Books – Fabio Zuffanti – Sacre Sinfonie

Title: Sacred symphonies – Battiato, all history
Author: Fabio Zuffanti
Publisher: The castle (2025)
Pages: 463
Price: 24 €

Everyone writes and talk about Franco Battiato. Few, however, really can penetrate the great enigma represented by the Sicilian composer within the history of Italian music, finding the right keys to approach its varied and unsettling work, still too modern and visionary to be fully understood. Among the best exegetes of the Sicilian singer-songwriter, there is certainly-and not from today-Fabio Zuffanti, a prominent musician of the new Italian progressive scene Post-20000, writer and music critic who we honor ourselves to include among the signatures of Ondarock.
Scholar of the artistic and human path by Franco Battiato, Zuffanti dedicated a tetralogy of volumes published between 2018 and 2025 to the musician of Jonia: “Battiato – The Master's voice: 1945-1982, birth, ascent and consecration of the phenomenon”, “Franco Battiato: all records and all the songs, from 1965 to 2019”, “Signals of life, Franco Battiato “and now this” Sacre Symphonie – Battiato: all history “, which promises to be a sort of definitive biography, capable of embracing the entire artistic and human path of the Sicilian genius, offering a complete and detailed overview of its musical and personal evolution.

Published on the occasion of what would have been Battiato's 80th birthday, the work is monumental, with its 463 pages, distinguishing itself for the analytical depth and the richness of the details. Zuffanti offers a narrative that goes beyond simple history, intertwining biographical events with personal reflections and historical contextualizations. The result is a story that is so at such an extent, to come (slightly) fictionalized in turn, as Zuffanti confesses in the introductory note, admitting that he had made himself sometimes taking his hand.
Moreover, Battiato's life can never be fully unveiled so much so rich in unexpected events and twists, misdirections and changes of course, surreal situations and displaced rebus, because Franco has been “a restless being who felt the desire to highlight himself, at stake, and always do something different” – as Zuffanti explains – he wanted to make his own thing his own and give his vision. His is a life and music full of surprises. It is not only the guru that everyone knows, but a being full of desire to know. “

And then you can grant some novelist license to those who are called to the (impossible) mission to reconstruct it as a mosaic, card after card, since childhood in the 1940s in Riposto, a small Sicilian country, so remote and distant from the nerve centers of the national show business. This is where the first traits of Battiato's visionary character emerge, fascinated by music from an early age, thanks also to the influence of the grandfather who gave him his first toy guitar.
The transfer to Milan in 1964 marks the first turning point, introducing Battiato in a fertile environment for sound experiments and significant encounters, such as friendship with Giorgio Gaber, who suggested that he was called Franco not to get confused with the other Francesco, Guccini. Battiato matures a passion for musical experimentation that will even push him to risk serious disciplinary sanctions during military service, when he will fly to London to buy a synthesizer. An alienating electronics hybrid, prog and psychedelia will arise, initially seasoned with good doses of Mescalina, until it decides that it could obtain the same effects thanks to meditation.

Speaking of those reckless experiments without network, Zuffanti reports the fun anecdote of the messianic meeting with Maestro Karlheinz Stockhausen, who, intrigued by the dedication reserved for him on “Clica”, invited him to his home in Kürthen, near Cologne. When the German guru presented him with the gigantic score of “Inori”, a composition for orchestra of 89 elements, inviting him to participate in the project, the young Battiato blushed like a schoolgirl, confessing in a trembling voice: “Maestro, I don't know how to read music”. Faced with the astonished reaction of the German Vate, Franco explained his pop-rock formation and cling to the cases of artists such as Pink Floyd, Beatles and Rolling Stones, who did not know the music but managed to compose from Excelsa. And, as in an evangelical parable, the teacher convinced himself and, struck by his skills, he began to explain to him the foundations of music theory, pushing him to put new studies and drastic choices in the continuation of his career.
There is no shortage of other curious anecdotes, who contribute to offering an intimate look at Battiato's personality: from the injury that interrupted his youth football career – a frightening crash with his nose on the goal of the door, which helped to shape his distinctive aspect – to the story of his first record contract, obtained thanks to a job as a bird, up to the unintested gift by Frank Zappa, who donated him a pair. of winged boots to encourage him to pursue his goals.

If the experimentation of the 70s gave Italy a versatile and surprising composer, capable of keeping up to the giants of the European avant -garde of the period, however, starting from the pop turning point of the end of the decade, then refined in the next one, which Battiato imposed himself as a unique and unreachable personality in the national scene, coining a musical language popular And caught together, capable of marrying captivating and sound techniques Avantgarde, summer catchphrases and philosophical lyrics, very rich in unprecedented cultural, historical and geographical references. Making such cultured and sophisticated music accessible to the general public, combining usability and expressive depth, the maximum – and unparalleled goal of the Sicilian composer will remain.
A turning point started from that explicit invitation addressed to the upper floors of EMI: “I came here to be successful, tell me how I have to do and do it”. From here to the Simpirena fame, the passage was very short, starting from that magical summer of 1982 that hatched the doors of celebrity and the sales charts, thanks to the immense success of the bestseller “The Master's voice”. The book focuses in particular on the concert-event at the Arena di Verona, where over twenty thousand people realized to applaud it and celebrate its triumph. He had not spared himself on the stage and with the trusted musicians behind him he had pitted songs from “The era of the white wild boar” and by “Patriots”, even brushing up the mythological “Areknams”. But the reason that had prompted all those people to go and hear it was only one, remember Zuffanti: listening to the songs of “The Master's voice”, the album that will mark a definitive watershed – and not only in his career.

So between hit, experimentation, soundtracks, sacred works and author music, you get to the rock rock, and then again to chamber music, always mixing styles and disparate cultures. A motorcycle of uncertainties, changes of perspective, winks to the general public and unpredictable artistic turns, always the result of its restless existential journeys. Of each stage, Zuffanti reviews the crucial albums: the apocalyptic scenarios of “The Ark of Noah”, a perfect sequel to “The Master's voice” – inevitably less popular but full of brilliant ideas – the electronic permeated with melancholy of “lost horizons”, the mystical and esoteric atmospheres of “physiognomic”, “like a camel in a grontic” That masterpiece of cultural and religious syncretism named “Caffè de la Paix”, the displaced projects conceived with the philosopher Manlio Sgalambro – “The umbrella and the machine to be sewn”, “The ambush” and the formidable “Girolacca”, an alt -rock experiment between futurist electronics and crawling sounds – the heartfelt covers of the “Fleurs” series and the latest acute (iron ” Beat “,” Open Sesamo “,” Joe Patti's Experimental Group “) before the disease and the poignant farewell of” We will return again “.

The biography is not limited to the musical aspect, but also deepens the other passions of Battiato, starting from the philosophical and spiritual issues that have permeated the work. The interest in meditation, the theoretical philosophy, the sufi mystical (in particular through the influence of Georges Ivanovič Gurdjieff) and the inner research are analyzed in relation to musical compositions and artistic choices, highlighting how these dimensions have influenced not only the lyrics of the songs, but also the compositional approach and the structure of the works of the artist of Jonia.
The book also underlines the role of Battiato as a key figure in Italian culture, not only as a musician, but also as a director, painter and intellectual, also recalling the social commitment, the relationship with religions (the first pop artist to perform in the Vatican), political ideas (he was a supporter of the radical party, therefore – for a short time – councilor in the junta Crocetta in Sicily), philosophies, aesthetic mutations, vegetarianism, vegetarianism. cinema, literature and painting. Always new challenges that pushed him to confront the arts in a broad sense, outlining the contours of a complex figure, from adolescence to the disease and the last years of his existence.

Sliding, despite its fearsome ponodosa, “sacred symphonie” therefore proves to be an essential reading both for those who want to approach the universe of Franco Battiato for the first time, and for long -standing fans, offering a complete and fascinating overview of an artist who has contributed decisively to redefining the borders of Italian music, through a unique depth and complexity in the national scene.

23/03/2025