La citazione è sintomo d’amore: cantautori italiani e memoria letteraria by Francesco Ciabattoni (review)

Considered as exponents of what Theodor W. Adorno disparagingly labeled leichte Musik, Italian songwriters have had a difficult time being recognized as a phenomenon of serious scholarly analysis. Despite numerous collaborations with poets and literary authors, the cantautori were often seen, as Giaime Pintor put it in 1975, as “sacerdoti di una cultura inesistente che vive solo grazie a un’erudizione appiccicaticcia e all’ideologia della cialtronaggine,” or, as Giorgio Manacorda still states in the Nineties, as “turisti della letteratura.” Songwriters, on the other hand, succeeded in distancing themselves from poets and intellectuals, claiming their difference from what they saw as a hypocritical, treacherous and often inebriate array of “ugly creatures,” “brutte creature” (Francesco De Gregori, Le storie di ieri, 1975). As a result, real academic interest in cantautori’s songs only began to arise at the end of the last century, first with a focus on the authors’ linguistic aspects and their interaction with the historical context, and, only recently, on their possible acquaintanceship with literary forms.

In this respect, Francesco Ciabattoni’s book is both exemplary and innovative. The author explicitly avoids addressing both the vexata quaestio of whether songs can be defined as poetry or not, and the issue of defining the difference between the two genres. Instead, he explores the production of six of the most renowned Italian songwriters from the Seventies to nowadays, by examining the complex relationships that these cantautori establish with so-called “high” literature. In particular, Ciabattoni aims to question the stereotype of the songwriter composing solely according to an emotional rapture, by showing instead—following the definition proposed by Curt Sachs—the logogenetic nature of most of the songs by these authors, and the abundance of intertextual allusions they convey. Despite acknowledging that the genre of the song “non ha davvero bisogno di un pubblico esperto nell’arte allusiva per esistere, per vendere e perfino per essere una forma d’arte legittima” (13), the author argues for the inextricable necessity of investigating these allusions not as decorative embellishments of the lyrics but, rather, as essential features through which the texts’ inner meanings unfold.

The first chapter, dedicated to Roberto Vecchioni, already clearly shows Ciabattoni’s particular insight. Vecchioni is known for displaying his literary citations on the very surface of his songs, inserting easily identifiable literary elements into his texts and titles. Ciabattoni, however, focuses on Vecchioni’s subtler mode of literary allusion, proving his approach to be readily effective. In analyzing Vecchioni’s Blu(e) notte (Samarcanda, 1977), the author demonstrates, in fact, that, by establishing a dialogue with the poetry of both Sandro Penna and Giovanni Pascoli, this text creates a provocative mix of literary allusions which proposes a concept of non-traditional and anti-patriarchal love hardly graspable from just the literal meaning of the song’s lyrics.

The same approach is adopted in addressing the production of Francesco Guccini and Angelo Branduardi, respectively discussed in chapters 2 and 3. About the former, Ciabattoni recalls the particular link to the tradition of literary anarchism, and his debt to novelists and poets of the Beat Generation (Kerouac, Ginsberg) and, more generally, to American authors (Salinger, Steinbeck, Hemingway, Caldwell). He finds, still, in Guccini’s lyrics, some striking references to Guido Gozzano and daringly compares Il vecchio e il bambino (Radici, 1972) to Franco Fortini’s Il bambino che gioca. Instead, Branduardi is discussed in relation to his tendency to set entire literary texts to music, drawing inspiration from different traditions (Italian, French, German, but also Hebraic, Chinese, and Native-American) and different ages (from antiquity to modernity) to make these texts sound new through his music.

Chapter 4 focuses on the literary intertexts of the songs of Fabrizio De André. Compared to other cantautori, De André’s literary knowledge has been more thoroughly explored, thanks to both the songwriter’s explicit tributes to some literary texts (as for example the famous musical...