Fabrizio De André Italian Singer Born 1940 in Genoa

Early life

Fabrizio De André was born on 18 February 1940 in Genoa, in the Pegli district, into a well-off family. He began playing guitar at fourteen, and records of the French singer Georges Brassens that his father gave him shaped his earliest songs. Brassens also left him with a libertarian and pacifist outlook that ran through his later writing. De André studied at the University of Genoa, and in February 1961, while still a student, he performed two songs at a theatre in the city. They became his first single later that year.

Career

In his early recordings De André mixed literary themes with traditional and medieval song forms, casting himself as a modern storyteller who wrote about outsiders and antiheroes. Songs such as "La ballata del Miché" and the anti-war "La guerra di Piero" belong to this period, as do songs about Genoa such as "La città vecchia" and "Via del Campo". His first commercial success was "La canzone di Marinella" in 1967, after the singer Mina performed it on television. That year he released the album Volume 1, and he refused throughout his career to enter song competitions such as the Sanremo Festival.

Several of his albums were built around a single idea. Tutti morimmo a stento (1968) was a concept album with orchestral arrangements. La buona novella (1970) drew on the apocryphal gospels, Non al denaro non all'amore né al cielo (1971) on Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology, and Storia di un impiegato (1973) on the protests of those years. Canzoni (1974) collected re-recordings alongside his Italian versions of songs by Brassens, Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan. Volume 8 (1975) was a collaboration with Francesco De Gregori. De André had avoided live performance because he thought of himself more as a writer than a performer, but he made his concert debut in 1975 at La Bussola in Viareggio. Around the same time he moved from Genoa to Sardinia. In 1978 he released Rimini with Massimo Bubola, and from December 1978 to January 1979 he toured with the progressive rock band Premiata Forneria Marconi, which produced two live albums.

In August 1979 De André and Dori Ghezzi were kidnapped in Sardinia and were held until December. The track "Hotel Supramonte", from his untitled 1981 album known as L'Indiano, was inspired by that experience. In 1984 he and Mauro Pagani made Crêuza de mä, which was sung entirely in Genoese and drew on Mediterranean musical traditions. David Byrne later named it among the most important releases of the decade. He followed it with Le nuvole in 1990, again with Pagani, whose second half is sung in Sardinian, Genoese and Neapolitan. His last studio album, Anime salve (1996), was made with Ivano Fossati and explores solitude. In the same year he co-wrote his only novel, Un destino ridicolo, with Alessandro Gennari. In 1997 and 1998 he undertook the longest tour of his career. He died in Milan on 11 January 1999, and a public funeral was held two days later in Genoa.

Posthumous releases have continued. They include Mediterraneo (2001), the live collections released in 2012, and the albums ...Era solo Fabrizio in 2017.

Recognition

De André won the Targa Tenco prize more than once. One win came in 1988 for "Questi posti davanti al mare", which he sang with De Gregori and Fossati on Fossati's album, and another for "Prinçesa" as song of the year. The closing track of Anime salve, "Smisurata preghiera", received the Lunezia Prize. Because of the lasting impact of his songs in Italy, many streets, squares and schools there carry his name.

Personal life

De André married Enrica Rignon in 1962, and their son Cristiano De André, also a musician, was born that year. In 1989 he married Dori Ghezzi. He had two children in total.