicide of Luigi Tenco: not that poor Orietta was involved in the case, but the occasion of the Genoese songwriter's death was Orietta's admission to the finals with the song “Io tu e le rose”, against Tenco’s rejection. A rejection that, according to anecdotes and a note perhaps confusedly written by Tenco, would have been the triggering cause of the event we all know or can easily learn about by consulting another site. I believe that this perspective does not help to illuminate Berti’s true role in Italian music, ultimately creating an unjust contrast between the losing singer-songwriter song on a commercial and existential level and the more cheerful and lively commercial song.

Instead, I believe that the study of Orietta Berti's repertoire can be conducted by valuing her artistic career as such, without too much indulgence in searching for contexts to place it in, capturing some nuances of her best songs. If some of you, especially the younger ones, believe you are reading a gratuitous re-evaluation of supposed Italian trash, feel free to turn the page, since mine remains a reflection anchored to the historical value of Berti’s experience, through the filter offered – and it could not be otherwise – by her own songs.

Berti was not an album singer, but a singles artist. Singles that have always held a firm foot in popular tradition, without being pigeonholed into newly coined genres like the '60s yeye, '70s folk or singer-songwriter music, '80s electropop, and '90s revivalism, to which Orietta also contributed with numerous television appearances.

In this, I would say that Orietta represents a sort of one-of-a-kind in our music history, her style not being comparable to the rock-like style of Caterina Caselli, the maximum rhythm'n'blues of the best Iva Zanicchi, the Brechtian passion of a Milva, the jazz-lounge of a Vanoni’s mala, not to mention Mina’s eclectic histrionic and showy style: Orietta’s style is not only personal, but it reflects more than any other singer of the era the personality of the real woman, and not just of the artist as a mere image or commercial simulacrum produced by record companies.

The beauty and greatness of Orietta seems to lie, therefore, in her truthfulness. Truthfulness that never collapses into the sketch or caricature of the beautiful and good Emilian woman, nourished by the same realism of the fog and the heat of her land, of the wide spaces of the plains where sky and land blend together.

And between sky and land, feeling and reality, dream and concreteness, the same Orietta can be situated and met. Discovering, perhaps, a different reality from what appears, beyond the mists of prejudice or hasty evaluation.

To clarify, just listen to some songs of hers.

Of this beautiful anthology, I would like to highlight some pieces, starting with the very famous “Fin che la barca va”, a piece that, in the sixties, became an archetype of the Italian optimism of the boom, to the point of being indirectly cited by the great Federico Fellini in “E la nave va” (’83), symbolizing, not without a certain cynicism, the inertia with which our Italy entered the eighties among the world’s leading powers.

The fact that it is merely an optimistic piece, however, appears groundless as soon as one focuses on the content of the verses, and not just the chorus: Orietta sings of a sister “who had a boyfriend from Cantù/wanted to have one even in China/and now she doesn’t have the boyfriend anymore,” thus symbolizing – with cheerful irony – the risks of abundance and the desire to grow beyond one’s limit and beyond one’s measure. A sinister warning, both for Italy which in the seventies was preparing to meet years of crisis, and for the entire recent history of our unfortunate country.

It seems we hear, in the metric, the later Capossela of “Decervellamento,” when the bard of contemporary Emilia tells us about a man – a small bourgeois who could be the very companion of the woman Orietta told us about years before – who, having pushed beyond his own limit and the very sense of limit, ends up falling “straight headfirst/into the vortex from which you never return.”

That Orietta’s repertoire is optimistic only on a rhythmic and melodic level, but melancholy in terms of content – creating a sort of dissonance between form and substance – is also clear by studying “Tipitipitipitì”, where the chorus enriched by Pascolian onomatopoeias contrasts with the sadness of illusion and abandonment, which a woman in the sixties lived almost like a betrayal, if not like a repudiation: almost Freudian is the semantics of the verse where “the man with the organ/who gave us a blue ticket/it said “he loves you”/but it wasn’t the truth” appears. What the truth is, we are not given to know, and the woman’s fate remains doubtful and ambivalent as, in reality, each of our lives is.

I cannot neglect, in conclusion, the same “Io tu e le rose”: the piece, listened to today, confirms that Tenco’s judgment was ungenerous and a child of the drama he was undergoing for other reasons, foreign to us. What appears to be a normal love song can be re-contextualized starting from an examination of the verses, where it is understood how the couple Orietta forms with her own man is somehow opposed by external factors: my sensation, but probably the couple is opposed as clandestine or for the scandalous choice to live together in an era when – I remind everyone – the girl left her ancestral home virtuous, to become a woman only once she dismissed the white dress and set foot in her husband’s house. And this is where the meaning of phrases like “for me there are too many people/people who want to know why/we live like this” and “and if the people’s hate/keeps us apart/we will remain ourselves/me, you, and love” unfolds. Passages that, today, find not few similarities with the best Dente, when – in “Vieni a vivere con me” – he sings that “honeycomb or fishbone pattern/we make a tape all how we like it/we put a bed on the floor/we’ll think about the back pain in the afterlife.”

In summary, I believe that Orietta’s best songs are not just modern collectibles, but also a useful tool for knowing the roots of our popular music and the reference models of modern music. That all this happens with the grace of a beautiful and simple red-haired woman, so similar to our aunts or your grandmothers, should not surprise: it’s the energy of provincial women that, always and almost like a mirror, multiplies men and ferries us from the past to the future.

Sincerely Yours