La Pantera di Goro now rests in peace, after a happy and often solitary battle that lasted sixty years in the Italian cultural and record savannah. Maria Ilva Biolcati was born in the lower Po valley in 1939, a few months after the start of the war; from that plain he immediately looked beyond the Alps (the France of variété and the Germany of cabaret) and across the ocean (jazz, fado and tango). She was the first cultured and popular “singer” of the postwar period. On the shelves of music shopping, his voice has for decades been a citizen of classical music, song, world music.
The intuition of the song-theater
Milva is a crasis in the name and in the work, her voice expresses the vocation of the Italian song to tell those from all over the world. His great invention, the miracle he performed, is the intuition of the song-theater (before the birth of the theater-song), in which it is the body, not just the voice, that interprets that story set to music of which it is made a song.
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The first recording – the first disruptive success – fishing from the repertoire of the great myth that will never abandon, Edith Piaf: it is the Italian version of “Milord”, written by pianist Marguerite Monnot on a text by Georges Moustaki. The French thank them, however, objecting; they throw it on rital folklore, but in reality they fear it: “Milva comes to us from Italy. Who does it look like? Not to Piaf, in any case. Rather in Dalida. Same kind of girl, legs high and well placed. She wants to be red and dresses like a dovecote. One thinks, in seeing it, that one does not know which cross between Simone Simon and Mussolini ”. The curious review appears in Le Monde in March 1962 on the occasion of the historic Milva concert at the Olympia in Paris and evokes the alienating and exotic effect that our Panther aroused in the French public.
An agile and powerful Panther
In fact, if Piaf was a nightingale (with a bloody uvula), Milva was truly a Panther, agile and powerful in her voice, in her lively and steady gaze and in her gestures. Which were by no means ancillary to singing, but a fundamental part of each of his performances. Excluding Strehler (Brecht’s poems and songs) and Grassi (“the Songs of freedom”), among the immortal interpretations of Milva, there is certainly the folk experience with Fausto Amodei of the “Cantacronache”, an attempt to making the song a popular instrument to tell the world and society, while at the same time recovering the musical codes of the thousand traditions of the Peninsula, from the Neapolitan song, to the tarantella, to the songs of the mondine. In this sense, Milva was (also) the first singer of our Folk Revival.
Record attendance in Sanremo
Anyone wishing to recover these and other experiences will easily find precious things such as “Canzoni del tabarin” and “Songs from the courtyard”. Since the 70s Milva la Rossa has contributed and brought to the world the songs of Luigi Tenco, Fabrizio De André, Franco Battiato, Enzo Jannacci and Paolo Conte, showing a sensitivity towards every language of “research”, on any level and at any cost. His is also the record attendance (fourteen) in Sanremo. The Pantera della Bassa was the great – the longest-lived, together with Mina – interpreter of Italian music in the world. Italy in the new century neglected it a little, while abroad it continued to be considered a great innovator of European culture. Let’s try to remember her like this, head held high and red, not with anger or shame.