Alice di Francesco De Gregori, tra sogno e realtà: una lettura intertestuale e poetico-musicale

Abstract

The presumed ‘hermeticism’ of Francesco De Gregori’s early songs, vaguely attributed to the scarce comprehensibility and coherence of their verbal texts, is perhaps one of the most tenacious commonplaces in Italian music criticism. To the point of arousing not only the singer-songwriter’s understandable perplexity, but also his own preventive ban on any possible exegetic effort. In the case of Alice (first track of his debut solo album), there are at least two structural elements, both overlooked by scholars, that contribute to link together and give meaning to verbal images that in fact, at a closer look, turn out to be anything but ‘hermetic’ and ‘disjointed’: (1) their largely intertextual nature, especially but not only in reference to Lewis Carroll’s two-part novel (Alice in Wonderland, Through the Looking Glass); (2) the way such verbal images are cyclically inserted in a perfectly logical, coherent, punctually expressive musical flow, such as to carry out, on the whole, something similar to a ‘oneiric-narrative’ function.