Franco Battiato, at a concert in Rome, in an undated image.Frezza La Fata / IPA / GTRES
With Franco Battiato, a great musician, a great artist and a great man have left.
He was a
special
person
.
How
special
were all the things in his life.
For a few years the disease had forced him to live locked up in his "secret laboratory" in Milo, on the slopes of Etna.
Halfway between the volcano and the sea, captivated by the perfume of jasmine, he spent his days meditating, writing music, reading, scrutinizing the metamorphoses of the sea and the starry sky.
His eloquent silences had already become legendary among those who have had the privilege of knowing him and intertwine friendships with him.
More information
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Battiato was a poet.
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Franco was able to stare at you for a long time, without saying a word. And yet he managed to communicate with his eyes, with the grimaces of his face, with his enigmatic smiles. Each meeting was an extraordinary opportunity to peer into the multiple windows that he knew how to offer to the gaze of his interlocutor: the musical (classical, pop, popular, ethnic, lyrical), the artistic (painting and cinema), the mystical (of the Neoplatonism to Buddhism, from Sufism to Teresa de Ávila and San Juan de la Cruz), the literary (the great ancient classics and European Renaissance literature), politics (his intransigence against corrupt rulers and his humanitarian concert in Iraq in 1992 after the disasters caused by the Gulf War) and above all the mysterious one, from which the fascinating abysses of the most intimate humanity were scrutinized.
He was able to stare at you for a long time, without saying a word.
And yet he managed to communicate with his eyes, with his face
Because in many songs Franco is human, understood as universal brotherhood and as allied with nature, which occupies a central position: if
the care
(
the
c
ura,
in Italian) an invitation glimpse to "take care" of the others: "I will protect you from the fears of hypochondria / disorders that you will find on your way from today";
in
Povera patria
(Poor homeland) there is contempt for a policy reduced to pure personal interest: "The rulers how many perfect and useless buffoons / In this land that pain has devastated."
I met Battiato in Cosenza, in 2011, when he was preparing the lyrical opera dedicated to the Calabrian philosopher Bernardino Telesio (1509-1588), considered by Francis Bacon “the first of the moderns”.
Since then, we have never lost sight of each other.
And every summer we would meet in Milan, invited by [film director] Elisabetta Sgarbi to the Milanesiana, a lucky festival of art, literature, film and music.
Franco Battiato (left) and Nuccio Ordine, in an undated image.
It would be impossible to tell in a few lines a long career as an artist, of more than 50 years. Battiato was a highly cultured singer-songwriter (his collaboration with the Sicilian philosopher Manlio Sgalambro is famous), who since the eighties had achieved extraordinary success, not only in Italy. A vegetarian by conviction, Battiato was drawn to the inextricable tangle of art and literature. It is not by chance that his lyrical opera dedicated to the philosopher Telesio is a musical representation where opposites meet and collide. Not only, naturally, the heat and the cold. But also the past and the present, the matter and the ethereal, the human and the divine.
Battiato has invited us to see what the flow of things does not allow us to see.
The scene of life and the scene of art both seem to be the theater of clashes, of contradictions, of a perennial going back and forth between reality and fiction, existence and dream.
In other words, for Battiato life and death are nothing more than transformations.
If here one thing dissolves, there another is born.
Now that he is gone, those who have loved him can glimpse him with "spread wings", performing, as his songs say, "unpredictable flights and very fast ascents" in the infinite universe in search of "a permanent center of gravity".
Nuccio Ordine
He is a philosopher, author of
The usefulness of the useless
(Acantilado, 2014).
