Fabrizio De André

Fabrizio De André is one of the greatest Italian singer-songwriters of all time, but above all he's one of the very few able to compete with the great figures of international songwriting. Deeply influenced by the American school of Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, but even more so by the French chansonnier tradition (Georges Brassens above all), he was among the first to break the dogmas of the Italian "canzonetta", with his dark ballads crowded with lost souls, outcasts and the wretched from every corner of the Earth. His stories, though often inspired by real news events, are always tinged with the colours of fable, losing any sense of temporal placement; and his characters seem almost to leap off the page, with their explosive charge of humanity, unease, and despair. His passion for French literature – Proust, Baudelaire, Maupassant, Villon, Flaubert, Balzac – is probably what gives him that extra touch of lyricism, but De André's songbook drew, over time, from the most disparate sources: from medieval ballads to the Provençal tradition, from the "Spoon River Anthology" to the songs of Sardinian shepherds, from the apocryphal Gospels to the Federico Fellini of "I Vitelloni".

At the end of the Sixties, gripped by a bleak pessimism, the Genoese singer-songwriter composed the sumptuous concept album "Tutti Morimmo A Stento" (1968). The sense of tragedy that had always inspired his work reaches its apotheosis across these eleven tracks. Released with the subtitle "Cantata in si minore per solo, coro e orchestra", "Tutti Morimmo A Stento" is a journey through a Dantean circle of human desolation, populated by addicts, death-row prisoners, ruined young women, ogres and traumatized children. An obsessed and obsessive journey, accompanied by the notes of a symphony orchestra conducted by Giampiero Reverberi.

An album that is at times almost too baroque, influenced by the first stirrings of Italian progressive rock, "Tutti Morimmo A Stento" nevertheless manages to condense so much "excess" into just 33 minutes and 51 seconds, the way things were done back when there was still respect for the listener and no one dared pad out records with the kind of filler that today passes for "concept". The formula chosen, as De André himself explained, is the classic cantata form "in which all the pieces are linked together by symphonic interludes and share, as a minimum common denominator, the same key, and deal with the same subject." A subject represented by marginalization and by "psychological, moral, mental" death.

The dominant atmosphere is bleak, funereal, thick with omens of death. The tracks follow one another without pause, punctuated by the "Intermezzi", in a crescendo that culminates in the "Recitativo" and dissolves into the final chorus. The overture is an immediate gut-punch, with "Cantico Dei Drogati", whose title alone – in jarring contrast to St. Francis's "Canticle of the Creatures" – seems to underline the degeneration of the human race. When the orchestra – the Philharmonia of Rome – gives way to De André's baritone voice, the intent becomes immediately clear: "I have dismissed God/ thrown away a love". And a knot of anguish already tightens your throat. "How can I tell my mother that I'm afraid?", moans the wretch at the height of despair. And ahead now lies only the night, the abyss, the end of everything. Yet there is also a yearning for eternity in the addicts who, "playing ball with their own brain, try to throw it beyond the set boundary, to the edges of infinity". It's a marvellous text, written by De André together with the anarchist poet Riccardo Mannerini, who took his own life in Genoa in 1980.

The tension is briefly broken by the "Primo Intermezzo", but then the enveloping embrace of the "Cantico" immediately restores a solemn atmosphere, which slowly dissolves into the noir fairy tale of "Leggenda Di Natale", inspired by "Le Père Noel Et La Petite Fille", a Georges Brassens song from 1958. The simplicity of the chord progressions and rhyming couplets helps create a magical, rarefied atmosphere, worthy of "Canzone di Marinella". But the theme is anything but reassuring: the protagonist is a young girl deceived by a Santa Claus who spoke of love but "whose eyes were cold and were not kind". And so "now that others call you a goddess/ the enchantment has vanished from your every thought/ but still to the moon you'd like to tell/ the story of a flower wilted at Christmas". A chilling premonition of paedophilia.

Through the "Secondo Intermezzo" we reach the ideal heart of the album's architecture: "Ballata Degli Impiccati", inspired by François Villon's "Ballade des Pendus", the first "poète maudit". De André's lyrics – always spare, rough, sarcastic – never give in to sentimental rhetoric ("Nothing is born from diamonds/ flowers are born from dung" – from "Via del Campo" – was always his creed). And so even Villon's condemned men are transfigured into mythical creatures, animated by a desperate, boundless resentment: "Whoever mocked our defeat/ and the extreme shame and the manner of it/ choked by the same grip/ let them learn to know the noose. Whoever scattered earth over our bones/ and calmly resumed their walk/ let them too come, undone, to the grave/ with the mist of the first morning/ The woman who hid behind a smile/ the discomfort of remembering us/ may she find every night on her face/ an insult of time and a scar". A bloody, terrifying rage that offers no escape: "We nurture for everyone a resentment/ that smells of clotted blood".

Giving the album an almost scenic quality instead is the soft "Inverno", which revives the tradition of "seasonal poetry" fashionable in eighteenth-century England. Winter is the image of nature erasing itself in the white of snow and fog, and in the black of bare trees, marking the cyclical end of all things: "But you who remain, why do you stay?/ Another winter will return tomorrow/ more snow will fall to console the fields/ more snow will fall on the graveyards". One cannot help but see in these lines yet another De André metaphor for the crisis of the couple: the alternation of loves happens fatally, naturally, just like the changing of the seasons (a subject very dear to De André since the days of "Amore Che Vieni, Amore Che Vai" and "Canzone Dell'Amore Perduto").

If "Inverno" plunges the listener into aching melancholy, after the following "Girotondo" there will be room only for despair and horror. "The earth is all ours.../ we'll turn it into a great carousel/ we'll play at making it ours/ marcondiro'ndero marcondiro'ndà": the chorus of maddened children, drunk on war and death, is one of the most excessive and chilling inventions in the history of Italian song. The "Terzo Intermezzo" flows into the harrowing final "Recitativo" (a condemnation of selfishness, moralism and human insensitivity), alternating with the "Corale" – with the choir of singers from the Roman basilicas led by Pietro Carapellucci, conducted by Reverberi, providing counterpoint to the invective recited by De André – and with the "Leggenda Del Re Infelice".

If in “Buona Novella” the theme was the weakness of men before an overwhelming divinity, in “Tutti Morimmo A Stento” it is the miseries and horrors of the Earth that are sung, of the "human and desolate flock of those who died with a noose around their neck".

Though inevitably dated, with its pompous arrangements and baroque orchestrations, “Tutti Morimmo A Stento” is also one of the clearest showcases of De André's talent, not only as a songwriter but also as a musician. And his instrument of choice can once again only be his voice: a deep baritone that – following the example of Leonard Cohen – knowingly lingers on the lowest tones, ever heightening the pathos and drama.

Demolishing one by one all the clichés of traditional Italian song, the Genoese singer-songwriter crowns an achievement comparable to Bob Dylan's in the United States. His language is that of a non-conformist poet, who wields the debunking force of irony and sarcasm to shatter convention and expose the hypocrisy and cowardice of the very bourgeoisie he himself belonged to. His, ultimately, is a desperate message of freedom and redemption against "the laws of the pack" and the arrogance of power. Mario Luzi, one of the great Italian poets of the 20th century, said of him: "De André is truly the chansonnier par excellence, an artist who fully realizes himself in the interplay between literary text and musical text. He has a history. And he really does bite".

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29/10/2006