An urgency and a desire unite Italo Calvino, Vinicio Capossela and the masters Luigi Nono and Luciano Berio. And, passing through Bach, Mozart and Beethoven come up to the pianist Roberto Prosseda. It is the urgency to tell, pass on, combine music with essay, song with protest to reach the new generations. Once again Calvino is a source of inspiration, precisely because of his ability to have a "multiple and multifaceted vision of the world", according to the definition that he himself used in the American Lessons to describe what would be "the great challenge for literature". The special of the Ansa 100 of these Calvino, which in the first part dealt with how much the work of the writer continues to affect the present, this month tells the mark left in the world of music.
"After the Second World War the reborn freedom to speak was for people at the beginning eager to tell", writes Calvino in the preface to IlSentiero dei nidi di ragno. That desire is the same that drives him to write song lyrics with the Cantacronache, the collective of intellectuals and musicians (Umberto Eco will be part of it among others) that was born in '56 and aims to create a bridge with the new generations by handing down, through popular song, the history of the Resistance but also carrying on the struggles of young workers. Calvino writes Oltre il ponte, with music bySergio Liberovici, in which he tells a girl in the first person about his partisan experience. But also Sad Song the then very contemporary story of a couple who never meets because he does the night shift and she the day shift. For the collective he will sign the lyrics of nine songs.
Capossela and Cantacronache: 'Today everyone is indignant alone'
An experience, that of the Cantacronache, which lasts only a few years, but leaves its mark, so much so that it is considered the basis of the great tradition of Italian singer-songwriters. And of course Calvino leaves its mark: Oltre il ponte enters the repertoire of Modena City Ramblers who rearrange it and put it in the lineup. But to collect the tradition there is also Vinicio Capossela, who sang it for the last time on April 25th and has also carried on that eagerness to tell, speak, denounce: it is no coincidence that his latest work is entitled 13 urgent songs.
Calvino, explains Cisco Bellotti, former singer of Modena City Ramblers, "had a communicative urgency: trying to tell the new generations what he had experienced during the resistance and found a wonderful way together with Cantacronache writing 'Oltre il ponte', a song that for me is a masterpiece and that we have rearranged".
Cisco Bellotti and Oltre il Ponte
"The Cantacronache project - says Capossela - also speaks to us of a historical moment in which there was so much shared commitment" while today "we are all individualized. Today, everyone is indignant on their own." The execution of Oltre il ponte on April 25, in Turin, he assures, was "very exciting. Singing all together (maybe 80, 100 people between band and choir) a song so of union was a great emotion. It starts from the concept of passing the baton and it is a concept that I took up in one of my songs called Relay on a bicycle.
Music accompanies Calvino even in novels, his style always follows a melody. Maestro Prosseda notices this, reading his essays, he feels the lightness of Mozart, Bach and Mendelssohn, the rapidity of Beethoven, Scarlatti and Webern, the accuracy of Bach, Schoenberg and Paart. And he brings to the theater the American lessons juxtaposed with the symphonies of the great composers." Calvino was a musician ante litteram because his way of understanding literature is very musical - explains Prosseda - Calvinian lightness, letting the thought fly to see from above and not giving excessive importance that often comes from the lack of a wide view, is also found in music: Calvino teaches us that the gaze must be multiple to better understand reality".
Prosseda shows the juxtaposition of Calvin, Mozart and Bach
That Calvino's writing contained a melody was also noticed 65 years ago by the great master Luigi Nono, who in 1958 sent a letter to the writer asking him to create a text for him, and he did so with that same urgency. "I need - underlines Nono - not a booklet, museum stuff but the creative imagination of a man of today". To reconstruct the correspondence between the two, interrupted and then resumed over the years but which in the end never resulted in a collaboration, is an interesting lesson, for the cycle Incontri con la musica di Luigi Nono of 2021, by the scholar Luigi Finarelli who tells the relationship between the writer and the composer. And it also shows a copy of ThePath of Spider's Nests that belonged to the great composer, in which the phrase about the "eagerness to tell" is underlined and the word "eagerness" even circled.
Calvino will actually do an opera libretto, 23 years later, in 1981, together with Maestro Luciano Berio. It will be called The True Story and will return to link up with popular fiction. This is told in an interview by the same Berio who at the beginning of the 80s will also compose the opera Un re in ascolto, which is based on a story from the collection Sotto un sole giaguaro by Calvino.
Capossela, Ariosto, la luna and Calvino
Even the book that Capossela recommends, speaks of the desire and urgency to pass on that the Ligurian writer had. This is Orlando furioso by Ludovico Ariosto toldby Calvino. Which once again leaves its mark: "His great love for Ariosto was contagious because it is precisely by reading his story that I became passionate about this author. In the book there is a definition that I also put in a song."
