Non al denaro non all'amore né al cielo

Non al denaro non all'amore né al cielo
Studio album by Fabrizio De André
Released	1971
Recorded	1971
Genre	Italian singer-songwriters
Length	31:15
Label	Produttori Associati; Ricordi; BMG
Producer	Roberto Dané; Sergio Bardotti
Fabrizio De André chronology

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Non al denaro non all'amore né al cielo (Neither to money, nor to love, nor to Heaven) is an album released by Fabrizio De André. It was issued in 1971 by Produttori Associati and reissued several times by Ricordi and BMG. It is a concept album based on the Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters. The co-author of the music is composer Nicola Piovani, who later won an Academy Award for his soundtrack for Roberto Benigni's Life is beautiful. The title itself is a citation from the first poem in the Spoon River Anthology, The Hill:

Drinking, rioting, thinking neither of wife nor kin,

Nor gold, nor love, nor heaven?

Live performances and 2005 remake

Unusually for a De André album, the whole work was never performed live by its author, the only song regularly featured in his live sets being the fast, country-flavoured "Un giudice". In an interview excerpt included within the sixth DVD ("Poesia in forma di canzone" - Poetry as songs) of the 2011 eight-disc documentary series Dentro Faber (i.e. Inside Faber, about his life and works), De André stated that most of the songs on the album were either too poetical, something which the singer-songwriter felt would not translate well in a live context, or too musically complex to play live; he cited "Un ottico" as an example of the latter, as that song features four sections in different tempos and includes overlapping vocals (originally recorded by De André singing the same lines twice, with a heavy delay effect), displaying a progressive rock influence.

In 2005, the entire album was faithfully remade by singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Morgan, who also re-arranged the various excerpts of classical music (particularly from Vivaldi's Four Seasons) featured on the original album. Soon after the release of his version on CD, Morgan successfully toured Italy and Europe with it.

Track listing

All lyrics by De André and Giuseppe Bentivoglio, based on poems by Edgar Lee Masters (see below); all music by De André and Nicola Piovani.

"La collina" (The Hill) (4:03)
"Un matto (dietro ogni scemo c'è un villaggio)" (A Madman) (2:35)
"Un giudice" (A Judge) (2:55)
"Un blasfemo (dietro ogni blasfemo c'è un giardino incantato)" (A Blasphemer) (2:59)
"Un malato di cuore" (A Sufferer of Heart) (4:18)
"Un medico" (A Doctor) (2:39)
"Un chimico" (A Chemist) (3:00)
"Un ottico" (An Optician) (4:35)
"Il suonatore Jones" (Fiddler Jones) (4:25)

The songs

All songs are based on poetess Fernanda Pivano's first-ever italian translations of poems from the Spoon River Anthology, further rewritten by De André with lyricist/writer Giuseppe Bentivoglio. Notably, Edgar Lee Masters's characters are all named, while De André's are not ("A Madman", "A Judge", "A Blasphemer" etc.).

"La collina" is based on "The Hill", listing various people who are buried in the imaginary Spoon River churchyard and stating that "All are sleeping on the Hill". This song is the only one in the album which mentions people's names (which, however, are never used in the following songs).
"Un matto" is based on "Frank Drummer", in which a man memorizes the Encyclopædia Britannica and is considered crazy by the people of Spoon River.
"Un Giudice" is based on Selah Lively, the story of a midget who studies law and becomes a judge to get revenge on the people who made fun of him all his life. De André uses deliberately vulgar, scurrilous language, quite far from Masters's restrained style, to underline people's nastiness toward the protagonist.
"Un blasfemo" is based on "Wendell P. Bloyd", a non-believer who practices blasphemy and keeps on not believing even when, after his death, he is welcomed into the Garden of Eden. De André also uses the Bibilcal imagery as metaphors for various forms of power in 1970s Italy, such as political power and police power.
"Un malato di cuore" is based on "Francis Turner", in which a man dies of a heart attack while giving his first kiss. The quasi-classical arrangement of the song features melodic wordless lines sung by Edda Dell'Orso and, at the end, an excerpt from the second movement (Largo) of Antonio Vivaldi's "Winter", from The Four Seasons.
"Un medico" is based on "Dr. Siegfried Iseman", the story of a doctor who wants to cure poor people without receiving payment. At the end of the song, the doctor is deemed a trickster and imprisoned for having sold flower extracts as an elixir of life.
"Un chimico" is based on "Trainor, the Druggist", in which an unmarried chemist, who doesn't understand romantic relationships but instead loves chemical elements, dies while executing an experiment. The music for this song was stated by De André to be an adaption of an English folk tune.
"Un ottico" is based on "Dippold the Optician", the story of an optician who, after his passing, only wants to create special glasses which project strange visions. De André's "updated" description of him, through the words of his imaginary "customers", makes him similar to a Timothy Leary-like figure - a promoter of LSD and mind-expanding hallucinogenic drugs. The highly complex, multi-part musical arrangement features another excerpt from Vivaldi's "Winter", this time from its first movement (Allegro), played on electric guitar.
"Il suonatore Jones" is based on "Fiddler Jones". De André identifies himself with the itinerant musician who plays without asking or hoping for any kinds of rewards, but just out of pure joy in playing. In the final verse of his lyrics, the musician's instrument was changed from a fiddle into a flute, for metrical reasons. Edda Dell'Orso is featured again here, singing a wordless coda.

Cover artwork

The artwork for the original album, created by advertising designer Deanna Galletto, is a drawing of an orange box floating in a blue sky with smoke-like clouds. The box, whose front door is half-open on the main cover, is revealed on the inner gatefold to "contain" six characters, three males and three females, drawn on squared paper and unrelated to the characters in the songs, walking in an idealized Eden setting. The outer jacket does not include lyrics (which are instead featured on the inner sleeve), but contains an interview with De André conducted by Fernanda Pivano. The inner sleeve, along with the lyrics, also includes an imaginary interview with Edgar Lee Masters, compiled by Pivano from various writings by the American author.

The artwork for Morgan's 2005 remake, created by the design company MoltiMedia.it with contributions from Morgan himself, and referred to by the musician, in the visual (DVD) section of the album's DualDisc release, as "a deferential parody", is a photo of an actual orange wooden box, glued to the right side of an old wall in a house; the wall is painted in a sky-blue colour, with several areas of paint having fallen off to reveal a grayish tint, and puffs of white smoke rise up from below. Similarly to the original cover, the front door of the box is half-open, and another photo on the CD tray reveals the box to be a small closet full of old-fashioned medicine bottles; each bottle is labeled with a pictorial rendition of a song title (and, on three bottles, the lyrics to the song), although not all labels are fully visible. The back cover is a photo of Morgan standing in a field, in the distance and with his back to the camera, seen through a two-pane window in the same sky-blue/gray old wall on the front cover, and implied to be part of the same house; Morgan is seen through the pane on the right, while the one on the left frames a bare tree.

External links

(in Italian) Spoon River Anthology and Fabrizio De André

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