Dear Peppino,
I imagine you already suspect it but, on a day like this, I am comforted to be able to take the opportunity to reiterate a fact: part of your career has been supported financially and emotionally by people who have never drunk champagne. Me, for example. I was a latent teetotaler for a lifetime, before coming out for a blood sugar issue. Wine, let alone champagne, has always seemed to me to be a drink that demanded too much of me.
For guys like me Champagne (1973) was the handbook for preparing for a double qualifying exam: the first to feel, for the duration of a song, part of the big world, and the second to remain outside it for the rest of his life without suffering exclusion. Champagne has always seemed to me above all to be a cultural object. I saw it appear in films, in midnight waits, in weddings where it seemed that happiness needed to be uncorked to be more concrete.
The teetotaler develops peculiar abilities. Learn to hold the same glass for three hours without drinking its contents. Accept prosecco to avoid explanations. He smiles sadly when someone tells him: “Come on, just a drink.” For this reason, I have always been amused by the fact that one of the songs that I loved most and that accompanied me the most in the various phases of life in which, like it or not, I had to deal with the blood alcohol level of others, spoke precisely of the drink that, of all, could belong to me least.
For years I believed there was something wrong with this preference. It would have been more logical to get excited with a song about still water, perhaps sparkling, with ice and lemon, or with one about Coca Zero (even if I don't think they've ever written it). But no. It always was Champagne. Today, thinking about it, I understood why: yours was never a song about champagne.
Yours is a song about that form of polite melancholy that comes over you while the party is still going on. About that strange moment in which everyone is toasting but someone, inside, has already understood that the evening is over. Or, worse, that the story is over. No matter how many studies and comparisons can be made on the sound paraphernalia of that refrain (the strings that open like a silk curtain, the warm and vaguely salty timbre of your voice that always seems to have just come off a motorboat, the way in which the melody rises exactly where you would expect it to fall, like bubbles in a glass) the doubt will never be resolved as to what makes yourChampagne so irresistible. Whether the casual and complicit sensuality with which you describe a world of atmospheres and betrayals, or the almost childish sincerity with which, behind that ease, one senses that all that foam is destined to deflate in a few minutes. Probably both things together, and it is right there, in that gracefully held duplicity, that your genius as an interpreter lies.
Champagne it's a song that Italians have been able to transform into a celebration of euphoria because they have a special talent: using sad songs in happy moments and happy ones in sad moments. Just as I am able to ask and obtain Happiness by Al Bano and Romina at a funeral, singing Champagne with the glass raised, forgetting that inside there is a guy watching the woman he loves leave with another. It's as if they were projecting onto unified giant screens Titanic during a Costa cruise.
You have never believed in noisy happiness. Your way of singing the songs seemed to suggest that every joy needed a little handbrake. You never put any emphasis on it or the anxiety of taking up as much space as possible. You never made the audience feel an obligation to have fun. You always had that elegant lightness of someone who already knew, from the start, before a love, a journey, a part of life, the price of nostalgia that those experiences would produce, and paid it without protest; indeed, singing and playing the piano.
As a child I thought you belonged to a world very far from mine. The ballrooms. Capri. The white jackets. Pianos in hotels. The adults who ordered things with bubbles and always seemed to know their place in the world. Instead perhaps it was the same world.
Even if I'm one of those who ends up talking to grandparents or photographers at weddings; or someone who always feels slightly out of time, as if the rhythm had been explained to others in a meeting for which he didn't receive the Calendar, I still found a refuge in your songs.
First of all because you were talking about a fantastic elegance that is accessible even to the awkward: not that worldliness that asks you to know which knife to use to saber a certain type of champagne bottle, but that, infinitely more accessible, of someone who at least once has felt too much at his own party.
You were the king of that slight melancholy that comes while everyone is laughing and makes you turn towards the front door, as if someone had just left without saying goodbye. Your music issued an edict: you can belong to an evening even without being the protagonist.
The parties never end with the last song, but when the waiter starts stacking the chairs, the DJ rolls up the cables, the most annoying guest is sedated. It's at that moment, when the magic is neatly put back into the boxes, that your song has always seemed to really begin to resonate.
Of course, it also resonates thanks to the crystal of a glass. But it doesn't matter if full or empty, of a sober or alcoholic guest. It matters that, looking through it, someone inevitably thinks of a person who is no longer there.
There are artists who give their name to a theatre, a street or an award. You, dear Peppino, managed to give yours to a moment, with all due respect for the city of Brindisi. Every time someone raises a glass and someone else, inevitably, sings that melody, you start all over again. And you remind us that parties aren't about bottles being opened, but about the people we hoped to empty them with, even if we don't drink a drop.
I have always been struck by the fact that, at the end of this song of yours, the final evocation of champagne is preceded for a moment by a breath of voice, your call to the “Waiter”. It is as if alcohol, however refined, alone, was not enough: it needed the discretion of those who serve it. It would seem like an oxymoron, French bubbles and one of the most humble professions. Instead, you Peppino Di Capri have transformed them into hendiadys: two words which, together, express a single idea: champagne, without someone to pour it, remains just a bottle; and the waiter, without that toast to serve, is not yet the silent guardian of a special moment. Beauty, in your simple music, arises from the meeting between those who celebrate and those who make the celebration possible.
Peppino, Champagne!
