Andre, Fabrizio de - Ave Maria

for solo voice and guitar / orchestra

year of composition / 1st publication: 1969

		Composer: Fabrizio de Andre (1940-1999) aliases, aka: Country of origin / activity: Italy website: http://www.fondazionedeandre.it/
		Text author: unknown
		Arranger / Editor: N/A

from 1970 CD la Buona Novella

Available documentation:

Score:

My thanks and appreciation to
Alessio Angelo
for sending me this score.

Lyrics:

E te ne vai, Maria, fra l'altra gente
che si raccoglie intorno al tuo passare,
siepe di sguardi che non fanno male
nella stagione di essere madre.

Sai che fra un'ora forse piangerai
poi la tua mano nasconder un sorriso:
gioia e dolore hanno il confine incerto
nella stagione che illumina il viso.

Ave Maria, adesso che sei donna,
ave alle donne come te, Maria,
femmine un giorno per un nuovo amore
povero o ricco, umile o Messia.

Femmine un giorno e poi madri per sempre
nella stagione che stagioni non sente.

MIDI:

MP3: not available

Play / stop MIDI

Recording: CD: la Buona Novella (1970 and later editions)

Video - posted on YouTube:

	All the videos with Fabrizio de Andre himself seem to be restricted, or get taken out of circulation after a while. Search http://www.youtube.com for more.

Internet references, biography information:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXamT4LSSyI

Fabrizio De André (18 February 1940 - 11 January 1999) was an Italian singer-songwriter. Known for his sympathies towards anarchism, libertarianism, and pacifism, he also was a convicted atheist, and his songs often featured marginalized and rebellious people, prostitutes and knaves. Artistically active during almost 40 years, and an author of thirty studio albums, he is renowned for the quality of his lyrics, and often considered a poet. He contributed to the valorization of local italian languages, most notably the ligurian language, and to a lesser extent, sardinian, gallurese and napoletano. Due to his popularity, several institutions throughout Italy had streets, places, parks, schools and public libraries named after him, starting right from his untimely disappearance.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabrizio_De_André

Fabrizio Cristiano De André (18 February 1940 - 11 January 1999) was an Italian singer-songwriter. Known for his sympathies towards anarchism, libertarism and pacifism, his songs often featured marginalized and rebellious people, gypsies, prostitutes and knaves, and attacked the Catholic Church hierarchy hypocrisies.[1] Artistically active for almost 40 years and the author of thirteen studio albums, he is renowned for the quality of his lyrics and often considered a poet. He contributed to the valorization of the languages of Italy, most notably Ligurian and, to a lesser extent, Sardinian, Gallurese and Neapolitan. Following his early death several streets, places, parks, schools and public libraries were named after him.[2][3][4][5][6]

Biography
De André was born in Genoa, welcomed into the world by Gino Marinuzzi's "Country Waltz" on the home gramophone. Twenty-five years later, Fabrizio De André would set his "Waltz for a Love" to Marinuzzi's waltz tune.
When war broke out, the De Andre' family had to seek refuge on a country farm near Revignano (a little town near Asti), in Piemonte. Fabrizio's father, who was an Anti-fascista pursued by the police, joined the partisans. In 1945 the De André family moved back to Genova. Fabrizio went to primary school, first at the Marcellian Sisters' School and, later, at the Cesare Battisti public school. He went on to the Liceo Classico "Cristoforo Colombo"; after his final examination, he enrolled in the Law School at the University of Genoa, though he did not graduate (he gave up when he had only a few exams left). De Andre' first played the violin, then the guitar, and joined a number of local jazz bands (jazz was his "first love").
First recordings
In 1960 De André recorded his first two songs, "Nuvole barocche" ("Baroque Clouds") and "E fu la notte" ("And There Was Night"); in 1962 he married Puny Rignon, a Genoese woman nearly ten years older. That same year the couple had their first and only son, Cristiano, who would follow in his father's footsteps and become a musician and songwriter as well.
In the following years De André wrote a number of songs which made him known to a larger public, soon becoming classic hits: "La guerra di Piero" ("Peter's War"), "La ballata dell'eroe" ("The Hero's Ballad"), "Il testamento di Tito" ("Titus's Will"), "La Ballata del Michè" ("Mike's Ballad"), "Via del Campo" (literally "Field Street", a famous street in Genoa), "La canzone dell'amore perduto" ("Song for Lost Love"), "La città vecchia" ("Old Downtown"), "Carlo Martello ritorna dalla battaglia di Poitiers" ("Charles Martel on His Way Back from Poitiers", written together with actor Paolo Villaggio, one of De André's closest friends), and "La canzone di Marinella" ("Marinella's Song").
Volume 1
Volume I
De André's first LP, Volume 1, was issued shortly after (1968), followed by Tutti morimmo a stento ("We All Died Agonizingly") and Volume 3; both LPs soon reached the top of the Italian hit-parade. The former contained a personal version of "Eroina" ("Heroin") by the poet Riccardo Mannerini, entitled "Cantico dei drogati" ("Canticle of the Junkies").

La buona novella
In 1970 De André wrote La buona novella ("Glad Tidings" - a literal rendition of the etymology of gospel), a concept album based on Christ's life as told in the Apocrypha. The album was very controversial, especially the song "Il testamento di Tito" ("Titus's Will"), in which one of the thieves crucified with Jesus violently refutes the Ten Commandments. He had written a number of songs (like "Preghiera in Gennaio", "Prayer in January", and "Si chiamava Gesù", "His Name Was Jesus") in which he showed a Christian-like open-minded spirit and in the meantime invited the audience in his own delicate way to think about the manipulation of the church.

Non al denaro non all'amore né al cielo
In 1971 he wrote another celebrated concept album, Non al denaro non all'amore né al cielo ("Neither to money, nor to love, nor to Heaven"), based on Edgar Lee Masters's Spoon River Anthology; in an interview the LP was introduced to Fernanda Pivano, the first Italian translator of the "Anthology" and one of Cesare Pavese's most intimate friends. Fabrizio De André's name began to be associated with literature and poetry, and some of his songs found their way into school books.

Storia di un impiegato and Canzoni
In 1973 he wrote his most "political" album, Storia di un impiegato ("Story of an Employee").
The following year, De André issued 'Canzoni_(album)' ("Songs"), a collection of his translations from Georges Brassens, Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan. The album also included a number of his old songs from the 1960s.

Volume 8
In 1975 De André (who in the meantime had divorced his wife Puny and begun a relationship with the folksinger Dori Ghezzi) wrote Volume 8 with another famous Italian singer-songwriter, Francesco De Gregori. With this album, he broke with "tradition" in order to find a new approach to poetry and music. The lyrics show how deep the influence of modern poetry is on De André's work. 1975 marked a real change in De André's life: he began to perform in a series of memorable concerts (after his first performances of the early 1960s, he had always refused to appear in public, except for a couple of TV broadcasts) and planned to move to Sardinia with his new love. For this purpose, he purchased the Agnata homestead near Tempio Pausania in the northern part of the island, where he could devote himself to farming and cattle breeding.
In 1977 the couple had a daughter, Luisa Vittoria (nicknamed "Luvi"). The following year De André issued a new LP, Rimini. Most songs included on this album were written together with Massimo Bubola, a young singer-songwriter from Verona.

Concerts with PFM and kidnapping
1979 was another milestone in De André's life. The year began with a series of distinguished live concerts from which a double LP was compiled; De André was accompanied by one of the most renowned Italian progressive rock bands, Premiata Forneria Marconi (PFM); the albums were released as In Concerto (1979), and In Concerto - Volume 2 (1980). At the end of August, however, De André and Ghezzi were kidnapped for ransom by a gang of bandits in Sardinia and held prisoner in the Alà dei Sardi mountains. The couple were released four months later with a ransom reportedly being paid. As De André stated in some interviews, he was helped by his father to find the money and had to start a tour shortly after the release of the "Indiano" album in order to repay him. When the bandits were apprehended by the police, De André was called as a witness before the Court. He showed compassion for some of his kidnappers, since he had been well treated by his "guardians" and declared his solidarity with them. "They were the real prisoners, not I", he said. He said he understood they were driven by need, but he did not show any compassion for the higher echelon of the group that organized his kidnapping, since they were already rich.

This incident, and the hard life of the Sardinian people, gave him inspiration for his following album, released in 1981. The album is untitled but, due to the image of Native American on the cover, the mass-media called it "The Indian". In De André's poetical vision, the American Indians merge with the poor Sardinian shepherds as an allegory for the marginalization and subjugation of people who are "different". The song "Hotel Supramonte", is dedicated to the kidnapping and to Dori Ghezzi, who was with him during those days. The album also contains one of his most famous songs, "Fiume Sand Creek" ("Sand Creek River"): in De André's unique, allusive way it tells the story of the massacre of defenseless Native Americans by US Army troops on 29 November 1864.

Crêuza de mä
In 1984 he turned to his native Genoese dialect; in collaboration with former PFM member Mauro Pagani he wrote one of his most celebrated albums, Crêuza de mä ("Path to the sea", the term "Crêuza" actually means a narrow road bordered by low walls, typical of Genoa and Liguria in general). The songs are a tribute to the traditional music from the Mediterranean basin. The album was awarded several prizes and was hailed as "the best Italian album of the 1980s".[citation needed] David Byrne named it as one of his favourite albums, and Wim Wenders said that it was this album that introduced him to the music of De André, whom the director names as one of his favourite artists.[7] As Pagani has repeatedly stated, De Andrè wrote the lyrics for the album, while the music was almost entirely Pagani's.

1990s
In 1989 De André married Ghezzi; the following year a new album was issued, Le nuvole ("The Clouds"), which included two more songs in the Genoese dialect, one in the Gallurese dialect of Northern Sardinia ("Monti di Mola") and one in the Neapolitan dialect, the highly ironic "Don Raffaè". A new series of well received live concerts followed, from which a double LP, 1991 Concerti ("Concerts 1991"), was issued. In 1992 he started a new series of live concerts, performing in a number of theatres for the first time.
De André's last original album, Anime salve ("Saved Souls"), was issued in 1996. Written in collaboration with Ivano Fossati, it represents a sort of "spiritual will", and includes songs such as "Khorakhané" (dedicated to the Muslim Roma people), "Disamistade" (a return to his beloved Sardinian themes, which has been translated into English and sung by The Walkabouts) and "Smisurata preghiera" ("An Infinite Prayer"), based on the Colombian writer and storyteller Álvaro Mutis's The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll. De André also sang a Spanish version of this song, Desmedida plegaria.
In 1997, he undertook a new tour of theatre concerts and a new song collection called M'innamoravo di tutto was issued ("I Used to Fall in Love with Everything", a quote from one of his older songs, Coda di Lupo - Wolf's Tail) . The Anime salve concert tour went on up to the late summer of 1998, when De André stopped after the first symptoms of a serious illness, which was later diagnosed as lung cancer.
De André died in Milan on 11 January 1999, at 2:30 am. Two days later, he was buried in his native town, Genoa; the ceremony was attended by a crowd of about 20,000. He is buried in the Monumental Cemetery of Staglieno, in the De André family chapel.
Fabrizio De André and faith[edit]

In the concept album La Buona Novella (1970), De André gives us the ultimate expression of his religious vision, making a clear humanization of the divine. In a concert at the Teatro Brancaccio in Rome in 1998, De André made the following statements about:[8]

« When I wrote La Buona Novella was 1969. It was then, in full students' fight and people less attentive regarded as an anachronism that record [...] And they did not realize that the Good News was meant to be an allegory: a comparison between the instances of the revolt of '68, and instances , spiritually higher but similar in an ethical-social point of view, built by a gentleman, 1969 years before, against the abuses of power, against the abuses of authority, in the name of egalitarianism and universal brotherhood. That man was called Jesus of Nazareth. And I think he was, and remains, the greatest revolutionary of all time. When I wrote the album I didn't want to go in ways difficult to get to me, such as metaphysics or even theology. Then I thought that if God did not exist we should invent it, which is exactly what the human did since he set foot on earth » « Probably the characters in La Buona Novella forgive a bit of sanctification, but I think and I hope particularly for the benefit of their better and more humanization »
The attitude taken by De André against the political use of religion and the Church hierarchy is often sarcastic and highly critical about their contradictory behaviour, such as, for example, in the songs Un Blasfemo, Il Testamento di Tito, La ballata del Miché and the last verses of Bocca di Rosa.[9]
« I feel myself religious, and my religion is to feel part of a whole, in a chain that includes all creation and so to respect all elements, including plants and minerals, because, in my opinion, the balance is exactly given from the well-being in our surroundings. My religion does not seek the principle, you want to call it creator, regulator or chaos makes no difference. But I think that everything around us has its own logic and this is a thought to which I turn when I'm in difficulty, perhaps giving the names I've learned as a child, maybe because I lack the imagination to find out other ones »

After the kidnapping, the religious vision of De Andr had a new development;
« During the abduction helped me the faith in men, just where there wasn't faith in God. I have always said that God is a human invention, something utilitarian, a patch on the fragility ... But, however, with the kidnapping something has changed. I've not changed my mind, but it is certain that today swearing at least embarrasses me. »[10]

Page last modified: August 17, 2013