La Dolce Grita
BEGINNER’S EAR | 5.23.21
With the Mozart-Beethoven debate squared away, I am free to turn my attention to a musical competition of more pressing importance: the Eurovision Song Contest. Last night the coveted trophy went to the Italian rock band Måneskin for their hard-driving “Zitti e buoni,” a song so intoxicatingly gritty it’s had me headbanging in the shower and mentally designing my first tattoo. (I’m thinking Medusa.)
Their victory at the Olympics of Kitsch has thrown Eurovision experts into disarray, not only because received wisdom has it that the prize only ever goes to power ballads or synth-pop anthems. It’s also supposed to be suicide to sing in any language other than English.
But what’s true for opera is true for glam rock: it all sounds better in Italian.
When I was little and thought that no one was listening, I used to pretend-speak Italian, stringing nonsense syllables with juicy consonants into the kind of sing-songy speech that I heard Italian kids use in my international school in Brussels. I remember crouching in a remote corner of our garden practicing rolled r’s according to a method my great-grandmother had used on her singing students. (To roll the r on the word brown, start by slowly saying b’down, then speed up the transition from the b to the d.)
A steady diet of opera followed, as did some targeted practice on a list of insults that an Italian classmate wrote down at my request. All this meant that by the time I finally enrolled in an official language course in Florence during my gap year, I was well ahead of the game.
And speaking it proved as delicious as I had imagined. Musicality is engineered into the Italian language. The rules of orthography prohibit any pile-ups of consonants. Vowels are so pure that they project the voice cleanly. (By comparison, observe what happens to your sound as you say the word brown.) And the difference between long and short syllables is so marked in Italian that a sentence sallies along on a canter rather than, say, the fast trot of Spanish.
And while all this creates that lilting rhythm I was so drawn to as a child, the phonetic traffic rules mean that you can speed the whole thing up without getting into a jam. Hence the fizzy patter arias in comic operas like Giacomo Rossini’s Barber of Seville. There, the famous “Largo al factotum” becomes an advertisement for both the character’s surgical, and the performer’s linguistic dexterity.
Listen to “Zitti e buoni” and about a minute in you’ll find a stream of rapid-fire, almost rapped, text that has more kinship with Rossini than with any English-language rock song.
Speaking of fizz and precision, Italian really has – unlike a certain president – the best words. My personal favorite is sprezzatura, denoting a demonstration of virtuosity that appears effortless and unstudied.
And art and eros are never far apart. I made that discovery in my 20s when I dated an Italian. Sometimes while we made out, he would whisper: mi ispiri. You inspire me. Which also meant: you turn me on.
Which brings us back to Måneskin – named, incidentally, for the Danish word for moonshine. (The band’s bassist is half Danish.) Language as song and song as seduction: that’s a game Italians have played skillfully long before certain moves calcified into kitsch. Add an electric guitar to Claudio Monteverdi – as Nora Fischer and Marnix Dorrestein do in this savvy arrangement of “Vi ricorda” – and 400 years of music history melt away. Translate Bob Dylan into Italian, as the great singer-songwriter Francesco de Gregori has done, and the bard sounds like a prophet.
Truth be told, I have listened to “Zitti e buoni” a ton in the course of writing this, and I’m not entirely sure the song will be etched in the annals of rock ‘n roll. I should probably hold off on that tattoo.
But for now, I find it all very inspiring.
Corinna
STAY TUNED
Watch this space for news on ticket sales for the next series of live outdoor Beginner’s Ear sessions at Caramoor. On three Sunday mornings in August and September these will bring meditation and live music to the center’s beautiful gardens – butterflies included in the price of admission.
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Image: “Medusa” by Carvaggio, inspired by a tweet from the official account of the Uffizi Galleries celebrating the Italian Eurovision victory. Because nothing screams glam rock like a head writhing with snakes.