I Pooh
Parsifal

Clear is the morning that rises from the East:
this forest is yours.
Born wild, pure in soul,
you know not what fear is.
Those knights similar to Gods
you have never seen them, however:
fear does not arise within.
Mad in the dawn, you want to know
what is not in the woods:
you have discovered your destiny -
your destiny in the name you will have:
king of the light you shall be.
Run, run, run, run.
They will speak to you of God, of the King.
The flower maidens on the journey you will see.
In a great ancient dream
your new life will push you solitary
and a doubt will conquer you.
Her enchanted foreign age
is not glory or wind, but sweet reality.
Inside the tall grass by the river,
your weapons to the sun and dew you have now given:
sacred you will not become.
Here your path halts.


Indisputable, but - alas - undeniable truth - and we all must surrender to the evidence without making too much fuss - there is a Pooh song for everything. That is to say: there is not a single darn topic that Valerio Negrini and Camillo "Roby" Facchinetti have not addressed at least once in their blessed and forty-year career as writers and composers.

Fertile partnership, theirs: the same that gave birth to successes such as "Pensiero, Piccola Ketty", which we all know thanks to Camera Café and which simultaneously produced, but in a veiled and subdued, almost secret manner, almost entirely unknown masterpieces - and sublime ones.
One of these is certainly "Parsifal", a track that lends its title to the album of 1973, the first with Red Canzian, then a twenty-one-year-old and exceptional guitarist from Capiscum Red, a bit like Jimi Hendrix, but with a naive face of a perverse girl, who suddenly found himself playing bass - and like few others.

And "Parsifal", not surprisingly, is the track that best represents the album in its entirety. The vinyl version of the album contains a photoshoot taken in the Como area where the four band members wore medieval-style clothes, costumes from the La Scala theater in Milan.

Stefano D'Orazio, an eclectic drummer, said: "Parsifal is legend but also history, literature. It's life. The one we fight every day. The troubadours sang their ballads in dusty lands, we sing our songs through an LP. What's the substantial difference?" Today we could answer that the relevant difference is in the quality. The legend says that Roby Facchinetti stood up with wide eyes when he first heard the Parsifal suite performed by the RAI symphony orchestra. It is an intensely lyrical, expressive, and rich piece. The immaculate clarity of the verses evokes Wagnerian characters and Disney-like settings. There is the lightness of the chivalric ideal in Dody Battaglia's guitar as in the strings directed by Leonardo Monaldi. The whole medieval epic tradition is in Valerio Negrini's verses. In the perfection of the images that they evoke.

"Parsifal" is the hero who has bestowed his weapons to the sun and the dew, but who with a refined six-minute suite, incisive and disturbing, unsettles the listener with the veiled tones of the lyrics and the barbarous and ruthless violence of the sounds. It is a marvel of balance, of strange alternation of lyrical and sound effects.
And although Parsifal's journey halts within the tall grass, by the river, his deeds will be remembered throughout the ages.

Because there is a Pooh song for everything.