Tito Schipa Jr.
Orfeo 9

The CD reissue of "Orfeo 9", a rock opera composed at the end of the '60s by Tito Schipa Jr, son of one of the greatest tenors of the 20th century, has been released by Warner Fonit.

"Orfeo 9" takes its cue from the myth of Orpheus, transporting the story of this unhappy love into a context typical of the period in which the work was conceived and realized.
Orpheus is a young man living in a hippie commune on the outskirts of a big city, and the city itself, with its alienation and paranoia, appears as the hell where the protagonist loses, finds, and ultimately loses Eurydice again. On this basic framework are grafted ideas and digressions that touch on all the issues that were at the center of attention in that immediate "post '68": life in the commune and hitchhiking as symbols of newly acquired youthful freedom, a strange bomb A (with the A enclosed in a circle too obviously recalling the symbol of anarchy) that terrifies the "good citizens" in the city, the false illusions of artificial paradises, the inability to communicate and the alienation of city life contrasted with the simplicity and communion of life in nature, etc. All of this represents, today, the faithful reflection of an era, a "document" that can tell us a great deal about what those crucial years were like and how the young people who lived them were.

But "Orfeo 9" is first and foremost a musical work, of which two fundamental aspects should not be overlooked: the visual and the musical. The work was created for the theater and later a film version was made.
The latter was broadcast a couple of times by Rai in the early '70s before falling into oblivion. Schipa himself is currently negotiating the acquisition of the rights, which raises hopes that at least in home video, the work may soon circulate again.

What is available to everyone today is the double CD that has never stopped selling over the past thirty years, collecting the music from Schipa's Orfeo. Music that almost always has the merit of placing itself outside the prevailing genres of the '60s and '70s, achieving a classicism that makes it accepted even today, something that cannot be said of much of the production of that period, strongly characterized by very distinct styles that are now very... out of fashion. Schipa signed the scores and lyrics, single-handedly creating an enormous work that is always of the highest level. Among the musicians involved in the opera, some young unknowns who would later enjoy great careers: Renato Zero is a hallucinated Seller of happiness, Loredana Bertè is part of the Chorus, the future DJ Ronnie Jones is a bluesman lost among the alleys, Bill Conti (who would later gain fame and money with Rocky) handled the orchestrations. Recovering this work today means immersing oneself in an atmosphere that is outdated (by today's standards) and certainly fascinating, understanding a little more about an era rich in cultural and social ideas, and getting to know an artistic work of great value, unjustly overlooked for too long.