To the voice of Fabio Milana
Giorgio Agamben,
Quodlibet, April 15, 2022
In the history of poetry, music and any arts, there are seemingly modest events, which nevertheless mark for those who come across them a watershed that peremptorily separates a before and an after. One of these inapparent events is the recording, under the column “The Poets”, of two CDs out of the market, which contain, according to what is written in the booklet accompanying them, “pieces composed and/or performed by Fabio Milana”. The poets, to whom Fabio’s voice seems to lend its chant, are in order, besides some anonymous:
Horace,
Sulpicia,
Chrétien de Troyes,
Francis of Assisi,
Cecco Angiolieri,
Dante,
Jacopone,
Petrarca,
Villon,
Lorenzo de’ Medici,
Goethe,
Leopardi,
Manzoni,
Emily Dickinson,
Pascoli,
Rebora,
Jahier,
Saba,
Montale,
Ungaretti,
Penna,
Antonia Pozzi,
Simone Weil,
Pasolini,
Brecht,
Elsa Morante,
Franco Loi,
Franca Grisoni,
Luzi,
Fortini. Hence, one might think that these are poetic verses set to music by someone usually called, with an unlovable word, a songwriter. It is not so. Fabio did not stupendously set the verses of his most beloved poets to music. He did something different, which we do not know whether to place in poetry or music, but that rather has its place in the difficult intersection between the two.
Dante defines the poet’s works as “to tie words together” and poetry as a thing “harmonised by musical ties” (
Convivio I,VII,14). Therefore, with a singular etymological figure, he derives the word “author” by a “verb which signifies more or less to tie words together, that is
auieo”. This verb is exemplary, because in its form is it itself “figure of a tie” and hence summarises in itself the activity of poets, “who have tied together their words with musical art”. Anyone who appreciates it carefully, “in its first form will observe that it displays its own meaning, for it is made up only of the ties of words, that is, of the five vowels alone, which are the soul and tie of every word, and is composed of them in a different order, so as to portray the image of a tie. For beginning with A it turns back to U, goes straight through to I and E, then turns back and comes to O, so that it truly portrays this image: A, E, I, O, U, which is the figure of a tie” (IV,VI,3-5).
The “music” that “turns and comes back” here in question is internal to poetry, and it is this intimate harmony that makes it capable to receive possibly a chant (
ad quandam odam recipienda armonizata est —
De vulgari eloquentia II,X,2). Dante calls this internal tie of poetry
coniugatio and, as far as regards the triple intertwisted rhyme of the
Comedy,
“cantilena”. It is on this
“cantilena”, on this internal tie of poetry that Fabio concentrates all his skill. His chant, so full of pauses and refreshes, which rises and falls, so vibrant with harmonics that it sometimes even appears diphonic is, however, somehow, a diction and a canonical reading, such that, after listening to it, we can no longer read or recite those poems as we used to read them before. Leopardi’s “frail leaf”, Montale’s “eel”,
Caproni’s “prayer” — we believed we loved and understood them — but not anymore. Only now, following Fabio’s voice, we do begin to understand and love them.
In the spring of 1942, archaeologist
Ludwig Curtius attended a concert by
Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli at the
Teatro Adriano in
Rome. “The marvelous faculty of Benedetti”, he writes, “is the
cantilena (
die Kantilene). Not only the singing tone of
legato, no, rather a modeling of the single sounds; as if each time it went upward like a sculptor into the wax through the most subdued turgidities until reaching its obstinate language and then again sinking back from its height to slight, almost slippery passages. Each sonorous syllable has its own special nuance, almost its own fragrance, no note renounces its transfiguration and whilst the phrase flows in ever-new intensifications and attenuations from
pianissimo to
piano and
forte and then back again at the stupendous completeness of a
Lied, suddenly the singing of a poem sounds, reflecting all the youthful purity of this artist...”.
It is this
cantilena, which incessantly breaks off and returns to itself, it is this intimate singing tone of the musical tie that Fabio let happen in his voice, before discreetly disappearing into the poetic canon that he delivered back to us as if it were the first and last time.
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