“Musical textures for a description of Paolo F.’s soul” is a new composition dedicated to my friend Paolo Finzi.
Last July Paolo chose to leave of his life.
I composed this piece the day after his death.
I chose to remember him playing my composition in a baptistery, a place where you enter life.
Because the things that Paolo taught me are alive.
The baptistery is one thousand years old: it’s in romanic-byzantine style.
The baptistery is near Venice, in Concordia Sagittaria.
There is only another one like this in the world: in Istanbul.
The baptistery today seems like an asteroid, a fragment fallen on our barbaric world from another era more cultured and more and more careful.
Also Paolo Finzi was just like an asteroid: anarchic, free, different from the world around him. His mind impacted without frills.
Paolo was the enemy of circumlocutions.
Giovanna Famulari played my composition with me on her cello, because she plays it like nobody else and she loves life.
The audio was recorded live in the baptistery.
Paolo was an anarchist.
Fifty years ago exactly he founded the anarchic magazine “A-Rivista Anarchica”. He was the director until the day of his death.
Sadly, the magazine died with him.
He used to say that it was the firs magazine in Italy and then he used to add with a smile: “ in alphabetical order”.
I knew him in person only in the last years of his life.
My unforgivable discretion, guilty, had stopped me to do it before.
He pushed me immediately to write on “A-Rivista Anarchica” and he welcomed my (too few) articles with kindness, he always spurred me to go on, to write more.
Paolo loved music.
Paolo loved Fabrizio De André (the Italian Bob Dylan). He was his friend. His love was respectful, honest, true.
Paolo didn’t sanctify Fabrizio De André.
Paolo loved songs.
I met him for the last time on the stage of Ariston Theatre, in Sanremo: weird place for the last meeting of two anarchic friends.
It was Tenco Award: on that evening the award was given to another friend, the songwriter Alessio Lega.
But actually Paolo and I met before going to the stage that day, in the train station.
We got aff the same train, maybe.
We both walked the long pedestrian tunnel that leads outside the station, without recognizing each other.
Both of us immersed in our own thoughts.
We walked slowly, for a long time.
Both of us with the perception of another man walking that long tunnel, in silence.
Only at the end we looked up and recognize each other.
I remember the joy in his eyes.
No joy anyway could ever lift that veil of sad awareness, that his eyes always communicated and in which I mirrored myself, totally.
Now, Paolo is gone.
The things that he taught us remain, a little bit of his soul remains in all of us..
Also that sad awareness remains.
Thanks to that awareness today I can’t avoid saying that, beside the feel-good slogans, around the corner a world where nothing will be better is waiting for us.
Paolo, at least, will have the grace not to see it.
Michele Gazich
