Qui dove il mare luccica e dove tira forte il vento Su una vecchia terrazza davanti al golfo di Sorriento…

Here, where the seas shines, and the wind howls, on the old terrace beside the gulf of Sorrento…

On an afternoon in the summer of 1986 the Italian singer-songwriter Lucio Dalla (1943-2012) wrote what was to become one of the most beautiful and heartrending songs of recent times. It has been covered by an impressive number of the world’s finest singers on a diverse range of stages and in different tones. The song is the unforgettable Caruso.[1] The story behind its inspiration was revealed by Dalla himself in an interview he gave to an Italian newspaper. He relates a story told to him by the owners of a hotel in Sorrento where Dalla lodged for some nights.[2] It was the hotel where the great Italian tenor Enrico Caruso himself had stayed shortly before his death from peritonitis in 1921. He was aged 48. At the time he was suffering from pleurisy and empyema and was in awful pain. The celebrated Caruso was giving singing lessons to a young girl with whom he would become infatuated. Lucio Dalla stayed in the same room, the “Caruso suite”. It was this impromptu story, of an impossible love emanating from a dying man who looks into the eyes of a beautiful girl in full bloom, which inspired the singer-songwriter and registered the song into our imagination.[3]

E’ una catena ormai Che scioglie il sangue dint’e vene sai…

It is a chain by now that heats the blood inside the veins, you know…

I first heard Caruso from Pavarotti and Bocelli. It resonated deeply from the start for its mesmerizing melody and elegiac lyrics. Even so, it was only when I was older that it struck me for all of its other implications. This happened when I unearthed the breath-taking Lara Fabian who gives perhaps the most impressionable of all the performances. Mercedes Sossa, the legendary Argentine singer known as “La Negra”, is probably the most soulful. I listen to the song often. It transports me to different destinations. Not only as I grow older and consider the decay and ruin of my own flesh, but particularly when I reflect on the relationship I have with my wife and on the miraculous circumstances which brought us together.

Ti volti e vedi la tua vita come la scia di un’elica…

You turn and see your life through the white wash astern…

The English philosopher Roger Scruton who specializes in aesthetics (the study of beauty and taste) has recently published a marvellously engaging and intelligent piece on the BBC’s A Point of View where he considers what it is that makes for great music.[4] One of his key contentions is that good music is “a language shaped by our deepest feelings” and not “put together on a computer from a repertoire of standard effects”. Dalla’s delicate song in the celebrated tradition of the canzone Napoletana does sit comfortably in the first category.