The Battiato perspective

On the day Franco Battiato died, Etna was activated on the side opposite the slope where he lived and filled the sky with pink ash. The musician moved here when he discovered that a friend of Silvio Berlusconi had won the elections fraudulently in Catania, the Italian city where he took his first steps and whose horizon can be seen from the slope of the volcanic earth garden. Right there, around the deconsecrated church that he had rebuilt years ago, most of his friends and family gathered to see him off on Wednesday in a ceremony - Catholic rite, but without mass - in which they read some verses and listened to the homily of a priest who accompanied him on the last section of the traffic that began when, some five years ago, an irreversible disease was detected. For many it was a surprise.If one reviews his work now, in fact, he had written almost everything about that passage.

More information

• The chamomile of 'mamma' Battiato

• Battiato's last years on Etna

Battiato had left at 5.30 the day before, in that chiaroscuro where dawn is so difficult to perceive in the shadows, as he sang in

Perspectiva Nevski (Patriots,

1980).

The disease squeezed suddenly.

He pulled him away from the music.

The coronavirus, also of some of his relatives.

In recent times, he thought a lot about Saint John of the Cross and Saint Teresa of Avila and on that path of suffering, as remembered by his close friend and

manager

, Francesco

Franz.

Cattini.

It must not have been an easy transit.

But none of the eight intimates who give their testimony for this report remembers it with sadness.

I was fully prepared, they point out.

"He lived it serenely and left with a smile," recalls Franz, with whom he recorded all his albums since 2000 and traveled to Iraq in 1992 to do a historic humanitarian concert.

Franco Battiato in 1988.Rino Petrosino / Getty

His manager continued to accompany him to all the concerts until his last tour in 2017, when he decided to step aside and start preparing for that trip to the other side for which he had studied a lifetime. It was noticed in

La porta dello spavento supremo

(2004). Or in the documentary that he recorded and titled

Travesando el bardo

(

looks from beyond

) in 2014. Also listening carefully to the song

Testamento

, from the album

Ábrete Sésamo

(2012), the last one he composed with new songs and that sang that of: We have never died, we have never been born ”. He wanted, as he once said in an interview, for this definitive step to be "well calculated."

The last times he spent with his brother Michele and his niece Grazia, heirs to his work, who moved to his house in Milo. He listened to classical music on the radio and on television. No pop. Never his records. Few books, fewer readings than I used to. He had even stopped meditating after visiting his reference Willigis Jäger a little more than three years before, who confessed that he had also given up the exercise. Father Guidalberto Bortolini, a priest with long experience in mission in India, specialist in accompaniment to death, was close to him in recent years and officiated at the ceremony on Wednesday: “We prayed at night on the phone. I was very prepared for this trip. I asked him when he was sick if he was afraid or worried. He always told me nothat he was ready for everything because he had made his life. Slowly he spoke less, but until he was able to do so we faced these issues. He felt that he had accomplished his mission. And fulfilling a mission is the most serene way to leave this life. Death is not a drama, it is just a possibility ”.

Painting was his last expressive channel in this process. He received visits from friends, such as the talented young Sicilian musician Giovanni Caccamo, who used to sit and play his baby grand piano and chat with him. The last time was in April, but they had known each other for a long time. “It was in 2012. Nobody believed that I could make a living from my music, not even my mother. A friend told me that Franco had rented a house in Donnalucata (in Ragusa). I hid behind a tree for four hours and when he came out I went up to him. 'What's he wearing there. A compact? Give it to me, come on. Goodbye ', he said very dryly ”. Within hours I had four missed calls. Battiato had liked it and produced his first album. "He was a mentor to me." Caccamo, who won in San Remo, like his teacher in 1981, read a poem at the ceremony that he had written the night before.

The farewell brought together about 70 people. Some recited excerpts from

L'ombra della luce

, another prophetic work on the dawn of death. “

Differendimi dalle forze contrarie. La notte, nel sonno, quando non sono cosciente. Quando il mio percorso si fa uncertain. I'm not leaving my mai. Non mi abbandonare mai

”. Francesco Messina, intimate companion, squire of physical and spiritual journeys, author of the most emblematic covers of the musician, remembers some of those texts. “The center of everything was the meaning of life and the meaning of death. That's what has brought all of Franco's old friends together. On Wednesday something happened that I liked to participate in. I felt that Franco had managed to bring people together in the name of something that he repeated a lot: love as an original force ”. An idea that he also repeats in

Le nostre anime (2015)

, with a voice that perhaps was no longer the most transparent, marked by some suffering. “Our souls look for other bodies in other worlds where there is no pain. Just peace. And love, love, ”he sang. "That I think was exactly his focus, the objective of his search," recalls his friend.

Messina published an obituary on Wednesday in

Il Corriere della Sera

. “Thank you for what you have taught me. For what has been said, and above all, for what has not been said ”. Battiato's silences were anthological, say his friends. If you followed his argument, fine. Otherwise, you saw the character leave with his overflowing intelligence and intuition. In recent years, however, he didn't feel like much. His film project about Handel, his favorite composer, was left halfway through, despite the fact that he had already written it and had studied the musician's life for eight years. I even had chosen the music on which the images would be superimposed. He worked very much like Luis Buñuel, says Messina. “These are not sad days, because Franco has left this world with a smile. And I really mean it. He was calm and prepared. First, because he had been ill for many years, and he knew what would happen.But also because he has spent a lifetime preparing for that separation. And he has done it as he transmitted it in his songs, it is extremely consistent with who he is. With the invitation to the trip that he always proposed to us, considering that existence has a beginning and an end. But it is a journey that can begin again, because he believed in reincarnation ”.

Battiato, following the teaching of Gustav Klimt or Andrei Rublev, always wanted more attention to be paid to his work than to the character he embodied. But the magnetism of his figure, a huge walking mystery that traveled the winding path from the avant-garde to pop, was irresistible to that curiosity. Even when it's gone. Stefano Senardi, who was president of PolyGram and seized the musician from EMI after 30 years to record three albums with him (

L'Imboscata

,

Gommalacca

and

Fleurs

), believes that it always had to do with that way of reflecting his audience in the mirror of his work. Even those who never had an ounce of spirituality in their blood. "It is almost inexplicable that so many people love him having different tastes, ages, religions or cultural background ... And that is something mysterious and unique. I do not know other popular music singers who have conveyed to their entire audience in a different way. The ability to love him from opposing cultural assumptions is fascinating. Anyone could make a song their own, in an unusual and profound democratic way. Even those who had overheard him lightly, in passing, on a radio. But it has always left a deep mark on everyone ”.

Battiato's last voice was recorded in 2018. The musician called his friend and legendary sound technician, Pino Pischettola, known in the industry as Pinaxa. He barely had the strength left. Especially after two falls with broken femur that left him very touched. He had toured a year before with the Royal Philharmonic, so they used some of the recorded arrangements and released

Torneremo ancora.

, the last song he had written in a drawer. More recited than sung, the voice did not give much anymore. "Life does not end. It is like the dream. Birth as awakening. Until we are free, we will still return ”, he said. “We recorded the voice and the orchestra's guidance on a keyboard, and then the orchestra, in London,” recalls Pinaxa. “He always did what he wanted to do, with absolute freedom. When I made the records I thought only about the music, not about what might come next. And that can be a great inspiration for young people. In music there is room for everyone ”.

The video for that song was commissioned by the artist Giuseppe La Spada. Battiato was no longer well, but they worked remotely. The images, says the director, are recorded in Sicily: on Etna and Argimusco, a place where there are still some megaliths from the Bronze Age. “It was a place where Battiato went a lot, places with a great spiritual charge. The idea was to look for spaces not contaminated by the human being, where to start trips, transmigration of souls. He speaks in the text of that sense of non-permanence. Everybody knows that song is a testament. And the volcano is a place where life regenerates ”. Maybe that's why Milo's sky was covered in ash on Wednesday.