The Tenco effect. Suicide, San Remo, and the social construction of the canzone d'autore

Abstract

Canzone d'autore is an indigenous expression that has no precise equivalent in other languages. Its social use identifies a genre of popular song that presuppose the existence of an ‘autore’ taken in its most vigorous sense, meaning a ‘creator’, an ‘artist’– but how did this claim to artistry originate? How did it insinuate itself into the world of song, a genre that by definition belongs to the realm of what is traditionally called in Italian ‘musica leggera,’ with unmistakably pejorative connotations? In this essay, I will put forward a sociological interpretation of the genesis of the canzone d'autore, using as a strategic conceptual device the idea of cultural trauma. The traumatic event that I propose to explore, making use of this concept and its analytical machinery, is the suicide of the singer-songwriter Luigi Tenco during the seventeenth San Remo ‘Festival della Canzone’ (‘song festival’) – that is the best-known, most controversial, and most influential single event in the field of Italian ‘musica leggera’, an annual event regularly attended every year – via radio, television, or audience participation – by millions of Italians. Through a reconstruction of that suicide and above all of the public and dramatic events that followed in response to it, the paper examines the social process that transformed an individual tragedy into a collective, social drama, a process that not only produced a new musical classification, but also a new cultural and aesthetic category.

Keywords:

• Popular music
• suicide
• cultural trauma
• cultural entrepreneurship
• cultural consecration
• collective memory

Acknowledgement

Thanks to Antonella Bilotto and Tuccio Santoro for their help in the collecting of sources, and to Jeff Alexander, Paolo Capuzzo, Gary Alan Fine, Luca Marconi and Roberta Sassatelli, for their reading and helpful suggestions.

Notes

1 Already by the end of the 1950s, about eighteen million Italians, according to the RAI's statistical branch, listened to the festival by radio or watched the festival on television (see Berti et al.1960: 4).

2 Concerning the Italian term, see below. Its customary translation into English as ‘singer – songwriter’ fails to capture the symbolic value that it has acquired in Italian culture, linked to the author mystic.

3 Concerning the foundation and development of the Club Tenco, see also Santoro (2000) and Santoro and Solaroli (2006).

4 The story of Tenco's death has been told countless times by journalists, reporters, writers, and music critics, and it forms part of its own representation as a (more or less) traumatic event. The most detailed reconstruction of the event (though not necessarily the most ‘objective’ one) was done by Tenco's most important biographer: Fegatelli Colonna (2002); and see also Fegatelli (1982, 1986).

5 Dayan and Katz (1992) use the term ‘media events’ to describe those great media ceremonials, broadcast live, usually organized well ahead of time by public institutions with which the mass media cooperate, and which break up the flow of everyday life, catalyzing upon themselves the attention of a mass audience, in order to celebrate collective solidarity and order – even if they do not necessarily, as the two authors instead tend to suggest, also celebrate consensus (for this distinction, see Kertzer 1988). It is no accident that, beginning in 1952, the rules of the festival call for the participation of representatives of the radio audience, first, and the television audience, later, giving a clearly ‘democratic’ and ‘popular’ meaning to the event.

6 The most significant source – though admittedly and basically journalistic in nature – on the history of the Festival of San Remo is still Borgna (1986, 1998). Useful information on technical aspects of the festival can be found in Aragozzini (1990).

7 Concerning the crucial importance of radio for the world of the Italian canzone in the 1950s, see Berti et al. (1960), Buonassisi (1960), and Ionio Prevignano-Rapetti (1962).

8 Concerning the festival as a ‘not secondary tile in the “hegemonic apparatus” of the Christian Democrat power structure’, see Borgna (1980: 29).

9 The results of the voting placed Ciao amore ciao as fourth from last, with just 38 votes out of about 900.

10 Concerning the influence of this recording label on the San Remo competition in the 1950s, and its subsequent decline, see the description offered by Piero Vivarelli, in Borgna (1980: 217 – 218).

11 Years afterward, the police officer who made these decisions admitted that behind this ‘macabre ballet’, there was both pressure brought to bear by Zatterin, ‘a powerful figure in the RAI’ to cover up the case, and the actual shortcomings, both organizational and financial, of the local police department. See E. Pugnaletto, ‘La Rai ci ordinò: “Fate sparire il corpo di Tenco”’, Oggi, 10 March 2004.

12 For a sociological reconstruction of Tenco's artistic biography in the structural context of Italian musical and cultural life in the 1950s and 1960s, I would refer the reader to Santoro (2006).

13 The term was coined in 1960, as a contraction of cantante (singer) and autore (author), by two Italian recording executives, Ennio Melis and Vincenzo Micocci, at the time artistic directors of RCA Italy, the recording label in whose catalogue the new term first appeared in 1960, describing a number of new artists who had also written songs that were easy to listen to as well as danceable, and definitely more in keeping with the traditional ‘leggera’ (or light) popular music production than with what would later be described as the ‘canzone d'autore’ (see Santoro 2000; Fabbri 2005: 145). A significant contribution to the term's popularity came – a short while after its invention – with the television program that bore the same name –Il Cantautore– first broadcast in October 1961 by RAI's Channel One: see Bolla and Cardini (1997: 206).

14 See Luzzatto Fegiz (1976: 8 – 9). As far as I know, Luzzatto Fegiz's book was the first volume of music criticism published in Italy devoted to an individual singer.

15 The first complete critical edition of the lyrics, with discography, edited by Enrico De Angelis, came out in 2002: see Tenco (2002). Concerning De Angelis and the historic role he played in Tenco's posthumous career, see below.

16 Luigi Tenco sold, in 1966, according to official figures provided by his recording label, 33,000 albums and 242,000 45 rpm singles. That same year, Morandi and Pavone sold, respectively, 108,000 albums and 5 million singles, and 189,000 albums and 4.5 million singles (see Fegatelli 1982: 77).

17 Tenco's explicit models were such enormously popular figures in Italy, even in those years, as Bob Dylan and Barry McGuire, who ‘when he sold a million copies of Eve of Destruction did something that he could not have done if he had not belonged to a [certain] type of society’. The transcription of the discussion from which I am quoting first appeared in Cronaca, no. 7, 16 February 1967. The text also appears in Brancatella (1981: 23 – 31) and in Fegatelli Colonna (2002: 169 – 76).

18 The Zanzara was a student newspaper at the Parini high school, an elite center-city school with a student newspaper whose name, ‘the Mosquito’, is certainly evocative of the English term ‘gadfly’. The Zanzara published a series of articles about sex and was promptly censored (translator's note).

19 About them Tenco had often spoken, at times in a provocative way, stating that he himself was a ‘capellone’ or ‘long-hair’ (though he hardly looked like one), at other times to establish his distance from a phenomenon that might have reduced to purely aesthetic terms ideals for political change that were actually much more radical and deep rooted.

20 Concerning the explosion of the youth issue in Italy during those years, see Piccone Stella (1993). For a well-documented picture of these aspects of Italian social and cultural life, see now Crainz (2003: 187, and following).

21 What follows is not a thorough analysis of the media coverage of the event (following the example, for instance, of Mazzarella 1995). My goal here was only to identify in an exploratory manner – by examining a sampling (not random) of newspapers and magazines – the chief frames used to give a meaning to the suicide.

22 U. Zatterin, ‘Protesta calibro 7,65’, Radiocorriere TV, no. 5, February 1967: 28.

23 The parliamentary questions were directed to the minsters of the Interior and of Entertainment (Spettacolo) by the members of parliament Hon. Giovanni D'Antonio, a Christian Democrat, and Hon. Agostino Greggi, also a Christian Democrat who later switched party affiliation to the MSI, in April 1967. The description of Tenco's suicide as a ‘manifestation of weakness’ was offered, in a response, by the undersecretary for Telecommunications, also a Christian Democrat, the Hon. Mazza. See Luzzato Fegiz (1976: 75 – 77).

24 Il Corriere della Sera, Saturday 28 January 1967: 7. The article is indicative of the view that conservative public opinion held of the world of the Italian ‘canzone’ including the cantautori: ‘They are little poets, whose spirit is so small that it fails even to fog a mirror, but they put all the seriousness and commitment into their work that a real poet does, little Lorcas, little Préverts, creating thrills and heartbeats and notes that do not last even a whole winter, a whole summer, but who will remind them of their limitations, who will summon them back to reality and modesty? Perhaps Luigi Tenco was aiming much higher, he may not have been interested so much in the money as in a success that could usher him into the little world of the canzone and thus reassure him of his chance at far more ambitious successes in larger fields.’

25 I quote from Brancatella (1981: 48 – 49). A comparable frame, based on the rhetorical figure of the weak youth, is found in Rome's newspaper Il Messaggero: ‘A cruel machine that exalts and overwhelms, that demands a firm heart and a cold mind. This unassuming cantautore had neither one nor the other, and he allowed himself to be chewed up’ (I take this quote from a review article in La Voce Repubblicana, 29 January 1967: 4).

26 This theme of the depoliticization of the potentially subversive meanings of youth music – especially rock – is one that has been developed, for the German context, by Poiger (2000), who describes its spread both in West and East Germany after World War II, among other things emphasizing the decisive role played by liberal sociology and, specifically by Helmut Schelsky.

27 G. Pedercini, ‘[Editorial]’, L'Avanti!, 28 January 1967: 1.

28 Here is the emblematic headline of the article about Tenco, on the front page: Behind the tragedy of San Remo, the merciless world of the recording business. Luigi Tenco killed himself, but the festival continues. The young singer's struggle to gain acceptance for an engaged version of pop music in the face of a spreading tide of conformity and business interests. See L'Unità, 28 January 1967: 1.

29 The Dialectic of Enlightenment by Horkheimer and Adorno had just been translated into Italian and published as La Dialettica dell'illuminismo by Einaudi; the same publisher was preparing to issue the Italian edition of Herbert Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man which, as is commonly known, identified popular music as a tool of liberation.

30 S. Saviane, ‘La morte a 45 giri’, L'Espresso, no. 6, 5 February 1967: 12.

31 ‘Of course, no one kills himself over a song. But someone might kill himself over everything that is contained within that song … : the great domestic emigration, the abandonment of the countryside, the growing pace of urbanization and the resulting loss of roots’, with an explicit reference to the ‘verses’ of Tenco's canzone: E. Forcella, ‘L'ultima canzone e la logica del meccanismo’, Il Giorno, 28 February 1967: 1.

32 Ibid.

33 It is no accident that this third frame was used, a few months later, in what was at the time one of the venues by definition of Italian national mass culture, the widely read Selezione dal Readers' Digest, published in Italy by Mondadori, and which in the 1968 annual edition did not hesitate to interpret Tenco's suicide as a ‘sign of protest against a “system” that had wounded him, and which he refused to accept’. See Informatutto 1968: 190, entry‘Luigi Tenco’. This is a quote that would be printed in large type on the first page of the book, which that same year, the first Club Tenco, founded in Venice just a few weeks after the suicide, would dedicate to the ‘cantautore suicida’, in memoriam (Various Authors, 1968).

34 Ironically, Tenco's tragic death won him that very same popular success for which he had so yearned: in the month that followed, Ciao amore ciao sold 300,000 copies, rising to number 5 in the national hit list. The album in which the song appeared did even better, hitting number 3 in the month of February. In October, a new album, an anthology, released by his previous record label, Ricordi, rose to third place in the national ranking, and stayed in the top twenty for four months (Luzzato Fegiz 1976: 69).

35 Alexander (2003), too, identifies the generation as one of the most important matrices in the formation of the carrier groups that construct a cultural trauma.

36 To offer a single example, the cultural authority of Daniele Ionio, a professional music critic and the author of many books about the Italian canzone and the recording industry (see Prevignano-Rapetti 1962; Ionio 1969) was greater – at least in the musical and cultural fields in question – than that of Zatterin, a sports, television, and political journalist, whose career had notoriously been helped by his ties with the governing party.

37 S. Quasimodo, ‘Luigi Tenco ha voluto colpire a sangue il sonno mentale dell'italiano medio’, Tempo, no. 7, 14 February 1967 (in the column, ‘Colloqui con Quasimodo’).

38 ‘[Tenco] belonged to the family of poets who know the value, the weight, and the responsibility of words, and who live upon words and try to live in a rapport of understanding and love with other men … . And as for poets, at least in my name, for I am one of their number, I can tell you that Tenco's death is not a finished event, but something that we must reopen every day as an indictment of the ‘usual unknown malefactors’ who are in power, in charge of the much acclaimed national cowardice.’ See A. Gatto, ‘Tenco accusa i “soliti ignoti”’, Vie Nuove, no. 7, 16 February 1967: 28. The weekly was at that time published directly by the Italian Communist Party (PCI).

39 The circulation of the two weeklies, in fact, was no more than 300,000 copies: but here it was more the quality of the readership than their numbers, we presume, that counted.

40 ‘Most of them are students and young people between the ages of 17 and 25, explain the people at the Club [Tenco], in Venice, some twenty or so young people, an assortment of office workers, students, and shopgirls … plus two older ladies, both very active, a teacher and a former newspaper editor-in-chief’– those are the words of Bernieri (1978: I, 31), who traces the mythologization of Tenco to the need for guidance so typical not only of adolescents but also of students with low cultural capital (attending vocational institutes).

41 Concerning the continuity between the Venetian Club Tenco and the San Remo Club Tenco, suffice it to mention that the current director is none other than Enrico De Angelis whose byline, as a young journalist, had appeared on the introductory essay to the book of poetry, and who worked over the years that followed as a tireless reputational entrepreneur on behalf of Tenco.

42 I take the quote from Mollica and Sacchi (1982: 9). The degree to which the use of Tenco's name might still have appeared to be unseemly or incomprehensible emerges from the words with which a local journalist commented upon a news report about one of the association's first initiatives: ‘What I cannot understand is why they chose to call this the ‘Club Luigi Tenco’. Tenco was a good singer, a fine songwriter, but he never did anything deserving of an association bearing his name. Moreover, he was a coward who killed himself, and apparently for the most trivial of reasons’ (La Riviera dei Fiori, 7 April 1973).

43 The general debate on the value of the canzone d'autore made reference to the auteur theory, drawing upon its symbolic resources. In this context, the critics of the canzone d'autore borrowed or evoked – more or less directly – motifs that had already been used extensively in the field of cinema, where auteur theory– originally in France, the birthplace of the chanson– notoriously enjoys broad international popularity, offering a simple and straightforward approach to appreciation of the artistic merits of movies (see Kapsis 1989; Allen and Lincoln 2004). Motifs that were already, at the end of the 1960s, being used by the more culturally grounded rock critics in the English-speaking world (see Regev 1994).