Museo Rosenbach

In 1973, Italian progressive rock was by now firmly established as a first-rate force, no longer regarded as a mere import phenomenon. Culturally significant works such as “Collage” by Le Orme, the self-titled album by “Banco del Mutuo Soccorso” – not to mention the astonishing one-two punch of “Storia di un minuto” and “Per un amico” by Pfm – had shaken up the national scene in the two preceding years and laid the groundwork for the movement's eventual international success.
The creative wave was therefore anything but on the wane, paving the way for such personal masterpieces as “Felona e Sorona”, “Palepoli” and “Arbeit Macht Frei”, and helping in the years that followed to make Italian prog the most beloved and collected in the world after its British counterpart.
Yet in the midst of this golden age, a record released that spring was destined to become known as one of the unluckiest in the history of Italian music, relative to its actual worth. “Zarathustra” would become, all at once, its authors' debut, their masterpiece, and, ultimately, their epitaph.

Italy was living through a turbulent political and social phase, marked by protest, student movements and the violent events of the Years of Lead, with the wound of Piazza Fontana still fresh. Prog, experienced elsewhere mainly as an escape from reality, was interpreted by Italian artists and listeners alike as a subversive act against the established order. Just as the classic song form of their forefathers was being questioned, destabilized and dethroned, the themes of their lyrics readily embraced social protest and ideological conflict.
Political engagement, however, was decidedly not in Museo Rosenbach's DNA. The Ligurian band seemed far more drawn to philosophical themes, in keeping with the academic background of their bassist, pianist and chief composer Alberto Moreno. The lineup had come together two years earlier out of the ashes of a Bordighera outfit called Quinta Strada, made up of the aforementioned Moreno alongside drummer Giancarlo Golzi (future Matia Bazar) and keyboardist Pit Corradi, which then merged with guitarist Enzo Merogno (ex-Il Sistema) and Genoese singer Stefano Galifi, known as “Lupo”. The five musicians' apprenticeship largely consisted of playing other artists' hits, including covers of Santana, Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix and Cream. This kind of grounding, incidentally, was familiar to other illustrious contemporaries too, take Premiata Forneria Marconi, whose roots lay just as firmly in the King Crimson songbook.

Once the band's name was settled on — a nod to the German book publisher Otto Rosenbach — Moreno began presenting his existing ideas to the rest of the group, finding fertile ground for their new ambitions to write original material. In a short time the band wrote enough music to fill an album and, remarkably, landed a jaw-dropping three-album, three-year deal with Ricordi Records. It was the label itself that suggested “Zarathustra” as the guiding theme for the quintet's debut, drawing on the famous “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” by German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.
Resisting the temptation to embrace the classic concept-album format, so dear to progressive rock of every era, proved impossible. What emerged in short order was a long player built around the title track, an ambitious five-movement suite filling side A, with three further songs on the other side, their lyrics always tied to the album's overarching concept.

With this stunning debut, Museo Rosenbach proved themselves to hold a peculiar position within Italy's remarkably fertile progressive scene. There was no shortage of already-illustrious points of comparison at the time: Pfm favored an extremely broad sonic palette, in an almost impressionistic arrangement of violins, flutes and acoustic guitars. Banco had the theatrical flair of Francesco Di Giacomo, while Le Orme built their symphonic style around the primacy of keyboards. Finally, Area operated outside convention altogether, somewhere between jazz-rock, avant-garde and political radicalism. The Ligurians, however, followed a darker, more physical path than their respectable rivals. Starting from Moreno's ideas, often worked out at the piano, and fusing them with a melodic seed supplied by Merogno, the rest of the band would then let loose, enriching the songs' structures with ideas and interjections. The result is a constant interplay of rising tension, epic passages, plunges into silence and thunderous explosions.
“L'ultimo uomo” is the perfect manifesto of this approach. The opening Mellotron, played by Corradi, immediately conjures the right solemn, sacred atmosphere, before plunging into a dark guitar motif that seems to come from another world. Over this theme, guest Walter Franco — an old acquaintance of Moreno's — introduces the dialogue with Zarathustra. The idea, in fact, is to structure lyrics and vocals as an imagined dialogue between the common man and the prophet, extraordinarily embodied by Lupo Galifi's raspy timbre. His voice turns almost abrasive as he cries out “nell'attesa di un'alba diversa” (“waiting for a different dawn”), spurring Golzi to unleash the drums and catapult the rest of the band into a memorable, fully orchestral flight.

One of the secrets behind the Ligurian band's distinctiveness likely lies in the diversity of its members, each with their own passions and personal path, who nonetheless managed to transcend their individual leanings: Corradi, thanks to his past as a lead guitarist, was influenced by Jimi Hendrix and Jimmy Page; Merogno blended beat music experience with the classical music of Mussorgsky; Golzi was a talented and versatile rock drummer, a fan of Elton John, Giles and the Beatles; Lupo carried with him, and in his vocal timbre, a love of rhythm & blues, while Moreno moved between Pink Floyd and Bob Dylan.
That's how “Il re di ieri” delivers a haunting backdrop where the tolling of a grand piano — in Moreno's hands — and the ever-present Mellotron recreate a gothic mood, while this time it's Golzi who introduces a sung dialogue on the opposition between the Christian God and Lupo-Zarathustra, before the inevitable reply, carried along by a thoroughly rock-driven charge.
Another dramatic shift in scenery arrives with “Al di là del bene e del male”, where this time Corradi shows off a more dynamic Hammond organ to counter Lupo's equally dynamic voice, in one of those wildly syncopated movements that drive prog fans wild. There's an intriguing vocal choice used to represent the faction of dogmatic religious morality, declaimed by the members of Museo in a chorus with a priestly flavor. The thesis of religious morality imposes its dogma, denying man the right to forge his own values:

Ancient tablets, divine decrees
Have long since split good from evil
Man alone, far from God
Cannot build his own morality
Flee your own will!

What makes this debut phenomenal and immortal lies in its contradictions. Moreno himself, for instance, would later admit to having been skeptical of that singer with the thick Genoese accent who claimed to love James Brown, while secretly dreaming of finding his own personal Francesco Di Giacomo. And yet, it was precisely that thick-mustached male nurse who became one of the collective's greatest assets. Rather than the hieratic detachment one might expect when tackling a philosophical concept, Lupo offers up a raw, animalistic, tormented voice that tears through the elegant synthetic orchestrations wrapped around the compositions. Nor should we forget the enormous rhythmic work of that combustion engine known as Golzi, capable of single-handedly carrying the whole opulent, breakneck instrumental section of “Superuomo”, following Zarathustra's own awakening as he discovers within himself the inner tension needed to achieve the transformation into Nietzsche's Übermensch:

Alone and without strength
I lose myself in my own words
And perhaps the one I seek
Has always walked beside me

“Il Tempio delle Clessidre” forcefully picks back up the evocative theme of “L'ultimo uomo”, following the classic structure in which the Mellotron carries the main melody around which the rest of the band ranges freely, with special praise due to Merogno's work on electric guitar. This self-referential move, combined with the symbolism of the hourglass representing the cyclical nature of time, closes the suite on the concept of “the eternal return”: time does not lead toward some final redemption or definitive destination, but eternally retraces its own loop.

Although the “Zarathustra” marathon is the album's crowning achievement, it would be a mistake to overlook side B, whose songs don't form a suite but nonetheless trace a second conceptual path that complements the title track's. “Degli uomini” centers on playful keyboard flourishes, recalling the band's well-known debt to the Nice's “Elegy”, while also carrying inevitable, indirect echoes of contemporaries like Genesis and ELP. It's rather paradoxical to think that its excellent vocal coda, a reflection on the violence that dominates humanity, was written quickly and tacked on at the last minute just to bring the album up to a minimum running time.
“Della natura” is the most overtly rock-leaning track. Its stated debt to the English jazz-rock band If can be heard in the call-and-response between the Hammond organ and Golzi's drumming, remarkable here in the way it articulates, drives and fractures the structure of this sonic charge. Tension stays high throughout the track's more than eight minutes, making it, alongside the celebrated opening suite, the album's most ambitious composition. It's no accident that the lyrics touch on a central theme of the German philosopher's work, the discourse “On the Three Metamorphoses”. In nature's revelatory function, the three stages of human change are identified: the camel, the lion and the child, all named in the lyrics.

“Dell'eterno ritorno” closes out the platter, starting from an idea borrowed from Gentle Giant's debut album, but taking on a personality all its own. Its turbulent momentum echoes the dismay and crisis of a man struggling to accept the absence of any absolute answers to the meaning of life. It's the bleak perspective of the ordinary man, collapsing under the weight of existence's cyclical nature, still clinging to a linear conception of life's meaning:

I can no longer look for a way, since I would only retrace the same one
I die, without hoping that something is born, that something changes

The story behind the concept album's lyrics has a curious twist: they were all written by Moreno, though credited to his friend and writer Mauro La Luce, since the bassist wasn't registered with the Italian copyright agency SIAE as either lyricist or composer.
As with any self-respecting concept album, the cover plays a fundamental role in its development. The band's original idea was a face built from a collage of images meant to speak of freedom, poverty and oppression. Ricordi accepted the idea, but altered and reworked it: images of a prison, poor children and – in a naive move – the face of Mussolini appeared. A reference consistent with the theme of oppression, reinforced on the back cover by two crossed fists: one with a syringe in its vein, the other wearing a gold watch while crushing a person, symbolizing the abuses of the powerful against the weak.

Unfortunately, given the tense climate of the era, the combination of the Duce's face, the Nietzschian title and the word "Superuomo" – concepts still regarded in the Seventies as inspirations for Nazi ideology – set Museo Rosenbach on a path riddled with landmines. Public opinion branded the band as pro-fascist, and Rai essentially blacklisted them, crushing almost any chance of the album being played or promoted, save for rare exceptions. The band members' attempts to distance themselves from any sympathy toward the far right proved futile, a paradoxical situation given their long-standing friendship with a certain Francesco Guccini.
As a result, the album received excellent reviews but faced fierce backlash, leading to sales so disappointing that they sparked internal disputes, discouragement and, ultimately, a about-face from Ricordi Records, which dropped the band, leading to its premature breakup.

In the following years, Golzi, after completing his military service, would find success with the celebrated Matia Bazar. Moreno finished his philosophy studies and became a teacher, never fully abandoning music and staying in touch with the Matia Bazar circle. Corradi and Merogno pursued separate careers outside of music, as did Galifi, though he kept singing in projects such as Il tempio delle clessidre (a name that's decidedly no coincidence). In 2000, a new album titled "Exit" was released under the Museo Rosenbach name, with a reduced Moreno-Golzi lineup, meeting with little success, partly due to the huge stylistic differences from the band's historic debut.
It would take until 2012 for a return to the old prog ambitions. With Galifi back on vocals, 40 years after "Zarathustra", the spiritual sequel "Barbarica" was released.

Unfortunately, any hope of a lasting reopening of the Museo was shattered by the untimely death of Giancarlo Golzi in 2015. In Moreno's own words on the matter: "Giancarlo was the driving force, pushed by a great passion, and he was able to switch between pop and prog with great skill [...] With his passing, though, the motivational drive has gone, and right now I think it will be hard to recreate a new Museo." And yet, even if the Museo can never be recreated, its temple continues to stand the test of time. Perhaps an unrepeatable work, born from the chance meeting of five personalities who together managed to push well beyond the sum of their influences, doomed from birth by a fate as swift as it was unjust, "Zarathustra" would, over the years, know its own eternal return, resurfacing from oblivion to claim the place it deserved among the masterpieces of Italian progressive rock.

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google

09/08/2026