Milestones

Angelo Branduardi

Name: Angelo Branduardi – Alla fiera dell'est
Item: Alla fiera dell'est
Author: Federico Romagnoli

Alla fiera dell’est

1976 (Polydor)

medieval folk rock, songwriter

by Federico Romagnoli

Industry insiders immediately noticed Angelo Branduardi, and it could hardly have been otherwise, given Paul Buckmaster's involvement on his debut album. The presence of the arranger of Elton John wasn't enough, however, to bring the music to a wider audience, and in hindsight it's fair to say that – despite a result of undeniable value – the guest's personality overshadowed that of the singer, steering him toward territory he didn't feel was his own, and which indeed he would never revisit (some passages even veer close to jazz-rock, hardly the first thing that comes to mind when thinking of Branduardi).

The following "La luna" was arranged with Maurizio Fabrizio, little known at the time but destined to become one of the most successful songwriters in Italian music: his famously syrupy hits include "Almeno tu nell'universo" and "I migliori anni della nostra vita"; better, then, to remember him at Branduardi's court, as an arranger with a soft spot for Renaissance music.

"La luna" catches the public's ear, and two of the tracks on the record – "Confessioni di un malandrino" and the title track – become classics over time.

Long convinced of the appeal that early music, if handled properly, can exert on an audience, Branduardi feels reinvigorated and decides to go on the offensive with a collection of instantly catchy songs. He thus keeps the team from the previous album, with Fabrizio (guitars and lute), Bruno De Filippi (exotic string instruments), Andy Surdi (drums) and Gianni Cappellotto (bass), adding Gianni Nocenzi of Banco del Mutuo Soccorso on keyboards.

The new album opens with "Alla fiera dell'est", the title track. The music is by Branduardi, the lyrics a translation of the Hebrew poem "Chad Gadya", although the mouse was originally a little lamb. A melody repeated relentlessly, to match the cumulative structure of the text, and a folk-ballad structure with a grand finale of martial percussive hits and wild whirls of violin: that's all it takes to create one of the masterpieces of Italian music. A song that has penetrated our culture to the point of becoming a standard for all ages. Despite the bleakness of its message (essentially a chain of abuses) and the gothic apotheosis of its ending (which ruthlessly lays bare the precariousness of existence), its infectious musicality and nursery-rhyme feel have won over even children, who are taught it from kindergarten onward.

Several Israeli singers later covered Branduardi's song, not least the great Chava Alberstein, who gave it an unsettling electronic reinterpretation, restoring the lamb as the protagonist (it should be noted that the word “gadyà” in Hebrew can also mean a child, making the underlying message even more ambiguous and obscure).

Playing with contrasts, the second track is “La favola degli aironi”. Against the fervor with which he sang title track, Branduardi offers a piece in pastel tones, with a seraphic voice, chamber orchestration and barely plucked strings. What remains, however, as the central element of the lyrics, is the relationship between man and mortality: “It is there that the earth has bent down, to gather everything that time has abandoned. […] It is there that the last of the seeds bore no fruit, and the earth has now forgotten that many years ago, in a perfumed wind, the herons spread their colored wings”.

Dedicated to his newborn daughter is “Canzone per Sarah”, a splendid acoustic lullaby filled with birdsong and bucolic sounds, practically whispered: “My child, the sea carries you, the wave rocks you, the fire dresses you. And warm are your feathers, grain of wheat. Thin cloud, tiny hands”. Steeped in natural imagery, it recalls the ancient traditions of Native Americans, of which the artist is famously fond.

A reworking of the Breton song “Ar Rannou”, twisted almost beyond recognition, “La serie dei numeri” has a structure similar to that of title track. After a series of medieval figures and superstitious symbols, Branduardi concludes: “And death alone is unique, forever the mistress of sorrow”. The Middle Ages was, after all, the era in which music – indeed art in general – was used above all to subjugate and instill fear, so it's no surprise that the man who revived it was obsessed with its central theme: the looming presence of the Grim Reaper over our heads.

“Il dono del cervo” blends Celtic ballad with Andean folk music, with the recorder mimicking a pan flute. The lyrics are once again a metaphorical reflection on the cyclical nature of life, this time in a positive light: the death of the deer, who offers itself willingly, allows the hunter to obtain a range of materials useful for his own survival.

At eight minutes long, “Il funerale” is the centerpiece of the album. Branduardi crafts a lengthy acoustic introduction, dominated by his violin, while the vocal melody is drawn from the traditional 17th-century song “Henry Martin”, and the lyrics are a reworking of “Consigli al morto” by Franco Fortini, whose student Branduardi had been back in high school. Fortini's text, in turn, drew on a series of Romanian folk poems: so by the time it became “Il funerale”, it had gone through a whole chain of transformations, which in a way mirrors, in modern form, the mutations that folk ballads underwent over the centuries through oral tradition and translation.

“Sotto il tiglio” sets to music a text by the medieval German poet Walther von der Vogelweide. A tender love song immersed, as ever, in Arcadian landscapes and carried by a gentle melody, it's one of the simplest tracks on the album, but also one of the most evocative, as shown by its lasting popularity among the artist's followers.

Checking the vinyl, or the booklet of the CD reissue, one notices that Branduardi is credited as the author of every track. While six out of ten songs are indeed entirely his own work, four are reworkings of pre-existing material (whether lyrics, music, or both), though their origin is not indicated. Yet the artist has always been transparent about his sources, which he has pointed out on numerous occasions, both in interviews and during concerts. There is also a book published by Lato Side in 1979, “Angelo Branduardi: Canzoni”, which he himself contributed to, analyzing his own creations in great detail.

The practice of taking credit for songs derived from works in the public domain, or otherwise no longer under copyright, was fairly common in Italian music at the time: other great scholars of folk music, such as Gabriella Ferri e Fabrizio De André, have often resorted to the same device. It is, moreover, undeniable that these artists carried out significant work of reworking and integration: sometimes they took a fragment of melody and turned it into a full song, other times they set a foreign poem to music and adapted it into their own language, and other times still they took a nursery rhyme and changed the lyrics. It's obvious that their name deserved to appear; one could at most object to the lack of a credited source, but it must be considered that the artist had relatively little control over such matters, and what appeared in the credits was often the result of compromises with music publishers, managers and record labels – and once their good faith has been established through irrefutable testimony and documentation, the controversy becomes rather pointless.

Also because, in all this, a rather important detail risks being overlooked: the sheer quality of the achievement. If Branduardi takes a Hebrew poem and, in setting it to an original melody, proves so convincing that he inspires the most important Israeli singer to record her own version of it, that means he has achieved something significant. Thinking about it, what other artist has achieved mass success, becoming one of the defining songwriters of his generation, through a blend of modern singer-songwriter music and medieval sound?

Donovan – always cited as a mentor by the humble Branduardi – may have come close, but the ancient-bard quality was far more diluted in his work, which was, after all, heavily shaped by the trends around him (now psychedelia, now hard rock, now baroque pop). Branduardi, by contrast, hurls the listener into far-off eras and seems entirely immune to passing fashions. The same cannot be said of any other singermainstreamon the face of the earth.

"Alla fiera dell'est" is the record that made his fortune: it climbed to number two on both the album and singles charts, and served as the blueprint for the two albums bestseller that would follow it ("La pulce d'acqua" and "Cogli la prima mela"), together with which it forms a trilogy of unmatched iconic power.

And finally the Lord, upon the angel of death, upon the butcher

who killed the bull, who drank the water, who put out the fire,

who burned the stick, who beat the dog, who bit the cat,

who ate the mouse that my father bought at the market.

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30/09/2018

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This article is an English translation of the original Italian text by Federico Romagnoli, published on OndaRock.it. It was translated with the help of artificial intelligence, under the editorial responsibility of OndaRock's editor-in-chief, Claudio Fabretti.

Read the original in Italian · About the English edition

Tracklist

1. Alla fiera dell'est
2. La favola degli aironi
3. Il vecchio e la farfalla
4. Canzone per Sarah
5. La serie dei numeri
6. Il dono del cervo
7. Il funerale
8. L'uomo e la nuvola
9. Sotto il tiglio
10. Canzone del rimpianto

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Angelo Branduardi

The minstrel from beyond the Po

With his medieval ballads and his lofty lyrics, the Lombard musician is the undisputed "minstrel" of Italian singer-songwriting. Over his long career, he managed to graft onto Italian song his own fondness for the fairy-tale, drawing on the repertoire of folk legends, especially French ones, but also German, English, Irish and Jewish. Here's his story, which began with the notes of a nursery rhyme: "Alla fiera dell'Est"