Composer Franco Battiato has died at his home in Milo, a small town in Sicily, at the age of 76. Musician, writer, documentary scriptwriter and also a painter under the pseudonym Suphan Barzani, the artist had been missing from the public scene for years suffering from a disease that his environment never wanted to reveal. He had earned the right to live in silence the last years of his life, surrounded by his books and friends, to say goodbye quietly at home, in a landscape of volcanic lava on the foot of Etna, after a musical career that changed patterns of Italian music and that broke those annoying seams that insist on separating high and low culture. After a lifetime searching for a permanent center of gravity, that will now be the only consolation of his legion of followers, he may have finally found it.
The enigma Franco Battiato
Battiato did everything in music and always differently from the others. He triumphed in pop, sang at Eurovision in 1984 and created a sound (30 studio albums) that came from experimental music and improvisation based on synthesizers and all kinds of electronic pottery that until then had only been seen in the music of Vanguard. Born on March 23, 1945 in Riposto, in the province of Catania, Battiato moved to Milan in the first half of the 1960s to pursue a career as a professional on stage. After his first works with Giorgio Gaber and Ombretta Colli, he made his debut as Pino Massara's soloist with the albums
Fetus
and
Pollution,
milestones of that revolutionary drive that always accompanied him to a greater or lesser extent.
His music emerged from the depths of experimental sound and progressive rock. Touched by the magnetism of Karlheinz Stockhausen - he won the composer's prize in 1977 with the album
L'Egitto prima delle sabbie
- and the influences of the twelve-tone sound, albums such as
Fetus
(1971),
Pollution
(1972) or
Sulle corde di Aries were born.
(1973), three recently reissued pieces that often go unnoticed between the hits of the eighties and nineties and that today are coveted on collectors' shelves.
Instinctive musician, that was a period in which he learned harmony and to play the violin on the recommendation of Stockhausen himself;
a time when he became obsessed with technology and always packed more in his suitcase the old VCS 3, an analog synthesizer that was only used at that time by David Gilmour in Pink Floyd.
Battiato was a poet, by Manuel Vilas
'I want to see you dance' and five other great songs by Battiato
PHOTOS |
The life of the singer, in pictures
Battiato, however, was not content with inhabiting the backyard of the musical avant-garde. He was the first Italian artist - before animals like Vasco Rossi or Lucio Dalla - to sell a million copies with
La voce del padrone
(1981). Since then, it became a foreign body of music capable of arranging a family table that ended with the living room turned into a dance floor: “
È tour tutto intorno alla stanza mentre si dance
”, asked in
Voglio vederti danzare (L 'arca di Noe, 1982).
Or to unite in the same concert parents and children who normally had nothing to say to each other, old archaeologists from the
underground
music and well children who shouted chanting lyrics of songs that they never quite understood.
Something that, all things considered, might not have any importance either.
Battiato, at a concert in Milan in 2013. Getty
Stefano Senardi, president of PolyGram, who snatched the musician from EMI after 30 years and recorded three albums with him (
L'Imboscata
,
Gommalacca
and
Fleurs
), thus summed up in a report in EL PAÍS in 2020, the essences of artistic vision From his friend: “He doesn't like to explain things. He prefers that they are understood through the discs. The approach to his art can be done on many levels: instinctive, epidermal, intellectual, religious, sound study, the way of singing as in the album of versions
Fleurs
(1999). Not to mention his texts. In
L'Era del cinghiale bianco
cites the invasion of Afghanistan, migrations, social mutations.
It is very rare to find an artist who can be savored, understood and consumed on so many levels ”.
Battiato said little about himself.
He responded evasively or irony to questions about his intimate life, although he was always closely linked to fellow travelers such as the philosopher and composer of many of his lyrics, Manlio Sgalambro.
He left written in his songs, yes, that he prefers raisins to Vivaldi, salad to Beethoven and Sinatra.
Also that he did not like the Italian New Wave, that he desperately sought that permanent center of gravity of the Armenian mystic George Gurdjieff and that his desires and ours, no matter how the years go by, will never grow old.
Franco Battiato, in Turin in 2010. Photograph by Leonardo Cendamo / Getty Images.
Leonardo Cendamo / GETTY
Italian pop music often travels badly to other countries. Battiato, on the other hand, cultivated an important success outside his country, where he lived as a cult author idolized by artists such as David Byrne, John Cale or Brian Eno…. Especially in Spain. Where that strange effort of the record company to make versions in Spanish almost made him one more of the national scene. Yesterday he was recognized by the President of the Republic, Sergio Mattarella, who defined him as a "cultured and refined" artist, to the entire political and cultural class of Italy.
On September 17, 2017, the Roman Theater of Catania attended the final concert of Battiato. Two years earlier, during a performance in Bari, he suffered a broken femur from which he had a hard time recovering. There, rumors began to circulate about his state of health. That performance had to be accompanied by four others. No one knows if it was by chance that this French farewell took place in the city that saw him take his first steps. But nothing more was heard from him until last year when he released
Torneremo ancora
, recorded with the Royal Philharmonic and built on old songs and a single new song that seemed to announce something. "Life does not end. It is like the dream. Birth as awakening. Until we are free, we will return again ”.
This time his manager assured that it would be his last dance. But since he sang in
Mondi Lontanissimi
(1985), it is possible that time and space no longer exist in his music. "Nothing calms me down like going into the desert, feeling like an inhabitant of a universal house, the best refuge for the soul," he assured in an interview in EL PAÍS in 2013, in one of his multiple passes through Spain. “The only thing I am missing is a good passage. A good death ”, he added to close the conversation. But Battiato fervently believed in reincarnation. "It is idiotic to think that we come from the monkey," he said on one occasion. So if you see a dove, a white boar or any of their extraordinary characters, you will surely find a part of it there.