Rosa Balistreri, voice, ancient and young heart of his land.
A twenty years after his death, since its inception nearly fifty, Rosa Balistreri remains indispensable item of Sicily. As an undercurrent of lava across the entire island and then suddenly re-emerge hundreds of miles away from the source, his memory, his hand through and vivify the popular music of this island. His small body of women, and through that resonates from his land to give it voice, real, deep, very human, full of passion and ability to use a layered language over the centuries. Rosa is ancient voice, dark, fiery Sicilian.
a Sicily that imprisoned, imprison and, like a sea without fish, "poor" - the poor, the innocent, the last, the drowned - whose fate in the end is always the same: go to fund. "I did evenings for returning emigrants - says Balistreri -. The squares were filled: I was happy to sing for them. They were songs of protest, songs of sulfur miners of prisoners, people exploited and humiliated. I was a little like them. " Rosa scream that invaded his personal story of pain and will reread the scars and wounds, even deep and fierce, as if the wounds and the entire history of an island, its. "His voice seemed to come out from the parched earth of Sicily" she says Ignazio Buttitta.
"Rose is a drama, a novel, a film without an author ..."
The encounter with the pain, to tell this his life is strong, scarnificante. As in a Greek tragedy, part of his family will be overwhelmed by a wave long, dark, bloody. There's a disc of 1967, the only place where Rosa Balistreri become storytellers. In the cover photo of the billboard behind it describes the terrible story of "an unhappy marriage": that of his sister Mary killed her husband and their father's suicide from the pain. Dressed in black, Balistreri sing this ballad in the streets of Florence. It will be you, Rosa-witness and victim-survivor, that is intended to describe this tragedy that is also his.
"You want to know about my life? - Rosa said in an interview in 1973 - You have to understand is this: where does a woman like me, born in a small town hungry, forced to go to the streets to pick up orange peels to eat or go to begging not only for me but also for others (...) The courage that I had, and I still have, and are happy to have that courage, even if I suffer, even if it costs me, and if I pay him bitterly, because my life has been paid bitterly. But I'm so happy, because the suffering may be able to understand many things, it's better than going to school, look. One life touches it with his hands. (...) My pain, the pain of my land, exploitation, poverty on the other hand ... I come from this, I'm this, I come from all those wounds. I am a deep wound in Sicily, which is also mine. " Like every hero, its origin is unknown to all the poor, violence, imprisonment, family tragedies.
Lei è “un dramma, un romanzo, un film senza autore, un personaggio che cammina su un filo di cotone. Un cuore giovane per la Sicilia di Vittorini e Quasimodo, un cuore giovane per la Sicilia di Guttuso e Sciascia” dice Buttitta di Rosa nel 1984.
“Rosa è sempre attuale?”
“Rosa è sempre attuale?” chiede un giornalista alla Balistreri in quella che è forse la sua ultima intervista televisiva. In quel 1990, quando Rosa morì, la musica popolare, il “folk”, dopo che negli anni settanta era diventato genere di moda, quasi non lo si ascoltava più. Nel 1964 Rosa Balistreri è honored along with Joan Daffini festival of folk songs of Salerno will be the first in a series of awards. Follow the theater with Dario For, TV shows, the toured abroad, recitals in theaters alongside international artists like Amalia Rodrigues, Odetta, Maria Bethania, Vinicius De Moraes. But this is not enough: in the late eighties his person - what it represented - and his voice - for what he was singing - had become difficult to hear. The request of the journalist on current Balistreri glimpse of the beginnings, though already far advanced, change, mutation anthropology - as he would call Pasolini - of an entire nation and that, under the lash of the media, will increase even more in years to come. Broke into cries too strong, instupidenti against which became increasingly difficult to be heard. Years were those where slavery was known how to pass off as a new lifestyle. Intuits, in this question, the reasons for a defeat that still lasts.
"I am not a singer to those who need slit skirt - the Balistreri responds to the reporter that did this provocative question -. I'm not even a singer, I am a storyteller and a cuntastorie. I learned from the people, I immediately all this love. Rosa Balistreri you will understand when I'm dead. But as long as I live, ever. Why protest, and I have reason to protest. " "Triggering" Rosa Balistreri is like ripping the bandage from a wound that bleeds.
The Legacy of Rosa
"The best Sicilian tradition of folk song in her, in his acute sensitivity increased by a life of toil and bitterness, and disturbing family drama that marked the its existence. (...) It 'only natural then that the repertoire of Rosa Balistreri the projection of feelings excavated in pain and anger. The songs are poignant emigrants, those vibrant sulfur miners and peasants, the distress of the prisoners. And gentle lullabies that denounce poverty and frustrated hopes, and impetuous protest, and prayers that sound like curses, curses of those who live in the small circle of old injustices. " Orazio Barrese writes on the liner notes of a disk of Balistreri. We should listen, Rosa, when she sings an old lullaby, "ancestor", one of his finest performances, as delicate as a jasmine flower newborn. It 's a little Balistreri you know, that's where this song is not hard to imagine and voice that shapes, but one that is in one of his most important works, which means even more beautiful: "We are prisoners in hell," a collection of songs from the prison that still shines as one of its interpretations powerful and intense. "The anger I sang, but also the pleasure, the lullabies, love songs," says the self Balistreri.
In his songs, often, the Balistreri speaks of himself being able to transform his personal history in poetry and giving musical expression to their feelings. As in any poetic story that thanks to its universality is able to become archetypal collective its spectacle, its abuse, manages to transmute into its opposite and complementary: Myths and sterile performance. Rosa Balistreri, thus, has also been a feeling, a slogan, a stereotype, a label.
In the twenty years since his death in so many have ventured in the footsteps of Balistreri. Films in production, books, tributes, concerts, CDs, entire directories. Many, perhaps too many, it is irresponsible on what for them was just a name to be recycled, turning it into a brand and being so stuck like flies on flypaper of folklore. About some folk singers, so the Balistreri In an interview with Kris Mancuso, 1973: "The speech, the flame that we have inside is different and you can not change, when it is born and grows in a way." details of the differences, even with the great performers with whom he was often compared, Rosa continues: "I do, I also argued with Amalia Rodrigues, when he says that the world can not change it with songs. And that the world is destiny. It is not true. The farmer, who is dying of hunger is not destiny, the farmers are starving because 'it takes all things u Patruno him, and that is not destiny. I'll tell you to do that at last I said Rodrigues' you my Figs with all the respect that I, for me you know who you are? Neither fish nor fowl. " Rose could sing, and knew what he was singing.
Nature and / or Culture
E 'nature, the voice of Balistreri, and any modern reading of "culture" may be just a dim memory of the original power. Perhaps this' misunderstanding between "nature" and "culture" is the distance that separates Rosa Balistreri by almost all of its interpreters. The "nature" of Balistreri may be reproduced by the "culture", its vocations seance, its distorting mirrors, by looking at the finger instead of the moon.
La sua è una voce di coltello dove la violenza del timbro, l’asprezza, il disprezzo con il quale canta certe parole – nobili, padroni, mafiosi, preti – nel ricordo vivo che contengono diventano terribili; e musica. Cosa che fece Rosa quella notte a Gibellina, quando cantò “Avò”:
“Ho fatto tre tragedie di Carmelo Isgrò, a Ghibellina – racconta Rosa - dove ci sono i morti “arrivucati” (sotterrati) sotto le macerie. Noi a recitare sopra e sotto c’erano i morti. ‘N mezzu i morti, non tra i ruderi. ‘Nmezzu i morti arrivucati dal terremoto. Mentre recitavo mi veniva la pelle Goose, 'u friddu I was, and it was August. And when I sang Amuri, Amuri miu you vogliu goods (AVO), the singing of the dead under my feet. The singing voice free, without guitar, screaming singing it (...) The screaming, his chest that I would burst. " "What does not learn to swim ever by a treaty of swimming. What it means to swim only teaches us the plunge into the river, "said Martin Heidegger.
E 'a land cleared of stones, the voice and the memory of Rosa Balistreri. A land strong, hard, cleared of stones from their bare hands, with nothing on but his passion, and every stone wall that must be able to keep and make fruitful the land dark, bitter, fragrant. A land where they can sink their roots to feed, fertilize, take nourishment and life. And push their roots ever deeper to throw up, and music. That music, in other words, the more tied to the notion sometimes generic, a little 'nebula, tradition, folklore, ethnic, folk, in short, to Sicily. Idea synthesized in some people who buy symbol, by dint of being exhibited as "representation" of nature, the characteristics of trees and rivers inhabited by nymphs: mythic images, so deep in nature to embody it. For the deep heart of Sicily, Rosa is one of these shared symbols, his voice a sign in which recognize, his life a possibility of rebellion of slaves to their fate.
